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Musk's Boring Company Proposes High-Speed Underground Subway To Dodger Stadium (geekwire.com)
Elon Musk's Boring Company wants to build a transit tunnel connecting Dodger Stadium to a Los Angeles subway station. An anonymous reader quotes GeekWire:
The Boring Company laid out the plan for the Dugout Loop on its website, saying that the linkup could take baseball fans and concertgoers to the stadium in less than four minutes for a roughly $1 fare. This ride would be nothing like your typical subway trip: Loopers could book their tickets in advance, through an app-based reservation system that's similar to what's used to purchase theater tickets, or buy them over the phone or in person for a given time (say, 5:45 p.m. heading for the stadium).
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time. Loopers would board electric-powered pods (also known as "skates") that are based on the Tesla Model X auto design and are capable of carrying 8 to 16 passengers at a time. The skates would be lowered into the tunnel system, and sent autonomously at speeds of 125 to 150 mph from one terminal to the other. The Boring Company says it'll cover the cost of digging the roughly 3.6-mile tunnel with no public funding sought.
The Boring Company's site says this project will preempt construction of their proof-of-concept tunnel under Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard.
"The Boring Company has made technical progress much faster than expected and has decided to make its first tunnel in Los Angeles an operational one, hence Dugout Loop!"
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time. Loopers would board electric-powered pods (also known as "skates") that are based on the Tesla Model X auto design and are capable of carrying 8 to 16 passengers at a time. The skates would be lowered into the tunnel system, and sent autonomously at speeds of 125 to 150 mph from one terminal to the other. The Boring Company says it'll cover the cost of digging the roughly 3.6-mile tunnel with no public funding sought.
The Boring Company's site says this project will preempt construction of their proof-of-concept tunnel under Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard.
"The Boring Company has made technical progress much faster than expected and has decided to make its first tunnel in Los Angeles an operational one, hence Dugout Loop!"
At least initially, the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event, or roughly 2.5 percent of stadium capacity. The Boring Company says that capacity could be doubled over time
Is that it? 2-3 subway trains worth of people per event? If someone just built a real subway system then it could potentially shift everyone to the stadium and back.
So Ol'Musky wants to cut down on LA's traffic, with a project that won't need anything from the local government except approval & right of ways. So why not let him give it a try. Absolute worst case is that it doesn't pan out, and the city just ends up using the tunnel as storage space or fills it back up with dirt.
>Americans oppose public transportation for a single reason: they do not want poor people coming into middle class neighborhoods.
What's this got to do with going to a stadium? The participants have already bought a ticket that's open sale to the public.
In the linked story there is a tweet from the Boring company proclaiming the Dugout Loop to be Zero Emissions. I hate this often repeated fraud that anything electrical is zero emissions. To me, the best term I've heard is Remote Emissions. To educate the masses I propose to build a small electric generating plant next to the Dugout Loop and run it off whale blubber and coal.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It's funny that most of the comments in this thread so far seem to be... upset about people going to sports events. I mean, I'm no sports fan, but this just strikes me as weird.
Neat that they're going to make their first full LA tunnel an operational one. A connection to Dodger Stadium was drawn up on their longer-term man of plans for the LA area, so looks like they're jumping ahead a step. I wonder what upgrades they're going to be making to Godot for it? Maybe bringing it closer to Line-Storm? I know they've been modifying Godot over time in order to test tech for Line-Storm.
Boring Company has been going through phases as they transition from standard TBM approaches toward their ultimate goal. In their first tunnel with Godot (a mostly standard TBM in the beginning), they required the standard laying of tracks and power lines (time consuming and expensive, particularly the power lines) and a powerful ventilation system to deal with diesel exhaust from the diesel locomotive that hauls ore, as well as pushing off the casing ends and using normal cutting discs. Their third TBM, Prufrock, will be using delivered/replaced battery packs, no tracks, a battery powered electric locomotive, pushing off the wall sides and automating their assembly, and advanced alloy highly cooled hot swappable cutting discs; it's in the advanced design stage. Between Godot and Prufrock is Line-Storm, which has nearly completed construction, and is a mix of technologies between Godot and Prufrock, and is expected to be 2-4 times as fast as Godot (Prufrock is expected to be 10-15x faster). Line-Storm will be used on the east coast.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Nope! Chuck Testa.
Musk makes more promises then a politician. The guy is clearly a ego maniac as well as a good engineer and terrible CEO.
Many of us have come to realize how dangerous it is to have a massive sports industry centered around what is essentially an opiate for the masses to keep the surly proles from revolting.
Alternative Right.
"It's funny that most of the comments in this thread so far seem to be... upset about people going to sports events"
Agreed.
"Neat that they're going to make their first full LA tunnel an operational one"
I wonder who will invest in this without a 'proof of concept' of the tunnel and transport system.
