Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 43: Las Vegas Loop

Episode Date: October 26, 2020

take the fucking bus you freaks patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod

We're going to record a podcast. No, we don't acknowledge Red Scare on here. OK, and then I can start Presentating. OK. So shit, right. Yeah, we're podcasting. I forget how to introduce the podcast.

Hello and welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides with me, Justin Rosniak. We can't do the same gag twice in a row. Sure, we can. This whole podcast is the same gag twice in a row. We will do the same gag twice in a row. They're going to love it. Yeah, maybe pronouns.

I hate him. Maybe we put it at the end of every episode. Guy, who just said we can't do it twice. What's the joke that we put at the end of every episode? There's no joke. Shut up. There's no joke. Yeah. Hi, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem, a podcast which is about engineering disasters and it has slides.

I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. OK, go. I am Alice Kordwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. I am Liam Anderson.

I've expanded from yelling at you on Twitter and YouTube to yelling at you in our discord. My pronouns are he and him. Oh, yeah, we have a discord now. We do have a discord now. We have a discord now. We have Pennsylvania Secret Service. We'll fix the bots. OK.

Stop fucking stop fucking yelling at me. And we have Pennsylvania Secret Service ID cards that are mailing out. We still have shirts, Roz. I'll get on it. I'm going to clip the like angry Rosnuss. Is that? Just oh, God.

It's all right. It's fine. I'll be there in 10 minutes. Thank you. OK. So this is a fun episode. We get we get to talk about Elon Musk, our favorite guy who's saving the world every day

by building luxury cars. That's right. That's that aren't particularly finished off. He's so epic. He bacon. He turns himself into a pickle. It's the funniest shit I've ever seen. Please, bro, you just have to rewatch it.

Please, bro, buy a Tesla, bro. Get a load of this. I know he does. He did turn himself into a pickle. It was the funniest thing I've seen in my fucking life. You can have just buy a GTI. You don't don't actually because I need the parts to remain around the same place.

But if if you if you do buy a GTI, will you be able to play Tetris on it? No, no, no, but I have an intro to auto. Not the same. It's not the same as having like a native epic bacon computer in the car. I yeah, I paid one hundred and ten thousand dollars for my luxury sedan and the doors don't quite line up.

So one of these days, one of these days, as like a bonus patron thing, we should record the three of us working in shifts to read the oatmeal comic about how much that guy loves his Tesla. Yeah, OK. I don't know if I could read an oatmeal comic. Yeah, it's not 2011. I don't feel comfortable.

You have to work in you have to work in in shifts just to prevent too much exposure to it, because you might die. You know, it's like that. It's like that money. I think the pipe. Yeah, like trying to translate the deadly joke into German. I did. I did see one of the funniest and worst arguments I've ever seen.

That was at least nominally pro Tesla. That was well, no one complained when they bought a Lamborghini in the 80s and the doors didn't fit. I'm like, no one's stealing a Lamborghini. Yeah, but also people very much did complain. Yeah, they did. The entire 70s and 80s were just a succession of different guys complaining that, like, hey, I bought an Italian car.

I came out onto the driveway one morning and I found a six foot high pile of rust. Yes, yes. And so no one could put, you know, they could do that. And now you think through these great cars. I'm like, yes. Lamborghini also wasn't claiming to be saving the world. No, they weren't. They were just like off more, more, more, more, just more.

And they could be coming back on car. It has a 12 cylinders. They're valid shut up. Hey, it looks like a rocket ship. The lasers in the headlamps so you could see and also cut off the cars in half. Hey, I'm walking here. Just right into the York.

That's our reason. Suddenly Italian American Lamborghini was in my house. Are we going to get Liam doing Castle Doctrine on the fucking episode? I I heard Corinne and my roommate Megan talking, but I thought I heard another voice. And I was just like, I've got to do that. Yep.

All right. So the good Lord of into the tire iron Alice. What we're here for. They're cooking a tire on extra, extra, extra destruction. I got to bring it all the way back. Ross, if you want, I can drive over there and hit you with the tire iron before we ever finish recording this episode. Please go on. Oh, what we're talking about today

is Elon Musk's boring company and its loop system for high speed underground transportation. Did it work? Did it work? Can we talk about it because it works? No. I forgot that this isn't the first episode of our sister podcast that we keep threatening to launch. Well, there isn't your problem.

I literally just spit up my cherry coke because I laughed. That's fucking tight. So no, you're supposed to do that with the cherry coke. Like it's actually perverse to swallow it. You're just like gutting your cherry coke. Listen, I used to gut dip because I am a man's man. And one time I remember I was talking to Ross and I had just gutted a lip. I was like, he's got to move out of the way.

I'm going to throw up right in his face that we won't be friends anymore. So I thought we would. I've made a video on this previously on my other channel. But you should go watch it. I thought it would be a good idea to revisit it now that it's getting some more media traction again, because now they've announced a we're going to try and link up the whole city of Las Vegas with these underground tunnels.

I'm just here for the hate clicks with cars gone through them. Yeah, there's damn y'all mad. And they're almost finished with sort of a demonstrator line at the Las Vegas Convention Center, which we will be talking about in a moment. Awesome. But first, we need to talk about the goddamn news. Thank you for this headline. Oh, no problem.

Can you write in penis right behind him? Can you imagine in? Yeah, penis America. I love the childish Gambino song. So so this ban, Jeffrey Tubin, who I believe is a legal analyst for the New Yorker, whipped it out on a zoom call for some reason. And then at some point, I think, possibly still, maybe not before. There's been a lot of whipping out lately, like between him and Giuliani.

Oh, Jesus, God damn it. The shaking hands mean between Liam and the Daily Storm, and it's immediately looking up at the guy who's done something awful as Jewish, diametrically opposed for each other. Just can you please go one day without embarrassing ourselves in front of the Goyom? That's all I asked. Giuliani did the exact same thing with a girl he thought was 15 on the set of a horror movie.

Like the Italians are right there with you. It's fine. This is this is like a multi ethnic coalition. That's good. Oh, dude. I just. And people are defending this for some reason. Yeah. All of these like fucking like media freak shows like listen,

let he who has never jerked off on zoom cast the first stone. And I'm like, yeah, I'll cast to the fucking stone. Yeah. Yeah. I've never jerked it on zoom. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, like all of these people trying to like normalize this are so transparent, right? It's like, oh, like, like you've never jerked off in front of your coworkers. You know, it's like, well, no, not really. No, I haven't. I'm not jerking off right now.

I'm kind of distracted by having to do the podcast. I'm not really in the right mindset. I don't know what he was. Speak for yourself. I don't think you should jerk off in the office at all. I know he was working from home. Right. But like it was an election. They were wargaming the election. Like the fucking debate freaks that they are.

And they took a break from what was like a four hour zoom call and he left his camera on and he just just started cranking it. So, you know, talk about talk about an erection scenario. Oh, very good. Yeah, I didn't hear the joke the first time. So I just repeated it. No, I heard it. I was just choosing not to acknowledge it.

He wrote The People versus O.J. Simpson. And then he wrote a Trump book, of course, he did. Because we can only have a monoculture around Donald fucking Trump now. Yes, he is the problem. Jerking off on on Zoom in front of your co-workers, not the problem. And in fact, normal. We've learned this now how our various public intellectuals have like come out and told us that this is fine.

So it's actually not. It's actually impolite to not. Yeah, disrespecting your host by like showing you not. Yeah, what happened to civility? Yeah, it's called the problem, the tragedy of the commons. Tragedy of the commies. Oh, is that anything? Yeah, no, I'm going to vomit.

It's the tragedy of the of the whacking off on Zoom. Anyway, now you could have just done tragedy of the Cummins. That's what I said. That's the joke I did. I thought you said Cummins. I did say Cummins. Yeah, OK, so yeah, so tragedy of the commons is just how my head is funny. The tragedy of the Cummins is that they're, you know, really fuel inefficient. That's not true.

They actually make some good engines for like municipal buses and stuff like that. Can't die. Yeah. All right. In other news. Yet the Las Vegas Raiders all have fucking covid. Oh, yeah, the entire offensive line has covid. You'll see all the screen grab here. All five starting a line men have currently on reserve lists.

They have a starting safety. They already had a postpone this game, I think it's a first time. And he's like, no, we're not going to do it a second time. We're just going to roll with whatever our second trigger and be legends. I I can't emphasize enough for those of you who don't watch football and those of you who have tuned out because I'm talking about it. Stake of sports. You need to start.

