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Transportation Businesses

Musk's Boring Company Proposes High-Speed Underground Subway To Dodger Stadium (geekwire.com) 240

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!"
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Musk's Boring Company Proposes High-Speed Underground Subway To Dodger Stadium

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  • Is that it? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AC-x ( 735297 ) on Sunday August 19, 2018 @07:22AM (#57153724)

    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.

    • by SumDog ( 466607 )

      Or just even normal sized trains in the tunnels. Why have car capacity limitations?! That's the whole point of a fucking train. You've can easily hold 10+ people in the same square area of a train than you could in car.

      • Trains aren't the right shape to make efficient use of the space. These "skates" are like a carnival ride where you load in an area with headroom, but when they're traveling you're seated.

        You would need to tunnel out 4x as much volume per traveler to fit a regular train.

  • 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.
  • 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 [wikipedia.org] 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
  • 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 befor

    • 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 lik

      • 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

  • 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 t

  • 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
  • Before he starts all his unicorn jizz and fairy fart-laden pie-in-the-sky BS?

    #Monorail!

  • 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

  • When there's bad news, create a distraction.

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