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F=ma

Build your vehicle with 'bicycle technology' instead of 19th century technology, the weight goes down and the vibrations are solved too.

With 'bicycle technology' there are no crumple zones, there is very little steel and that is 'high tensile' steel rather than the hefty steel that you get on railways. Deluxe materials such as carbon fibre and the more interesting alloys of aluminium are used on bikes that, at the same price point, were made of more common materials a generation ago. Even though bicycles are old fashioned, they are up there and beyond F1 and other 'performance engineering'.

I would bet that the liner for a Tesla 'frunk' weighs more than most bicycles, plus on regular vehicles there is a lot of cruft that you just wouldn't have if you had to push it yourself.

I am not suggesting for one moment that Elon makes all of these tunnels for bicycles, however, you do not need to make a vehicle massively heavy (e.g. 50 tonnes) to get it to adhere to the train tracks.

Seems Japanese trains weigh a fraction of what American trains do:

https://pedestrianobservations.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/tabl...

I am sure that if Elon and co. thought about doing what the Japanese do on the train weights but '10x' the weight would be fine. There is no easier way to get speed - F = ma - plus there is important safety considerations, people get killed by heavy vehicles, deaths by being hit by a bicycle (e.g. as a pedestrian) are out there with freak events, improbable but possible.




Thanks for the detailed reply! That was kind of par of my question and interesting to read, but I actually referred to the booring head. It said he wants to increase booring by 10x.

I now read elsewhere he does not want to stop booring while putting in the supporting wall, so he'll advance continiously, but I doubt that's what takes so long.


My perspective is London where you do get basements rumble with the trains below, we did have Crossrail put in with a lot of disruption to existing infrastructure being more of a problem than the ground shaking to pieces. They did have a very large TBM and they also had to weave through and around a lot of other tunnels beneath the ground. A lot of lasers above ground made sure things did not subside, which was a bigger problem than the rumbling, which is a one time thing. With the aforementioned basement situation there is a rumble every few minutes.




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