Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
To be devil's advocate a little (and I could totally be wrong, and eagerly await bobman dunking on me): getting people from point A to point B is a huge problem in the world that has seen very little improvement from technology in our lifetimes, especially in the United States. The combination of highway traffic and slow public transit have enormous implications for another major problem in the US, housing: people have to either live close to their jobs in economic hubs, spiking demand and creating insane situations like the SF Bay Area, or suffer through hours-long commutes each way.
So, I'll give Elon credit for this: he's working on this problem. Maybe the idea with Dodger Stadium is to provide a working example to the public, that thousands of people use every day, that this sort of thing is viable and we need to do more of it. Maybe this is the sort of project that's necessary to prove these things before cities will take a chance on larger projects, or maybe revenue from something smaller like this is needed to fund larger projects. Look at Uber, which is an amazing system for siphoning money from venture capitalists to average joe drivers (they're still losing a billion per quarter) - it would never have existed if they didn't first get a bunch of people to sign up for their order-a-black-car-on-demand service for rich shmucks.
Not sure why you think I would want to dunk on this take??
I think all of Musk's weird tunnel shenanigans are interesting, but it's hard to see how they can actually work. For example, the Dodger Stadium thing has an upside ridership case of 250k people per year, which means their revenue at $1/ride is $250k a year, which is the topline revenue for a week at a Subway restaurant, not a year for a real subway line. The optimistic explanation is that this is basically a case of building a prototype and trying to use it to drum up favorable publicity/learn about real-world operations. It's not really an example of what a real-world system can be like.