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.
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.