jhm
Well-Known Member
Hmm, how are you getting to 20 car tunnels to 1 subways tunnel? Subways come 5 minutes apart and generally stop at each station. Cars can come at higher frequency 10 per minute or more and travel at a higher average speed, not having to stop at every station, maybe twice the speed of subway trains. So car tunnels can get 100 times as many vehicles through per minute. Moreover, high occupancy vehicles can also travel in car tunnels to increase the average number of passengers per vehicle. It seems an equal flow of passengers per minute could be obtained with just one tunnel.
Congestion at exit points can be mitigated by a computerized controlling application that schedules entrances. Such a system would know where each vehicle intends to exit prior to entrance and can accurately predict travel time to exit. It also knows when all other vehicles currently in the network will arrive at that same exit. Thus, it can schedule a precise exit time such that system never gets backup at an exit. So the exits are never congested, but of course the entrances still are subject to congestion. But at an entrance, a vehicle has other options to keep traveling on surface streets. If there are lots of entrances along your route, they you keep traveling down surface streets until there is low congestion at an entrance. Once you enter, the path is clear all the way to your exit. Indeed, multiple exits may also be available. So if the system know your ultimate destination, it can select the best available exit to minimize total travel time to destination. If your car is autonomous, then your car is in communication with the tunnel controller all along the way and seamlessly optimizes your travel time. This sort of computer controlled system would allow such a tunnel to be utilized at much higher efficiency than a traditional tunnel for cars.
I think the basic thing that one is paying for in using such a system is to cut travel time by avoiding congestion. Perhaps one is willing to pay $1.5/minute to travel at 90 mph. This becomes a bargain when the alternative is to creep along at 15 mph in congested traffic. This is a very different kind of objective than what public transportation is about where one wants to minimize the public cost of transporting a large population no matter how slow it may be for that population of riders. So if your objective is to provide premium transport that minimizes travel time for occupants willing to pay to save time, this opens up very different alternatives.
Let's keep in mind the zombie apocalypse that will come with autonomous vehicles. This will be no utopia on public roads. Empty autonomous vehicles will ply the public roads without concern for how slowly they are moving. Moreover, some people will live in rolling man caves. Their lifestyle is that their vehicle is constantly taking them somewhere, but they park no where. Rather the occupants live in rolling homes. Freeways are a rolling parking lot for those too cheap to pay for parking. So the public roads will be worthless to anyone who actually needs to get somewhere in a short amount of time. And don't even think of flying, zombie drones fill the air with pizza delivery. In this world where you can creep along with zombie cars going 2 mph, the only way out is to pay the Boring Company for limited access high speed tunnels. Or you could walk through the dystopic landscape.
