The context makes it clear that the parent means the car tunnel itself is the disaster. The video on the disaster is going to discuss why the tunnel is a failure. The project will be a disaster.
Often these are less about actual disasters and more like the brandenburg airport, where a lot of money (and more than originally expected) is spent for very little gains.
It is interesting to me that so many are hung up on form factor. It is like is has gotta look like a traditional NYC or London subway train (complete with gum stuck under the seat I expect) or it can't possibly be any good. It should just be about speed and amortized cost per unit distance.
The bulk of the cost of building a subway is in the tunnel construction. Could as well retrofit the tunnels with tracks for real trains later, when everyone except Elon realizes how little sense the original idea makes.
Don't know how easy that will be. Tunnels built for cars can have much tighter turns than a train/subway tunnel. Unless the tunnels are being planned with future conversion in mind they might need significant rework to be able to carry a train.
They basically chose the least effective, most expensive option. The option they’ve already proven is a failure on a small scale with convention center.
Speaking of expensive - if they stop the service (or even never start it) - who will maintain the tunnels? Looks like huge liability. Would refilling it with some material actually work (in terms of possible surface buildings damage)?
The current Vegas loop is a fun little novelty, like a roller coaster, but it’s so bad as a model for transportation. If we’re already digging the tunnels PLEASE just make a subway. The teslas are so awkward, have to be steered in this small and curved space, require a driver, only fit a few passengers, and on and on. Vegas is in desperate need of higher volume train transportation between the airport, the Strip, and downtown—but I’m afraid this isn’t going to cut it.
How is Vegas in desperate need of transportation between the airport and the strip? Of all the airports I’ve flown to Vegas was the closest to the downtown core and had the least traffic.
You still have to use a taxi/rideshare service, or rent a car. Compared to other cities, those methods are pretty cheap and accessible in Vegas... but it's still expensive and inconvenient compared to a real railway transit system.
Pretty much. Although I'm not sure how useful it would be to have a public transit system from the airport even in the best case. Given how huge the casino complexes are, you'd pretty much need a stop at every casino (and you still might have a long walk to the front desk as is the case with the little loop train that already exists).
It's not really more expensive. In Denver it's $10.50 per person to take the train from the airport to downtown. At the time of this post an Uber from LAS to the Bellagio is $11. If you have two people then the Uber is about half the cost per person of the train in Denver.
I would imagine that you could cut out 80% of the lanes of traffic on the strip if there was a dedicated train from the airport to the strip continuing to other points of interest for tourists. Maybe you could even make the strip pedestrian-only.
The strip is basically a walking area like a theme park, except that it’s cut down the middle by an eight lane road and supplemented with overpasses. Cars get priority over people, who ironically mostly don’t have a car while they’re on vacation in Vegas.
This is an avenue that’s already served by frequent double decker buses. The ridership volume is there at least for a light rail tram system.
You might imagine that but I'm very skeptical that 80% or anything like that of the traffic on the strip is people going back and forth to the airport.
1/3 of urban core traffic is just people cruising around looking for free parking. Then consider how much is unlicensed taxi services like Uber. A lot of urban core traffic is self-inflicted through lack of public transit.
Vegas doesn't really have an urban core as such and AFAIK, there really isn't free street parking near the Strip (and also AFAIK all the casinos now charge).
There are a lot of casinos. You could have a shuttle that serves some subset of hotels. Maybe that even exists today. (There are actually a couple of limited trains today along the Strip.) But people by and large don't love that sort of thing because shuttle buses with a dozen or so stops can take a long time. Rail wouldn't be a lot faster.
Sure, but it’s rather convenient that the route from the airport also takes you up and down the main drag.
Let’s say I’m staying at circus circus and I’m seeing a show at the MGM grand.
It’s an hour walk, 24 minute bus ride plus the wait for the bus (15 minutes divided by 2 on average), or a 12 minute drive.
The Vegas monorail exists but it isn’t anywhere near the actual street where the pedestrians are, and the station locations are so far from where you want to be that you might as well walk.
Therefore, if I’m a typical tourist I’m taking an Uber or a taxi for this trip.
That’s why the strip has so many lanes of traffic. I’m incentivized to get in a car and I haven’t even left the “theme park” boundaries.
Agreed, add a monorail/light rail along side the pedestrian only lanes running down the strip and you have a winner. Always suspected casinos don't want you to roam. Also with F1 now it will never happen.
One issue is that Boring Company is digging tunnels that are 12 ft in diameter. They can be used for subways [1] but it's quite narrow by modern standards.
What’s your thinking there? The bigger tunnel boring machines needed and the extra dirt excavated are cheap in the bigger picture. The trend is clear within London alone and globally, towards larger tunnels.
How are they cheap in the big picture? Average cost is a billion per mile in the US and the latest numbers out of New York are more than 5 billion per mile.
Vegas hyperloop was <30 million per mile, so somewhere between 3% and 0.6% the cost per mile.
Reportedly, in this expansion, private companies will carry the entire cost.
Most of that high cost isn't due to the use of specific tunnel boring machines. In Europe they pay 1/6th of the US cost and still dig much wider tunnels with multiple tracks that support higher-capacity trains and safety features that the Vegas tunnels lack.
I agree that there are a lot of reasons for the cost differential between the US and Europe, and many reports and papers on the topic. From what I've read, tunnel costs are climbing quickly in Europe.
At the end of the day The boring company seems to be able to avoid these high costs using a combination of their technology, simplified goal, and business approach while nobody else has been able to bring costs down for a large tunnels in the US.
It would be great if someone could figure out how to bring large Tunnel cost down in the US, but until someone does, smaller tunnels costing a few percent of the cost have a competitive advantage.
My understanding is that the problems driving large tunnel construction costs in the US are driven by a shortage of labor expertise, Labor bloat compared to other countries, and institutional inability to manage large projects and avoid scope change.
>> My understanding is that the problems driving large tunnel construction costs in the US are driven by a shortage of labor expertise, Labor bloat compared to other countries, and institutional inability to manage large projects and avoid scope change.