It helps a little. Automotive CO2 is a small part of total greenhouse gas emission and overall electric vehicles result in less energy consumption than gas powered cars. Electric vehicles are great for the planet in Canada where so much of the electricity comes from hydroelectric sources. It's too bad that nuclear power isn't used that much in the USA.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Anything to divert attention from his failing Tesla business, the lack of investors, the SEC interview.
I would say most people in the US reject public transit because they don't want to pay the extra taxes. Even if there is public transit, most families will still have carS so they see that transit as just extra taxes.
Yes, Americans can do without cars, but it's just the thing here. The exceptions exist in places like New York City, cities in California & Florida. Until there is a major cultural shift where the "American Dream" doesn't include cars, a single family home, and two kids, it won't change.
What keeps most people out of neighborhoods is property values. And since everyone from the sellers, lenders, agents, neighbors, and tax collectors want higher values, it's kind of difficult to build low priced housing. Even when Cities here try to build "affordable housing", it just ends up being unaffordable housing with unsustainable subsidies.
The first time buyers here are mostly priced out of good markets in the US. A problem that other countries have primarily due to population densities.
We can also do without plumbing, central heating, electricity, paved roads, refrigeration, telephones, and computers. Why would we want to? Those things all make life better.
For example, Los Angeles has hundreds of bus routes, yet few places have buses that run more often than once every 20 minutes, and some places it's every 2 hours and not on Sundays. Would you want to wait 20 minutes before you can go someplace, and another 20 if you have to make a transfer? Repeat that for the return trip? Even while not waiting a bus goes half the speed of normal traffic because it has to let passengers on and off. Time is money, and time is life.
Cars make life better, and for most Americans car ownership and use is a rational choice.
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Your understanding of technology, and even everyday life, is sorely lacking. Do you know the difference between open-cell and closed-cell foam? Paint is more likely to crack and flake off than "have bubbled up and melted off".
With regard to the Tesla in space, so what? Nobody claimed it was going to be driveable, or even pretty. It was just a publicity stunt, and almost everybody knows it.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Right now, Boring Company is working entirely on private funding. Mostly from Musk. Obviously that will have to change before they go large scale, but I doubt this one line will cost that much.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
‘Literally No One Calls Me That Or Has Ever Called Me That’: Our Interview With Ol’ Musky
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
Not sure how much better they make life in Los Angeles. The region is at a breaking point, and everything that can be done to limit individual car trips makes life better for everyone.
1) $60k is around 80th percentile in price people are optioning out their Model 3's to - even today where production is starting with the more expensive variants. But by all means, inflate, because price distortion totally makes your points legitimate.
2) The median Model 3 buyer is spending around $24k more on their Model 3 than on their previous car. Aka, they're not "rich", they just really want the car.
3) See the production volumes linked here.
Unlike other manufacturers, Tesla can't sell vehicles at a loss; they generally get about 25% margins on their vehicles (Model 3 just broke positive in Q2 and is expected to be around 15% in Q3). Others by and large sell subsidized or no-profit EVs - and consequently will not sell more than they have to.
So far there have been three different independent teardown studies of the Model 3. Two of the three (Munro and the German teardown study) show that even a base Model 3 without any options will turn a good profit (one disagreed - although they used a demonstrably inflated battery cost estimate). But of course almost nobody buys a car without options. The average car sale price in the US is $36111.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
He will just grow slowly crazier, like Howard Hughes... and Nick Tesla.
Then do it, and do what I do - a motorcycle. Lane splitting means that when you're stuck on the 10 or the 101 - I'm still moving. I can always find parking between vehicles. I get free parking in public garages, in the striped sections at the ends of the rows. I get 50+ MPG. I pay $285/year for insurance, for full coverage with a $500 deductible. It's a Honda motorcycle that needs an oil change every 8000 miles (very low service intervals). Get out of your car, get on a motorcycle, and free yourself.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Cars make life better, and for most Americans car ownership and use is a rational choice.
Cars also make life worse. It's not an either-or thing. An overabundance of ICE-based automobiles is why Los Angeles led the way with emissions standards, and guess what? It worked.
Self-driving public transportation is what will finally put the nail in the coffin of excessive vehicle ownership. People who make long trips will probably continue to own their own vehicles for some time, but commuters will give them up as soon as there is a viable alternative. And that alternative doesn't look like buses or even trains, at least not the way they look now. It looks like vans, and individual vehicles rolling on rails instead of joined-up trains. You tell the system where you want to go, it tells you what vehicles to get on in order to get there, and vehicles are dispatched as necessary in order to deliver as many people as are attempting to go places. The vehicles make only necessary stops, in order to efficiently handle demand. The smaller vehicles don't perturb traffic and don't require special stop areas in many cases, and not such large ones in others.
Public transportation isn't the problem, the number of drivers required to serve everyone's needs is. When the drivers are removed from the system, public transportation can be much more efficient.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with Los Angeles: everyone there wants public transportation, but no one wants to ride it. They want the other people to ride it, so the roads will be clear.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Obviously that will have to change before they go large scale, but I doubt this one line will cost that much.
