[JumpCrisscross]

> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50

Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. You can't build your way out of traffic. The only solutions are tolls or quotas.

In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt.

> transit for the actual public

Cars going through this tunnel are cars off other roads.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

[njarboe]

The concept of induced demand does not say you can't build your way out of traffic. This idea seems to come up a lot in transportation discussions. Driving a car on a road is not free in either money or time, so when a new road fills up it is because more people are going somewhere they want to go and are pay a cost to do so. Yes, when you build a new road near where there are already traffic jams, the new road gets filled up. This is not some magical thing that with infinite roads people will just drive all day so that they are full. I think most people who use this phrase don't quite understand it. The have learned that cars are morally bad and induced demand is some kind of concept that says building new roads for cars is pointless. I ask you, if there was a way for people to have instant point-to-point transportation that had little environmental impact, would you support its implementation?

The whole point of Musk's tunneling project is that with tunnels you can build as many tunnels as you want without the negative aspects of roads which are mainly taking up surface space and making a lot of noise.

[gowld]

Infinite roads are not an option. If there is more pent-up demand than total possible road capacity, then there will never be enough capacity.

[njarboe]

"If there is more pent-up demand than total possible road capacity, then there will never be enough capacity." That is a tautology.

With tunnels you can probably increase capacity by 100 times without going very deep. That would support some kind of crazy Hong Kong level density of people in the whole LA basin. Everyone in the US could live there. After that happens one can worry about this infinity demand potential.

[dsfyu404ed]

Every additional lane and rail is a good thing because it is a net increase in capacity. Even if it's an expensive road or rail it removes the traffic that considers it a good value from everywhere else.

>Roads suffer from induced demand [1].

Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out. Crappy infrastructure increases the cost of geographic distance and that's bad for everyone.

> You can't build your way out of traffic

Reducing traffic isn't the point. The point is getting more people and goods to and from where they need to be. You can slap a $100 price on a subway ticket or a $100 toll on the highway if you want to reduce traffic. That doesn't help anybody except the people rich enough to regularly pay it.

> The only solutions are tolls or quotas.

Which themselves have a bunch of negative side effects because you're basically forcing that traffic onto other roads or other forms of transit and many trips will be forgone in the process.

You can't create capacity out of thin air by manipulating the cost (money, time or some other metric) of the different transit options. You can only create the illusion of capacity by forcing traffic elsewhere.

>In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt.

Or a sign that your prices are so high that other options are still less worse by comparison.

[bryanlarsen]

"Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out."

It's economic activity that has a huge amount of negative externalities and infrastructure cost. So if the economic activity generated has a value less than that of the externalities and costs, society is worse off.

So we need a way of limiting demand so that any trip whose benefit is less than its infrastructure and negative externalities doesn't happen.

Currently we mostly do this by making trips really slow and annoying during rush hour. There's obviously a better way but tolls are political suicide.

[paulsutter]

Pods will be transiting these tunnels, not passenger cars

https://www.inverse.com/article/46041-elon-musk-s-tesla-plan...

> The only solutions are tolls or quotas.

Increasing density of traffic is another solution, for example buses or trains. Elon is proposing one more way to increase the density of traffic: up to 30 levels of tunnels (considering surface density of traffic). I don't know that he can achieve it, but I'm thrilled he's trying.

[lvh]

I'm not sure I understand your argument. On the one hand, you cite induced demand, on the other you say "cars going through this tunnel are cars off other roads".

Isn't that a contradiction? Or are you saying induced demand only works for cars?

[chapium]

The highway corridor from downtown to Ohare is one of the worst commutes in the country. Expanding mass transit is a good thing from this point of view.