[jcranmer]

I pulled my numbers for vehicle elevators by looking at the website of someone who sells vehicle elevators (which said 30-120fpm). Vehicle elevators are slower than human elevators, partly because vehicles are much, much heavier. I suspect most vehicle elevators are going to have to be hydraulic drives, not cable-driven. There's also acceleration to worry about, but short elevator spans are not going to let you build to full speed anyways.

Depth is trickier to reason about. The Boring Company's FAQ explicitly states that "There is no practical limit to how many layers of tunnels can be built, so any level of traffic can be addressed." This suggests that they generally want multiple layers of tunnel. As a matter of practice, most major cities already have underground rapid transit systems that already occupy space. As you go higher, you have to worry about the complex geometry. Because of the inherent lower capacity of the system, you also need an order of magnitude more tunnels, which is going to push you deeper anyways.

Even if you think my numbers are close to 10× off, the capacity advantage of rapid transit is still looking closer to 10×. The advantage of transit over SOVs is simply that large.