A 3.5 mile tunnel in Los Angeles sounds like a very expensive project, actually.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Cars make life better,
Where? For whom? In which situations?
A blanket statement like that is simply not true.
was that we could do without cars if we had things like buses that take 2 hours to go 20 miles on a Sunday.
Cars are what I'd call an irrational rational choice. We fight approximately 8 wars, breath toxic fumes and spend a large chunk of our GDP for the sake of those cars. Plus we devote a huge mount of prime real estate to parking them (there's a researcher who calls them the deserts of the city). There is literally not enough metal on the plant to give one to everybody, almost guaranteeing some form of conflict over basic transportation. And that's before we talk about the time spent in traffic jams or the loss of life and injury from a transportation system built around amateur drivers responsible for maintaining their own vehicles.
From a purely objective standpoint they make life worse than the alternatives. But there are no alternatives (2 hour short bus rides and all). The rational thing is to build those alternatives but nobody wants to spend the money and even if they did the car companies would fight tooth and nail. Given the disadvantages it's irrational but if you can't change the system then operating within it becomes rational. It's a classic catch 22: You'd have to be crazy to do it but once you're doing it you'd have to be crazy not to.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Automotive CO2 is a substantial part of greenhouse gas emissions. Light vehicles make up around 17% of total emissions. Switching to electric would have a huge impact
I'm just getting bored (pun intended) of all these stories about random stuff Musk and his companies say. The chances of it actually happening are 50/50 at best and this seems like one of the more half baked ideas.
Get back to us when they start digging it
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Self driving pods on dedicated track that move people between stations without intermediate stops was supposed to be the transportation of the future back in the 1970's. The term is PRT - personal rapid transit. Experimental track was build at West Virginia University and is still operating. Even the pod capacity is the same as the one proposed by the boring company
It depends what you use the bus for. If you just turn up randomly to go somewhere you have an average wait of 10 minutes, but if know the timetable or make the same journey every day you can get the wait down to nothing.
In some places like Tokyo the train/bus is often the fastest option.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I would say most people in the US reject public transit because they don't want to pay the extra taxes. Even if there is public transit, most families will still have carS so they see that transit as just extra taxes.
Yes, Americans can do without cars, but it's just the thing here.
And you would be wrong. What you fail to realize is that the US is really fucking large. No seriously, look at it on a map and you will see that almost every state dwarfs the size of almost every European country. On top of that, we built most of our populated areas after the invention of the car. Unlike European cities, they were designed to be traversed using a car instead of being shoehorned in afterwards.
Until there is a major cultural shift where the "American Dream" doesn't include cars, a single family home, and two kids, it won't change.
That is to say that it won't change.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
they do not want poor people coming into middle class neighborhoods.
You are thinking of zoning. Public transit is opposed because it generally sucks and is a pasted-on solution to what is essentially a planning problem. In places where it makes sense, it is quite popular and is used to bring huge numbers of low-income people into service jobs in areas that they could not possibly afford.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I only know two kinds of motorcyclists, young ones and those that have been in serious accidents. Even then, the Venn diagram has a big overlap.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
book their tickets for local trains at X time does not work.
Right now the local trains work with tickets have no fixed time and trains run at head ways from each 2-3 min each to 15-60 min.
and after events / games they run on load and go no fixed times.
Book in advance with gates can jam up line / lead to people getting crushed. In some places right after an big event they just make the gates go to open and do quick checks of tickets.
What if you get stuck in line getting out and miss the time? get there before your time? With mass people it's better for the on site staff to just use load and go vs dealing with people needing to back out from the gate find staff to help them and then wait.
Even going in if say to have an transfer that can get backed up as well.
Assuming Dodger stadium is limited to one event per day, and there are only a finite number of days per year (365 or 366), with a daily capacity of 1,500 passengers per day, and assuming full-capacity, every day, with every passenger booking round-trip passage, that gives you:
1,500 passengers x 2 trips (round-trip) x 366 days = annual revenue of about $1,098,000 with a one-dollar fare.
How can this venture support itself on a million dollars/year? Add in the reality that Dodger Stadium probably hosts fewer than 120 events/year (81 regular season home games, plus other events no more often than about once a week in my estimation), and annual revenue comes to $360,000/year.
How many jobs can this one-third to one-half million dollar enterprise support AND cover operating expenses?
Obviously Musk is looking for a showcase project to run at a loss to win larger, more lucrative projects going forward, and that's OK, but what happens when Musk no longer needs this showcase project?
Ken
Toll the roads with demand-based pricing to keep them moving and use the proceeds beyond road maintenance to fund public transit. This fleeces the well-to-do and subsidizes everyone else. A compromise that lets everyone wait in line if they really want to is a parallel express highway like they have in Virginia near DC - this fleeces the rich to pay for the roads while letting everyone else continue wait in line like they always have.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You get wet in the rain, ice and snow hazards in winter, and drastically higher risk of death in an accident.