This understanding is not correct. America's tunneling cost problem is driven by labor costs, unions, politics, and third party litigation. The institutional inability to manage large projects is a result of the latter three of these: the people in charge when the contract is signed are often not the people in charge when the job is half completed, and that change in leadership leads to scope changes that should (justifiably) be paid for.
I dont see a meaningful distinction between the causes you claim and what I said.
I agree third party litigation warrants highlighting, but I consider that as part of institutional inability to manage large projects.
Likelwise, I see high labor costs and unions as equavalent to lack of skilled labor and bloated labor costs.
At the end of the day, we are saying the same thing. Cost of workers is higher, the US uses far more workers, and the US legal and political systems are not condusive to efficient execution.
Your articulation is not unique to large diameter tunnels, the generic costs you point to are endemic to any diameter tunnel in America and also to any infrastructure project in America that takes place in an urban environment. To say that these things are a "large diameter tunnel" problem is to miss the unique distinctions between TUNNELING costs and INFRASTRUCTURE costs in America. At a high level we agree, but that's not useful for finding a solution to the specific problem of American tunneling costs.
For example, the labor shortage impacts all construction in America but tunnels require even more specialized laborers. Unions drive up the cost of all construction in America, but specific unions (like the Sandhogs) have specific provisions in their contracts that drive up the cost even more. Scope changes impact all construction, but scope changes underground cost orders of magnitude more than surface scope changes (add an offramp above ground versus add an offramp underground). Third party litigation impacts all construction, but the nature of tunneling increases the risk of third party litigation because settlement/sinkholes can occur vast distances away from the work.
This is 68 miles of tunnel. This is an enormous length of tunnel, its scope is anything but small.
I'm not sure what you mean by service requirements for a tunnel, but I assume you mean maintenance. Maintenance requirements for tunnels are only tangentially related to diameter once the final lining is in place, it is mostly driven by length. Realistically there is only so much maintenance that can happen for a tunnel or for any underground structure from the structural perspective since you can't look outside of the tunnel from the inside. So you overdesign. Maintenance requirements thus amount to visual inspections of the inside and maintenance of appurtenant mechanical/electrical systems. These mechanical/electrical systems become more reliable and more efficient with relation to tunnel diameter, and so your maintenance requirements actually decrease on an aggregate basis (i.e. - a tunnel that can support 2 lanes of traffic is less costly to maintain than 2 tunnels that support 1 lane of traffic).
And the idea that anything ran by Elon Musk is not susceptible to whims and scope changes is laughable.
Digging a wider tunnel requires a bigger tbm, which adds little to the whole cost. Hs2 put out a paper, though I don’t think it compares sizes. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
The NYC example is terrible, because the new part of the tunnel is only short and the whole project costs a lot does not mean each mile of the tunnel costs that much.
I was first asking why they thought small tunnels are better, is that purely on financial grounds? Low cost, low benefit.
Why is it not appropriate to compare a whole project cost the whole project cost per mile? The New York extension was 7.7 billion for 1.5 MI and the Vegas Loop was 47 million for 1.7 MI. Now you have a project cost per mile and you can
evaluate benefit from per mile. Biggest Loop was unquestionably much lower total benefit. Then you can compare benefit per dollar. At 1 200th the price does it provide more or less than 0.5% the value.
I guess my thinking was that it works pretty well in London to use smaller tunnels, and I don't immediately understand why larger tunnels are needed. If you're familiar with why tunnels have been trending larger, I'd love to know.
In animations of the intended final design, there will also be larger vehicles which can carry more people at once and will of course be automated. I don't think it will be materially different from a subway (train) in that regard where volumes are high. It will just be more flexible.
For the love of god, why does there need to be yet another lane? It will emphatically not solve the problem. Driving teslas through a tunnel is not flexible, it's a recipe for induced demand and gridlock.
Build a subway! High volumes of people get moved very efficiently. Moving small numbers of people in personal vehicles is a terrible idea. Flexibility is a bad feature here.
Subways are not particularly efficient from a cost perspective. One of the main reasons for the Boring company’s existence is the extremely high costs associated with subway construction. They are trying to bring the costs down by one or two orders of magnitude. This is material.
Yeah, I think the original vision for the Loop tunnels is a lot more practical and compelling than what currently exists in Vegas.
The primary advantages over a subway are:
1. They're point-to-point, requiring no stops between origin and destination
2. They integrate with the existing road system, allowing point-to-point transportation even between destinations where the tunnels don't run
3. They're compatible with existing electric cars, allowing owners to take their own private vehicles directly to their destination without needing to transfer between cars or share a space with strangers
4. Small tunnel diameter reduces the cost vs larger subway tunnels
Of those points, only #4 got implemented in the Vegas loop and even that is debatable. Plus a lot of other important features like automated driving and dedicated mass transit vehicles got left out, which greatly reduces the ridership capacity of the tunnels compared to what they theoretically could support.
It seems like an interesting and worthwhile experiment. It seems almost inevitable that if it works out, the drivers will be removed and they'll switch to tailor-made automated vehicles. It could start to make a lot more sense as a sort of point-to-point automated rail equivalent.
Perhaps a regular metro would suit Las Vega better, but if that's out of reach why not give this a shot? It's Las Vega after all.
I really like this vision for the system. If they can retrofit in some rails and remove the drivers, it suddenly makes a lot of sense. I hope that’s where this ends up!
Since the first one cost about 47 million, it seems reasonable to guess the others will cost some multiple of that. The opportunity cost of several hundred million dollars seems... bad? Just have a subway!
His whole thing for a while was how it was going to be cheaper to dig tunnels by using new techniques etc, that would equally apply to subways - but a feel like it was probably bullshit.
