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Transportation

Elon Musk's 'Boring Company' Finishes Digging Second Tunnel in Las Vegas (popularmechanics.com) 122

Posted by EditorDavid from the whole-hole dept.
"Not all of Elon Musk's projects have been thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic," writes Bloomberg.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web quotes Popular Mechanics: After a year's worth of digging, Elon Musk's The Boring Company has completed the second tunnel for its underground people-mover system at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It's keeping in step with an anticipated opening date in January 2021 — just in time for the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES)...

Back in May 2019, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority Board of Directors first approved the contract, and by February 2020, The Boring Company had completed the first tunnel...

The Boring Company plans to carry groups of 12 to 16 passengers in pods constructed with modified Tesla chassises. At speeds of up to 155 miles per hour, these adapted Model 3 and Model X trams will have the capacity to transport about 4,000 visitors per hour, said Steve Hill, the CEO and president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, in an interview with The Verge.

Hill said the pods will one day operate through the tunnels autonomously (Musk's company refers to them as autonomous electric vehicles, or AEVs), but will use human drivers at the outset. "Whenever we get to the point where we know that [it's safe to let the vehicles drive themselves]," Hill said, "that's when we'll take that step. But there is not a deadline for making that happen."
"No matter the barrier, Vegas doesn't stop," brags a tweet from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (using the hashtag #VegasMeansBusiness).

"Once completed, the people mover will be The Boring Company's first commercial transportation project in operation," notes the Verge, "following only a test tunnel next to SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California."
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Elon Musk's 'Boring Company' Finishes Digging Second Tunnel in Las Vegas More

Elon Musk's 'Boring Company' Finishes Digging Second Tunnel in Las Vegas

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  • In Germany, 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades.

    I thought the whole point of this used to be 1000mph pods on rails going through a vacuum tunnel.

    Without even planning for any of this anymore, what is the innovation and point of this again?

    • I think it's the speed at which they've built the tunnel, but I'm no expert at boring stuff.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      No - Boring Corp was always about building a subway.

      • And we always fought Eastasia too? :)

        This might well be true, but I'm gonna need more than that, to accept that statement. Like, some old articles and argumentative reasoning.

        You can't just state things, and assume people will simply believe them.

    • In Germany, 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades.
      ,br> 155 mph hour cars, and mountain tunnels, yes.

      Cars going 155 mph though mountain tunnels, no.
      • A mountain tunnel is probably the safest part of the road to do 155 mph. Unlike the rest of the road it’s very difficult to go flying off the mountain.

        • A mountain tunnel is probably the safest part of the road to do 155 mph.

          Try explaining that to the cop...

          Unlike the rest of the road it’s very difficult to go flying off the mountain.

          ... but you could crash into the tunnel wall, and set the whole thing on fire...

          ...plus visibility is limited where the tunnel bends (yes, modern tunnels do bend)

        • Are you sure "flying off the mountain" is even the main risk on a mountain highway?

      • Come to Germany. You can see it with your own eyes.

        210km/h is normal cruising speed for a business car driver.
        Sports car drivers easily drive 250-280km/h if they can.
        Economy drivers and elderly people drive 120-150km/h.

        Tunnel or no tunnel.
        Our highways are designed for it.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Pretty much every road tunnel in Germany has a speed limit of 80-100kph [wikipedia.org] you moron.

          With few exceptions, Baden-Württemberg has a speed limit of 100 km/h for all road and motorway tunnels that have two tubes. It is the only German state where this is the case; other German states have had a speed limit of 80 km/h.

          How someone living in Germany is unaware of this is astonishing.

        • I was in France, and once you got on the peage (toll road) the only speed limit that was enforced was the minimum speed.

          We always rented the Ford Focus diesel station wagon because it would go 200kph (125mph) and the rest of the rental fleet was limited to 160kph (100 mph). At 160kph it was like you were standing still! The extra 40kph made a huge difference.

          We had about a 75km drive on the peage (one way) each day, and we used to see how many days in a row we could make the trip with "the pedal to the me

      • 1. Speed limit.
        2. Actual driving speed.

        Do you see the difference?

        Unless there is a radar/camera there, of course. Then people slow down for that one bit. ... mostly.

        You still get people driving 210-300km/h through tunnels. Go stand at a straight tunnel exit for a day. Wait for that loud revvin vroom sound. Hold on to your hat.

        • Do you want to get into prison? Because that's how you get into prison.

        • You still get people driving 210-300km/h through tunnels. Go stand at a straight tunnel exit for a day. Wait for that loud revvin vroom sound. Hold on to your hat.

