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Anders Hovmöller
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When you assume, Gruber edition

2017-05-01

Gruber wrote a short little dismissal of The Boring Company. It is a rare glimpse into the snap decision and assumptions that go into normal thinking. Let’s go over it (removing the name calling and swearing):

Why in the world would any city in the world invest in a public transit system for cars?Here two assumptions are made:

  1. It’s a public transport system
  2. That the city is who will invest and pay for it I see no reason why either must be true. The first point is only true if “public transport system” includes roads, in which case all cities and countries are already investing huge amounts of money into public transit systems for cars.

The second point is also unfounded. There are plenty of private roads in the USA. Seems strange Gruber misses this, since he does live there.

I’m all for major investments in public transit infrastructure, but public transit is and should be for people, not for [f-ing] cars.Here Gruber makes these mistakes:

  1. He implies there’s a conflict between transporting people and cars.
  2. He assumes cars can only be of a certain size (let’s all remember that a bus is a car and a train is just a car that goes on a rail, functionally). The video even shows a bus-like pod!
  3. He assumes the system is just for people. Now, the sneak peek video doesn’t show it, but these tunnels would be great for transporting goods! Trucks inside cities are pretty horrible, so any reduction in trucking in city cores can be an outsized improvement. All in all I think this has been a quite bad hatchet job of Gruber. I am a regular reader and I expect more from him than “less space than a nomad” like thinking.
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