A publicly owned self driving car network, with express lanes, would solve most of the problems. Summon a car using your phone, ride directly to your destination. Cheap, not crammed with strangers, faster than a car. Done as a National Project it would make owning a car very undesirable. Make the express lanes underground or overhead and you can install power rails to recharge the car batteries while they drive.
It's perfectly legal in California, where Los Angeles is based. Too bad your State doesn't allow what California, and 95% of the rest of the world, allows.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
So many of them speak about cleaning the air and yet, few put their money where their mouth is. Building fast transportation across the edge of cities into the heart of them, would make lots of money. Right now, most of the public transportation is either outrageously expensive, AND/OR it is as slow as cars, but with numerous stops. Musk is developing a system where by they can do 100-150 mph which would enable moving from the edge of a city to the heart in just minutes. This system will make a LOT of money over time. Few 'public' systems in America will.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
mod down, please. Hard to believe that we have so many fucking trolls at such low numbers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Rei! You're back! You're needed over on the "Musk made Tesla shorts billions" thread... But anyway...
The average new car in the US today is around $34000; the typical Model 3 is between 60 and 100% higher than that. In other words - it's well above what the average person is willing to spend on a vehicle.
Tesla LOSES MONEY on every car sold. How many times do I have to correct you on this? They lost over $700 million last quarter, selling around 41,000 cars. You talk about "gross margins" and ignore the fact there are sales costs (S&GA) that are REQUIRED to deliver those revenues. And that makes the company lose money (it's been scaling linearly with revenue for years). You want to look at revenue and only SOME of the expenses REQUIRED to get that revenue. And that doesn't even include the servicing of all that debt. Nor R&D, or other expenses to keep the company going. Just sales of product and cost of sales makes it a losing proposition.
Tesla has less than 3 quarters of cash burn left. Musk committed securities fraud. Tesla cannot - has not - delivered a $35K vehicle. It's not looking good at all, and this money-losing tunnel is simply another "look over here, people!" from Musk in an attempt to deflect from the failure of Tesla.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Where did you get this info? Would like to read up more...
I think this has been changing over time. Certainly the ridiculously rich still opposed any pass through of mass transit, or even expressways. But I see lots more new upscale condos and apartments being build next to or near rail or light rail stations, places previously associated with either poorer neighborhoods or retail. I think this is because there are a lot more young people who don't use autos.
Here in the Puget Sound area, people can buy their tickets ahead of time from Sound Transit (our local multi-county transit agency). It doesn’t seem to cause any problems.
Now, we don’t have turnstile gates to contend with - instead, we have fare enforcement people doing frequent spot checks on our trains. It seems to work decently, and it’s rare that I see someone get caught without a ticket.
Even with gates/turnstiles... I’m not sure why there’d be a problem. It’s not like you can’t put scanners on the turnstiles - I believe that’s what they do in Japan. And I assume most transit agencies allow for the purchase of monthly passes, which functionally are identical to advance tickets.
But I’m a bit puzzled that you think you’d have to buy a ticket for a set time. What you likely *would* buy is a ticket good for a single (round trip) fare. Tickets have unique identifiers, and ransit system computers can deal with that, no problem.
#DeleteChrome
Yes, we all know that the NYT ran a hit piece on Friday containing false information (including a claim that Tesla was looking for COO which Bloomberg has since debunked), and whose author made a snarky brag on Twitter about lowering Tesla's stock price.
And OMG, stop the presses, a few cars out of over 70000 turned out bad! Hint: the plural of "viral anecdote shared endlessly by short sellers who scour twitter and Tesla forums for any bad examples they can find" isn't "data". If it's data you're looking for...
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
They've already made a 2-mile tunnel under Hawthorne.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
On that last point, I stand corrected - I see that the press release actually claims people could buy tickets for a specific time.
I suspect the person who came up with that specific statement (Musk?) has never ridden on mass transit. It seems inefficient and likely unworkable, as the OP stated.
However I expect they’d figure that out one way or the other, and it’s not like they couldn’t shift to single-trip tickets easily enough.
BTW that Geek Wire article’s statement about being “nothing like your typical subway trip” is pretty silly - I ride a train to work most days, and what is described sounds very much like how our “typical” subway system works.
#DeleteChrome
Ever driven in LA? Takes 2 hours to get ANYWHERE in a car. Busses are equally fucked.
Right of ways are valuable property rights and government subsidies.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This is why Musk's tunnel-boring is so important. Transit often makes gridlock on city streets WORSE... unless it has its own dedicated right of way. Tunnels are the least-objectionable way to do that, but traditional methods are just too expensive to do it large-scale.
With cheap tunneling, you CAN pitch transit to NIMBYs by saying, "it might reduce gridlock, and at LEAST won't make it even worse than it already is". You can't say that honestly about buses, streetcars, etc.