          Hello our most famous ignorant poster. Germany is a place where drivers are absolute lunatics ... except for speed limits. Those are things that Germans obey quite well, especially considering doing 210 in an 80 will get you arrested, facing court where you get a your drivers license revoked for 3 months.
          And no, even in on unlimited roads you don't see people routinely doing more than 210km/h, and sure as hell rarely doing 300km/h. The vast majority of people drive between 130-160km/h, to say nothing of 400

        • You still get people driving 210-300km/h through tunnels. Go stand at a straight tunnel exit for a day. Wait for that loud revvin vroom sound. Hold on to your hat.

          Except that your original claim was "In Germany, 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades." Since driving that fast through a tunnel in Germany is clearly illegal, and has been for quite some time, doing so would not be "normal" by any stretch of the imagination.

          And permitting a wholesale violation of the law for decades doesn't sound very German to me - especially since there's a "speedtrap day" where a big part of the country's law enforcement gets together to remind dr

          • I don't know anything about German tunnels but I do know that in Canada it is illegal to drive over 100kmph on the 401. I also know it is very normal to drive up to and over 130kmph on the 401. Legal isn't a synonym for normal.
            • Driving 130kph in a 100kph zone is a far far cry from driving 250kph in an 80kph zone. If you think driving ~3X the speed limit through tunnels in Germany is "normal", and has been going on for decades, well I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Cheers!

      • Re:So all this is... is a tunnel?? (Score:4, Informative)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @01:12PM (#60070654) Homepage Journal

        This isn't a road tunnel though. The modified cars are not being driven by people, they are going to be running on some kind of guides. Maybe computer driven, maybe replace the wheels with ones for tracks. There are already underground railways that use inflated tyres and guide rails too.

        It's heavily scaled back from the original proposal, which involved building the tunnel much faster and much more cheaply using some new techniques that don't seem to have worked out, and then allowing people to drive through them in their personal vehicles. Initially they were going to be roads but then they realized that many normal cars and tyres can't safely reach those speeds and even Tesla ones need huge amounts of maintenance if they do it regularly. Then they switched to using sleds but realized that the logistics of getting cars safely on and off them was hard so now it's just glorified trams.

        Presumably in time they will develop some special vehicle because even a Model X only seats 7 people and that's not exactly in comfort or with easy access to the rear most seats.

        • I wasn't saying anything about hypothetical Boring Company's tunnels; the comment was about actual existing tunnels in Germany.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by pz ( 113803 )

          Rather literaly, re-inventing the wheel.

          Or train-based subway.

          I applaud Musk's risk taking and follow-through that beats the pants off of 99.99% of the population (perhaps more), but this was not his shining moment.

          4000 riders per hour maximum capacity?

          The Read Line in Boston has an order of magnitude higher capacity. No, not an exaggeration. Their published ridership is an average of 240,000 riders per day. They run 6-car trains that have a claimed capacity of 1,000 passengers. During rush hour, they r

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Meh, if my parents gave me $300,000 to start by first business I'd have done a better job, but I guess we'll never know for sure.

          • Did the "Read Line" in Boston only cost $50M?

            No?

            Then why even compare them. They aren't building high-volume heavy-rail mass transit here. As it turns out, oranges actually are different from pork ribs.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by olau ( 314197 )

          ... and much more cheaply using some new techniques that don't seem to have worked out

          Hold your horses. They have a bunch of ideas that they're incrementally working on. They don't just throw everything out and start from scratch, because they need to have something working, because someone in there decided they needed customers - probably to keep them honest and funded, and not just a rich man's toy.

          If they get to build more tunnels, and none of these ideas work out say five years from now, then it's time to dust of that remark.

          I'll add that one of the ideas is to use more smaller diameter

      • So you talk about people going 155mph through tunnels is perfectly safe and been happening for decades, at which point it's mentioned that the highway engineers that built those tunnels disagree, and you just shrug off the illegal and unsafe behavior because it's at odds with your statement?

        As it turns out, lower speed limits are usually set for a reason.

    • Thats hyperloop. Boring Company is not building a tunnel for a hyperloop.. The point of these tunnels is to give vegas a proper people mover system. The current monorail absolutely sucks and is broken into pieces. Going from Luxor to Convention Center requires a frickin train change.

      • Thanks. That clears it up. First useful comment here.

        Now I wonder why it is underground at all though. Because it costs more money? ^^

        • It is a little strange. The existing LV monorail was a failure because its so far from the strip. I think the idea was to force passengers to walk through the endless casinos to get to the strip, but mostly they just never use it. It would probably have been heavily used if it ran from the airport, then along the strip.

