Re:Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
by jcranmer on Saturday December 16, 2017 @07:53PM
(#15943249)
> No more need to dedicate huge amounts of valuable land in our cities and suburbs to parking (cars can drive themselves to outlying areas to park or, better yet, can be shared).
Let's solve our congestion problems by doubling the amount of traffic on the roads! Sharing vehicles is a red herring; the peak traffic is caused by what's effectively a unidirectional, time-compressed mode of transit--once the car drops someone off at work, there's not enough trips nearby that it can do.
> Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Yeah, except for all those unpredictable pedestrians walking on the street in busy cities. You could drive faster and closer together only if a) every car were so wired, and no one drove manually and b) it's a limited-access highway with little conflicting movement. It might help I-70 in Kansas; it's not helping any street in NYC.
> A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
No, it ain't. The way you get mass transit is you start packing people into tighter spaces. A single-occupant car, no matter how many times it's reused, no matter how tightly you pack them, is just way too much extra space. The twin Hudson river NEC tubes carry more capacity than the GWB, Lincon Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Brooklyn Bridge combined.
Let's solve our congestion problems by doubling the amount of traffic on the roads! Sharing vehicles is a red herring; the peak traffic is caused by what's effectively a unidirectional, time-compressed mode of transit--once the car drops someone off at work, there's not enough trips nearby that it can do.
> Driverless cars could drive faster and closer together, especially if they can communicate with one another.
Yeah, except for all those unpredictable pedestrians walking on the street in busy cities. You could drive faster and closer together only if a) every car were so wired, and no one drove manually and b) it's a limited-access highway with little conflicting movement. It might help I-70 in Kansas; it's not helping any street in NYC.
> A driverless, electric, shared, and tunnel-augmented vehicle ecosystem is probably the perfect mass transit system.
No, it ain't. The way you get mass transit is you start packing people into tighter spaces. A single-occupant car, no matter how many times it's reused, no matter how tightly you pack them, is just way too much extra space. The twin Hudson river NEC tubes carry more capacity than the GWB, Lincon Tunnel, Holland Tunnel, Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, and Brooklyn Bridge combined.