It's a shame the ADA made future transit projects based on overhead suspended cables impossible (no way to provide a 3-foot wheelchair-accessible egress path from vehicles... floor hatches with unrolled ladders to climb down aren't legal anymore), because it eliminated potential cheap solutions that could literally run overhead with widely-spaced support towers (especially as a way to increase the "reach" of subway stations by a mile or two perpendicular to the main line).
Musk's subways can potentially do that. You could take a subway station that was built in a less-than-ideal location (with a major trip-generator a mile away), and build an automated mini-subway a-la-Musk to shuttle people between that destination and the subway.
Illustrative example: downtown Miami. When Metrorail opened 35 years ago, the "downtown" station was a good half-mile west of what most of what Miamians considered "downtown", and the station in Brickell (Miami's original financial district) was ~2/3 mile from all the tall buildings. The elevated PeopleMover ("Metromover") VASTLY increased the reach of both stations & made most of downtown Miami accessible via Metrorail. Without Metrorail, Metromover would have been a useless toy. Without Metromover, 80-90% of the people who voluntarily used Metrorail (despite owning cars) to commute to downtown Miami in the 80s and 90s would have driven instead.
Crimson Tsunami/Caffinated Bacon. ,take a hike. You continue to troll everywhere.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The US is huge, but the population isn't all evenly-distributed. Look at a night satellite image of the US... the lights will show you where most Americans REALLY live.
Take Florida... vast & sprawling, but ~90% of Floridians live within 10 miles of I-95, I-4, or I-75. Ditto for Georgia, where ~80% of the state lives in Atlanta or Macon.
Considering the New York Times routinely runs hit pieces on the best things the Western world has to offer, why would that be any surprise? Elon Musk would be doing us a favor if he bought it just to burn it down.
So the guy isn't perfect. He still developed a cheap, reusable rocket and a popular and coveted electric car.
I'll give you he's a bit of a bullshitter, but he isn't going to go to jail over one ill-considered tweet. Worst case, he pays a stiff fine and learns a lesson about shooting off his mouth.
Why so bitter? Because Elon Musk turned out to be human, just like the rest of us?
Where? For whom?
In Detroit. Well, at least they did, for a while.
Ezekiel 23:20
I would say most people in the US reject public transit because they don't want to pay the extra taxes.
No. Republicans reject transit, because taxes. Blue states usually have good transit, and taxes to pay for it. In my area, when the transit district wants more money for new routes, we vote on the tax increases, and they're often approved. They're not approved as often as school and fire department taxes, but more often than for police, or new administrative buildings. They're like parks; people want to say yes, but they do check the plan first. Schools, people just vote "yes" if D, "no" if R.
LA, the place in the story, is the only major city in a D state without good transit. And the problem isn't the taxes, the problem is that LA is a suburban wasteland with no effort to force people to build "up," they built "out" to the horizon and beyond. Transit benefits heavily from population density; if you build "up" or "out" you still need transit stops about every 2 blocks, and so if density is low then you have way more stops per rider, which means that the service is slow and inefficient, and costs way way more money per rider. It also does less to alleviate traffic congestion, because the bus is making lots of stops for just 1 person. If a new type of transit technology can provide better neighborhood-neighborhood service that connects to the regular transit system, that would really really help. It could be as important for transit in LA as Caltrain is in the bay area!
Before he starts all his unicorn jizz and fairy fart-laden pie-in-the-sky BS?
#Monorail!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Paris most of the time, too. And cheaper than the gasoline/insurance/maintanance of a car most of the time.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Right now, Boring Company is working entirely on private funding. Mostly from Musk. Obviously that will have to change before they go large scale, but I doubt this one line will cost that much."
So basically no outside investors to speak of, no plans, no cost estimates, and the expected revenue is extremely low.
Dodger fans will STILL not show up until the third inning.
...to the stadium in less than four minutes for a roughly $1 fare.
...the Dugout Loop clientele would be limited to about 1,400 people per event
So, even operated every day, they would only have revenue of about $500k/year? Even if they could somehow build this tunnel system for $5mil (which I highly doubt), and even if this thing ran with zero overhead operational costs, you are STILL looking at a decade to break even.
I actually doubt you could pay for the operational costs for $500k/year.
Has nobody informed Musk that baseball games generally don't pull the entire crowd simultaneously? Some people arrive early and watch batting practice, while others don't show up until after the game has already started. Now getting everyone out of the facility at the same time might be a bigger challenge.
Personally, I have found that parking at Union Station and then walking up the hill to the ballpark just isn't that bad, and keeps me out of the horrible traffic that always results when 60,000 people try to drive away from the same place at the same time.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Fuck off Windy you lying sack of shit.
No, because the market regulates who can be in a neighborhood more effectively than that.
Most cities have nice northwestern suburbs and a toxic, cheap southeastern area. The worry is that proles from the cheap areas will be easily able to go to the suburbs and raid them. After all, suburbs were formed when people fled the prole infestation of the inner city.
Alternative Right.
The herd is generally inert, but sports/entertainment/beer keep them unlikely to do anything but keep going to work and complaining on the weekends. Mentally disorganized people are harmless.