You need an O line because that's the Eagles problem right now is that again, Roz is starting at right guard. Yeah. And three dudes we found at the Wawa. Yeah, if you own if you own a Pennsylvania Secret Service ID card, you are going to be drafted into the Eagles. Yeah, you're going to have to report to to the link on Sunday. So hope everybody's ready.

I just I loved it. Like the NFL is just steadfastly like, no, there's there's not covid. Shut up. Like it's it's the United States sort of general response of we got bored of the virus and so just accepted that like 200,000 plus people are going to die. But what if also football, it's an illegitimate season. They should never fucking have done this in the first place.

But, you know, more specifically, you don't have to watch college football this year, because college football is even worse after teams are fucking dead. They're not all even playing full seasons. Like there's no need for this. You know, look, do you want to see Derek Carr run out there on his own? Pick up the football. I'm amazed, you know, who the Raiders starting quarterback is. And then like all of his bones fall apart from like weird covid complication.

I'm going to do an episode on whether or not Derek Carr is good. It depends on like how much you're into like football, eugenics, right? I guess his brother wasn't very good. Yeah, exactly. I watched a Fresno State game when Derek Carr played once and I remember him just getting crushed underfoot 900 times. And last year or two years ago, he got sacked like for the ninth time in a game and he cried because he was truly hurt and frustrated.

And people made fun of him and I'm just like, all right, here's the thing, you go stand there in quarterback pads and I personally am going to run at you 50 times and we'll see how you feel. Yeah, I mean, this is welcome to the Las Vegas cannot catch a break episode. I was about to say, yeah. Yeah. So even worse than the Raiders not having an O line is Las Vegas having a hyper loop line nailed it. Nailed the segue.

Ah, yes. That's the next slide. OK, it looks so pathetic. So we have it looks like an electric razor, but like bad. It does look like an electric razor, actually. So I thought we'd start with some history and some context of this loop project, right? So it's important to remember that we were invented by alchemy days. Yes. No, that was screws.

Whatever. Same thing. Yeah. So circles were invented by, I don't know. Fuck, who was the guy who was like, don't disturb my circles? And I believe that would be Sir. Conference. Yes. And the Knights of Pie. Yeah. It was Archimedes who said, don't disturb my circles. Oh, so he invented the screw and being stabbed because of like circles.

OK, fine. So my original joke stands. Fuck you. Yes. So there's two, there's two different concepts which Elon Musk claims to have come up with, one of which is the hyper loop, which is just his name for a vacuum tube train, which is a concept which has existed since the 1910s. But like we talked about it. Which episode was that?

Atmospheric Railway. Seven. Yes, one of our one of our great accomplishments. Hmm. That's one of our best podcasts. As strong again as the horse visor a bit from that episode. OK, we may have jumped the shark on that one. Fuck. Peaked early. Fuck.

So Elon Musk came up with this hyper loop idea in 2012. The main difference between this and a pure vacuum tube train is originally the idea was there'd be a big air compressor on the front so that instead of being a vacuum tube that this pod travels through, it's an almost vacuum tube and you can still overcome a lot of air resistance. The idea here is that since it's a tube with very low air pressure, you can go very, very fast, very, very easily, right? And there have been a few practical attempts to build a hyper loop now.

And all of them have done away with the air compressor. They thought that was stupid. Just make it a vacuum tube train. So I can pretty confidently say Elon Musk has contributed almost nothing to this idea, but is still credited for it. He contributes a large hindrance to it. Yeah, he's made everything worse. So I'm glad this this pattern will never be repeated with any of his other ventures. Yeah. And one of the weird things is of the two concepts we're presenting here,

the hyper loop and the loop. I think the hyper loop is probably the more practical idea. But it just makes a lot more sense, even though it seems much, much more technically infeasible. Well, it's because it's a train, right? Like it's it's kind of a fucked train. But you can't say train and has to be a pod. No, yeah, we have to do like cool and new and trains are old and busted.

It's a pod. Fine, it's a it's a pod, but you can't take that pod and then like take it out of the tube and like drive it around. Yeah, also, I don't think you can connect a multiple ones together because otherwise then it would be a train, which is bad, needs to be a pod, which is futuristic and good. I swear to God, this all I Elon Musk just started all this shit because he got screwed over by Union Pacific once.

And he's been he's been mad at railroads ever since. Yeah. Mm hmm. So OK, from this, he develops a concept called the loop, right? The even dumber one. Yes, the even dumber one, the number one. And that's because he was frustrated, having to drive to the airport and to his house and to SpaceX and crap. And he was too good to take the light rail that stops

right there outside the SpaceX office. I mean, it's a little bit inconvenienced. You got to walk like half a block, but you just get a helicopter like everybody else who has too much money. Sixty nine thousand four hundred twenty dollars, epic bacon style. That's the thing. I I I guess Elon Musk is not completely stupid because he did not buy a helicopter to solve this problem.

Well, congratulations, Elon. You did something. Yeah. Because that puts him ahead of like a was it? Was it Cuomo de Blasio who wanted the like civilianized V-22 Osprey to get in and out of New York? I was big. I was walking around New York City three days ago, I think.

Why would you do that? Because I had time to kill and I walked by this. This apparently there is some kind of new on demand helicopter app in New York. It's called Blade, Ross. That's like four years old. Yeah. Did they put a fucking like rope down to you and like winch you up or what? Otherwise, I'm not interested.

Actually, a bunch of of helicopter pads near like 34th Street, right? And it's like, I figured on demand helicopter service, you know, you'd have pretty luxurious facilities there. And it's like, no, it's a bunch of wooden shacks which are painted black so, you know, they're cool. But it's a bunch of wooden shacks next to a helipad. I will accept an on demand helicopter service only. And only if the helicopter is painted bright yellow,

it's got the checker pattern on it. It's got a taxi light that comes on. It's got a medallion and the guy leans out of the thing to yell at people. You can, however, also buy a 20 pack of flights between Manhattan and Nantucket. Yeah, you you I don't ever need to be in a helicopter again. That's a long flight in a helicopter. Well, it's in a seaplane. Oh.

I mean, planes are cool. They don't bring the seaplanes back. You know, fly to Philly and we don't because I will do what I did when I was a kid and and think about just standing on my roof with an RPG seven and you'll have to cut that, Roz. We're just since our RPG seven. It was just I just from your days growing up in Mogadishu. You know, shots of super six one.

I just listen, you stand. You you live next to a Medevac helicopter pad long enough. You stop wanting them to save lives. You're just like, you should have died. That's what I said. We're going to leave all of that in now. Three in the morning.

Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go. Creed is clear. Water revival starts playing out of nowhere. Every day I'm in here, I'm getting weaker and Charlie's out there getting stronger. My dad's coming down to ask me what the hell I bought about as I started learning like, I don't know, a cardboard tube with cat food to go swear on the helicopters. So OK, Elon Musk did not buy a helicopter.

He decided. Congratulations. What we need to do is find a way to move cars more quickly. Right. What if we build some tunnels to move the cars really fast, right? You know, the existence of 11 billion lane miles of highway in Los Angeles didn't real phase them, right? He was like, well, we'll just build more tunnels. We'll build more lanes just for cars.

And then under the ground, you can do whatever you want. I've repurposed this idea that I got about emerald mines into like fast car trip mines. Well, it's a real it's a real like a tech brain solution, right? Because there's like only one there's only one thing these tech companies have done, which is sort of throw capacity at a problem until it goes away. That's like how the entire gig economy works, right? You know, it's not like Uber has like a really efficient dispatching system.

They just have a shitload of drivers. They just have an app. Yeah. Yeah, which they're currently using to like try to force everybody to vote. Yes, yes, which you should not do. That's right. Don't don't give these people any more power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't give VC monsters any more power.

Fuck them. They can walk. Yep. It's not an endorsement, by the way, because every time we endorse something, something catastrophic happens to that particular point of. I think I may have broken the spell, though, right? Because I said I hoped Trump got better from covid and he did. So now it's impossible for me to tell I've lost all trust in it, you know. I don't know. That might be a fluke.

That's true. So, you know, you want ideas? You can build a shitload of tunnels underground for cars. And then that way you won't have traffic anymore because you'll have so many tunnels that that you just can't fill up all of them. Right? Yeah, I mean, this is basically like if you think of it as Elon Musk's plan to entomb a bunch of people in tunnels under the city so he can drive on the

surface faster, it's basically not dissimilar to the plan that Bane had in the Dark Knight Rises. Or like that old Usenet group, Pave the Earth. Hmm. I mean, we could. Yeah, which is advocated for turning the world into a smooth ball of asphalt so everyone can drive very quickly everywhere. So, OK, one of the parts of this plan, which actually seems to have worked out OK.

