Basically, I see three ways of looking at what Boring Company is trying to do:
1. It is being built by people who don't know what they're doing and don't understand the field, and it isn't going to work. (This seems to be the way you look at it.)
2. They expect to be able to reduce the costs of tunneling so drastically that the lower throughput of PRT won't even be a problem.
3. They plan to use an unprecedented level of automation to advance the state of the art in how PRT can be done. (This is my guess.)
Obviously, nobody really knows which of the above is the case. They haven't shared a lot of detail.
But in support of the idea that it _could_ be #3, there's a reason I think there's room for innovation in PRT. It's so expensive to build any transit system that relatively few attempts have been made at PRT. And some things have changed since many of those tries, mainly advances in automation. So for example, if switching is a bottleneck for headway, maybe there is a way to build a much faster switch but nobody has put the R&D money into it yet.
Comments
Basically, I see three ways of looking at what Boring Company is trying to do:
1. It is being built by people who don't know what they're doing and don't understand the field, and it isn't going to work. (This seems to be the way you look at it.)
2. They expect to be able to reduce the costs of tunneling so drastically that the lower throughput of PRT won't even be a problem.
3. They plan to use an unprecedented level of automation to advance the state of the art in how PRT can be done. (This is my guess.)
Obviously, nobody really knows which of the above is the case. They haven't shared a lot of detail.
But in support of the idea that it _could_ be #3, there's a reason I think there's room for innovation in PRT. It's so expensive to build any transit system that relatively few attempts have been made at PRT. And some things have changed since many of those tries, mainly advances in automation. So for example, if switching is a bottleneck for headway, maybe there is a way to build a much faster switch but nobody has put the R&D money into it yet.