Alternative Right.
This placebo effect allows people to engage in sports tribalism instead of pursuing their own interests as a group (religion, ethnicity, class, race). In theory, this keeps us all unified so that we can pursue the ideology that Government lays out for us.
Alternative Right.
Why would I be against public transport Windy? It makes no sense. It's one of the reasons American's have such a huge carbon footprint. More public transport and you can start to drop back towards twice the world average from 3 times.
Right, except it is possible to live in NYC without a car. With Uber/Lyft it is possible to live in many US cities without a car. With rideshare it is possible to get to work without a car. I know people who only had one car and two people working 30 minutes apart. This was quite common 20 years ago. I know people who only have a bicycle! I know people who live in walking communities with major grocery stores within 1/2 a km. My youth was spent without a car for a few years. I was a full time travel consultant. I had but didn't need a car. I always booked close to the client I flew to.
Trust me, it's quite possible.
And the primary problem you have with public transit in the US is that it simply sucks. It is horribly funded, costs too much, and gets you close but not where you want to go. Partially because of sprawling retail shops and housing.
It's not that there is a bus/train every 20 minutes that bothers people. It's that there isn't a bus/train every 20 minutes. It's 20+/-5 minutes that gets people in a twist. You can plan for a scheduled bus... if it's on schedule. We all do it for sports, meetings, and various other events throughout our life. Heck 15 years ago, a family would get together on schedule to watch a TV show!
I understand, the car isn't a luxury but it's also not an absolute necessity in may parts of the US like heating or plumbing.
Building a 2 mile tunnel under Hawthorne doesn't sound nearly as expensive, actually, for a lot of reasons.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
From what I have seen there are only two places with Ok transit. NYC and DC. Those would be passable in the EU. All the others don't hold a candle to the likes of EU, Singapore, and Japan. Heck places like Hong Kong, Hyderabad, and Moscow have better transit systems than some US metros.
As a frequent flier, I am well aware how big the US is. Most people fly rather than drive to get around it. But traveling those distances isn't what we are talking about. US cities are just as dense and similar in size as many other foreign cities but with worse public transit.
Most of our cities are designed around horse drawn carriages, trollies, and pedestrian traffic. Only in the last 80 years have we really redesigned them for automobiles. We basically pushed pedestrians to the side (get it?), phased out carriages, and defunded trollies. It was just 60 years ago that we decided to have standard roads outside of cities. 35 years ago, you couldn't get from one side of the US to the other on a standard road! We completed our national highway system just 25 years ago!
This car craze we have in the US is literally just 2-3 generations old. And the current generation is using ride shares. And the next one is looking forward to driverless taxies.
It's the same oil that's used in the transmission - so it gets a bit dirty from the clutch. Still, it's equivalent to most brand-new cars, but uses a lot less oil (about 3.8L) and gets great mileage. And because I'm not sitting in traffic all the time, I'm even more energy efficient.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Well, you know the saying... Something like 94% of all Harleys ever sold are still on the road today.
The other 6% actually made it home.
:) I like the reliability I get. I ride - a lot. My current main ride is a Honda CTX700 (mid-sized cruiser) with 49,000 miles on it in 3.5 years. And I'm overseas for about 4 months a year. So I typically put about 2200-2500 miles a month on the bike. It's been rock solid. Four rear tires, two front tires, 6 oil changes, one air filter, two sets of front brake pads, one set of rear brake pads, and one chain - that's it.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Throw in a couple pedo accusations and an SEC investigation and you have the beginnings of a made for tv movie.
When there's bad news, create a distraction.
Pretty sure the English and French building an tunnel under the English channel was a bit better than any German one.
Only if you zone everything else around it in the same category, which in the age of the car would mean many miles.
Alternative Right.
What country are you from? If you're in the EU, Asia or South America, there's a good chance I rode - and lane split, like all the other riders - in your country. And yes, it is legal AND is more environmentally friendly.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Rode the bus to work today in LA. There are some great bus services (like Commuter Express) that solve problems for people that can afford a car... and can afford someone to drive them to work. The areas with direct service to downtown via train work well too.
What is painful and makes a lot of people avoid public transit in LA is the need to transfer. That is an urban planning issue more than a transit issue though.
If small areas are allowed, that enables apartments to coexist with the burbs.
This strengthens my point, which is that people coming out of the inner city are not wanted in the suburbs, which is why Americans oppose public transit.
Alternative Right.
The USA used to have the best urban public transportation services in the world. They were heavily stressed before, during and after WW2, resulting in a need for heavily capital investment and making them ripe targets for hostile acquisition - which is exactly what happened.
The existing public transport companies and city operators were quietly bought up by front companies (National Bus Lines and friends) backed by General Motors and Standard OIl and deliberately mismanaged in order to encourage people out of streetcars/busses and into cars.
