Musk again? a lesson in inefficiency and ambiguity

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, September 1, 2023

A friend, explaining why he admires Elon Musk, describes the efficiency of Musk’s auto-transport tunnel: subway train cars are expensive because they can’t be mass-produced, they require large tunnels the boring of which require exponentially greater energy for every increment of diameter, and trains must support rush hour capacity even on off hours, whereas autos are mass-produced cheaply on the assembly line, they require little tunnel space, and on off hours, only the occupied ones run. He concludes that the Musk tunnel is efficient.

Well not so fast, pun intended. And there’s an important linguistic and conceptual lesson to be learnt from that lack of speed.

The carrying capacity of a packed subway/metro car is about 250 people. The average train is eight cars, so about 2000 people running, in NYC, every two to five minutes in rush hour. Off-loading that efficiency onto autos would require about 2000 autos every five minutes, or about 7 autos per second. A car would have to have 1/7th of a second to load onto Musk’s tunnel platform to meet rush hour demand. Not likely.

Even if that were possible, consider an on-ramp for a midpoint station B from destination A to C. In rush hour, there’d be a constant flow headed from A towards C.

A–>——B–>——–>C

To accommodate cars coming from station B, that traffic flow would have to slow down to allow a car to enter into the single-lane traffic of the tunnel, and the on-ramp itself would have to be backed up for the one-by-one entry onto the tunnel, even if this were all automated. A subway train typically has dozens of stations between its endpoints. Imagine the traffic jam in a single lane tunnel at rush hour, each car containing one person since the 2000 people in each train have now been distributed into individual cars. Depressing.

In other words, the Musk tunnel can’t handle rush hour traffic if used for a metro system. It would probably be so slow that either long lines would drive people away, or it will be priced high enough to prevent long queues. You don’t need to think long and hard to figure which option will be the business model. It only makes sense as a luxury shuttle from airport to hotel district for the business class, with a discount during off hours.

And what does the subway/metro serve? The entire public, the society as a whole, the economy that serves everyone. The inefficiencies of the system are sacrifices to the priority it serves. And it is fast. Very fast by compare!

Tunnels are not new. We know when and where to use them efficiently for the public. There’s a reason why we use tunnels only for A to B destinations, like midtown NYC to Weehauken — nobody needs to get out in the middle of a river.  There are projects that serve money, others that serve the public, and some that serve the vanity of their promoters’ public image.

Here’s the lesson: a grotesquely inefficient idea implemented efficiently remains grotesquely inefficient. Its efficiencies are intended to create more profit for the owner. So of course there will be efficiencies in any business model. That does not at all imply that the business purpose is efficient.

This notion of “efficiency” is trading on an amgibuity between the efficiency of the business idea (Musk’s is not) and the efficiency of its implementation (conveniently for his profit). The inefficiencies reveal the respective purposes: serving the public, the society, the economy as a whole or making money serving a luxury economy. This is why Adam Smith despised the wealthy — their servants could have been employed in the productive economy that serves all, but instead were wasted on serving wealthy individuals with no benefit to the nation’s economy, the wealth of the nation.

And it’s a lesson for the libertarian: because the market supplies demand, in unequal societies the wealthy will be served more and better in ways that are inefficient for the economy as a whole and the nation. Smith’s book is not entitled “The Wealth of Individuals” but “The Wealth of Nations”. Remember that.

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