This is ridiculous misinformation. "Drills" come in every size already, from the 12-inch range all the way up to 60 feet in diameter. All modern "drills" that erect a liner behind them are electric - air quality and safety issues (along with the massive energy requirements) mandate the use of an umbilical from the surface and prevent the use of diesel or gas in the tunnel for these machines. None of Boring Company's "drills" are able to start at street level and dig themselves down, they require a ramp or shaft just like every other TBM. This is physics, the Boring Company has made no technological advances. They literally bought their TBM from someone else and put it in the ground with a new paint job.
Here are pictures of the drills launching at ground level and digging themselves down [1], and a third party source discussing it as an innovation in boring [2]
This would be called a launch ramp in the industry. It is an adaptation of HDD approaches to larger diameter machines. It has been going on for decades. It is only viable where space and the final geometric constraints of the project permit. Additionally, it requires very specific geologic conditions or the construction of a structural headwall in order to avoid a sinkhole.
You’ll never be able to build 68 miles of subway in a place like Los Vegas given the cost structure that exists in America today. The next 1.5 mile phase of the second avenue subway in NYC is going to be $7.7 billion. DC desperately needs more downtown subway capacity to accommodate the new suburban lines it has built. It won’t happen. I think you can count the active subway expansion projects in this country on one hand.
Outside somewhere like New York, a cheap low capacity system that goes more places is better than a high capacity subway that doesn’t go anywhere.
The Second Ave. subway cost explosions are driven by a combination of union grift, overly litigious third parties, onerous design requirements driven by politics rather than engineering, and the requirement of building stations in the middle of New York. The problem in DC is similar but also impeded by the fact that Metro does not want to take responsibility for any new track (see the Purple Line fiasco).
Your point still stands that America's approach to infrastructure (and underground in particular) is costly; however, those costs are not nearly as bad outside of major metropolitan cities. Underground work in the Vegas area is relatively inexpensive in my experience (I have worked on underground projects in all three of these locations within the last decade).
New York and DC are especially bad, but LA still paid a billion dollars a mile for its recent subway expansion. If built as a subway, the 68-mile network would cost at least $50 billion. The gross domestic product of the entire Las Vegas region is just $136 billion. A $50 billion infrastructure project would be like New York City taking on a $750 billion infrastructure project.
You could build a much smaller subway network. But at that point, the value proposition of the network in a sprawling city like Las Vegas evaporates. (Especially in a city as hot as Los Vegas, where long walks from subway stations to destinations will be miserable.) Baltimore is much denser than Las Vegas, and the one underground line has a ridership of just 2 million people annually. Limited subway networks that don’t go anywhere are worthless.
NYC's subway system has nearly 1000 miles of track. The cost of that was spread over years. Similarly, the 68 mile network proposed here will be built over years. Based on Boring Company's own PR, it took them a year to build 1.7 miles of track at the convention center. 68 miles will take them 40 years. Considering the reality of construction schedules and the fact that none of this is permitted or designed and using your $50B number, this will take half a century or more to build. So that amounts to less than $1 billion a year. Does NYC take on $15 billion in infrastructure projects a year? Probably.
I find it entirely plausible that NYC would take on $750 billion in infrastructure projects over half a century. Hell, if NYC were to attempt to build their own subway network again using the Second Ave. number (and conceding that it's inflated), it would take nearly $5 TRILLION dollars. Handicap that number for the inflated cost and we're still looking at NYC having already spent multiples of the amount you are asserting NYC would equivalently have to take on on a project-to-project basis with this.
As to the rest of your post, I agree - this proposed 68 mile tunnel system in a place that lacks the requisite urban density for public transit efficiency will have limited ridership and will be worthless, if it's ever completed. More likely it will be abandoned partway through and will only serve to become a literal obstacle to future tunnels/development.
NYC has not spent $750 billion on subway expansion (adjusted for inflation) even over more than a century. To use the IND 8th Avenue line as a benchmark, the second to last trunk line, the 14 route miles were built for about $4 billion in today’s money. The whole system has 248 route miles, almost all of it built before 1948. Assuming it was built at the same per-mile cost as the 8th Avenue Line, that’s about $70 billion or so in today’s dollars for most of the original network.
The NYC MTA spends $7 billion a year on capital expenditures, not $15 billion. Most of that is maintenance, not expansion. No transit system can spend anything close to 100% of their budget on expansion over that time horizon. So your $1 billion a year is probably more like $2 billion accounting for maintenance. That is more than the entire Las Vegas budget.
>Public transportation systems all over the country currently have huge budget gaps because ridership keeps going down.
The pandemic basically destroyed ridership in a lot of places. Boston--both the subway and the commuter rail--have crept back up to "only" being about 30% below pre-pandemic levels (and has probably been impacted by some disruptive long-deferred maintenance as well). But one of the consequences is reduced schedules which makes public transit relatively less attractive.
> Public transportation systems all over the country currently have huge budget gaps because ridership keeps going down.
COVID and remote work did this. Might be less of a concern for a captive tourist audience. A line to the airport and 4-5 big intersections or attractions could be pretty effective.
This is what you get when ideologies of hyperindividualism are presumed as natural law. It sounds like something out of some 80s lampooning cyberpunk movie.
The whole premise of cities is efficiency through collaborative infrastructure. It's really wild how badly we do it.
> This is what you get when ideologies of hyperindividualism are presumed as natural law. It sounds like something out of some 80s lampooning cyberpunk movie
It... what? How do you get from the six sentence linked article to that?[1].
Can't it just be a silly boondoggle? I mean: how does public funding of transportation infrastructure (however silly) even remotely follow from "hyperindividualism"?
[1] I mean, I know how you got there. It's got nothing to do with tunnels and everything to do with how fun it is to hate the nutjob that runs the tunnel company.
No it's got nothing to do with Elon Musk or Tesla. There's efficient systems that already exist to solve these problems but there's ideologies that act as blinders and keep the better solutions shelved as impractical or facing erected roadblocks like "where's the money"
When Tesla decides they don't care about it any more, then the tax payer becomes responsible. This is the classic "public-private partnership" where the responsibilities and liabilities are on the tax payer while the profits and power are privatized.
