The Las Vegas tunnel is 12ft diameter. The London Underground deep-level tube diameter is 11ft 8in. Underground is considered too small but is possible to run trains in tunnel that small. Plus, Las Vegas doesn’t need heavy rail but some light rail or pods would work well.
Trains tracks tend to be designed so that the trains must stop at each station, something that can add plenty of time to a trip. Ideally, the smaller cars/scooters/whatever can load and unload out of the main pathway making it possible for every trip to be non-stop.
Uh, it's not about the passing lane on the road. It's about the station. The passing happens at the stations. The car gets out of the way while people load and unload. That's the ideal design.
Sharing a train or bus just forces everyone to stop at everyone's stop along the way.
Currently living in Switzerland, here they just use railroad switches. So express trains can run uninterrupted while e.g. another train is on a separate track in the station.
The actual practice behind metrorail and PRT operation, not to mention the actual operation of the system here, puts some lie to the theory you're working under.
When you design a system so that vehicles have to shunt to and from a station, you strongly limit the capacity of the system by that shunting system. Unbranched metrorail lines can reach 45TPH in normal operation, while branched lines do worse, and systems with heavy reverse branching (splitting from one line to rejoin another, NY's and DC's systems do this something fierce) struggle to get 24TPH. PRTs get better headways because they're smaller vehicles, but they're not really any better than a standard highway lane in the best case (which is beaten out by just about any other rapid transit system in existence).
If you look at the station design here, it's phenomenally bad from a throughput perspective. They appear to be using low sedans (which mean people take longer to get in and out of their seats compared to typical trainsets or buses). Furthermore, the parking spots are angled parking, which requires the cars to back into the travel lane to exit the station, backing up even traffic trying to "express" through the station. There are honest-to-god traffic jams on this system at even moderate capacity events. (Compare this with subway stations, where the station being at crush capacity utilization leads to trains skipping the station until it clears out; that's harder to do in this system.)
I really hope this is successful. If we can automate delivery of goods, above ground roads could have a much longer lifetime as heavy truck damage could move underground.
Maybe we could even build really long multi-trailer trucks with big diesel-electric engines. We could then use these trailer "trains" to move lots of goods over long distances economically.
Maybe we can even spend trillions of dollars and displace thousands of people for every mile! It also seems safe to run these things fast with dangerous chemicals, nothing bad could happen
Then you'd have to repair the asphalt underground, at greater expense. What's the point? The hyperloop is one of the dumbest transport projects to ever be built.
It is important to distinguish between the Hyperloop, the long distance vacuum tube, and Loop intra-city tunnels. They are very different and they are both stupid.
Most asphalt damage comes from water getting under it and freezing. That shouldn't be a problem in a tunnel. But I'd assume they would use a concrete surface in any case.
Likely because it's remarkably naïve as though the person didn't read anything about Loop. Loop uses manned vehicles for human transportation, essentially underground taxis.
Why can't they put electric vans or buses in these tunnels? shuttling everyone in 4 person cars seems inefficient... Lay down a track, and they can be autonomous very easily (compared to relying on tesla self driving tech)
musk's companies do this precisely in part because it's inefficient. By lobbying hard against good transit infrastructure and building flashy but sucky alternatives, they lock in dependance on their product, automobiles.
Because Tesla is a car company. Literally, they only things they currently build are sedans, a crossover, and a handful of semi-developmental semis. They're building factories as fast as they can and still can't keep up with demand. Plus you have that corporate "synergy" with everybody using the self driving tech to produce more test data, although enclosed single lane tunnels populated only by self driving vehicles should be a trivial use case for it.
In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller.
Take a look at the number of deaths from smoke inhalation in any plane crash report, and that's with emergency exits. That's people who survived the actual crash and died from the fire. A fire in a plane is indeed a disaster. Fortunately, planes don't crash nearly as often as cars do.
Really well, thanks for asking. It's amazing what a culture that takes safety extremely seriously, and has pragmatic systems in place to learn from incidents, can produce.
Commercial air transport is THE safest mode of transportation in terms of deaths per distance traveled.
It's like a train, but with monumentally less carrying capacity- it's basically special tunnels for taxis. This is a real head-scratcher and calls into question the basic competence of LV government.
Actually, what it's closest to is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), which is a transit idea that has generally always underwhelmed every place it's been introduced, starting from Morgantown in 1975.
It's kind of unimaginably worse... PRT has basically always assumed automation, with practical PRTs having very few implementation differences from AGT. But the Boring solution is manually operated, so it's going to have all the downsides of PRT (really more since the boarding time is worse) with the extra operating expense of paying an operator for each vehicle.