          A monorail loop of airport -> strip -> convention center -> airport would work. Its not very far, total loop is something like 6 miles, so an above ground monorail topping out at

    • Everyone seems to conflate hyperloop and boring company. The hyperloop was a specific set of technologies that were supposed to do as you describe -- key points being partial vacuum, air bearings, linear electric motor, etc, resulting in some kind of medium-distance 700mph speeds. It's actually an interesting sci-fi engineering read, if you're into that sort of thing: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/hyperloop_alpha.pdf

      However the boring company just digs tunnels. They are supposedely working on a

    • Without even planning for any of this anymore, what is the innovation and point of this again?

      It's not about the result; it's about the process - digging tunnels has been profoundly slow and incredibly expensive and Musk sees it as an industry ripe for disruption. His electric TBM's haul ass, and he's only just begun.

      What I don't get is that there's talk of extending this Vegas dig all the way to LA but I fail to see the point; land is surely cheap out there; it's a journey across desolate terrain that I've only made once but I don't recall it being other than straight and flat the whole way. Tunnel

      • They only "haul ass" because they are only 14 feet in diameter [wikipedia.org]. They're tiny. What's getting built in Los Angeles [metro.net] is more common, at a diameter of 20 feet. That's twice the cross sectional area. And curious enough - they only take about twice as long to dig as the one in Las Vegas. Imagine that - digging a tunnel is gated by volume of dirt moved! Double the volume - double the time.

    • In Germany, 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades.

      In Germany.

      Everywhere else the speed limit is way lower than that. Especially in tunnels. So don't try this in Switzerland :-)

    • 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades

      Cars come out somewhere and that doesn't fix the problem on the surface. But good comparison between Germany and the USA, let's face it traffic in your major cities is also absolutely shithouse.

    • "In Germany, 155mph cars passing through a mountain tunnel have been normal for decades."

      No, it's either 80, 100 or 120km/h.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      4000 people per hour is about half of a poorly designed light rail system. Light rail systems are 4000pphpd (persons per hour per direction.) Really not selling me on this here Elon.

      This is what Hyperloop should be:
      a) A maglev
      b) A vactrain
      c) A LIM propulsion

      This is none of the above. Vancouver's (Expo line) Skytrain (which is the same tech as Detroit's people mover, except actually realized as a train) is C and can does 25,000 pphpd easily. The Chuo Shinkansen line in Japan which opens in 2027 is A and C an

      • Now compare the price of this $50M project to a light rail project, or consider that a full blown light-rail transit solution is a fucking stupid answer to the question of moving people around a convention center.

        As it turns out, installing outsized solutions to problems isn't very cost effective. Look at the god damn map of the project - you're moving people from one side of a ridiculously huge convention center to the other side. The vehicle cost alone would be north of $4M per LRT vehicle, and you aren'

  • But it will save you 5-13 minutes of driving.

    • But it will save you 5-13 minutes of driving.

      Your joke is hilarious in that America may actually be the one place in the world someone would consider driving the route in question, a route that can be walked in 15min, and that despite as you said it may take you 13min to drive it because traffic just sucks.

      • At least, that's what your teevee says about the place.

        I'm sure they tried hard to give you an accurate view.

      • We're talking about a convention center. Very often a 15 minute walk won't actually be 15 minutes because there are thousands of people between you and where you are going, as well as a byzantine maze of booths and demonstrations that you have to navigate.

        If you are trying to make it to an event that starts at a certain time, having an express route past 3 million square feet of exhibitions might really help.

  • I guess all those empty casinos, hotels and streets in Vegas are part of some elaborate movie set.

  • Just wait until one of those pods hits a homeless person sleeping on the track

    • If a homeless person breaks into the convention center and finds his way to the closed tunnel system used for this and chooses to sleep in the middle of the god damn tunnel rather than anywhere else in the 3.2 million square feet available, I think there are bigger problems to consider.

      Do homeless people regularly choose private tunnels only accessible via private access controlled basements to sleep in anywhere else? For example, how many homeless people do airport trams run over? I'll bet the answer is

  • ” The Boring Company plans to carry groups of 12 to 16 passengers in pods constructed with modified Tesla chassises.”

    By the time the tunnels open, it’ll have turned regular Tesla bodies with at best modified wheel sets - and some people will claim that was the plan all along.

  • Will make all this obsolete, sorry Musk. :)

  • Still no patch on a metro (Score:5, Informative)

    by mvdwege ( 243851 ) <mvdwege@mail.com> on Sunday May 17, 2020 @01:57PM (#60070824) Homepage Journal

    New York transports some 5.5 billion passengers daily. Paris does slightly more than 4 million. The London Underground: 5 million. Amsterdam, with only 4 active lines, some 130.000.

