"Nothing has the durability of a bad idea." "Everything is simple to the simple minded."
Many of these various traffic concepts have been around in some form or fashion for a long time. It is hard to know where to start. Musk sounds like he thinks he has a new and completely unique idea with people pods in tunnels. Welllll, there are a few things missing here. First and foremost there appears to be no consideration given to safety issues, such as the need for emergency access, evacuation routes, etc., etc. I have news for the old boy: Tunnel construction has been around for 100's, even 1,000's of years, with many people involved in it trying to figure out ways to do it easier and cheaper over a long period of time. You can't suddenly walk into the field ignoring all the lessons from the past. That is called, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Yes, a small diameter tunnel is cheaper to construct than a large one, but one of the first things you get into dealing with issues in tunnels is this strong desire to go back to the designers, and scream at them, "Don't shrink wrap the equipment!" Also, you still need right of way. Same as with pipelines, except on a larger scale. It may be invisible to the world, but you still need to buy the right to build and access a facility from the owner of the land you are passing under.
Vacuum tube? Been tried 100 plus years ago. Try maintaining the vacuum in a large cross section long facility. Hard to do then, maybe not as much so now as in the past, however, but still not easy. It takes huge amount of energy to achieve a vacuum or low pressure environment and to maintain it. Keeping everything sealed approaches impossibility. Then you have to take it off to do any maintenance. You have to have airlocks at every stopping point. You can go faster and with less propulsion energy on straight lines because you are not pushing a plug of air, but your curving and starting and stopping issues are the same. it is called "g" forces on the passengers. You don't worry about these in the tubes to the bank drive-throughs, but people are not paper. If a facility carrying people changed speed and direction at the same rates used with these little paper carriers you would be removing bodies from the ends or sides of the vehicles with a large spatula. In California, for example, you do not want these facilities going through fault lines. One thing about it, you do not have to worry about getting out the injured in case of a quake, you will just be removing bodies when you get around to it. Then you simply cut the unidentifiable blob up into chunks about people sized each and put a name on each chunk of the blob so there is something for the family to bury.
The whole idea that the transport capacity of 12+ car trains running a 15 minute intervals or so, as is the case on some high speed railway systems can be provided by a slug of 12 to 20 people size pods is simply nuts. And . . . giving some of the nut cases traveling today, do you really want to be locked up in a pod with a few other people for an hour or so in an other than propulsion is an uncontrolled environment?
Musk may have good ideas with the electric cars and even space vehicles but both things have in common this: You do not have to build any facilities to carry them. The roads used by the cars have been built by others and the space vehicles do not need roads to operate on.
)
