It’s Spaceball One… She’s gone to Plaid.

Paris’s RER A is an extreme example, with 10-car double-deck trains moving 2,600 people, ~30 trains per hour. More than a million daily journeys.

The Victoria line is a more frequency-heavy system, with 8-car single deck trains at 1100 passengers at 36tph, or 40k PPHPD.

Fully underground systems usually have shorter trains due to the constraints and costs of building longer underground platforms.

Partly this is because there are 2-4 roads in parallel attempting to move the same number of people, or demand is unmet because people can’t get to where they want to go when they want to go.

Honestly you’re in the 11-15m range in most cases, because you want lineside equipment (signal cabinets, masts, cable routing etc) and ideally a 4WD path for maintenance access.

9m is doable but you don’t built an entire system like that unless you really have to. Equally, your roads have hard shoulders and crash barriers.

Usually these systems rely on people getting on/off at different stops, rather than one stop seeing full volume. If it’s one stop, chances are it’ll look like a terminus station and you’ll need several platforms and possibly dual-side boarding to each train. It’ll be quite a bit wider than tracks with no station, or a minimalist station.

This is pretty common at major sports arenas.

The same of course applies to other transit options: high-capacity bus stops take up space, and motorway interchanges and especially carparks also take up a lot of space.

What nonsense?

50k PPHPD is near the top of what can be easily achieved in a metro with one track per direction, but certainly achievable. 2x4m wide tracks and some space for ancillary equipment and fencing is reasonable.

You get maybe one passenger per two seconds in a car lane, or about 1800 per lane per hour. That implies 28 lanes each way, 55 total, or about 165m assuming 3m lanes (pretty narrow). Seems fair to me.

No comment on buses, cyclists, or pedestrians.

Too hot is the least of the problems these cheap chargers are likely to have. Inadequate primary-secondary insulation tends to be far more lethal.

Fair. Just found out my PC has the “detect you reusing your login password on other sites” feature turned on… when I entered my old password into the change password box.

You need to enroll a TOTP app as a 2FA method, then you should be able to select which you use.

I’m pretty sure any other 2FA TOTP app can be used instead; you just have to enter the six-digit code.

Did this because my work laptop arrived before the phone.

Firefighting is probably one of the best fields to attract volunteers to. Save lives, glamorous, awesome PR, play with cool ‘toys’. Downside is danger but there’s enough people for whom that’s an upside.

Does that mean they’re all/mostly trainable, stick around long enough to justify the training, and willing to put in the work even when it comes to more mundane tasks like training, cleaning, equipment overhaul, drying pipes etc?

I believe most places have both paid and volunteer firefighters and I imagine it’s for a reason.

Yes. You’re still going to need to reward those people in some way that isn’t generic feel-good or worthless karma. People won’t go “I’m on the UBI and all my needs are met, but I’ll go build water pumps where one in fifty might get used in a pharma application just for the feel-good”.

Yeah. I’m not saying that no positions can be filled by volunteers or people working for feel-good rather than profit motive… but it’s a lot easier to find people willing to do novel research or development than it is to find someone to keep the plant chilled water systems running, or to build the pumps for the plant.

Employment doesn’t have to be exploitative.

I have usually seen this argument applied as saying that we’re post scarcity now and that if we just gave everyone UBI, you’d be able to fill all the jobs you actually need with volunteers today, and just ‘get rid of’ the unnecessary/wasteful consumer goods.

Yeah, if you centrally applied resources to fields that actually needed it rather than profitable fields, that would in some ways be great. Ads would basically die overnight, for starters.

There’s a small proportion of the population that loves what they do - and more would if you were able to get rid of middle management. A good part of the reason volunteer projects tend to be successful is that they’re almost entirely composed of people who completely believe in the project.

Are you going to find a few thousand people in the same area who really believe in building great quality drugs/aircraft/electrical cables/plastic pipe when their job is mostly repetitive labour?

I’ve worked a fair bit of construction. There’s a feel-good factor for certain kinds of projects, but at the end of the day you’re installing stuff. Are we going to be able to build, staff, and maintain a semiconductor fab, a pharma factory, or an aircraft/engine assembly line with volunteers? What about the wire/steel/pump factories that make the bits used to build the building?

Part of how we’ve got to record low levels of e.g. aircraft fatalities is meticulous documentation (certain issues notwithstanding), procedures, and double/triple checking. And no-one really wants to be QA for long, or have QA watching over them like a hawk, especially when it’s both.

Replacing some of these roles with AI/robots doesn’t necessarily help that much. AI is bad at meticulous paperwork. So are unenthusiastic people.

And other ones are being paid by a big firm to work on FOSS projects because it’s still easier than reproducing something from scratch.

And is that actually achieving reliable quality and traceability? Not that mass-market pharmaceuticals are perfect, but I don’t remember hearing that many scandals about actual contamination/mismanufacturing (as opposed to testing/development failures like Thalidomide).

I’m not sure it’s that simple.

All of these except Minecraft have perpetual funding and labour issues, especially for the less sexy parts.

You’re not going to staff a pharmaceutical factory with volunteers.

Freewheel hub would prevent it.

You would need to put the freewheel between the motor and the pedals, and have an always-spinning chain/shaft

That’s what gearing is for (you just go up the hill slower), but I can see the benefit to not being on the road.