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Re:Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring by hypersoar on Saturday December 16, 2017 @10:53AM (#15940049)
Apart from tolling based on footprint, that sounds exactly like what we have now. Automation might increase the capacity, but individual cars will never be as efficient the public transit we already know how to build. You're never going to get the cars closer together than people on a train.
Re:Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring by njarboe on Saturday December 16, 2017 @01:12PM (#15940798)
Did you read what I wrote? You can put buses into this system and charge by how much space the vehicle takes up. If a car is 1/2 the space of a bus then the bus pays 2 times the price and the people in the bus pay 1/20th the price. If demand is high enough then car travel will get very expensive and the system transitions very nicely to a train system with only large, packed buses traveling in it.

This system is also nice because people could choose all types of different ways they would like to travel. From sleeper cars, to mobile offices, to cramped seats on a bus, to stand-only packed in like-sardines, we are now in a Japanese subway situation.

Re:Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring by sundaeofshock on Saturday December 16, 2017 @01:38PM (#15940998)
Or you could just make it a damn subway system at the begining and be done with it. This seems like a damned inefficient and expensive way to get a subway line.
Re:Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring by rohit2412 on Saturday December 16, 2017 @08:54PM (#15943500)
Even worse, it sounds just like an underground highway with streetcars and trams.

But as it runs on skates, do they want everybody to input their routes first? And clearly, it's going to cost so much now than surface highways, but economics is lost here, for people are convinced that a maglev train in a pneumatic tube will cost 6 billion, but a high speed rail will cost 80 billion. The name Elon musk is like magic to dispel any economic sense.