This isn't speculation. There are a number of antitrust judgements against the companies at the time and in the following decades, but you can't undo a destroyed public transport system because the shell games played meant that the reparations involved can't be taken directly from General Motors and Standard Oil.
Los Angeles in particular had one of the very best public transport systems in the world, with high frequencies of service, high levels of punctuality and rapid transit. The Streetcars depicted in Who Framed Roger Rabbit weren't fictional, nor was the laughter at the idea of freeways taking over.
It's amazing what a cartel can achieve with underhanded tactics and huge advertising campaigns about the freedom of the highways, isn't it?
"Transit often makes gridlock on city streets WORSE... unless it has its own dedicated right of way"
That statement is rooted in the assumption that the Car is King.
First and foremost, Cities are for People.
Transportation systems and urban planning need to work on that basis, not on one particular mode of transport to the exclusion of all others or the detriment of the inhabitants. This is something European city planners started realising in the 1970s and adjusted their thinking accordingly.
In a lot of places it makes more sense to ban private cars entirely from urban centres, replacing them with buses/light rail (park and ride) and restricting delivery traffic to specific routes for heavy vehicles or particular times of day (so you don't get large vehicles and heavy pedestrian/pubic transportion flows getting in each others way)
"What is painful and makes a lot of people avoid public transit in LA is the need to transfer. That is an urban planning issue more than a transit issue though."
Transferring is _easy_ if there's a universal pass. I do it all the time in London. One ticket purchased at the start of the day/week covers riding the trains, subway, buses and various other transports, all operated by up to 60 different companies, or a PAYG card does the same duty.
Solve that and people will happily wait 20 minutes outside urben centres (but they'd prefer 10)
Make riding the bus easy and people will ride the bus. Make transfers easy and people will happily take longer journeys. If they have to fiddle around with change for each transfer, you're putting them off. That's one of the main tactics that General Motors/Standard Oil used with their National Bus Lines sham operation (amongst others including making schedules sparser) to push people into cars.
No, i reject public transport because a public transport ride to my work takes FOUR HOURS, while awful city driving in grinding traffic takes two.
If that was reversed, I'd have my butt on a bus seat every day.
Because it doesn't work. When you're taking a train to a bus to a train and waiting 40 minutes between legs, it doesn't work.
Comparing mass transit in Tokyo and Mass transit in Los Angeles is like comparing a Mercedes and a kid's kick scooter.
LA does actually have a universal pass; the action of transferring is easy enough, but the wait and ...transfer station demographics particularly in LA can be a bit of a problem. The Tube, MTR, SMRT, or Tunnelbana make it quite easy to transfer within the subway, and not entirely painful between modes, but LA has a long way to go there.
Why? He's pushing space exploration, and other technologies. While I don't myself own a Tesla, I don't understand the Hate. Is he a showman? Yeah. Name one really front page executive who wasn't.
As far as the overwhelming majority of Americans are concerned, cars ARE king, and pedestrians are the intruders. You can debate whether that's good or bad, but the fact is, even people who LIVE in the urban cores of big cities almost always own cars unless they're prevented from doing so by virtue of poverty (or they use cabs and Uber SO OFTEN, the distinction between owning and not-owning a car is almost a matter of abstract semantics).
From the standpoint of that overwhelming majority, transit has actual MERIT only if it promises (truthfully or not) to reduce traffic congestion, and any form of transit that's likely (or practically GUARANTEED) to make traffic congestion worse is politically intolerable.
The utter failure of transit planners to come to terms with this reality is why Miami voters feel like victims of an elaborate bait & switch scheme every fucking time we get tricked into voting to increase transit funding. The county transit agency runs a multi-month advertising and public relations campaign that makes it look like they're planning to extend Metrorail down to Homestead, up to Broward, to South Beach, and out to West Dade... then six months later, quietly spends all the money on buses.
Fact: if Miami-Dade Transit had been 100% honest about how they intended to spend new transit funds (eg, on buses), voters would NEVER have agreed to either of the past two transit tax referendums. They would have gone down in flames and been defeated SO BADLY on election day, half the transit department's planning staff would have probably been laid off the following day in retribution.
Making matters worse, Miami's transit agency has an absolute KNACK for taking a good idea, then turning it into a proposal that's so fundamentally-flawed and awful, even people who SUPPORT building new rapid transit lines can't stomach it.