It was initially private until it couldn't be profitable and then it became public until it was profitable because the public stewardship was trying to do a service and not simply milk the consumer, then they privatized it again when it was profitable.
So when it loses money it's our responsibility when it makes money it's their benefit and we don't see any of it.
It's totally insane but we have ideologies that demand it to be this way so that's what we get
Ideologies like the gov't must compensate private property owners when utilizing eminent domain? Environmental protection? Need to use union labor? What are the philosophical blockers to public infrastructure projects? Cause as far as I can tell the primary blocker is their massive costs.
the major blockers to public transportation is spending government money to benefit people that aren’t necessarily you. The rest is mostly smoke and mirrors.
The long term ROI may be huge economically and environmentally, but that’s far to abstract to motivate most people.
You're blinded by your ideology so that certain types of projects you categorize one way and other types you categorize another.
For example when LAX, which is government controlled by the city of Los Angeles, was expanding in the 1950s on up to today, all of the costs of expanding the airport were not controversial up to where it's now servicing 100,000 people daily.
You know what was controversial? Public transit there. Building an airport that can fly in and out 100,000 people was not expensive, was not complicated, was not some huge cost for the taxpayer.
Those adjectives were not assigned to that project.
However the idea of putting a train there, that is complicated, that is expensive and that is a huge cost to taxpayer because people have decided to use those adjectives there.
And that's the only reason.
Here's another example. Cincinnati built a 400 million dollar sports stadium on the tax dollars dime.
The stadium didn't get assigned the adjectives that say a 400 million park or housing project would have gotten, regardless of the fact that a 400 million dollar housing project would have far more predictable revenue and wouldn't lead to the city being forced to sell off hospitals.
No that would have gotten the adjectives complicated difficult expensive and all those other negative modifiers because of the underlying ideologies. Those adjectives are assigned to reflect the ideological commitments
This is not about principles or ideology, just self-interest re: how to deploy political/actual capital imo in all directions. Public infrastructure projects are expensive and the benefits of them are not evenly distributed and that's why the fights over them are so intense these years, now that the country is more mature and billions of dollars of wealth are potentially in the balance every time one comes up.
Lots of subsidies and bailouts go swiftly to very specialized interests without such public grumblings. It's happened multiple times in the past 15 years on the scale of trillions
Parks, community college and library funding, which is public and ostensibly for everyone, are under far more scrutiny than say, the billions in subsidies to Amazon, which you probably didn't realize existed.
Under your hypothesized system, free healthcare, preschool, generous maternity leave, free college, these would all be easy victories.
They are not because of an ideology of hyperindividualism and a dogmatic commitment to an amorphous ideology called "the free market" which is seen as so sacrosanct and holy that some people get wobbly knees and raise an accusatory finger if someone has the gall to dare to question whether the current cowboy capitalism peddled under the label "free market" is actually a good idea.
The insanity of fundamentalism has invisibly inserted itself into our daily life by Tartuffian free marketeers who suckle the public teet.
The analysis of reality fails your proposed tests. The ones I've suggested map to reality more faithfully without any rationalizing or circuitous logic required.
You can believe whatever you want. Some beliefs, however, are more accurate than others
Quotes like this really make me wonder about the people who say them in the moment. Do they realize how ridiculous the words they are saying sound when put in this order?
“It’s not like a subway where you stop at a bunch of stops along the way,” said attorney Stephanie Allen, of law firm Kaempfer Crowell, who spoke on Boring Company’s behalf. “It goes directly from Point A to Point B and saves a lot of time in doing so.”
I have no idea what the Point A (except maybe the airport) and Point B would be in the context of Vegas given there's no real downtown in the sense of many cities.
I honestly cannot believe that a city would give permission to build such a pyrrhic public transportation system, even if it is privately owned. From the article:
"The convention center loop has been operational for about two years and has seen 1.2 million passengers over that span. The highest daily capacity of the system during that time is 32,000 riders."
The similarly planned Austin MetroRail has a yearly passenger volume of ~500,000, but at least it is more useful than this.
A train or bus that only carries a few people is not really a problem. Because labor costs are the majority of public transit operating costs not vehicles it makes sense to use the largest vehicle everywhere. Using minibuses or smaller train cars just means you get capacity issues during rush hour and you can't standardize on one vehicle.
You are right that public transit does not go door to door. Riders are expected to walk a block to the nearest station. If a transit system tries to replicate taxi service it would be too expensive or would really inflate waiting times for a ride.
The video linked in another comment here said that she had been trying to film it for a year, but they only run the loop when there is an event going on at the convention center. Seems like that ought to depress the numbers massively.
Those numbers aren’t possible literally anywhere else. Silver line phase II extension carried about 1.1 million people over six months. That’s the marquee project of the DC metro system—the only thing it has focused on building over the last decade (to the detriment of the rest of the system). Boring Company’s little demo carried a meaningful fraction as many passengers as that $3 billion dollar, decade-in-the-making transit project.
Is it a meaningful fraction? What is the theoretical daily capacity of the Boring Company tunnels vs. the DC silver line extension? Even at this meager capacity, we’ve already heard reports of traffic in the tunnels.
Why are we comparing a system that just has 4 stops on the Las Vegas Convention Center campus plus one at a nearby hotel to the much much much larger entire NYC subway system?
Sure, let's compare it per station. According to Wikipedia, NYC has 5.2 million daily riders and 472 stations [1] for an average of 11,000 riders per station per day — over 26x more than the Las Vegas Loop stations have been accommodating. Even if you adjust for population differences (LV ~600k, NYC ~8m) the Las Vegas Loop does significantly worse.
That still seems questionable to me because they are completely different kinds of systems.
The NYC system is serving an entire city with stops near a large number of businesses of all kinds. It's a system that almost anyone in the city might have reason to use.
The LV system has stops at just two businesses (four at the convention center and one at a nearby hotel). It's a system that is only useful to people who need to move between locations at the convention center or between the convention center and that one hotel.
It's a bit amusing the city doesn't even think it will happen but is just approving it because all of the destinations told them to.
> Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman isn’t sure the project will ever come to fruition, but voted in favor of the extension anyway, due to the urging of the various resorts and other entities in downtown.
> “I am one who just does not believe will come to be, certainly not in my lifetime,”
That people think a city should ban a company from building underground transit without even letting them try when the alternatives are robustly known to be almost literally (if not just literally) too expensive, too slow, and too encumbered to build, is exactly why transit is too expensive, too slow, and too encumbered to build. It shocks me to no end how much people want to shoot themselves in the foot.
> The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.
68 miles would cost the city around $50B, if past trends hold true. Contra, Vegas Loop is being fully covered by private funds.
In defense, one subway mile is likely worth more than one Loop mile.
A modern 68-mile subway system under Vegas would cost probably $100 billion. LA just expanded its subway system for $1 billion a mile. In comparison, the Boring Company did the 1.7-mile Las Vegas Convention center tunnel for a $47 million fixed price.
Really? It seems totally reasonable to think that a failed solution is actually worse than no current solution. For example, are these tunnels going to be an obstacle if the city decides to build a real subway someday? Is a failure here going to destroy public appetite for "similar looking" projects? Can the people behind this project be trusted to build it in such a way that it doesn't become a death trap and strain on emergency services?
There are a variety of totally legitimate reasons not to let just anyone try to do something like this.
Loops don't provide the same capacity, frequency, or efficiency, of the underground train. For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Another thing is that Tesla tunnels are completely bare, with pretty much zero safety and accessibility measures [0]. Tesla build them in Vegas because it is a dry, mostly stable environment. This would be a complete disaster pretty much anywhere else in the world.
To pick just one point, vis a vis Brandolini's law,
> For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Some quick math:
> ...the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) plans to spend $3.686 billion in the order. The contract is split into three parts: R211A, R211S, and R211T. The majority of the 535-car base order will comprise 440 R211A cars...
$3.686B / 535 cars / 30 seats/car ~ $230k/seat.
Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty. And anyway,
If there's an advantage to train cars here, it's not as obvious as you state. Maybe the cost of mass produced road cars is somehow worse, but it's certainly not obviously worse enough to make the project illegal over.
You ignored the lifespan of a train vs a Tesla vehicle. Maintenance is also a big cost factor. You can run a train for decades with very low maintenance costs, which is just not true for a car fleet. Your average car would suffer from some critical, perhaps non-repairable condition, at 300,000 miles. Train cars last for decades.
> Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty.
It seems that you are really concerned about personal space, but anyway.
"Larger" tunnels and stations are needed for several reasons, one of them being able to handle passenger volume and accessibility. What you are saying is, essentially, that underground train infrastructure is "more expensive" because it is just better: it can handle more passengers, has to comply with safety regulations, and needs to be accessible.
It is cheaper to maintain one train, than the equivalent number of cars.
Simply put, there is no way a Tesla car would run 30+ years without having to replace batteries and motors several times.
If an average Tesla car would run for, say, 1 mile per minute, and kept it for 12 hours a day (nothing unusual for an average train line), that would average to over +500,000 miles in less than two years. These cars would definitely need to be fully rebuilt or replaced, and I'm not even counting interior wear and tear.
Even privately owned, there's the problem that whatever tunnels they do build are going to be in the low hanging fruit and in the way of building actual subway systems in the future if a sensible transport policy starts.
The crazy thing is that a high-schooler with a back of envelope calculation can show this is significantly less efficient than metro.
That's even before taking into account safety issues they have had. Consider all the idiots you see on the highway, now think about what would happen if there was no way to go around them
32k daily? So if they are evenly spaced in 24h (I don't believe it's remotely possible), it means 22.2 passengers per minute (or 7. 4 per station per minute, if they are evenly distributed).
First reaction: it isn't that high, but it's interesting.
Second reaction, after looking at the pictures and where the cars can stop and take passengers: filthy liars.
> As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.
The most important point of their design should not be thought of as it being express transport, though it is, nor anything special about their throughput, though it's competitive — it's just that underground transit is good, the regulatory environment is bad, and Teslas-in-tunnels is about the least encumbered way of making it happen.
I have no better data for the broad claim than the claim itself, but IIUC LA only has B and D lines for subway, and those are <23 miles total. Given they opened over 20 years ago I find it hard to see where LA would have built >20 miles of subway. I skimmed the pages for the lines and don't think they've expanded at all in that time, in terms of underground miles. I assume TBC's figure doesn't include work still under construction.
Happy to be corrected, my numbers are best-effort.
I was curious what the current status of what's been built is, this review I found informative: https://youtu.be/XnWL-iZFlSM.
Maybe it could work in Vegas, given how unwalkable it is, and how many people are there without cars, looking to move from a specific resort to a specific resort for shows/dining etc.
As a privately-funded attraction, AKA "silly thing to do in Vegas" this seems fine, no worse than visiting the Ice Bar or climbing a reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. Hopefully none of those Teslas catch fire in the little tunnels.
I think people miss this point, Vegas is a spectacle. If they are going to do something it has to be an attraction not just a rote tool that serves a purpose. They literally want it to be a place you have to go to because you can't experience it anywhere else.
The permission from the city should be contingent on 24/7 operation.
Novelty services that serve tourists going to the convention center don't move the needle on daily users being able to get rid of cars and the car lifestyle unless they can rely on the system at all hours.
This is only true for people who don't live in high-rise condos/apartments like Turnberry, Allure, Sky, Panorama, etc. All of those are approximately "on the strip" and thousands of people live in them.
He's starting from the other way around, sell snake oil to corpos and politicians, get all the bureaucracy out of the way, and then take his sweet ass time to actually deliver.
In our current system, this is the best way. Example, in Toronto our politicians literally spent a decade and half debating, approving, then disallowing, then commissioned studies for a ~10 mile long subway line.
Can't wait for the Adam something video. If you do not know him, he is a youtuber that like trains a lot and make good criticism to a lot of new "hypes". I do not agree with everything he says, and he tend to be a bit extreme, but good content.