I wonder if it would be possible to fit a commercial AGT like Mitsubishi Crystal Mover into the Boring tunnels. They're wide enough I think but I don't know if the height clearance is sufficient. And of course AGTs are always constructed with a fire egress walkway which wouldn't fit, but Boring seems to have already accepted that significant safety limitation.
The intent is that it's supposed to be autonomous cars moving around, but it seems Elon vastly overestimated the speed with which autonomous cars can actually be delivered, so the manual operation is just a stopgap solution.
Then again, it's pretty telling that he's struggling to recreate the features of systems developed 50 years ago.
Wait, the LV underground Teslas have to be manually driven? An enclosed track like that is basically ideal for self driving, there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do it with their current tech.
"Six killed in self-driving car pileup under Las Vegas" would be such bad PR for all involved that even someone as tone deaf as Elon probably has some cold feet.
The current Teslas in Convention Center tunnel have human drivers. The original plan was to have automated pods but that would have cost money. It might be possible to drive Tesla automated, but it is probably not easy to disconnect the drivers seat.
Human drivers can't be cheap either, and they reduce the capacity of the vehicle by a whopping 25%. Or are the cars in self driving mode but still stuck with the driver alertness systems? That would be a terrible job, holding on the wheel of a self driving car in a tunnel all day long just to keep the self driving system from getting mad and stopping the car.
It's hard for me not to view the situation as intentional. Conversion of buses to guideway operation has been done by local shops in several cases around the world. If you look at the tunnel design it seems that the small side curbs may have been intended to support side guidewheels similar to what many AGTs use. It's hard to believe that introducing at least steering guidance would have been that big of a project, but when you look at the stations it seems pretty clear that there was zero consideration of any kind of existing guidance technology. Sure, some of this can be attributed to a very hand-wavey "we'll do it in software," but it's hard for me to believe that automation was every seriously planned when they didn't build out mechanical steering guidance and design the stations for it. That's well-established technology going just about to WWII and the early Boeing APM experiments, and with a track record of shops doing semi-custom conversions of existing vehicles.
Ultimately I think Boring/Tesla would introduce automation to the Las Vegas tunnels faster if they just bought a commercial moving-block system like Cityflo and adapted the vehicles. The fact that they don't seem to be pursuing this makes me think that the automation goal was never serious outside of its potential as a marketing tool for Tesla, which they are perhaps ironically also failing to deliver.
How would we feel about it if the tunnels were for bikes? Seems like that would have some benefits: sheltered from the weather, no interaction with multi-ton vehicles driven by inattentive drivers, etc.
As a bicyclist, it might make sense, but not commonly. In rural or undeveloped areas, it's cheaper to just pave a bike path aboveground. In dense and developed areas, the sheer number of potential destinations means you'd need an unreasonable high number of points from which to emerge from the tunnel; better to just build protected bike lanes where bicyclists can transition to ordinary sidewalk-borne pedestrians by merely stepping off their bike. The only tunnel solution that makes sense would be a "highway" through a dense area with only few onramps/offramps, but that implies that you have a very high amount of urban density such that bike trips (which are usually under five miles) can't just be done using dedicated above-ground protected bike lanes. Or hell, an actual subway.
Maybe not bikes but small electric vehicles such as golf carts would be great.
Most wouldn't want to go to work all sweaty.
It amazes me that a lot of these green cities haven't incorporated a small golf cart lanes as most people work within a range of a golf cart distance to travel.
The cost would be a lot cheaper than a car, no need for insurance premiums(if so, very little) , and less maintenance than . Also could likely double the lane traffic within the equivalent car lanes.
The consumer would be more than willing to get on board using and buying golf carts just for the financial benefit of it.
Golf carts can provide rain and sun protection and can also allow for people to drive their kids to school and other activities as well.
Not saying that ebikes are bad but it would also be more appealing for the masses to embrace golf carts over bikes as a replacement for their vehicles.
But it's only good if you are going from one end of the tunnel to the other. You are cut off from all of the destinations in between. This is fine if you're talking about a tunnel that goes across a highway or something, but not great if you're bypassing all of downtown. I'd much rather see cars and trucks underground and bikes on the surface.
One could imagine a city where the streets are only for bikes/pedestrians/scooters/etc... and deliveries happen via underground tunnels where there is parking every other block and a freight elevator to bring the goods to the surface. A kind of futurist ideal that will never work because it would be horrendously expensive and the elevators would always be breaking down and as the city grew the system would be trapped at its current size and become increasingly overloaded over time.
