“For higher capacities, special vehicles for those tunnels could be constructed”.

Congratulations, you’ve rediscovered the subway.

If Musk wants to make the argument that he’s found a way to drastically reduce subway construction cost, I’m all ears. But he should jump straight to that, rather than this ludicrous idea of zipping personal cars around under the streets; a proposal that doesn’t come anywhere close to the transit density needed for an actual mass transit system.

Yes, he claims to have found a way to drastically reduce construction consts. First of all, reducing the tunnel diameter, as the digging speed is constrained by volume. Second, he tries to improve the technology of tunnel boring machines. With the smaller tunnels, there is the requirement for smaller vehicles. You can't run standard trains through these tunnels. For now, he is using Teslas (quite obvious choice) to demonstrate the tunnels, but equally it is obvious, that to increase the capacity of tunnels, you want more bus or train-like vehicles. It is so funny how people critisizing Musk assume, he wouldn't understand so simple connections like seats per vehicle and transit density.

> It is so funny how people critisizing Musk assume, he wouldn't understand so simple connections like seats per vehicle and transit density.

Well, he does keep showing renderings of public transit stations full of Teslas and not, you know, people. It's not really a big leap to say that he doesn't understand when he keeps marketing as if he doesn't understand.

Sure he does. And he probably has a reason. But it is absurd to assume he hasn't considered that "trains" allow more people in shorter ties than a single car. So you can speculate why he does as he does, but you are talking about someone sending people to space.

If I am not mistaken the boring co test tunnels are actually slightly larger in diameter than the London tube tunnels (3.8m vs 3.6m), so you could actually run "standard" trains through those.

Ah, that is a very interesting detail. A compelling argument to stop with the whole “we’re going to zip around teslas” and just promise to make subways cheaper.

The Boring Company And Musk said they’d be willing to make Subway tunnels, too.

Turns out Teslas are cheaper per passenger seat than a subway car plus have less requirement for specialized infrastructure (rails, etc). So if TBC is gonna be doing the whole project, they intend to use Teslas. It’s not a bad engineering choice. With automation (not hard in a tunnel), can achieve similar throughput as a Subway.

There is no way you can get even close to the same capacity as a subway.. not even for a point to point setup.

Minimum train space with pretty standard signaling can be as low as 90s. With modern moving block systems that can be pushed even lower. The tube trains have a seating capacity of around 250 people and 800 people can be standing. This gives a capacity of between 3 and 12 people per second.

How are you going to inject 1 car per second (to reach the lower level) into the tunnel in a safe way? And even if you could do it - Consider how huge the stations must be. They have to contain 100+ cars plus space to enter/exit them (couple seconds to come to a stop, 10s of seconds to leave the vehicle - with some people quicker than others -, 10s of seconds for other people to enter the vehicle, couple seconds to accelerate and synchronize to the flow..).

Cars on freeways already regularly do sub-2 second spacing. If each vehicle had 7-16 people (as TBC plans), you’d get similar to Subway capacity.

Folks who dismiss getting subway-like throughputs haven’t actually done the math.

The planned capacity is however only 4400 people per hour for the CES tunnel so about 14s spacing (some other projects even lower). One train every 90s has a capacity of more than 10000 people (and that's not even rush hour with any people standing).

Sub-2 second spacing is quite unlikely to be used, since stopping distance (with 0 reaction time, which is not too unreasonable with LIDAR/RADAR) dictates around 2s spacing between vehicles (1.9s at 100km/h for teslas I believe). And while humans might be fine with ignoring safety aspects computers can't and shouldn't.

Nevermind that building a subway-light vehicles (more similar to a people mover) is not really the same thing as using slightly-modified Teslas as subway replacement (which is what it seems they will be using for now)..