[njarboe]

"If you look at maximum road capacity for a highway lane it's pretty pitifully in the hundreds."

You need some units for this sentence to have meaning.

If a vehicle and its space buffer takes up 52.8 feet and goes 60mph one gets 100 vehicles/minute or 6000 per hour. With two people per vehicle, that is 12000 people per hour. Use mini-buses with 10 people each you can get 60,000 people per hour. This rate is about what BART does when completely full at rush hour.

Another cool thing about a road is that one can mix high capacity vehicles (buses) with lower capacity ones (cars) with cargo vehicles (trucks). You can even use them for tanks, ambulances, fire trucks, Humvees, etc.