The people throughput capacities seem quite low, so these don't scale - they will be expensive services for the few. At least for starters.
You could have electric buses that could travel as a "metro" in the tunnel for the longer transit or congested city centers and then on the road in the suburbs, for lower cost and better flexibility.
AIUI a single tunnel doesn’t scale, sure, but part of the Boring Company’s mission is to make the tunnels super cheap, so scaling up the system consists of adding additional parallel tunnels.
I guess it’s like adding lanes to a highway, but instead of being limited to “make it wider” you can think in 3D and “bundle” tubes together with a honeycomb cross section.
Spitballing more, “reversing the polarity” of a single lane tunnel in such a bundle would be trivial to account for burst traffic (like they move the center divider on the Golden Gate Bridge).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadYou could have electric buses that could travel as a "metro" in the tunnel for the longer transit or congested city centers and then on the road in the suburbs, for lower cost and better flexibility.
What is the problem with this? Most things start out this way as efficiencies typically grow as you gain scale.
Let's instead get it built as quickly as possible so we can make it to the scaling phase.
I guess it’s like adding lanes to a highway, but instead of being limited to “make it wider” you can think in 3D and “bundle” tubes together with a honeycomb cross section.
Spitballing more, “reversing the polarity” of a single lane tunnel in such a bundle would be trivial to account for burst traffic (like they move the center divider on the Golden Gate Bridge).