So Las Vegas is getting a more expensive, less reliable and weird metro system? I don’t understand the appeal of Musk’s tunnels. Public transportation is a little bit of a solved problem but for some reason in most of US is considered lower class transportation. It’s cliche but you have to really look at europe and learn how to design cities for people, instead of cars.
This is because Las Vegas doesn't want to become a mass transit + cycling + walking city. It wants to stay car first. TBH, given the climate in that desert, I can't really blame them...
It’s worse than a subway as Teslas going single file through a tiny tunnel is inherently low capacity. Fire safety seems sub par too. But at least there isn’t a vagrant sitting in the same metal box as you.
Walkable urban areas and infrastructure are not a sexy marketable product. Most transportation networks run at a loss without subsidies: airports, highways, domestically built boats. Profitable enterprises depend on transportation but stay a layer higher.
I assume that they are able to meet whatever the relevant safety codes are, but whenever I see footage from those tunnels, I wonder what happens in case of a car fire or some other bad failure scenario. It seems like traffic behind can't back up or turn around or go past. Would the column of traffic ahead have to clear the route for first responders to access? Always been curious about that.
If the current tunnel is any example there are no emergency exits. You can't even get by a car if you were walking. Imagine a full Tesla lithium battery fire in the tunnel. You are DEAD.
My take is that vegas is into showy attractions, and this qualifies.
I remember walking down the strip (in the HOT burning sun) and I came across a people mover just going "somewhere". I stepped on and voila... found myself in an air conditioned casino.
This may work when designing a city but does little to help cities that already exist. Las Vegas is also in the middle of a desert where temperatures routinely soar above 100 and people die of exposure. Bike lanes aren't going to cut it there.
As I understand it, Boring Company’s vision is to decrease the capital cost of public transit by using commodity carriages (Tesla cars, eventually self-driving) and smaller tunnels. The Vegas Loop test case appeared to work okay, but in the videos I saw, was subject to congestion in the stations.
My layman’s understanding of the topic is that the major expense for subways is the platforms more than the tunnels. The article says Boring’s platforms will be 1.5-20 million to build. Anybody know how that compares to traditional construction in similar soil?
The $2 million/mile number is misleading, since Boring Co only includes the cost of tunneling itself, but public projects usually fold in all of the other costs related to the project into their per mile figures.
Generally, the actual cost of tunneling depends on the soil and route conditions; for example, most subways are tunneled under existing infrastructure and buildings and thus the process of tunneling also includes numerous measures to prevent damage to existing structures. Urban tunnels must also contend with undeclared but still utilized utility and power lines which must be rerouted. Additionally, businesses and residents impacted by the construction are usually compensated for harms caused by the construction (i.e., excess noise, loss of accessibility, etc.) When you're tunneling under a city it's going to be expensive, and that's generally where you want to tunnel because that's where people actually want to go.
The Vegas tunnel has avoided that so far because it's built under a low-use private road), but that's going to change when it has to go under the Strip and under the Casinos. They're suddenly going to discover why public transportation tunnels are so expensive.
Note that the LA Metro subways (specifically, the current Purple Line Extension) cost significantly less than $1 billion/mile where they get to tunnel under roads, but more than $1 billion/mile where they are tunneling under buildings or near the tar pits. Similarly, the "Regional Connector" project was ahead of schedule...until it ran into undisclosed utility lines downtown and had to spend a year rerouting hundreds of unmapped utilities lines.
The Boring company doesn't have any new tech that makes their tunnels cheaper, they are just smaller [1]. Smaller tunnels also mean less capacity, that's why I would argue that the total cost doesn't matter as much as the "cost per capacity". Even if Boring tunnels and stations are cheaper, how big is the throughput?
A New York Subway car [2] can carry up to 240 people per car and costs $2 million. If four people sit in a Tesla that would be 60 Teslas just to match that and cost $3 million. The Loop apparently can only transport 800 people an hour, for a 0.8-mile track [3]. The one subway car could (assuming conservatively 5min at the station and 5min for travel) transport 1440 people an hour. Two subway cars, 2880 people an hour. A subway can scale, Teslas which each need a parking space for entering and exiting can't. Also, a ticket on the Vegas loop may cost $12, that is not a public transport solution but a joyride vanity project.
> The Loop apparently can only transport 800 people an hour, for a 0.8-mile track [3]. The one subway car could (assuming conservatively 5min at the station and 5min for travel) transport 1440 people an hour.
At that point would it just make sense to have a continuous system (like Tomorrowland [1]) or those belts at the airport?
Absolutely fewer people. Yes, I agree a subway is better than car tunnel, when costs are ignored. But LV doesn't have $30B to build a subway tunnel. But a car tunnel can be built for roughly 100x less, $300 million.
Yup, expropriating land and blocking main roads for months while you dig down and pour concrete for a station is expensive. Although some newer metro lines like Barcelona's line 9 are able to fit most of the stations inside the larger tunnel so that they only need to dig elevators straight down to them which ends up being a lot cheaper.