Was to, you know, make tunneling a whole lot cheaper by removing some inefficiencies in the process. And the boring company, which is the company Elon Musk set up, actually seems to have made some progress in that respect. Right. So, you know, they have this sort of standardized tunnel boring machines that they're developing that you can just haul up to a site on a truck and sort of dump on the ground and then just start digging as opposed to having to build like a launch pit and stuff like that.

We've all seen the end of The Incredibles. Yes. Ross, have you ever seen The Incredibles? No. Wait, yes, I have seen The Incredibles. Oh, OK. Yeah. Ross has seen, as far as I know, four movies, which are The Incredibles of the Godfather trilogy. So, you know, OK, they've done they've done some actual good work on like making tunneling faster and time is money. So that makes it cheaper, right? But.

The what they're using it for is very stupid. Yes, we've talked about some of the problems with cars in tunnels before in the Selang tunnel episode, and we'll we'll get back to that later. And that's why the original loop concept was probably the best one, right? So the original one was they were just going to have pods, right? Again, with the pods, right? The original one, well, they call them sleds. You can see here, there's a car and it's on a sort of platform with wheels, right?

So the car drives up onto the platform that's up on the surface, then they lower it into the ground, into a tunnel, right? And then that takes off by what seems to be some kind of. I think this is either a third rail or it's a cable hold system. I am not sure. I think you'll calm down this rail gun. Yeah. Yeah. And we hope that the rail stays together. Good luck, folks.

So you've just built a rocket train is what I'm hearing. But it's not a train. I can't call it a train. It's a rocket pod. It's what you've built. What you've built is that thing that that US Air Force Colonel used to test the GeForce experiments, the rocket sled. Only, you know, you have a car on it now. It's it's cattle bar, but for the ground. Just to have an LSO lighting up a fucking Christmas tree beacon

for a Tesla coming in hot. That's awesome. So the the idea is, OK, you put your car on the platform. Now, you're, you know, the platform goes about 124 miles an hour in the tunnel, right? And there's a whole bunch of them going through the tunnel, you know, constantly, right? Some of these some of these platforms, these sleds would be these passenger shuttles, right? Which could carry a whopping 16 people.

Wow. Yeah. For reference, Wilson there. For reference, a normal city bus. Now, about 34 people seated and, you know, probably 50 more people standing. Max is a couple of bikes on the front. A couple of bikes on the front. Yeah, maybe there's a guy hanging off the back.

I don't know. Guy with roller skates on a tether. Yeah. Yeah, or a skateboard. Never mind me. So in an articulated bus, it's obviously even more people. And back before the ADA, we had like 60 seat buses. But, you know, gotta gotta leave some room for wheelchairs and reduce the seating capacity. So.

The the one lane tunnels that Elon wanted to build were intended to move many more cars than a highway lane could since they were all automated in some fashion. Automated in some fashion, right? So something like 4,000 cars an hour or a car every 0.9 seconds, right? So that means very close vehicle separation at very high speeds, right?

That's fine. I'm sure it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Nothing bad could happen. And if this works, you know, perfectly, that's about four times the capacity of a highway lane, if I recall correctly, offhand, because I didn't put that in the notes. And again, listen, listen to the Solange Tunnel Fire episodes

with Joe Kasabian for an example of how you can't necessarily do that kind of separation safely with a bunch of Euro trucks moving at five miles an hour. Yes. And if all the vehicles were full, it would almost be comparable capacity to a subway, right? But. This after you telling me that there's a gotcha with a lot. Well, as it turns out,

for some reason, they actually decided to try and build it. Right. Bad idea with these kind of visionary concepts is actually trying to do it. That brings us to a concept scale down number one, right? So Elon Musk starts the boring company, right? And they get to work and they build this test tunnel in 2017 underneath the SpaceX campus that goes six thousand feet. It has one curve at the end, right?

During this phase, like the sled and rail in possibly cable system is eliminated, right? The idea now is that we have these sort of guide wheels, right? In front of the car that hold it onto a track in the tunnel, right? This sounds like a great place to share. This is, you know, what never fails as wheels ever? Well, they don't actually for never failing. Very, how many wheels, by the way?

Hmm. Is it just four? Is it four? Is it four wheels? No, there's just two one on each side in the front. Are you fucking kidding me with that? So this is very similar to how a guided bus way works, actually. And those work pretty reliably. On the speeds they're aiming for. Yeah. And on the surface. Yeah. So now this this is this is something interesting.

We'll see as these as the system is scaled down further. And this makes the tunnel more proprietary, right? Before it was like you put your car on a sled. So presumably you could just use any car on it. Now you need a car with these special guide wheels, right? Which I think in practice means only Tesla's could use it. Hmm. We've put DRM on our tunnel. Yeah.

Jailbreak. Jailbreak the tunnels. Yeah, that's just when you parallel bore in with your own tunnel machine. So this this is when they used they they started sending out some documents that looked like construction documents, but clearly we're like. The has not built. Yeah, these are these are schematics done by someone who's never who's seen construction documents and is vaguely aware of what they are. But, you know, these aren't real.

This is of the idea that maybe you could have your car could be in your garage. And rather than going out to the street, maybe you would just have an elevator that drops you into the tunnel in your garage. Oh, OK. Maybe I just have an elevator shaft under my garage. That's yeah, I can maintain that on my own time. The touch of suck it. Also, I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to turn your car to get in the tunnel here at the end.

Especially when there seems to be a wall between the tunnel and the access way here. I'm just doing like a 20 point turn. Yeah, doing the crab walk. Yeah, while a car goes for hours at like 120 miles an hour every second. But yeah, so OK, there's there's there's more reliance on software here as well. They start, you know, taking, you know, they start to say, well, the Tesla's autopilot will handle some of the stuff as opposed to any kind

of mechanical guidance, right? And the system is going to get more and more reliant on software for safety critical features as we move on, right? But despite this, the system has been fine. Yeah, there have never been problems with software. I always know that like software is rock solid all the time. It's like we have a good example of how a switch from a primarily set of mechanical set of safety systems to primarily a software based one

has been dangerous in the aircraft industry. Yeah, when you can just like fly an airbus and accidentally elbow the switch for crash to on. So. Despite the fact that they're relying on software more, the system's still supposed to move four thousand vehicles an hour in each tunnel at very high speed, you know, separated through software. The test tunnel opened a great fanfare.

Elon Musk brought a bunch of the press through in a Model X cars hit a whopping 40 miles an hour in the first tunnel. Because the track they built was extremely rough and bumpy. Holy shit, can you go 40 miles an hour in a tunnel or just suck all the air out of your lungs? No, no, it's the the bumps and jolts from building an incredibly shitty track that does that. All right. So that brings us to the second scale down of the system, right?

Oh, boy, that's just a road. Well, that is just a road. It's just a road. The flesh light around it. Yes. So let's say. They ran a bunch of tests and they're like, yeah, we built this track like shit,

but they didn't come to the conclusion that they should build the track better. They decided, what if we just pave it with asphalt, take the guide wheels off and let autopilot do its thing. The road that's just a road with a poly tunnel over it. Yeah. Yeah. So now it's just Teslas and tunnels. But, you know, with the promise that, you know, the fully built out system would,

of course, also include those autonomous passenger shuttles. They're going to hold the road that I've built. Do you know that this bus technology works on it, too? Incredible, we can fit upwards of 15 people on one of these buses. Damn. Now, at this point, they started achieving some decent speeds in the test tunnel, I believe. I believe you could go.

There's there's video on YouTube of them doing about 125 miles an hour in this test. Holy shit, you can drive fast on a road. Yes. Wow. Incredible. So traffic. Wow. No one's been able to figure out whether they can get. I don't think they're at a point where they've been able to figure out if they can get 4,000 cars an hour through the tunnel, because I think you would need a lot of cars to do that.

We'll get to that in a moment. Yeah, unfortunately, Tesla has only built 420 cars this week, this course. So what's up with that? Weird. Everything in style. That's right. So, but, you know, the demonstrations of the system working at high speed, you know, they're public, they're on YouTube, they're everywhere, right? And anyone who's worked in transportation can sort of look at this and say,

this is an incredibly and obviously stupid and dangerous idea, right? To cram that many cars into a tunnel, right? It is. You are shaking hands with danger. Yes. Oh, fuck. I shouldn't say that shit without knowing that I have to drop two hands. Now, politicians and investors, on the other hand, fucking love this idea.

