Elon Musk's vision of AmericaFollow

Any new road in our county must have a bike lane and sidewalk. Any existing road that is going to be repaved must undergo a feasibility study of adding bike lanes and sidwalks. To our great sadness, the major artery in town that I live by did not make it through the feasibility study with bike lines or sidewalks intact - it would have doubled the cost of the repavement and extended the length of time by six months, so the county nixed it for now.

Quite a few lesser roads have had the bike lanes tacked on, though. It's a start.

Any time I've encountered something like that I start imagining the logs falling off the back and into the car I'm in.

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Oh I know, I'm not scared of it happening, I just have a morbid imagination.

omg what have i done

Edited, Nov 15th 2013 7:43pm by Elinda

It'll be okay, with a little luck everyone will pull an Aethien and quickly forget.

Oh sure. I'm not saying there aren't technical solutions to these problems, just that these solutions will both increase the actual resulting cost *and* decrease the resulting product from what is being presented.

From a technical point of view, there are still problems with just using short side tubes at the stations for loading/unloading (I'm assuming that's more or less what you're talking about). It's a matter of speed. Remember that that travel times are based on the assumption of a train accelerating in the tube up to just below the speed of sound and maintaining that speed for the entire trip. Additionally the energy costs for moving the train a given distance is based on that assumption as well. But it takes time to get up to and down from that speed. The 3 minutes between those stops I mentioned earlier were not the time it take to travel from one to the other, but the time a train traveling full speed would pass each station in order. Presumably, it would take much more time to get up to speed in Salinas, and then decelerate to stop at Santa Cruz.

While your model helps a bit (a lot actually), you still have the issue of trains trying to accelerate or decelerate from/to stops along a route, while other trains are barreling through at full speed. The timing for that would be pretty nearly impossible to manage, doubly so given there's no way to perfectly manage the time at each stop. You would have to have computer control systems that constantly adjusted the speed of the cars going on the longer "express" routes in order to avoid slamming into the shorter route cars while they are accelerating or decelerating along the main tube routes. This basically means constantly slowing or speeding up the longer route cars to provide sufficient spacing for the short route cars to get on/off the tube at the stops along the way. That means far less efficiency for the trips and more cost than projected.

Not saying that this isn't still a better solution, just saying that Musk is massively understating the costs and problems involved.

Oh right, I forgot paying taxes on things completely offsets the cheapness and convenience that which it goes to pay for. Of course. How stupid of me. Because if I were to travel to Europe right now, it would be ever so painful to buy a train ticket there because golly gee just think of all those poor motorists who had to pay taxes on cars and gasoline to make this ticket so cheap.

Back of the envelope calcs put it 1-2 mi for the acceleration/deceleration corridors. hypothetically you could only accelerate to ~60% of thoroughfare speed in a half-mile, and ramp to the full speed along the main track. This is assuming ~2g accel force, for ~17s, if you wanted a gentler 1g accel you'd need roughly a 4mi corridor.

If we're looking at it from an infrastructure implementation point of view, then yes, the costs that are paid via taxes do completely offset the reduced ticket price of the result. Failing to take that part of the cost into account is misleading at best and an outright lie at worst.

Imagine if the government decided to do the same thing with other products or services? Let's pretend there are two chains of burger joints, but for some reason the government has decided to apply a 50% tax on chain 1's burgers and use the revenue gained to subsidize the cost of burgers at chain 2. If we assumed that both burgers were identical and would normally cost $5, the consumer would walk into chain 1 and see that burgers cost $7.50, and walk into chain 2 and see that burgers cost $2.50. He might also make the mistake of thinking that the burgers at chain 2 were less expensive.

The problem is that both burgers actually cost the exact same amount. They require the same ingredients for the same cost. The fact that the consumer is being tricked into thinking that one costs more than the other doesn't mean that they actually cost different amounts. For the same reason, even though in the case of cars versus trains the products themselves are different, the fact that we massively subsidize one of them by imposing taxes on the other means that the consumer is being deceived about the actual costs involved. We can argue about how much of a deception it is, but it's still absolutely wrong to use that cost difference to argue that one is a better deal than the other, in exactly the same way it would be wrong to say that burger chain 2's burgers were better because they are less expensive.


I'll also point out that usually when things are subsidized to that degree it's because they are *not* as good a value by themselves. If they were, people would choose to buy them freely without the need to subsidize them. And even if they don't start out as a worse value, they often become a worse value because the industry that produces the subsided product has less incentive to improve their product. They don't have to keep costs relative to quality in check because they don't have to entice customers. The government does it for them by adjusting the price to a rate that customers will be willing to pay regardless of the actual costs. This can only make the value relative to cost worse over time.

You realize that this is an internet forum, right?