I was just talking to my wife about this yesterday and wondering why Vegas didn’t have a subway like transit system. I know they have the monorail but it’s really not a comprehensive solution. This will be cool to see unfold. The strip can be tedious to navigate if you’re on foot.
The things that make walking tedious also make public transit tedious if you're walking from some station tucked in the back of the casino to where the actual casino and restaurants are. And if a station is outside, we're talking 110 degrees F at certain times of the year. The whole design of the Strip is oriented towards getting you into a casino and keeping you there.
On a related note, Tesla announced it wants to make commercial vans and buses, which would significantly increase the efficiency and throughput of these tunnels.[a]
165 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI am more interested if the Boring's TBM technology actually dig any faster.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs&ab_channel=Thund...
The strip is basically a walking area like a theme park, except that it’s cut down the middle by an eight lane road and supplemented with overpasses. Cars get priority over people, who ironically mostly don’t have a car while they’re on vacation in Vegas.
This is an avenue that’s already served by frequent double decker buses. The ridership volume is there at least for a light rail tram system.
Let’s say I’m staying at circus circus and I’m seeing a show at the MGM grand.
It’s an hour walk, 24 minute bus ride plus the wait for the bus (15 minutes divided by 2 on average), or a 12 minute drive.
The Vegas monorail exists but it isn’t anywhere near the actual street where the pedestrians are, and the station locations are so far from where you want to be that you might as well walk.
Therefore, if I’m a typical tourist I’m taking an Uber or a taxi for this trip.
That’s why the strip has so many lanes of traffic. I’m incentivized to get in a car and I haven’t even left the “theme park” boundaries.
--- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#Deep-level_...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_Subway
Vegas hyperloop was <30 million per mile, so somewhere between 3% and 0.6% the cost per mile.
Reportedly, in this expansion, private companies will carry the entire cost.
At the end of the day The boring company seems to be able to avoid these high costs using a combination of their technology, simplified goal, and business approach while nobody else has been able to bring costs down for a large tunnels in the US.
It would be great if someone could figure out how to bring large Tunnel cost down in the US, but until someone does, smaller tunnels costing a few percent of the cost have a competitive advantage.
My understanding is that the problems driving large tunnel construction costs in the US are driven by a shortage of labor expertise, Labor bloat compared to other countries, and institutional inability to manage large projects and avoid scope change.
This understanding is not correct. America's tunneling cost problem is driven by labor costs, unions, politics, and third party litigation. The institutional inability to manage large projects is a result of the latter three of these: the people in charge when the contract is signed are often not the people in charge when the job is half completed, and that change in leadership leads to scope changes that should (justifiably) be paid for.
I agree third party litigation warrants highlighting, but I consider that as part of institutional inability to manage large projects.
Likelwise, I see high labor costs and unions as equavalent to lack of skilled labor and bloated labor costs.
At the end of the day, we are saying the same thing. Cost of workers is higher, the US uses far more workers, and the US legal and political systems are not condusive to efficient execution.
For example, the labor shortage impacts all construction in America but tunnels require even more specialized laborers. Unions drive up the cost of all construction in America, but specific unions (like the Sandhogs) have specific provisions in their contracts that drive up the cost even more. Scope changes impact all construction, but scope changes underground cost orders of magnitude more than surface scope changes (add an offramp above ground versus add an offramp underground). Third party litigation impacts all construction, but the nature of tunneling increases the risk of third party litigation because settlement/sinkholes can occur vast distances away from the work.
Where I disagree is that the boring company is approach minimizes the magnitude and impact of these challenges.
For example, if the project scope isn't dictated by politicians, it is less susceptible to political whims and scope changes.
If the project scope is smaller, the we all challenges will be fewer. If the tunnels are smaller, service requirements are lower.
It would be interesting to know the boring company uses union labor or not.
I'm not sure what you mean by service requirements for a tunnel, but I assume you mean maintenance. Maintenance requirements for tunnels are only tangentially related to diameter once the final lining is in place, it is mostly driven by length. Realistically there is only so much maintenance that can happen for a tunnel or for any underground structure from the structural perspective since you can't look outside of the tunnel from the inside. So you overdesign. Maintenance requirements thus amount to visual inspections of the inside and maintenance of appurtenant mechanical/electrical systems. These mechanical/electrical systems become more reliable and more efficient with relation to tunnel diameter, and so your maintenance requirements actually decrease on an aggregate basis (i.e. - a tunnel that can support 2 lanes of traffic is less costly to maintain than 2 tunnels that support 1 lane of traffic).
And the idea that anything ran by Elon Musk is not susceptible to whims and scope changes is laughable.
I was first asking why they thought small tunnels are better, is that purely on financial grounds? Low cost, low benefit.
Build a subway! High volumes of people get moved very efficiently. Moving small numbers of people in personal vehicles is a terrible idea. Flexibility is a bad feature here.
The primary advantages over a subway are:
1. They're point-to-point, requiring no stops between origin and destination
2. They integrate with the existing road system, allowing point-to-point transportation even between destinations where the tunnels don't run
3. They're compatible with existing electric cars, allowing owners to take their own private vehicles directly to their destination without needing to transfer between cars or share a space with strangers
4. Small tunnel diameter reduces the cost vs larger subway tunnels
Of those points, only #4 got implemented in the Vegas loop and even that is debatable. Plus a lot of other important features like automated driving and dedicated mass transit vehicles got left out, which greatly reduces the ridership capacity of the tunnels compared to what they theoretically could support.
Perhaps a regular metro would suit Las Vega better, but if that's out of reach why not give this a shot? It's Las Vega after all.
Experimentation with alternatives is desperately needed.
They are electric and can start at street level and dig themselves down.
https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock
https://www.construction-europe.com/news/6-ways-tunnel-borin... -evolving/8026001.article
For example, what Boring Company is doing has already been done in the extreme limit: Herrenknecht sells a vertical shaft boring machine that is essentially a TBM turned 90 degrees. https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/productdetail/verti...