They are an order of magnitude cheaper (or more) even if they are tiny and single file. You could build 10 of them for the same cost as a regular tunnel and you could do it in less time. Makes sense to me.
I do NOT get the cars.
Self-driving does not work reliably enough today and likely wont for a long time. The Model X is expensive too. Why not some sort of simple rail transport? Maybe cars are cheaper in bulk and easier maintenance? Why not fit them with some kind of guide rail then? You just can't have people driving these things. It's nuts.
Building 10 smaller tunnels actually costs more than building 1 regular tunnel; Boring Co's own projects in Hawthorne and Vegas demonstrate that on a per-mile basis they're only saving a few pennies on the dollar, and all of that comes from avoiding the things like fire escapes (the Vegas tunnels don't have any mid-tunnel), tunnels smooth enough for the vehicle/train to go through at fast speeds (the Vegas tunnels are so rough that speeds are limited to less than 35 mph), stations big enough to handle meaningful amounts of passenger (the biggest station can handle fewer than 1000 people an hour), high-strength concrete and surfaces for the massive volumes of traffic, etc.
In other words, Boring Co tunnels are cheap because they're bargain-basement quality tunnels with limited use and lifespan. And so Vegas is getting what they paid for: a "public transportation" system that has less throughput than a sidewalk.
Well, if they're already building the tunnel they can just add markers every 10 meters or so, and patch their "self-driving" software to recognize these markers.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 74.9 ms ] threadWalkable urban areas and infrastructure are not a sexy marketable product. Most transportation networks run at a loss without subsidies: airports, highways, domestically built boats. Profitable enterprises depend on transportation but stay a layer higher.
I assume that they are able to meet whatever the relevant safety codes are, but whenever I see footage from those tunnels, I wonder what happens in case of a car fire or some other bad failure scenario. It seems like traffic behind can't back up or turn around or go past. Would the column of traffic ahead have to clear the route for first responders to access? Always been curious about that.
It's nonsense.
I remember walking down the strip (in the HOT burning sun) and I came across a people mover just going "somewhere". I stepped on and voila... found myself in an air conditioned casino.
Maybe that's what these tunnels will do.
My layman’s understanding of the topic is that the major expense for subways is the platforms more than the tunnels. The article says Boring’s platforms will be 1.5-20 million to build. Anybody know how that compares to traditional construction in similar soil?
Generally, the actual cost of tunneling depends on the soil and route conditions; for example, most subways are tunneled under existing infrastructure and buildings and thus the process of tunneling also includes numerous measures to prevent damage to existing structures. Urban tunnels must also contend with undeclared but still utilized utility and power lines which must be rerouted. Additionally, businesses and residents impacted by the construction are usually compensated for harms caused by the construction (i.e., excess noise, loss of accessibility, etc.) When you're tunneling under a city it's going to be expensive, and that's generally where you want to tunnel because that's where people actually want to go.
The Vegas tunnel has avoided that so far because it's built under a low-use private road), but that's going to change when it has to go under the Strip and under the Casinos. They're suddenly going to discover why public transportation tunnels are so expensive.
Note that the LA Metro subways (specifically, the current Purple Line Extension) cost significantly less than $1 billion/mile where they get to tunnel under roads, but more than $1 billion/mile where they are tunneling under buildings or near the tar pits. Similarly, the "Regional Connector" project was ahead of schedule...until it ran into undisclosed utility lines downtown and had to spend a year rerouting hundreds of unmapped utilities lines.
A New York Subway car [2] can carry up to 240 people per car and costs $2 million. If four people sit in a Tesla that would be 60 Teslas just to match that and cost $3 million. The Loop apparently can only transport 800 people an hour, for a 0.8-mile track [3]. The one subway car could (assuming conservatively 5min at the station and 5min for travel) transport 1440 people an hour. Two subway cars, 2880 people an hour. A subway can scale, Teslas which each need a parking space for entering and exiting can't. Also, a ticket on the Vegas loop may cost $12, that is not a public transport solution but a joyride vanity project.
[1] https://observer.com/2021/07/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R160_(New_York_City_Subway_car... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/16/elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-...
At that point would it just make sense to have a continuous system (like Tomorrowland [1]) or those belts at the airport?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrowland_Transit_Authority...
But you can retrofit corruption to any technology. Even to underground traffic jams.
They are an order of magnitude cheaper (or more) even if they are tiny and single file. You could build 10 of them for the same cost as a regular tunnel and you could do it in less time. Makes sense to me.
I do NOT get the cars.
Self-driving does not work reliably enough today and likely wont for a long time. The Model X is expensive too. Why not some sort of simple rail transport? Maybe cars are cheaper in bulk and easier maintenance? Why not fit them with some kind of guide rail then? You just can't have people driving these things. It's nuts.
In other words, Boring Co tunnels are cheap because they're bargain-basement quality tunnels with limited use and lifespan. And so Vegas is getting what they paid for: a "public transportation" system that has less throughput than a sidewalk.