They love to shake hands with danger. Yeah. So the contracts start to roll in. So we'll start with, I guess, the first sort of loop idea that almost came to fruition and depending on who you ask is still in the works. And that was something called the dugout loop. Oh, boy. Oh, geez. Yeah. We're going to have a Tesla run the bases. Yeah.

So this is Dodger Stadium, right? I'm the Dodgers. Yeah, we get it. You have Mookie Bats. Congratulations. I will bring the Dodgers back to Brooklyn. You will. Hey, I mean, the Dodgers are named that for having to dodge street cars, right?

And Charlie Dodgers. So, you know, this is this is a logical conclusion. It's, you know, you're just dodging Teslas now. Yeah. So Dodger Stadium is the third oldest MLB stadium is built in the 1960s in Los Angeles and as such has very bad public transportation access, right? I think there's a bus that goes there. A what?

Unacceptable. Yeah, you got to have. You got to have pods. You got to have a pod that goes to be a pod. Yeah. So Elon was looking for a project to demonstrate the viability loop and decided this is the place, right? The dugout loop was supposed to go from the Los Angeles red line

subway, the Dodger Stadium, right? And this is where you start to realize that their concepts for how to operate these tunnels might not be so fleshed out. Wait, so is this a car tunnel also? Like, are you going to drive your Tesla to the red line and then or like? That's a good question. No, the idea was this was going to be like a sort of public transportation only, right?

OK, they were going to use this made a parking ride. They were going to. Yeah, they were going to use these shuttles, right? OK, so the idea is they were going to build a single tunnel, right? From the red line to the stadium. And they run these high speed autonomous 16 passenger shuttles to and from the stadium, right? Yeah, it's a subway, but worse. And they'd cover the three miles in about four minutes, right?

The boring company claimed it could transport about 1400 people to the stadium per game. So do you see a problem here? Uh, yeah, that's a lot of shuttles if they only hold 16 people. Yes, that's one of the problems. The other problem. The other problem is that it's a one lane tunnel, right? It's fine.

People go, people go to the game and then they all watch the game. They get back on the thing and they come back from the game. Exactly. That's one thing when I think about baseball, one thing I know for a fact is that I'm going to stay to watch the whole game every time people watch the whole thing. They all leave at the same time. Yeah. So you have about 90 of these shuttles

that people all get on at the same time. They go through the tunnel. They get the Dodger Stadium. I guess they park them somewhere. I don't know. They've got like a parking surface above, I guess, I guess. Yeah, I guess. And then and then, yeah, everyone goes to the game and then they all come back at the same time.

They get on the shuttle and then they go back through the tunnel the other way. I'm just no pressure. Shut up. Yeah. I love to I love to be sat there watching the seventh inning. Just know just being forced to do that by Elon Musk. Yeah. The Dodgers are losing by like by like 17 runs. And it's like, I'm not allowed to leave.

No, Elon. Elon Musk will not let me leave. My dad, Elon Musk will not come to pick me up. So I just have to sit here and watch. So I mean, so obviously this is like not a not a good conceptualization of how people use transportation, right? You need some capability to transport people to and from the stadium during the game, right? So the dugout loop clearly did not serve that function, right?

Now, one of the ideas here is you'd book the round trip tickets in advance, right? For some reason, doesn't really answer the question. Yeah, but you know when the baseball game is going to be. And so in order to be famous, famously, baseball games, all get cancelled, time to play, take the same amount of time, always start on time and end on time. Yeah. And therefore you can be epic and you can you can book your like Elon Musk package deal to go see the Dodgers on such and such a date.

And everything works fine. It's like a Swiss watch. Yeah. Oh, OK. OK. Well, thanks for answering my question. I'm ready to go. Extremely, extremely consistent and reliable game. Yes. Namely, actually. That's why so many people like it. Every time you go to a baseball game, you'll see something you never saw before and Elon Musk will make sure of it.

So this is sort of a consistent theme around a boring company's proposals, right? Maybe the civil engineering itself is relatively sound like, yes, you can borrow this tunnel. But the way they want to operate the damn tunnels is bonkers. Also, what they're trying to do is bought like a three, four mile tunnel. That's not like they may have made some incremental improvements, but that wasn't something like beyond the can of more than a tunnel exists. Yeah. Yeah.

No, nobody was being like, holy fuck, you're going to dig. You're going to dig a hole under the ground. Shit. This definitely isn't something that the city of Los Angeles could have done with a subway line if they had had the the, you know, wherewithal and the money to do it. Oh, no, the Los Angeles red line famously runs in the middle of the street because they couldn't figure out how to dig a tunnel.

Thank you to Elon Musk, inventor of the shovel. It actually goes. It actually is a series of inclined planes over the mountains near Hollywood. Yeah, I love I love to go up to Hollywood by a series of locks like on a canal boat. Yeah, going up. Yeah, that's only only only municipal, municipally operated, operated mass transit canal in the United States.

No, we we managed to make angels flight work. And that's the only thing that you can do with public money anymore. And so what we've had to do is we've had to incline the rest of Los Angeles to a 45 degree tilt so that you can get a funicular. It's yeah, all the all the transportation on the same level, though, is done by canal boats hauled by mules. Yeah, it's canal boats. And then the rest of it, we're going to like embark on a massive public

works program of raising one end of Los Angeles. Well, you raise one end, you lower the other. You just get you put it on like a big tilt table, you know. And this is after this project goes nowhere. We get to the third scale down of the concept. Yeah, right. See seen here where we force some people into the clamshell packaging that the electric razor came in.

So the dugout loop went nowhere. Elon tried to pursue a few other contracts. One of them was a high speed shuttle from Chicago to O'Hare Airport. And his famous verbally approved loop from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Yeah, where he gets some more, some more, some more Japs on Twitter, where he's like, I've I've got the permissions to do this this loop. And then he does not. Yeah, they just don't happen.

You can just take a train. They're not that far apart. I know you can't because those are old. Yeah, you're going to take a pod. Bad. Yeah. Don't you want to be in a pod? No, bad. Yeah, but no, I don't know what's Sutherland from the end of

a fuck, what's the movie with nevermind? Fuck, that's going to bother me. Put the pod in West Baltimore, please. What's the pod movie? Pod people, fuck. Just go on without me. Go on without people. Donald Sutherland.

Thank you. Got you. I'm so embarrassed. Division of the Body Snatchers, Alice. Thank you. Fuck me. I don't know if I got the rona or if like the preons from all the meat that British people ate in the nineties is catching up with me, but I just could not get there.

Yeah, you don't want a preon disease. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid prions myself. No, thank you on a prion free diet. Yeah, I'm on I'm not. If I see prions on the menu at a restaurant, I'm like, no, it's a prions or prions. I always said prion. Oh, if you are, if you are like someone who knows about these things

in the comments, first of all, tell me that I'm not going to die from being alive in Britain in the nineties and also tell us. Oh, which way is pronounced? Yeah, I know. Sorry, but prions, prion sounds like Prius. Hmm. Sick of these Hollywood liberals driving their prions. So. These proposals, the Chicago Airport Loop and the DC, the Baltimore Loop,

they generate a lot of hype and media coverage. And, you know, even reports that went so far as to say tunneling is already approved and underway. And neither of them happened. They just didn't happen. Hmm. Until March 2019. Like, like the monorail episode of The Simpsons, you pitch this

to enough desperate municipal governments and eventually one of them is going to be like, yeah, OK, fuck it, we can do a monorail. So. This is when Elon gets a contract from the Las Vegas Convention Center to build a underground people mover. At said convention center, I liked it better when Vegas corruption was run by the mob instead of Viacom and where you could just be like, yeah, OK, we'll let you dig this tunnel, but we got to like bury a half dozen snitches in there.

So. The Las Vegas Convention Center is pretty large convention center. They got multiple halls there, you know, pretty far away from each other. So they wanted a people mover for big conventions. And also they built the PRT, right, which already existed. Yeah. So rather than being adults and buying an off the shelf system like something you might find in an airport, they decided to go for a big flashy thing. They awarded the contract to Elon Musk and the boring company to build them a loop, right?

So this was a three station system is a three station system. Total length was less than a mile, right? It costs from one side of the convention center to the other side of the convention center, right? I love to get on. I love to get on the epic bacon walker later. So unlike the dugout loop, this one has two tunnels so the vehicles can presumably, you know, run back and forth constantly.

And there was a surprise, another scale down of the concept. So the vehicles in the tunnel would be regular old Teslas. No, no shuttles. No, no, just just a regular car. Just a car is just a car in a tunnel. This is foolish. And the vehicles were going to all need drivers. Yes, yes, we're timing automation.