This one is reported as no cost to the city.
Outside somewhere like New York, a cheap low capacity system that goes more places is better than a high capacity subway that doesn’t go anywhere.
Your point still stands that America's approach to infrastructure (and underground in particular) is costly; however, those costs are not nearly as bad outside of major metropolitan cities. Underground work in the Vegas area is relatively inexpensive in my experience (I have worked on underground projects in all three of these locations within the last decade).
You could build a much smaller subway network. But at that point, the value proposition of the network in a sprawling city like Las Vegas evaporates. (Especially in a city as hot as Los Vegas, where long walks from subway stations to destinations will be miserable.) Baltimore is much denser than Las Vegas, and the one underground line has a ridership of just 2 million people annually. Limited subway networks that don’t go anywhere are worthless.
I find it entirely plausible that NYC would take on $750 billion in infrastructure projects over half a century. Hell, if NYC were to attempt to build their own subway network again using the Second Ave. number (and conceding that it's inflated), it would take nearly $5 TRILLION dollars. Handicap that number for the inflated cost and we're still looking at NYC having already spent multiples of the amount you are asserting NYC would equivalently have to take on on a project-to-project basis with this.
As to the rest of your post, I agree - this proposed 68 mile tunnel system in a place that lacks the requisite urban density for public transit efficiency will have limited ridership and will be worthless, if it's ever completed. More likely it will be abandoned partway through and will only serve to become a literal obstacle to future tunnels/development.
The NYC MTA spends $7 billion a year on capital expenditures, not $15 billion. Most of that is maintenance, not expansion. No transit system can spend anything close to 100% of their budget on expansion over that time horizon. So your $1 billion a year is probably more like $2 billion accounting for maintenance. That is more than the entire Las Vegas budget.
Tesla announced it wants to make high-passenger-count commercial EVs (akin to vans and buses):
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
EVs that carry 8, 12, or more passengers (perhaps by chaining the EVs) would significantly increase the efficiency and throughput of these tunnels.
And then there's a big question mark on self-driving, which, if achieved, would significantly improve the economics.
That would make the whole thing even dumber than I firstly thought.
Public transportation systems all over the country currently have huge budget gaps because ridership keeps going down.
Meanwhile, this provides 68km of low throughput transport to the city, for the public price of zero.
This is really making good the enemy of the perfect. Especially When the general public doesn't agree on the perfect, or want to pay for it.
The pandemic basically destroyed ridership in a lot of places. Boston--both the subway and the commuter rail--have crept back up to "only" being about 30% below pre-pandemic levels (and has probably been impacted by some disruptive long-deferred maintenance as well). But one of the consequences is reduced schedules which makes public transit relatively less attractive.
That seems incredibly high. My city in France just finished building a new subway line and the cost was ~100 million € per km (170 million $ per mile)
Not sure why there's an order of magnitude difference?
https://gothamist.com/news/cost-of-second-ave-subway-extensi...
Somewhat related: New York metro unveils $30M staircase
https://nypost.com/2022/05/16/mta-unveils-stunning-30m-stair...
only slightly less egregious, BART completes $41 million pedestrian bridge:
https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2022/news20220203
COVID and remote work did this. Might be less of a concern for a captive tourist audience. A line to the airport and 4-5 big intersections or attractions could be pretty effective.
The whole premise of cities is efficiency through collaborative infrastructure. It's really wild how badly we do it.
It... what? How do you get from the six sentence linked article to that?[1].
Can't it just be a silly boondoggle? I mean: how does public funding of transportation infrastructure (however silly) even remotely follow from "hyperindividualism"?
[1] I mean, I know how you got there. It's got nothing to do with tunnels and everything to do with how fun it is to hate the nutjob that runs the tunnel company.
When Tesla decides they don't care about it any more, then the tax payer becomes responsible. This is the classic "public-private partnership" where the responsibilities and liabilities are on the tax payer while the profits and power are privatized.
It's a raw deal. The most famous example of how this works is Conrail, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail
It was initially private until it couldn't be profitable and then it became public until it was profitable because the public stewardship was trying to do a service and not simply milk the consumer, then they privatized it again when it was profitable.
So when it loses money it's our responsibility when it makes money it's their benefit and we don't see any of it.
It's totally insane but we have ideologies that demand it to be this way so that's what we get
The long term ROI may be huge economically and environmentally, but that’s far to abstract to motivate most people.
For example when LAX, which is government controlled by the city of Los Angeles, was expanding in the 1950s on up to today, all of the costs of expanding the airport were not controversial up to where it's now servicing 100,000 people daily.
You know what was controversial? Public transit there. Building an airport that can fly in and out 100,000 people was not expensive, was not complicated, was not some huge cost for the taxpayer.
Those adjectives were not assigned to that project.
However the idea of putting a train there, that is complicated, that is expensive and that is a huge cost to taxpayer because people have decided to use those adjectives there.
And that's the only reason.
Here's another example. Cincinnati built a 400 million dollar sports stadium on the tax dollars dime.
When it wasn't profitable they ended up having to sell off hospitals and raid their savings. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-county-stadium-debts-cin...
The stadium didn't get assigned the adjectives that say a 400 million park or housing project would have gotten, regardless of the fact that a 400 million dollar housing project would have far more predictable revenue and wouldn't lead to the city being forced to sell off hospitals.
No that would have gotten the adjectives complicated difficult expensive and all those other negative modifiers because of the underlying ideologies. Those adjectives are assigned to reflect the ideological commitments
I wrote a related article about this 6 years ago
https://kristopolous.medium.com/public-private-partnerships-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37048877
This is not about principles or ideology, just self-interest re: how to deploy political/actual capital imo in all directions. Public infrastructure projects are expensive and the benefits of them are not evenly distributed and that's why the fights over them are so intense these years, now that the country is more mature and billions of dollars of wealth are potentially in the balance every time one comes up.
