I am floored by the negativity on the Boring Company plans on this board. It sounds exactly like Seeking Alpha with a bunch of armchair experts going on about what an idiot Elon is to try an build an electric car. This venture may not work out, and he may loose money, but I would be willing to bet all my money, that whatever problems any one of us can imagine with the plan, he has at least thought of, and has well reasoned first principle reasons for starting where he is starting. To say he hasn't researched the problem is insane!
In regards to bottle necks at the elevators, and expensive sleds, my guess is that the sleds are mostly about safety and reliability. If a single privately owned car broke down, lit on fire, ran out of charge, collided with another car, etc, in one of these very small tunnels it would be a total cluster F to sort out. Also, if "traffic" is going that fast, there is going to have to be very precise control of high acceleration/ deceleration , and merging control for cars entering and exiting the system with no visibility since it is branches in a tunnel.
The other thing I would guess regarding the capacity concerns would be that at least in the beginning these would follow a model much like Tesla cars. In the beginning they would be very expensive, limited capacity, and mostly for rich people that don't want to wait around in traffic. They don't nessesarily need to replace the freeways and get millions of cars through this system, to make it a successful venture if they can build it cheap enough. It could be $10 a mile and I am sure there are plenty of rich people in LA in a rush to the airport that would be happy to pay it. For the common folk, Tesla network minibuses, could pack lots of density in at a much lower price per person.
On the question of ramps vs. elevators, my guess is that the reasoning is that vertical shafts would be orders of magnitude cheaper to permit and build, once in place they could easily dug deeper and extended as more layers of tunnels are dug in the future. They would not only be used for entry and exit, but for moving between layers of tunnels. It was not shown this way in the video, but the elevator thing seems to me like it would move a lot more cars if they could figure out a way to make it a pair of shafts with the platforms moving up in one shaft, and down in its twin, kind of like a ski chairlift. I'm sure it would be tricky engineering, but probably possible.
If they can figure out how to make all this work profitably, and demonstrate it as such, it seems like the kind of long lived, steady income producing asset that Trillions of dollars of pension fund, sovereign wealth funds, etc, are dying for in this low rate environment. Once built, these tunnels could be a cash cow for a century or more.