Specific examples I remember from recent years:
* The "East-West" Metrorail line, proposed to extend Metrorail from its current orange-line terminus at Miami International Airport west along State Road 836 (more or less) to Dolphin Mall, the south to Florida International University. Slam-dunk, right? Wrong. At one point (around 2007), they drew up fairly specific plans that showed where they planned to build stations. Let's just say that they literally couldn't have come up with worse proposed locations if they'd explicitly TRIED to achieve that as their primary design goal. Take the proposed station "at NW 87th Avenue". OK, solid choice... a square mile of medium-density office park to the northeast, a square mile of medium-density apartments and condos to the southeast, another square mile of medium-density apartments & condos to the southwest, and a HUGE lake with no room to build anything meaningful within walking distance to the northwest. Guess where they proposed putting the station? Yep... the northwest side of 836 and 87th Avenue. Literally ANYTHING of pedestrian interest would have been at least a half-mile walk away from the station. You could give Miami-Dade Transit a barrel full of fish & a shotgun, and they'd manage to explosively amputate their own foot. Any HALFWIT could look at Google Maps & realize that the sane place to put the station would be above the CSX railroad tracks, between NW 87th Avenue and NW 82nd Avenue (which would put much of the area to the north and south of the station within direct, easy walking distance, including the residential area south of 836 since 82nd Avenue now connects on both sides (it didn't back in 2007, but the reconstruction of SR836 was ALREADY underway, and if MDTA planners DIDN'T know about it, they sure as fucking hell SHOULD have).
* An EVEN WORSE plan to extend Metrorail west along SW 8th Street instead of 836... a route that would have not only managed to completely miss two huge malls (International Mall & Dolphin Mall) by 2 miles (as opposed to putting stations on the edge of their respective parking lots), but would have put two or three $50-100 million stations within conveni
Motorcycles should not use engine oil equivalent to most new cars. Modern auto oils have friction modifiers that affect clutch performance in motorcycles. You either have to use very cheap car oils (which have other shortcomings), motorcycle engine oils (which are very expensive) or some types of diesel oils that are outside recommended weights but work great (in my experience) and are not expensive.
Topmost among this last group are Rotella 15w40 and the synthetic Rotella 5w40 "T6".
- Sig
I use T6 - and a LOT of motorcycles use the same oil for the engine as for the transmission. One system...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This is why Americans oppose public transport: poor people, who commit most of the crime, will then be able to get from their ghettos to the suburbs.
Alternative Right.
When did Slashdot become Reddit?
Alternative Right.
The Reddit method of debate is to keep repeating yourself, asking the other guy alternately if he just doesn't understand you or for a source. Then, declare victory and make a snarky comment.
This type of behavior has blighted the internet, so I ask you to reconsider employing it.
Alternative Right.
Not this American. I oppose it for many reasons, not just one.
Because it loses money (at least, when run by a government) it destroys value. If a $10 million project creates an enterprise that is worth $8 million, the world is a poorer place. In addition to this destruction of capital, it also has to be subsidized to remain in operation, taking money from one group of people to provide benefits to another group of people.
It's dangerous. Because the St. Louis County Prosecutor * got into a pissing contest with the light rail operator's security department, the trains don't feel safe, and very often aren't. ( * Soon-to-be former prosecutor. He lost his primary election.)
It doesn't go where I want to go when I want to go there in a reasonable amount of time. Commuting, in particular. Drive 20 or 25 minutes to get to work, or ride the bus for over an hour, with a transfer? Golly, how to decide?
Let's use a tie-breaker: standing in the heat or cold or snow or rain, waiting for that bus? Or a different tie-breaker: knowing that if I am late I miss the bus, but if it is late I just wait longer. Or yet another one: there is no bus stop near my home (so, a long walk) nor near my work (and if get off the bus where there's no stop, I still have to jay-walk to get to the building, where cops ticket such scofflaws).
I'm sure there are more. But aren't those reasons enough?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
This is a great way to visualize how unrealistic programs and policies weaken the economy. Imagine thousands of these at once and some of our recessions no longer seem so inexplicable.
Alternative Right.
Again, Americans do not want it because it allows poor people into their neighborhoods. You have not really done anything except offer tangentials here, and then you made accusations, and now you seem to be just confused.
Alternative Right.
There are always new commuter systems; however, it depends on where they go and how useful they are.
Houston, for example, adopted a new line that runs between downtown destinations. Does it head to the suburbs? Heck no. There is a reason for that.
Not all rail systems are equal or even alike. You have to dig deeper.
In the meantime, you still refused to address the core point, which is that class warfare makes mass transit unpopular in the USA.
Alternative Right.
In my experience, most cause/effect relationships are like building a campfire: if you make a circle of rocks, pile wood in it, put newspaper and kindling under that, and soak it in lighter fluid, you have a complete fire awaiting a spark.
All of these little failures contribute to the conditions required for the economy to crash.
Alternative Right.
Depends on prior rates and what these rail systems are doing relative to the point of suburbinner city transportation.
Alternative Right.
Good analogy, I think.
Let's see... where was government in this?
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I covered this one here: http://www.amerika.org/politic...
Alternative Right.
Plz no!
Regulation imposes costs and unintentionally legalizes certain behaviors since anything not on the naughty list is presumed to be nice. In addition, it gives business another few layers of paperwork to hide behind.
I suggest we cease regulating entirely, and go back to good old-fashioned lawsuits. If you catch someone doing something bad, and can prove it, you should be able to sue in the interests of your group as a member of that group. That way, you do not need to have toxic waste on your lawn to sue on behalf of your community.
Alternative Right.