Lots of subsidies and bailouts go swiftly to very specialized interests without such public grumblings. It's happened multiple times in the past 15 years on the scale of trillions
Parks, community college and library funding, which is public and ostensibly for everyone, are under far more scrutiny than say, the billions in subsidies to Amazon, which you probably didn't realize existed.
Under your hypothesized system, free healthcare, preschool, generous maternity leave, free college, these would all be easy victories.
They are not because of an ideology of hyperindividualism and a dogmatic commitment to an amorphous ideology called "the free market" which is seen as so sacrosanct and holy that some people get wobbly knees and raise an accusatory finger if someone has the gall to dare to question whether the current cowboy capitalism peddled under the label "free market" is actually a good idea.
The insanity of fundamentalism has invisibly inserted itself into our daily life by Tartuffian free marketeers who suckle the public teet.
The analysis of reality fails your proposed tests. The ones I've suggested map to reality more faithfully without any rationalizing or circuitous logic required.
You can believe whatever you want. Some beliefs, however, are more accurate than others
“It’s not like a subway where you stop at a bunch of stops along the way,” said attorney Stephanie Allen, of law firm Kaempfer Crowell, who spoke on Boring Company’s behalf. “It goes directly from Point A to Point B and saves a lot of time in doing so.”
Can we please invent cost effective low-speed maglev trains.
China is moving in the right direction: https://youtu.be/9u4lG0HuICg
> China is moving in the right direction: https://youtu.be/9u4lG0HuICg
This looks like it has all the advantages of a traditional train, with all the disadvantages of maglev.
Yes, faster, quieter, and smoother.
People will give up their cars when mass transit is faster and more convenient.
I honestly cannot believe that a city would give permission to build such a pyrrhic public transportation system, even if it is privately owned. From the article:
"The convention center loop has been operational for about two years and has seen 1.2 million passengers over that span. The highest daily capacity of the system during that time is 32,000 riders."
The similarly planned Austin MetroRail has a yearly passenger volume of ~500,000, but at least it is more useful than this.
Go try it yourself, or watch the videos people have uploaded.
You are right that public transit does not go door to door. Riders are expected to walk a block to the nearest station. If a transit system tries to replicate taxi service it would be too expensive or would really inflate waiting times for a ride.
Is that really hard to believe? It’s shockingly low for public transit but seems an easy bar to clear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_s...
The NYC system is serving an entire city with stops near a large number of businesses of all kinds. It's a system that almost anyone in the city might have reason to use.
The LV system has stops at just two businesses (four at the convention center and one at a nearby hotel). It's a system that is only useful to people who need to move between locations at the convention center or between the convention center and that one hotel.
> Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman isn’t sure the project will ever come to fruition, but voted in favor of the extension anyway, due to the urging of the various resorts and other entities in downtown.
> “I am one who just does not believe will come to be, certainly not in my lifetime,”
68 miles would cost the city around $50B, if past trends hold true. Contra, Vegas Loop is being fully covered by private funds.
In defense, one subway mile is likely worth more than one Loop mile.
There are a variety of totally legitimate reasons not to let just anyone try to do something like this.
Loops don't provide the same capacity, frequency, or efficiency, of the underground train. For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Another thing is that Tesla tunnels are completely bare, with pretty much zero safety and accessibility measures [0]. Tesla build them in Vegas because it is a dry, mostly stable environment. This would be a complete disaster pretty much anywhere else in the world.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/review-of-elon-musks-dc-to...
> For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Some quick math:
> ...the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) plans to spend $3.686 billion in the order. The contract is split into three parts: R211A, R211S, and R211T. The majority of the 535-car base order will comprise 440 R211A cars...
$3.686B / 535 cars / 30 seats/car ~ $230k/seat.
Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty. And anyway,
$3.686B / 535 cars / 240 sardines/car ~ $29k/sardine.
If there's an advantage to train cars here, it's not as obvious as you state. Maybe the cost of mass produced road cars is somehow worse, but it's certainly not obviously worse enough to make the project illegal over.
> Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty.
It seems that you are really concerned about personal space, but anyway.
"Larger" tunnels and stations are needed for several reasons, one of them being able to handle passenger volume and accessibility. What you are saying is, essentially, that underground train infrastructure is "more expensive" because it is just better: it can handle more passengers, has to comply with safety regulations, and needs to be accessible.
Simply put, there is no way a Tesla car would run 30+ years without having to replace batteries and motors several times.
If an average Tesla car would run for, say, 1 mile per minute, and kept it for 12 hours a day (nothing unusual for an average train line), that would average to over +500,000 miles in less than two years. These cars would definitely need to be fully rebuilt or replaced, and I'm not even counting interior wear and tear.
That's even before taking into account safety issues they have had. Consider all the idiots you see on the highway, now think about what would happen if there was no way to go around them
First reaction: it isn't that high, but it's interesting.
Second reaction, after looking at the pictures and where the cars can stop and take passengers: filthy liars.
I cannot take this seriously.
> As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.
The most important point of their design should not be thought of as it being express transport, though it is, nor anything special about their throughput, though it's competitive — it's just that underground transit is good, the regulatory environment is bad, and Teslas-in-tunnels is about the least encumbered way of making it happen.
Happy to be corrected, my numbers are best-effort.
Maybe it could work in Vegas, given how unwalkable it is, and how many people are there without cars, looking to move from a specific resort to a specific resort for shows/dining etc.
Novelty services that serve tourists going to the convention center don't move the needle on daily users being able to get rid of cars and the car lifestyle unless they can rely on the system at all hours.
Even 20/6 means you still need a car.
He's starting from the other way around, sell snake oil to corpos and politicians, get all the bureaucracy out of the way, and then take his sweet ass time to actually deliver.
In our current system, this is the best way. Example, in Toronto our politicians literally spent a decade and half debating, approving, then disallowing, then commissioned studies for a ~10 mile long subway line.
If it’s privately funded, I don’t think the foolishness of this plan can do a lot of long-term damage to the city.
those life boat seats look uncomfortable!
[a] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
https://www.casino.org/vitalvegas/vegas-loop-experiences-mul...