    With 4000 projected riders, orders of a magnitude less, the Boring Company project is nothing more than a giveaway to a billionaire. Corporate welfare at its best.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by mvdwege ( 243851 )
      Sorry, Rotterdam does 130.000. Amsterdam is still good for 90.000. And the Rotterdam network is more extensive than Amsterdam's, it even connects the suburbs, and these days it has a light rail connection to The Hague.

    • re: Corporate welfare (Score:4, Insightful)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Sunday May 17, 2020 @06:26PM (#60071690) Journal

      I'm not sure I agree?

      For starters, this was done in Vegas. Practically everything done anywhere near the Vegas strip has to do with entertainment value and drawing in tourists/visitors. If you can say you have the first commercial project done by the Boring Company, owned by Elon Musk of SpaceX and Tesla fame? You now have a big, long hole in the ground that a whole lot of people want the opportunity to travel through -- just to be able to say they saw it and used it.

      Lots of people have taken light rail/subways before, and there's nothing really glamorous about any of it. Usually, you're stuck in a dirty, smelly underground station where you stand around a long time waiting for an equally dirty and smelly train to pull up. Then, if you're lucky, you can actually get a seat on it instead of being packed in like sardines, standing room only.

      A tunnel with little pods that let groups of 7 or so at a time ride at speeds of over 150MPH through it? That's just not really the same experience....

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by mvdwege ( 243851 )

          Using NYC transport as a yardstick for anything is an exercise in futility.

          Then it's good I didn't do that. I compared to metro systems in general, using New York as only one example (and admittedly misreading a 'b' for an 'm' in Wikipedia's numbers).

          Tell me, is getting a lobotomy a requirement for becoming a Musk fanboi?

          • Oh the irony.

            say it with me now: The Las Vegas Convention Center tunnel project isn't a fucking metro transit system.

            So really, you actually did do that. In another post you compared this project meant to link three exhibition halls across less than a mile of distance and has 3 stations, with the New York Subway which has taken over 100 years to build to it's current state, costs billions in maintenance every year, has 245 miles of tunnels and 472 stations. Oh, and a operating loss of about half a billio

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by mvdwege ( 243851 )

              Oh good that you mention that. This is already proven technology. Airport terminals use short-range light rail, based on existing metro designs, to connect terminals or to move passengers from car parks to the terminal.

              Again, your fanboiying provides no reasons why Musks idea is any better than existing technology. If you love Musk so much, go offer to blow him, instead of making a fool of yourself here.

              • If you look really carefully, and cock your head to the right a bit, you will notice that I never mentioned Musk or anything about his company or efforts here. At all. I was saying that you mentioning ridership on the NYC Subway is a massive non-sequitur, because apples are not pork ribs. And that you are a massive idiot.

                They're both food, and that's where the similarity ends. Just like the subway and this project are both tunnels that have vehicles that haul people down them, but that's where the simil

      • Usually, you're stuck in a dirty, smelly underground station where you stand around a long time waiting for an equally dirty and smelly train to pull up.

        No, that's only in New York. Try going to East Asia (Seoul, Taipei, Tokyo, etc - even Beijing or Guangzhou) some time - the subways are spotless, and you rarely have to wait longer than 2-3 minutes. Not coincidentally, these cities didn't have massive coronovirus outbreaks like New York did.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by mvdwege ( 243851 )

        What? An Elon Musk project is a tourist draw? Can you be even more ridiculously fanboish?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by olau ( 314197 )

      Yes, subways have high densities, but we don't have subways everywhere, do we?

      And none of those subway networks you mention were built in a few months. Infrastructure takes time. The first tunnels by Boring Company are experimental, they're trying to figure out how to go about this. If they don't manage to figure out it, then sure, nothing big is ever going to come out of it.

      The reason people watch them is Elon Musk thinks it's important and he's shown more than once that he's willing to help stuff take off

    • And why would a convention center tram need to be comparable to an entire metro urban mass transit heavy rail system that costs orders of magnitude more per year in maintenance alone?

      What a fantastically stupid comment.

      It might come as a huge shock, but different systems might be built to different requirements.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mvdwege ( 243851 )
        Why shouldn't it be? What is Musk offering that's more than a simple light rail system in a tunnel? Nothing, except an opportunity to shove massive amounts of tax dollars his way.

        • A massively reduced price for one. Show me any light rail system anywhere that has a constructed price of less than $50M per mile. You won't find it.

  • "No matter the barrier, Vegas doesn't stop,"

    Well the Buffet seems to have stopped everywhere in Vegas.

  • His boring company goes under, his more interesting company gets protested against...

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