A subway by any other name....

Here's one of the stories about Elon Musk's proposal for underground roads for autonomous electric vehicles: Musk's Hole. Looks an awful lot like a subway to me.

This whole autonomous car thing is an attempt to combine the indvidual convenience of the car with the safety of rail. From a rail passenger's point of view, a subway car is an autonomous vehicle. "Leave the driving to us", Greyhound used to say. Well, when you ride in a train, someone or something else is driving. Properly controlled and isolated from cross traffic, a railroad is a horizontal elevator (as George Kneiling said many decades ago). The first elevators were controlled by human operators. Now they are automated. There's no reason not to automate passenger rail, except our weird notion that we should all be able to come and go as we please, and damn the expense.