The unions win again. Yeah. So this journey so far has brought us from this like elaborate system of vehicle sleds capable of transporting your actual personal vehicle to a three quarter mile tunnel under a convention center for taxis. Wow. I can't stand in the way of progress, but I kind of like this. I'm coming back to the Glade Helicopters. Everything as society gets better, everything increases

in its like ability to become a checker cab. Like everything's getting closer to every vehicle being a 50s taxi cab. And I'm very here for it. Yeah, it'd be nice if they if they use like checker marathon lookalikes. I'd you know, I'd love. All right. You must crazy taxi when you grab another beer. I'll be right back.

Man, you have a crazy taxi. Though I think it's on steam. I might have to go and pick up crazy taxi. I'm thinking about the Simpsons hit and run. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, although that game drove me crazy. Like the most broken controllers. Oh, yeah.

I've been into. I've been into this game called Assa Raleigh, which is a little free plug here, but like it's genuinely very good if you like, if you like rallying. I do. I bought this episode. Absolutely. That's what inspired it was.

I was playing this and I was like, man, Group B rallying was insane. Oh, yeah. You know, you know what that is? It's a problem. Welcome to the sport that hates its fans. Suicidal, homicidal, omnicidal. Just put more turbochargers on it.

Yes. Yes. So all right, here's a render of one of the stations in the Las Vegas Convention Center. Right. Wait a second. Wait a second. If it's built and operating, why is this a render? Oh, it's not quite. It's not operating yet.

They haven't quite finished it. Supposedly on October 1st, they went a little over time. Typical. They did get close. Well, I didn't get close to the tunneling speed they wanted. They went about half the tunneling speed they wanted. Still faster than usual, though. So I guess that's an accomplishment.

But. So now we know, like, sort of what kind of system we're dealing with here, you know, Tesla's in tunnels. A dumb one. What's wrong with it? Right. What's wrong with this idea that our public transportation should be provided by rather than like a subway or a bus, it should be

everyone gets to drive really fast in a sports car in a tunnel. And, you know, there should be four thousand of them going through each tunnel each hour. And I thought we'd focus on three things here, which are interrelated, right, which is safety, capacity and operations, right? You know, so safety, of course, you know, will it murder people? How will it murder people?

What are the failure modes, which will cause these murders? That's my that's my favorite one of this, this like arm of this trident. Yeah. Capacity is, you know, can it handle all the people it needs to? What are the choke points on the system? All. Yeah. The escalators, the tunnels. Those fucking railings you've put there next to the car base.

Just name it. And operation because this is Vegas. What happens to everybody is shit based. Yeah. Yeah. And then operations is like, you know, how do we operate all these vehicles? How do you do stuff like merges and splits? How do you how do you regulate traffic, right? And I think the Vegas loop, simple as it is,

gives us a nice microcosm of the problems the system might have and will have, especially if it is expanded to a large scale citywide system like Elon Musk wants to do, right? So OK, let's talk about, you know, sort of general operations first. I thought we'd start with a simple, easy question. How many cars do we need to run this three quarter mile system? Oh, I mean, you can decide all that, probably. Yeah. So I did a back of the envelope sort of calculation on this, right?

So the Las Vegas Convention Center's loop of FAQ says trip is going to take about one minute end to end, right? And then presumably at each end, you have some time to get in and out of the car. Right. No, no, you don't. No, you don't. You get shoved out. No, we've creased the seats. Well, you still have to stop. No, no, no, you don't.

We have to stop. You got a NASCAR out of there. So I figure, all right, if each car, you know, each car has taken one minute to go end to end, you probably got 30 seconds each end to, you know, board and to let passengers on and off, right? Maybe you could get 20 to 30 trips in an hour per vehicle. And, you know, I'm saying 20 to 30 because, you know,

sometimes people are going to take longer to get out of the car. Sometimes it's going to be shorter. There's no no one's addressed ADA compliance at all with the system, as far as I can tell. No one's asked that question. No, because no one fucking cares about handicapped people, man. Just no one ever fucking don't. That just pisses me off so fucking much.

Yeah, we're going to do where handicapped people don't exist. And the wheelchair compliance for this is we just lashed the wheelchair to the back bumper of the Tesla. It's just we're back to the guy roller-skating behind the bus again. That's that that's the compliance. You have to skitch it like it's Tony Hawk. Pro skater. So the system, the system in question

has a nameplate capacity of 4,000 people per hour. Depending on who you ask, it's either 4,000 people per hour or 4,000 vehicles per hour. Elon seems to switch between them fairly frequently because, of course, you know, of course, he has car brain, so everyone's driving alone. The cars have been variously shown to be Tesla Model X's. That's the crossover and Model S's, which is the sedan. But, you know, I'm going to be generous here and say it's the bigger Model X, right? That has three rows of seating that seats seven people in a driver, right?

If you use all the seats. So if every seat were filled. Wait, isn't it isn't the Model X seven people, including the driver? Seven people, including the driver, hang on, I'm just sitting on the truck. Yeah, it's it's seven, including the driver, so it's six passengers. OK, then that's very efficient. Yeah, I mean, OK, so if every seat was filled and it was all Model X's. To get 4,000 people an hour.

Hey, you only need 29 cars, right? If everything runs perfectly and you can get seven people out of that car, in 30 seconds, you'll have to get six to six passengers, six people out of that car. So, you know, yeah, no, I've gotten that. Like that's just assuming that it's so fucking annoying, because if they if this this is like a trade show, presumably they have like bags and stuff. Yeah, they got bags of swag and stuff. Yeah. So now everything doesn't run perfectly on these systems, right?

Including we're not going to show you the car, we're not going to show you the car. Including we're not going to shove seven people in each of these cars. We're not going to like you have to go. You have to take the seats back. You got to do all that crap in order to shove people in the in the seats in the back. Someone has to sit in the bitch seat. No one wants to do that. You got to put all this shit in the trunk or the footwells.

Yeah, so it make more sense to use a number closer to one point sixty seven people per vehicle, right? That's the average occupancy of a vehicle in the United States of America, right? There's one point six seven people in every car. So if the average trip has one point six seven people in it, we need one hundred and twenty two cars to run this three quarter mile long system. So you've just built an H.O.V. late, that's what I'm hearing. No, because it's not H.O.V.

H.O.V. is two. You just put a minimum. Yeah, it's a B lane. So rather than pay for two or three people, mover trains, you've bought one hundred and twenty two luxury cars, which you're paying one hundred and twenty two people to drive. Unions win again. I don't.

I don't think they're going to be Union Alice. Oh, yeah, even even aside from that, imagine having this is your job. You just have to drive the same like two tunnels. You're not even driving. It's still it's still running on autopilot. The driver's just there for safety. So fuck's sake, because they live or die, man. Oh, man. OK.

But anyway, this is obviously a greener and more futuristic solution than, you know, a boring old people mover train, right? So the other thing is you need one hundred and twenty two cars to run the system. You also need some for spares. You need some that are, you know, some are going to be offline for charging. So you need extra cars for that. I don't know exactly what that would be. So I said, yeah, maybe you're one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy five

cars, depending on fleet availability to run this tiny system. You know, so that's I measured that's like in the parking lot. That's right here. That's like this much space taken up just by cars. To run this little system is fine. So all right. So the operations are kind of bonkers here. And we didn't I didn't even talk about stuff like, you know,

when we get to a bigger system, like how do you handle merges and splits? We'll get to that in a bit. Let's talk about the stations. But the render looked so clean. So this, you know, I'm sure this will be fine. This is one of the above ground stations that's a terminal, right? And the thing is, station is not the right word for what this is. This is a taxi stand.

Yeah, it's a cab rank. If you prefer your English. So this is where some of our capacity constraints come in, right? So in order for the system to move four thousand people an hour, each station is going to have to handle a large fraction of that amount, not the full four thousand, but close to that, right? Because there's three stations. So we'll look at the plan for the taxi stand here.

You can see folks enter on this crosswalk, they then cross over where the autonomous cars go and then they're in the inside. And then I don't know. You can go you can get in the car, you know, so on and so forth, right? OK, so you can't like build a tunnel or an overpass or a staircase or anything. You have to like actually cross the the surface that the cars are on. Well, you see tunnels only work for cars. That'll work for people now.

