- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_cars@lemmy.ml
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I don’t know why anyone’s surprised by this, Musk admitted years ago that the intent of the “hyper loop” was to kill high-speed rail projects in California.
This isn’t even the same thing. But I forgive you for being confused because he’s got a lot of stupid things he’s half working on.
*he sometimes remembers he has people working on
It’s almost like tech billionaires are all completely full of shit! And like maybe the shittiest parts of our society have much more to do with private business screwing over the public than “lazy” or corrupt government workers!
After years of salivating over running the country like a “business” we finally put a couple billionaires in charge who immediately took a strong economy and turned it into a dumpster fire while personally enriching themselves, just like big business today!
Yep whenever someone says they want government run like a business I just hear I want government run poorly (because that’s how businesses are run).
This video was phenomenal. I had no idea just how stupid this thing was. And I knew it was stupid.
What bugs me is that there’s probably some kind of rail-based system you could design that’s actually reasonable for narrow-bore tunnels like that. Something physically more like a train of passenger-vans or a roller-coaster than a proper subway or LRT. But instead they made this nonsense?
Well the thing is if they made it a train then they’d have to follow pesky safety regulations like having room in the tunnel for someone to escape an accident and ventilation in case of a fire or other release of toxic fumes.
The point isn’t to make a functional transportation system, it’s a grift to get taxpayer dollars into Musk’s pockets by giving Tesla more places to put cars they can’t sell otherwise.
Well, also sounds like Uberization: “The laws for X are annoying, so we’ll do Y that’s basically the same as X but dumber because there’s no regulation on Y”.
If it were a train it would have more room for evacuation because a train could run a half-inch from the non-door wall. Tesla model 3 is about 1.85M wide sans mirrors. The Vegas tunnels are about 3.6M wide at the widest, but that’s not useful because of road… eyeball it and say it’s about 2.5M wide. Put the car on rails so it’s at the leftmost edge of that road (no need for wiggle room where it gonna go?) and you’ve got 0.65M of emergency walkway on the right hand side, which is almost spec for an EU emergency walkway. Lift the walkway up a bit higher off the level of the road/rail so it’s level to the doors and you’re at a wider spot of the tube, and then you’ve got your emergency walkway.
A train also drives the risk of fire way down, since you don’t have a big scary Tesla battery down there anymore. I mean you’d still have a 3rd rail or a catenary cable or whatever and that’s not nothing but that’s not the Greek Fire of a modern lithium battery.
If there was an actual reason that narrow-gauge tunnels were cheap for some use-cases, you could probably make a pretty cool vehicle for them.
But yeah, this is all academic, since the point was to use Teslas.
That quote at the end about how hard the rock is in Tennessee really sent me. Worth a pause to read the whole thing.
