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Elon Musk pitches 150 MPH rides in Boring Company tunnels for $1
Earlier in the evening Musk retweeted an LA Metro tweet that said it's coordinating with The Boring Company on its test and said the two will be "partners" going forward. Much of what Musk discussed about how his concept in-city Loop would work has been answered in concept videos and the company's FAQ, but he specifically said that the plan is for rides that cost a $1, and carry up to 16 passengers through hundreds of tunnels to those small, parking space-size tunnels located throughout a city.
The big problem is digging those tunnels to start with, and while part of the session included video of a speedy test run through the tunnel Musk has already dug on SpaceX property, the plan is to pick up the pace. Davis said Musk has challenged his team to match the digging pace of a snail (0.03 MPH), and get up to 1/10th of the average walking speed of a human at about 0.3 MPH -- compared to its current top speed of about 0.003 MPH.
Previously: Elon Musk Wants to be Boring
Elon Musk's Boring Tunnel Near Los Angeles
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @07:42PM
I believe that full-duplex requires two tunnels. Once you have a tunnel for each direction, then you can "pipeline" and run multiple cars in each tube (at, for example, your suggested 1 minute headway/interval). This does require turn-arounds at each end, either a circular track, or a turntable -- more expense. Also, with more than one car at a time moving in a tunnel, any failure or accident will likely involve more than one car.
Since nothing is perfectly reliable, there will need to be service vehicles at each end that can pull disabled vehicles out of the tunnel and rescue the passengers. I helped design one of these for a rubber tire "train" that connects different parts of an airport--it was based on a Unimog truck that had been modified for 4-wheel steering to follow the guideway.
There is also the question of how many people need to get from LA to LAX (or between any two end points). This article https://www.dailybreeze.com/2016/01/26/lax-sets-record-for-passenger-volume-in-2015/ [dailybreeze.com] states there are 70+ million passengers a year through LAX (about 200000 per day), but of course most of them don't come from downtown LA, they come from all over the area.