So there's 10 parking spots in this taxi stand, right? And we're going to say, for the sake of argument, makes the math a little bit easier. We're going to say this station needs to be able to handle thirty six hundred people per hour, right? That's one person each second, right? So each of these taxi stands needs to handle three hundred and sixty people per hour. Um, so if we do this math again on occupancy per vehicle,

that means every parking spot, assuming you're cramming seven people in every car, that's fifty one departures an hour from each parking spot. Just over a minute for everyone, you know, to get out from the middle row, then fold the seats forward to the people in the back row can get out. And then the next people come back in and the process runs across that crosswalk. I mean, it's it's going to look like Omaha Beach up there. You know, the ramp goes down. You fucking rock.

So much like farmer ramps, like holding their bags under the sheet. When the man with the swag bag gets shot, you pick up the swag bag and move forward. We will not lose our commemorative hands, people. It's just one guy still hollering around the flame. But there are a few people who are just absolutely mowing down the other. This is a good way of organizing public transport. Yes, this is brilliant. All right.

So that was an assignment back, bring some energy into the situation. That was the optimistic scenario. Um, more realistically, if your occupancy is something like one point sixty seven people per vehicle, that's two hundred and fifteen departures per hour per parking spot. That's a departure every 16 seconds. Oh, that's bold. Yeah. What we've done is we've arranged some machine guns to fire over the crowd

at like a level. Intel. It's Intel. What we've done is we built the machine gun that fires cars into this taxi stand. Sometimes you're 34 chassis, though, we're efficient. Yeah. All right. So the time a vehicle spends sitting in a station is called dwell time, right? And it's easy for a vehicle like a subway train to achieve very low dwell

times while still discharging lots of people, right? And that's because the subway train has a lot of big doors you can just walk out of, right? Yeah, especially if you have Gareth Dennis, friend of the shows, but no level boarding, which you can do very easily with a subway train in particular. You know what you can't do with a car? Level boarding. Yeah. You have to like sort of climb into it.

It's like awkward to get in a car. Um, you can't let go because it hazarded yourself. You can't wash in gunfire. That's what everyone's going to have to do. I have to make sure we've just take it like genuinely, if you wanted to increase the frequency of operations on this, the first thing you could do would be take the doors off all of the Teslas. Why do you need a door?

You have to get jeeps. Yeah. I love to get thrown into the jeeps from Jurassic Park and then driven through a town. Actually, that sounds cool as hell. I think you got you got a duke's. Everyone's got a duke's of hazard themselves into the cars. You paint a Confederate flag on the top so the stunts work better.

So. Anyway, it seems kind of unrealistic that the loop. Practically would be able to achieve low dwell times consistently, right, especially if you got a convention for like gerryatrics or something. So, you know, this is this is not a this is this is not a system that's going to be able to reliably perform at the capacity it is advertised to. Yeah, the station is hilariously undersized.

People are going to have to scramble to get into vehicles. But luckily, it does self-regulate on capacity thanks to this crosswalk here. So long as you remind the drivers to stop for the crosswalk, it should be fine. Oh, no, I'm saying like three out of every four people who try and get in the station are going to get run over. So. Yeah, and that that that driveway, if operating at maximum capacity, that would be a car every one point six seven one one point six seconds

going through that spot. That's fine. It's fine. Just I love to play frocker, you know. Yeah, one must lower their expectations, I think. Elon Musk has combined all the worst features of a taxi stand with the worst features of an F one pit line. What you've got to do is you've got to practice your like a bullet time jumps. If you can throw yourself across the width of that road in one easy motion,

you should be fine. Just tuck and roll. Yeah. So from some fire code documents, which were obtained by TechCrunch, right? They had to do a fire code proposal for this. Yeah, yeah, they did. This is actually from the fire code documentation. The fire marshal just says, hey, what is this? A fire in the tunnel and the guy just puts his head in his hands. No more.

Yeah, we just concrete over the entrance and call it goes. Yeah, I think it goes far more of the flamethrowers. From the fire code documents, the station is only rated for 800 people each hour. Oh, no. So even the boring company is like, yeah, yeah, we can't hit 4000 people with the system. Are you fucking nuts? But the interesting thing is, and I don't know why you need a capacity

of 4000 people per hour in a convention center, right? I don't think you need to move that many people. But the contract Elon Musk signed said he would only get the full payout if he could demonstrate full capacity. They call me Mr. Two Damned Deals. He agreed to do this. Impossible thing on spec. He's a genius for our times.

Oh, that's business. That's good business. Oh, it's like how bad is Elon Musk at reading faces to have signed that document across the table from a room? As his lawyers, as his lawyers constantly making the like throat pat motions. No, no. We'll take it.

I reckon I can do it. It's like half Australian there. Yeah, I can do Elon Musk's accent in text, but I can't do it in like voice. Good enough. I know that feeling. Groms. There's Groms have invented a loop. We'll have to get Milo on the podcast one of these days.

Then we'll have some accents. So one of the things which I thought was a little unclear about this is what happens if like traffic backs up into the tunnel, right? Which could occur if there were both too many people and too few people using the station. Yeah, you just in bumpers, the bumper traffic in it to get across a parking lot at a convention center. Yeah, like if no one if no one is if there's no one here,

no one's getting into cars, right? But some people want to come up this way and all the taxi stands are full. What do they do? They just wait until someone walks across the crosswalk and gets in a car and then they take the next one. Did the empty cars move? I don't know what happens. It's never going to be empty. It's never going to be empty.

This is true. This computer is never obsolete. This insane system is never is never empty. One of the things which is so far some conventions are bigger than others. Yeah, a very consistent feature of the boring company. What their press releases, what they tell you, what they don't tell you is that there's a lot of there's a lot of questions they do not answer. Oh, really? Yeah.

There's a lot of like, how is this supposed to work? And they're just like, hey, it works. Thanks for asking. No, no technical information anywhere, which brings us to safety. Yeah, sort of. Sort of combined safety with reliability. Oh, I see a prime example of your it works thing here, where it just says

Metro is accessible with a little wheelchair at home. It's accessible. How is it accessible? It's accessible. Oh, it's accessible because if there's an elevator outage, there's a shuttle bus that brings you to the next station where there isn't an elevator outage usually. Well, sometimes sometimes you just go fuck yourself. Yeah, it's accessible. Follow your handicap. This is America.

Sometimes all the escalators are out at Roslyn and you have to climb 300 feet of stairs. Burn down Fairfax County. That's Arlington. Is it? Yes. Burn it down either way. OK. So safety here, right? So we'll get the big one out of the way.

The obvious safety issue is like a high speed collision in the tunnel, right? If the software has an error or something, and then there's a fire, right? I thought that would they don't have tunnel fires. I've never heard of a tunnel fire or a podcast episode about one. No, no, it's never happened. There's never been a fire in a tunnel. There's not enough air. It can't sustain the fire.

That's right. Yeah. So the boring company claimed that there's not much to burn in the tunnel, right, because the tunnel is made out of concrete and stuff that doesn't burn. Right. OK. What happens when what Tesla's battery packs are infissively hard to like firefight just blow up? Oh, I have a draw for this, actually. I mean,

cut. Yes, thank you. Yes. Love the car, though. Oh, so. See, the thing is, the tunnel is full of cars, right? And all cars are made of just a wide variety of horrendously flammable materials, in addition to the fuel and the battery, of course. The battery is notable for catching fire.

In my head is just currently I just have the Ramstein song Benzine. Which one is that? It's the one about Benzine. You can. Oh, I saw the title. So, you know, all these, you know, so stuff like the upholstery, like all the plastic in there, the tires, you know, the battery. I like how you pause like you're expecting me to like sing it like I haven't

already really hated myself enough with the accent tonight. No, no, you know, not on a free episode. You got you got to you got to give us some money for that. Yeah. And so if there's a car that's going through the tunnel every one point six seconds at one hundred and fifty something miles an hour, these if there's a collision, it's probably going to involve multiple vehicles. Oh, that's why you have the driver who otherwise does nothing is they just break in time. They got to have like a firefighter.

They got to fight a pilot's like level reflexes while they're just like looking at empty tunnels for their entire work day. Yeah. So the tunnels are NFPA one thirty compliant. That's a national fire protection. Something that's the association association. Yeah. But there's a lot of points of failure in these tunnels. Like there's a lot of if you're moving that many vehicles through the tunnel.

I mean, there's that's a lot of stuff that can go wrong just by virtue of how many vehicles there are. Right. And that's just by accident. Well, like what if somebody does a terrorism, right? Like bad enough when that happens on a subway train, you do that on this. Well, yeah, you could sabotage the system real easy. But some of the other safety issues and operational issues are a little more subtle, right? So now a Tesla, the car is a consumer product, right? There's sports cars in their luxury cars, right?