Separated bike lanes at street level or bust. Digging tunnels underground for bikes to get around is pants-on-head backwards- like we're trying to find the most expensive and circuitous solution to a problem we already know the answer to.
Subways in the US cost about $1B per mile. The Boring Company is spending about $10M per mile.
Subways have a capacity of about 50,000 people per hour. TBC's tunnels have a capacity of 4,000 people per hour.
So 8% of the capacity for 1% of the cost.
Even if the numbers are an order of magnitude out, it would still be attractive. 8% of the capacity for 10% of the cost would be fabulously useful in smaller cities like Vegas.
And Las Vegas isn't paying a dime for it. The cost is carried by the boring company and all that Las Vegas does is give them permission to dig the tunnels
Isn't the question if 4,000 people an hour is sufficient? An electric scooter can possibly get 1/100th the cargo to a destination at 1/100th the price of a semi truck, but does that actually solve the problem?
No they don't. The most expensive subway in the country costs $1B per mile. Typical costs are much cheaper (and could be even cheaper, but that's another story).
Subways can run in the Boring tunnels. They are smaller than what are normally used but same size as the London Underground tunnels.
This means that need to put down rails and control systems in the tunnels. I can't see that being $10M/mile.
The huge cost for subway systems are stations. What do the Boring stations cost? I bet the $10M/mile doesn't include the stations. Fairly simple stations for Las Vegas should be pretty cheap.
The cost for the subway could also be reduced the same way as the loop by the way. Here in Switzerland a km of train tunnel costs around 50-200M per km.
The 4,000 passenger number is afair only for the current section, the planned expansion will have a capacity of 2,000 passenger per hour.
The Las Vegas Loop makes sense as a vanity project.
If this is the way that economies of (small-) scale work w.r.t. tunnels, then how 'bout we shoot coffin-like pods down pneumatic tubes for something close to free ?
Everything about LV is an affront to god and man. A city shouldn't be there, and it's having issues for that reason. That they want an overpriced loop that delivers little shouldn't come as a surprise.
So those are much smaller tunnels than usually used for both trains and cars as far as I understand. How are the fire safety issues handled here? Large tunnels usually have a smaller escape tunnel at the side. That doesn't seem to be the case here.
Do regulations that mandate escape routes in tunnels not exist in the US? Or are these tunnels different enough that they don't apply? Or do they have safety measures that are not visible on the images here?
The current tunnel conforms to NFPA 130, which is intended for passenger rail and mass transit (whether a bunch of passenger cars counts as this is an interesting question), and is less-stringent than federal vehicle tunnel requirements. Essentially, the key requirements here are that you need to have no more than 2,500 feet (760 meters) between exits and cross-tunnel passages no more than 800 feet (245 meters) apart.
In the case of the LV "loop," it's a single tunnel shorter than 2,500 feet, so they basically don't need tunnel egress; having said that, imagine an electrical fire in a crowded tunnel with hundreds of tourists in varying degrees of intoxication trying to get out using narrow, 3-ft passages on either side of the cars. It's ... concerning.
Is this a "fat Americans" joke? If it were 1 or 2 foot wide I could see calling it narrow, but 3 feet is plenty wide. Doubly so because there are passages on either side so it's 6 feet of walkway. The low maximum capacity of the system also helps in this regard, it will never need to evacuate thousands of people at once. Just the handful that were in the cars at the time.
This might change if Tesla changes out the current cars for higher capacity ones, but it doesn't seem like it should be an issue currently.
> Is this a "fat Americans" joke? If it were 1 or 2 foot wide I could see calling it narrow, but 3 feet is plenty wide.
The standard width for walkways per NFPA 130 is 3.75 ft, so 3 ft is definitely narrower than the US standard. (The European standard (SRT TSI) is 2.6 ft though.)
If you've seen videos of the current Vegas loop, it looks like a deathtrap. IIRC, there are sections of the tunnel where there isn't even enough space to fully open the car's door.
Even if there was an escape tunnel, you might not be able to get out of the car to get to it.
Completely false. There are no "sections" of the tunnel, it is all one uniform width. There is 3ft on each side of the car, which is more than most garages and parking spaces.
NFPA requirements for road tunnels is an emergency exit every 1000ft/300m. Cross-passages to another tunnel are acceptable, including a parallel travel tunnel if there's automatic traffic control. They may also be stairs or ramps. Secondary tunnels are not common; typically they are for long and/or deep tunnels.
Dunno if the Vegas system would qualify as a road tunnel (thus NFPA 502) or some sort of transit tunnel, which might be a different thing. (I've not seen such exits provided in subway tunnels; emergency procedure seems to be "walk back to the station".)
