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0 pointsqayxc5y ago0 comments

How on earth would you have multiple lanes within a glorified utility tunnel? That's even more unrealistic, because now you not only need a main tunnel and emergency exits, you also need a bunch of parallel tunnels with individual lifts/ramps plus lots of room for merging.

This is even more impractical. Just to be clear: impractical doesn't mean impossible - it just means that there's no way this can be as economical, safe, and efficient as existing concepts.

An actual station or "a series of parking spaces" as you put it, has no advantages over a traditional subway/people mover station in terms of efficiency, cost and space requirements while offering significantly less throughput.

I just don't see how any of this would be an improvement in any way.

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yholio5y ago

The improvement lays in the flexibility of the system. In the financial district, you have a large station with similar costs and restraints as existing systems, and with multiple paralel lanes to handle the trafic, merging etc.

When you fan out throughout the city, you can build, for the same price of a single subway tunnel, multiple links, and you can build much more micostations, close to where people need to go, with very short ramps and deceleration and acceleration handled cooperatively with the other vehicles, since throughput is no longer critical.

And finally, on the last mile, the vehicles goes outside and drives to your suburban home on the existing road network, in areas of low density where no people mover will ever make economic sense.

It is this flexibility that makes self driving vehicles a very practical proposition for future cities.

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yholio5y ago

And finally, on the last mile, the vehicles goes outside and drives to your suburban home on the existing road network, in areas of low density where no people mover will ever make economic sense.

It is this flexibility that makes self driving vehicles a very practical proposition for future cities.

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