That's, you know, distinct from something like a fleet vehicle, right? Like a Ford F one fifty or a Crown Vic, something that contractor or the police would use. You know, a Tesla is designed to sit in a garage for 90 percent of its life and they do that fine, right? Yeah, unlike the Lamborghinis of old, they tend not to like just dissolve into rust. Yeah. But what we're talking about for a system like this is it's a big fleet of Teslas. They're being run hard, like really hard, because they're constantly accelerating and decelerating for 12 hours a day, seven days a week, or at least whenever there's a convention on. Right. And stuff is going to break as a result.

And stuff is going to break in the tunnels while the system is in use. You have a car, it's going to stop in the tunnels. They're going to be unable to move it, maybe like a tire shreds or the motor burns out. But now you have a stopped car in your one lane tunnel. What do you do? Go around, just go around. Go around. I know, there's one lane. Just push fast.

I did just like it. No, it's called a live fire exercise. People get the lead out. Just right. Just let out. Have the next driver just ride up to the bumper and push it out. You could you could have you could have a you could like do like sort of a barrel roll around the other side of the. Yes. Now we're talking. Now, every Tesla has ballbars on the front, like a cop car, and they just they can just push forward.

Well, that's the thing. You need someone steering the damn thing in the next car. No, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to call a tow truck and have it back up in the tunnel. And if that's like a long tunnel, like a city wide system, if you if you like have a car that breaks down like right here, that tow truck is going to have to back into the tunnel like a mile while there's a couple hundred people stuck behind the damn broken car.

We found we found the like dirty jobs guy for this episode. And it's the guy who has to drive a tow truck in reverse for a mile down a tunnel. Just looking at. And if you're yeah, if you're in a long section without stations, this is a disaster show, right? And this can cause some problems a long way away from the actual incident, right? So we got to talk about reverse branching, right? So if we know what like a branch line is, right? It's a line that, you know, brand a railroad line that branches off of a main line, right?

In the context of what I'm looking at here, which is the Washington Metro. So the blue line and the yellow line out three. These these guys branch off of a main line here that runs to the Pentagon, right? But then you have something called a reverse branch, right? That's when a trunk line branches into multiple trunk lines, and then they come back together again, or they come back together with another trunk line, right? So where the blue line and the yellow line split at the Pentagon, the blue line goes through Arlington Cemetery and then joins up with another major trunk line

that runs through Roslin to Stadium Armory, and then they branch off again, right? And the yellow line goes and joins up with the green line for another trunk line. What this means, practically speaking, is that the lays in one part of the system back up to completely unrelated parts of the system, right? So if a train gets stuck at Roslin on the blue line, not even on the blue line, if an orange line train gets stuck at Roslin, right, and it was gone this way, then your blue line trains start to back up all the way back to Arlington Cemetery to the Pentagon, and then the yellow line trains start to back up too,

which means some guy up here at Gallery Place is seeing half as many trains as he otherwise get because an orange line train got stuck at Roslin, right? Yeah, but it's DC, so he's going to find a way to blame this on socialism. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, he's like one of those never-burny people. Bernie Sanders has personally made my train late. Yeah, he's at the Karsh Institute for austerity. Yeah, advanced fracking studies.

Yeah, yes. So yeah, you can have a delay in one part of the system, but you can have a delay in one part of the system, and then you can have a delay in the other part of the system. Yeah, you can have a delay in the other part of the system. You can have a delay in one part of the system, and it very quickly affects entirely different parts of the system, right? And it's not obvious how these propagate immediately,

but when you think, you know, you realize how the network works, you're like, oh, any train that stops anywhere can cause any other train to stop at any time. Yeah, see New York constantly. New York at least has enough branches that they can start rerouting trains, so suddenly you're like, I mean, we both had the experience, we're just like, you know, this this F train is going to take the A line and then they'll be coming out for some reason. Hope you hope you like Queens. So yeah, this is this is something which would absolutely also affect the loop, right?

If I have a car that like stopped in the tunnel, it would back up cars through every tunnel just at random. And one of the other problems is on a subway, you can mitigate this a bit, right? Because you can single track. That's annoying, but you know, it works like, you know, a train, a train goes on the opposite track, it goes through then the other train waits and comes the other way and then you just keep doing that for a while. You actually go around, right?

It's a pain in the ass, but it works. But like if you have whatever they're even if it's like that cable stayed system, I guess you'd call it. I just I can't understand the logic. I guess unless you're just going to have some sort of branch lines like a train, a pod, a pod, I'm sorry. Yeah, pod. It has to be a pod.

It's futuristic. Really reinventing the fucking wheel. Yeah, this is like a problem with with the the loop system is it doesn't seem to be possible to do anything like single tracking, right? Just because I mean, I guess you might be able to use some of these crossovers to like do do, you know, a contra flow do Hickey temporarily, but it just doesn't seem it does not seem like something which is easily doable. And it would certainly like reduce the efficiency of the system to a huge extent almost immediately

if there were any problem. That's fine. This is fine. It's just that the systems that seems to rely on everything working perfectly all of the time. And everything does. And when it doesn't, you'd like call the guy who criticized it a pedophile. Yes, obviously. So yeah, this is not a this is not a system that seems especially reliable, assuming it works

at all at the first place. What I said in the video that I made, you know, two years ago, and this is the difference between this is the AM FM difference, the difference between actual machines and fucking magic. Yes. People got mad at you for that. People get mad at me for everything. That's true. You can still having more housing takes.

Oh, God. Just throw out the harrowing of hell right there. So, you know, all I could say sort of in conclusion is, you know, this is part of the same personal rapid transit grift that's been going on for 50 years now. You know, this is the Ultra at Heathrow. This is the Morgantown PRT system, which at least that one actually works. Go mountaineers. The Morgantown system actually works.

It's a little clunky and it's very, very, it takes up a lot of space, but it does. You'll never find a finer mode of transportation for bringing the burned couches to you. I think it's cute. It's very ugly, but it's cute. Yeah. Tell me about Morgantown, Western Junior. Well, the thing is it worked and that's why they absolutely no one would ever consider that model again for personal rapid transit is, you know, if something works, it's bad.

That's how economics work. You should only invest money into things which don't work, which is why Tesla is an incredibly highly valued company. But yeah, this is personal rapid transit is something that comes up every 20 years. Someone tries and actually build a system and it's incredibly underwhelming. Just performs poorly. It's very slow. It's very stupid.

This is another stage in that grift. We're going through the cycle again, right? This time we're doing with straight up electric cars as opposed to something that kind of acts the same way as an electric car. And electric cars are not a solution to climate change or transportation, right? Still horribly energy efficient, inefficient. They're very, they're very space inefficient. And also the rare earth minerals or materials needed to like that you have to mine for obviously

leads to poos in some cases. They produce a lot of pollutants, absent, you know, emissions, you know, tire dust, brake dust. Look, there's nothing flammable in those tunnels. Of course, you have individualized pods that work identically to electrical electric cars are also not the solution. I am pretty sure this is all just sort of a grift to get Elon so Elon Musk can sell more cars. Yeah, it's both of that. And also an unwillingness to let go of totally individualized transport.

You know what's funny? I was actually thinking the exact same thing. This is extremely John Galt way. Yeah, if you want, if you want like efficiencies, if you want efficiencies, there are basically two ways to do it. One, absolute massive collectivization. You get the bus or you get the train option to bicycle. And if you like the problem is all of these people have an individual,

very green, very efficient method of transportation available to them in the form of a bicycle. They just will never take it because it makes you look like a car. Dude, Tesla Tesla drivers fucking hate you if you're riding a bike. Those people are the worst. Like I saw I just I try and stay like two lanes away whenever I see like someone driving a Tesla and I'm I'm riding my bike. I'm like, these people are going to be assholes to me. There was a guy in the Northern Liberties Facebook group,

despite the fact that I don't live in Northern Liberties, I live popular. Thank you, who was complaining about someone at the methadone clinic who was stealing packages. And of course, on his like Facebook profile, he's talking about how liberal he is. And of course, he drives a Tesla. That's his profile picture. And I'm just like, yep, like, yep, you're you're you're very, very slightly better choices. And I'm being generous. I think even saying that, like, you're still it's still bad.

Like, sometimes you don't have to make the least good choice. Or the second to least good choice. Sometimes you can just take the fucking train. Yeah. You know, these days, you can even sometimes take a bike, ride it to a train station, put it on a train and then ride the train and then get off and ride the bike. Like to see your hyperloop do this, as you're just pedaling through the tunnel. That was something that was something I forgot to put in the slideshow.