But in a short shallow system like in Vegas, they could have periodic cross-passages or stairs to the surface. Dunno if they do; never been in it.
I’ll wait to hear more details rather than assuming everyone doing anything I have any question about is a liar or a grifter.
Tunnels are cool. Small tunnels maybe less cool - but one can still imagine the uses. Here’s one: put it deep enough only the DOD knows it exists and run oil pipelines without public controversy.
I've never been to Las Vegas, but every video I've seen of the Boring tunnels is either underwhelming or just seems plain stupid. It looks like something Tesla could use to get around their own campus as a fun PR stunt, not a city infrastructure project. It seems to have less capacity, be less safe, and more complicated than the alternatives. I don't even see any theoretical advantages, and the execution looks even worse. It's amazing that this got built in the first place, and now it's expanding?
And by the way, if Tesla cars can't be autonomous in purpose built tunnels built by a sister company, then why would anyone expect them to handle traffic on actual roads? I consider this to be negative PR for them.
Agreed. Seems like an excellent PR deal for Tesla but beyond that, it's just silly. I'm completely lost on how Las Vegas compared modern subway systems with an underground version of that amusement park ride where they put you in a car on a track and somehow decided to go with the latter.
It's pretty easy to understand why Las Vegas approved the project -- it doesn't cost them anything. If somebody proposed building a subway at no cost to Las Vegas they would have approved that too.
These look like underground, single vehicle tunnels. It got me wondering why tunnels instead of building above ground. It looks like 1) tunnels are much less expensive in dense areas than above-ground roads, and 2) more tunnels can be added as needed by digging deeper (so the company says).
This is cool. I have no idea if they'll solve traffic jams or succeed as a business. There are many issues to solve (ventilation, safety exits, traffic from accidents and exit queuing, etc.). But, having lived in LA and seen how traffic alters livability of a region, I love that they're trying.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] threadAre you saying that no private company should compete with public services?
I love transit and dislike car culture. But I find it hard to fault a car company for trying to present their product as a solution.
you can also run express services with rail.
Sharing a train or bus just forces everyone to stop at everyone's stop along the way.
When you design a system so that vehicles have to shunt to and from a station, you strongly limit the capacity of the system by that shunting system. Unbranched metrorail lines can reach 45TPH in normal operation, while branched lines do worse, and systems with heavy reverse branching (splitting from one line to rejoin another, NY's and DC's systems do this something fierce) struggle to get 24TPH. PRTs get better headways because they're smaller vehicles, but they're not really any better than a standard highway lane in the best case (which is beaten out by just about any other rapid transit system in existence).
If you look at the station design here, it's phenomenally bad from a throughput perspective. They appear to be using low sedans (which mean people take longer to get in and out of their seats compared to typical trainsets or buses). Furthermore, the parking spots are angled parking, which requires the cars to back into the travel lane to exit the station, backing up even traffic trying to "express" through the station. There are honest-to-god traffic jams on this system at even moderate capacity events. (Compare this with subway stations, where the station being at crush capacity utilization leads to trains skipping the station until it clears out; that's harder to do in this system.)
Well, water can erode away the material underneath the road, but if this is happening in your tunnel you have serious problems.
uh... is that why many roads in California are shot, too?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/amp/cargo-sou...
This is comedy gold.
In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller.
[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...
nb. In tunnels, the smoke kills.
Commercial air transport is THE safest mode of transportation in terms of deaths per distance traveled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#/media/File...
TBC tunnels have more room to exit and maneuver than most older subway tunnels.
I wonder if it would be possible to fit a commercial AGT like Mitsubishi Crystal Mover into the Boring tunnels. They're wide enough I think but I don't know if the height clearance is sufficient. And of course AGTs are always constructed with a fire egress walkway which wouldn't fit, but Boring seems to have already accepted that significant safety limitation.
The intent is that it's supposed to be autonomous cars moving around, but it seems Elon vastly overestimated the speed with which autonomous cars can actually be delivered, so the manual operation is just a stopgap solution.
Then again, it's pretty telling that he's struggling to recreate the features of systems developed 50 years ago.
Ultimately I think Boring/Tesla would introduce automation to the Las Vegas tunnels faster if they just bought a commercial moving-block system like Cityflo and adapted the vehicles. The fact that they don't seem to be pursuing this makes me think that the automation goal was never serious outside of its potential as a marketing tool for Tesla, which they are perhaps ironically also failing to deliver.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-longest-cycling-tu...
