Agreed, but that’s only bad if it’s a zero sum game, and you gave up something else to get it. I can easily picture a ramp into this system out in Newark by the Airport that drops you onto a ramp to the FDR northbound. I can see from my front door people in stopped traffic on the turnpike ramp every morning trying to get into the Holland Tunnel.
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But in this case, we’re discussing getting people in suburban areas to places like bus depots or trains, to decrease traffic into the city itself. A bus in a suburban neighborhood might not always be practical? Even school buses usually have stops where kids are picked up in larger groups (at the head of neighborhoods on a larger road).
But I do agree that autonomous cars don’t deal with the larger volume problem (which will only increase in the coming years).
You do give up something. Tunnels under urban areas aren’t something that can be entered into lightly. The risk of subsidence is real and any competing system has to deal with crossing the other to reach the surface. In addition to the engineering difficulties each tunnel poses for any new tunnel their is the risk of weakening a functional system for an inefficient one. If you can siphon off a relatively small portion of riders from a system that requires high utilization to be viable, you can eliminate the existing system. The new system doesn’t have the capacity to absorb the displaced riders and we end up with even more people relying on private surface transit.
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This is key. It wasn’t about moving freight or really moving people for Moses. Looking at archival footage of him it’s clear that he regarded human beings and the neighbourhoods they lived in as impediments to his life’s work.
American cities have to break out of the exurban car-culture mentality of the mid-20th century, which was only viable due to anomalous circumstances that haven’t been operational for at least a decade. I’m all for new technologies and innovations as long as they always take care to reduce the incentives for car ownership by households (something which is not necessarily at odds with Musk’s Tesla business).
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I’d say that isn’t an issue here, where every transport system is at saturation, perhaps elsewhere.
Read The Power Broker, it’ll blow your mind. It’s really a history of how American cities got to where we are today.
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I have and second your recommendation. Any aspect of Moses’s story is fascinating and Caro is an amazing writer and painstaking researcher who just draws you into what in other hands might seem to be dry and boring subject matter.
Just mentioning Moses could send this thread off into hundreds of possible tangents. I set up a General thread to discuss such matters for those who are interested:
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Ah, no, not quite. It just needs to seem cost competitive when you start building it - then a company will start building it. But then, a second company thinks there is money to be made, and starts building in parallel… but there might not be enough demand for both companies to break even…
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Apart from all the problems mentioned by @moortaktheundea in his answer to your post, these inefficiencies mean that noone but the 1% will be able to use your fine tunnel.
at odds with fundamental, irrefutable facts of geometry
Human geometry, yes, but at odds with chthonic non-Euclidean geometry?
What about Ivo Shandor’s system using unusual materials such as cold-riveted girders with cores of pure selenium, magnesium-tungsten alloys, and gold plated bolts, designed in a fashion exactly like the telemetry trackers NASA uses to identify dead pulsars in deep space?
I mean, if you told people that they could shorten their commute with a demonic system that violated the laws of nature and was an abomination in the eyes of God, they’d say “exactly how demonic are we talking here?” 
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[quote=“gero, post:90, topic:114707”]
these inefficiencies mean that noone but the 1% will be able to use your fine tunnel.
[/quote] ot try
Pure speculation about an emergent technology. Same was true of cars, aircraft and cellphones. I’m not trying to be techno-utopian, but I’m opposed to condemning new technology and ideas because it looks inefficient according to old paradigms.
Sorry, I had to do that. More seriously, all sorts of nonsense contradicts the old paradigms, but it doesn’t break the paradigm because it’s nonsense.
Before we commit billions to a new paradigm scheme that’s supposed to break the old paradigm that more-or-less works, it behooves the would-be paradigm-forger to do some work to show how their new paradigm is supposed to work better, and not just wave their hands while ignoring how the old paradigm says their scheme won’t work. They have to actually answer the criticism.
Does Musk actually have a paradigm, or is it just visions? “If you build it, it will make money.”
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Well, right - “decreased number of cars on the road” isn’t the same as decreased road use because right now there are a whole lot of cars that aren’t being used at a given time. Ideally autonomous vehicles include various sized shuttles and buses (that have non-fixed routes/times) that can car-pool people where a traditional bus with human driver wasn’t feasible, not just to their final destinations but to other, even more efficient, forms of mass transit. So autonomous vehicles can definitely be part of reducing traffic, even if single- (or no-) occupant vehicles just contribute to it.
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And the “incumbent interests” consist in large part of all the middle and upper middle class people who own single family homes.
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Actually, here single families are relatively rare, although becoming less so in several neighborhoods as the affluent buy brownstones that were multi and make them single. But what creates the parking hysteria is that any given 25’ lot frontage of a 2-4 unit building will not quite park 2 cars. So you can see why adding people and cars gets some people upset, whether they rent or own. But density brings infrastructure as well as the reverse. More people can support more transit options so there’s less need for personal cars. There was a recent article challenging the idea that incumbents should be able to control the destiny of their neighborhood, was that here or the Times?
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Honestly what Musk has is a substantial, personal profit motive to get more people to buy privately owned electric vehicles even if that outcome is less optimal for society as a whole. Smart people can rationalize some pretty wacky things when they put their minds to it.
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This basically is my problem with all of Elon Musk’s companies and proposals. They all are aimed at an elite portion of the population, basically the top 20%, without any consideration of the realities of the bottom 4/5ths of the population. For example, electric cars take so long to charge that they basically require owners to have a private garage with a charger installed in that garage. But 55% of the residents of my city are renters. They either live in apartments or homes where they have no private garage, or live in a home where their landlord is not going to install a charger in the garage for them. Not to mention the condo owners. So basically Elon Musk is selling vehicles to a wealthy elite in my city. Or rooftop solar. See the statistics above. Renters, condo owners, etc. are the majority of people in my city, and none of them benefit from rooftop solar. And so forth.
In that respect, his loopy tunnel idea is no different than any of his other proposals. They are all aimed at a small rarified elite, and ignore the needs of the vast majority of people. Now, granted, I can see why he would do this – the United States is the most unequal advanced economy on the planet, so, just as with the bank robber who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is”, Musk targets the elites because that’s where the money is. But let’s not confuse that with him being some sort of world changing altruist. Targeting the needs of a few million elites might make life better for those few million elites, but is not going to change the world.
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I don’t understand what you mean.
I just had a bout of fridge logic about that show: with all the money he spends ordering ACME gear to try and catch the road runner, couldn’t Wile E. Coyote just order food?
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