Some of the conceptual drawings for above ground Tesla loop stations. And they have like a massive parking lot adjacent to them. And it's like, yeah, I drove my car to take another car. Yeah, driven by another guy. Driven by another guy. And that's smart. I'm still not overthinking about the drivers of those Teslas, though, because like driving something extremely monotonous where you have to have very fast reaction times in a controlled

environment, that's something a computer is actually very useful for. And it's the one thing they won't use a computer to do. That's not allowed. Yeah, I guess. Still, though. No, you're absolutely right. And the other thing, which is irritating about this system is that if I do that pisses me off about you don't really grinds my gears about loops.

It's bad, folks. So it's bad. If they build all these tunnels and they might do it, they might wind up building a shitload of tunnels and the system fails miserably and gets completely clogged up, which I think is the most likely outcome. You can't really reuse these tunnels or anything. There are more accommodations. Yeah, I mean, that's your best that's your best bet.

It'll be like Metro 2033 down there. It's going to lock in usage of Tesla cars in these tunnels like basically forever. I mean, Elon is just setting up a system where he's able to supply fleets of Teslas to these tunnel systems for the rest of eternity, which is about 20 years. No time will continue on without us. Well, maybe. I mean, I don't know. I've been coughing a lot.

Maybe I've got the rona. So like you don't have the rona, Alice. This is not going to age very well if I got the rona. All right, we'll cut it out of it. No one will know that I said leave it in. If I die of the rona, I want people to be like, ha, Liam laid that now Alice is dead. Now she's dead. Let's just be at Roz screaming at each other.

Yeah, you killed Alice. You killed her. All right, another thing a lot of people tried to yell at me about in YouTube was that Elon is just developing this technology for Mars, you know, for his Mars colony and not for Earth. And I just want to say all these problems with dwell time that we mentioned before, there's not been a lot of study into the effects of low gravity on public transport performance. But it's going to be harder to get into a car in low gravity than it is in normal gravity.

It's going to slow stuff down. Balancing off the sides and shit. Yeah. Yeah, you're not going to get so much traction in the vehicle either. So, you know, that's why what you should do is take the bus like a normal person. Yeah. Take the bus. Take the bus or ride a bike.

Ride a bike and actually see a cool stuff. Take a train. If sometimes people but places have trains, you can take a train. And you take a train. Oh, did you see the like the Amtrak speculative 2035 map? Yes, we saw it, Alice. Have you seen workers and resources? It's the Soviet Republic.

It's this game called workers and resources. Soviet Republic. So we have a section on this podcast called Safety Third. Save for the person who submitted this. Don't say their name. Yeah. Oh, where's the shake hands of danger? There we go.

Shake hands with danger. Shake hands with danger. This comes from a person whose name I forgot and they don't want to be said anyway. Redacted. Redacted. Alice, do you have the beep? Yeah.

Yeah. So say the name or rather say you don't remember the name and I'll beep it. Yeah. This comes from. I don't remember the name. Okay. Okay. Hi, everyone.

Got a very relevant 2020 safety story for you, Safety Third for you. For obvious reasons, I'd like to not be named on air. I work as a hospital bastard. And by bastard, I mean one of the ACAB variety. One of our duties normally is regular security stuff such as patrols. Well, during COVID, we suspended patrols and slowly we've resumed them. But currently only for the exterior of the hospitals and surrounding roads and common areas, lobbies and stuff like that, right?

We don't go on the units or in any patient care areas unless we receive a call for service. Okay. Recently, our administrator stated he wants us to fly the flag and be visible, right? And so he's directed us to start patrolling the units again. I said, we don't patrol the units because if we pick up the virus from one, we could move it to all the others. Recommendations from a nearby hospital that also had an outbreak stated that one of the key factors is to prevent staff from moving between units.

Yeah. You don't want to have your cops just like bumble the virus in between like going from the like the COVID ward next door to the like extremely frail children ward. Yeah. Going from the COVID ward to the ward that's for people who would die immediately if they get COVID. Why did they label it that? Well, I guess it's, you know, straightforward. Why did they put them next to each other?

Efficiency. Why are ammonia and bleach next to each other in this cabinet? Well, just in case we get a quick way out. So I asked Ross about that once. That's a true story. I said, do we have any bleach? And he said, I said, it's next to the ammonia. Yeah.

It gives me the quick way out. Those are verbatim of his word. Just in case you hear about the clouds of HF coming over the horizon and you're like, I can do better. Taking my shirt off or running into the doxious gas and saying, you'll never take me alive and then running back and saying, on second hand, I'd very much prefer to be taken alive. That's such a like, you can't fire me.

I quit kind of thing. I'd be like, I lived next to the fucking oil refinery. Fine. Fuck you. I just gasped myself. The administrator told me it's okay because the unit's log who enters their unit for contact tracing, right? Yeah.

Like when you go through a bar and you like scan the QR code, it's fine. I said, contact tracing only helps us find infected people faster. It doesn't stop infections. He said, do it anyway. Myself and many of my coworkers have refused the unit patrols and so far have not been reprimanded. However, some officers have resumed unit patrols. And as of now, five units at my hospital have COVID cases of unknown origin.

A mysterious cop shaped origin. So far, it remains to be seen if we were the vector for infection. However, the unit patrols continue, except now we're supposed to avoid the confirmed COVID units. Oh, God. Well, I want to retract the B from that guy's ACAB because if you want to not be a B anymore, I would say one fast way of doing it is whistleblowing, even to us. Like Jesus. Oh, and part of our job is to deal with anti-maskers, people who refuse to quarantine

despite testing positive, and other things which make us a very high risk for contact with the virus. My boss just told me I had to go and lick all the door handles to make sure they still tasted OK. I don't know why. I don't know why. I couldn't taste anything. Oh, it's just me out there looking door handles. Couldn't smell it either.

Yeah, fuck you, man. I don't come into your room and tell you about your long history of drug dependency. I was going for the symptoms of the coronavirus. Yeah, you didn't get that. Yeah. No, I got that. You know what? It's fine.

Do you know what Lingo is telling me? It's time for my Polish lesson. Can we wrap this up? OK. Well, the next episode is the Comanero's Bridge Disaster. Yeah, finally, at some point, I will be able to speak to Ross in his native language. I'll be just confused and infuriated. Yeah, you're shaving progies at you.

We have a discord now. It is for patrons only. The one rule is that if you piss me off your band. Yeah, what do we call the discord again? It was like Liam's DL. The Gertrude brand, Liam. Beautiful. We also have the Pennsylvania Secret Service ID cards.

I know people have finally started getting like some of the first batch that I sent out. If you want one, what you have to do, DM me on Twitter with, do not DM me with, oh, hey, it's the Pennsylvania Secret Service cards. Don't know. Send me the photo you want on it, the name you want on it. Those don't have to be you. I've made them for dogs and the address you want me to mail it to. Please send us the photos of the dog once though.

Yes. I will mail you the thing. You don't have to ask me. I will just do it. And if you want to throw me a few dollars for shipping, that's very nice of you. But otherwise, don't worry about it. Yeah, that's it. I will continue to make these until I run out of cards.

Fun. Yes. Oh, Justin, you still need to send me a picture for yours because you still don't have one. This is true. Yeah, I need to get like a good picture of me. I have some good ones of you. I had the passport photo. I could use that.

Or if you have a good picture of me, that would also work. Yeah, I'll find it. Shirts. Shirts. Shirts. Shirts. Shirts. Shirts soon.

Shirts. All right, I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it tomorrow morning. I don't want to do anything tonight. Shirt hands with danger. Oh, the next bonus episode we talked about it is going to be Group B.

When Roz has done editing the Sixers episode, I hope by the end of the month, that'll be up with Dan McQuade. Do we have anything else? I was going to say, this will be probably the last episode we put up before the election. So we'll be on a earlier statement that all our endorsements find their way to death and destruction. Keep America great. Yeah, vote for Trump.

Yeah, you should probably vote for Trump. That's a good idea. Do not take that out of context. Liam will come to your house. Yeah, you know what we're saying. Listen to the jokes. Fuck Elon Musk. I look forward to your hate clicks.

Crapping your diapers in the YouTube comment section gives me life. I fucking hate you people. That's right. Don't be an asshole on the discord. Yeah, that's it. I got to eat. Yeah, yeah. Hungry.

All right. That's good enough reason to end as any. All right. All right. Covid's in, yeah, I forgot it. Hi, everyone. Covid is in. Au revoir.

That's for Donia. Bienvenido. All right. That's welcome. Shit. Let it go. Bienvenue. I'll put this on too.

What's real? All right. All right. Sayonara.