It amazes me that a lot of these green cities haven't incorporated a small golf cart lanes as most people work within a range of a golf cart distance to travel.
The cost would be a lot cheaper than a car, no need for insurance premiums(if so, very little) , and less maintenance than . Also could likely double the lane traffic within the equivalent car lanes. The consumer would be more than willing to get on board using and buying golf carts just for the financial benefit of it.
Not saying that ebikes are bad but it would also be more appealing for the masses to embrace golf carts over bikes as a replacement for their vehicles.
One could imagine a city where the streets are only for bikes/pedestrians/scooters/etc... and deliveries happen via underground tunnels where there is parking every other block and a freight elevator to bring the goods to the surface. A kind of futurist ideal that will never work because it would be horrendously expensive and the elevators would always be breaking down and as the city grew the system would be trapped at its current size and become increasingly overloaded over time.
Subways have a capacity of about 50,000 people per hour. TBC's tunnels have a capacity of 4,000 people per hour.
So 8% of the capacity for 1% of the cost.
Even if the numbers are an order of magnitude out, it would still be attractive. 8% of the capacity for 10% of the cost would be fabulously useful in smaller cities like Vegas.
No they don't. The most expensive subway in the country costs $1B per mile. Typical costs are much cheaper (and could be even cheaper, but that's another story).
Subways at $120M/mile would be pretty freaking awesome.
This means that need to put down rails and control systems in the tunnels. I can't see that being $10M/mile.
The huge cost for subway systems are stations. What do the Boring stations cost? I bet the $10M/mile doesn't include the stations. Fairly simple stations for Las Vegas should be pretty cheap.
The 4,000 passenger number is afair only for the current section, the planned expansion will have a capacity of 2,000 passenger per hour.
The Las Vegas Loop makes sense as a vanity project.
If this is the way that economies of (small-) scale work w.r.t. tunnels, then how 'bout we shoot coffin-like pods down pneumatic tubes for something close to free ?
actually, I'm not even kidding.
Do regulations that mandate escape routes in tunnels not exist in the US? Or are these tunnels different enough that they don't apply? Or do they have safety measures that are not visible on the images here?
As far as I'm aware, not only do they exist, they are more stringent than in Europe generally.
So I don't know how these things are working under US fire codes.
In the case of the LV "loop," it's a single tunnel shorter than 2,500 feet, so they basically don't need tunnel egress; having said that, imagine an electrical fire in a crowded tunnel with hundreds of tourists in varying degrees of intoxication trying to get out using narrow, 3-ft passages on either side of the cars. It's ... concerning.
Is this a "fat Americans" joke? If it were 1 or 2 foot wide I could see calling it narrow, but 3 feet is plenty wide. Doubly so because there are passages on either side so it's 6 feet of walkway. The low maximum capacity of the system also helps in this regard, it will never need to evacuate thousands of people at once. Just the handful that were in the cars at the time.
This might change if Tesla changes out the current cars for higher capacity ones, but it doesn't seem like it should be an issue currently.
The standard width for walkways per NFPA 130 is 3.75 ft, so 3 ft is definitely narrower than the US standard. (The European standard (SRT TSI) is 2.6 ft though.)
at 2ft wide, most people would not be able to walk down it and have to turn sideways, let alone evacuate.
The 95th percentile male hasshoulders ~23 in wide, and eblows protrude further.
Even if there was an escape tunnel, you might not be able to get out of the car to get to it.
Dunno if the Vegas system would qualify as a road tunnel (thus NFPA 502) or some sort of transit tunnel, which might be a different thing. (I've not seen such exits provided in subway tunnels; emergency procedure seems to be "walk back to the station".)
But in a short shallow system like in Vegas, they could have periodic cross-passages or stairs to the surface. Dunno if they do; never been in it.
Tunnels are cool. Small tunnels maybe less cool - but one can still imagine the uses. Here’s one: put it deep enough only the DOD knows it exists and run oil pipelines without public controversy.
And by the way, if Tesla cars can't be autonomous in purpose built tunnels built by a sister company, then why would anyone expect them to handle traffic on actual roads? I consider this to be negative PR for them.
This is cool. I have no idea if they'll solve traffic jams or succeed as a business. There are many issues to solve (ventilation, safety exits, traffic from accidents and exit queuing, etc.). But, having lived in LA and seen how traffic alters livability of a region, I love that they're trying.
the article title is:
> Boring Company Gets Approval to Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network
which is also actually truthful - the Boring Company announcing something and £7 will get you a pint in Zone 1 these days.
Residential neighborhood speeds for 21st century mass transit, dream big.