Elon Musk's Boring Company Finally Unveils Las Vegas Tunnel (jalopnik.com) 233
Elon Musk's Boring Company showed off its 1.7 mile loop of tunnel underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center this week, and Electrek writes that "it proved to be, well, quite boring... The vehicles are not going faster than 35 mph, and they are not being driven autonomously."
CNET's headline even calls the tunnel "lame," complaining that the project "is quickly turning into Tesla cars driving people underground, rather than some sort of futuristic transport system."
"Detractors say that makes The Boring Company's projects little more than reinvented subways with significantly less passenger capacity," adds Business Insider: Critics also point out that The Boring Company's noble aim of building congestion-alleviating tunnels under cities worldwide ignores the phenomenon of induced demand, which says that more roadways — even underground ones — will give way to more cars.
But Jalopnik had probably the harshest reaction to the Vegas Loop, noting that the speed of the system is "about 10 mph less than the top speed of a 1908 Ford Model T," and calling it "about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park..." Musk's The Boring Company own the machines that dug the tunnels, and those machines, some of which were heavily modified by the company, are capable of using the excess dirt from the tunnel to turn into bricks, which is pretty cool, I guess. Raw, humid thrills of brick-making aside, all this really is are some Teslas driving in tunnels lined with LED lights.
Sure, it's a 45-minute walk (correction, more like 20 minutes, sorry) on the surface and only a few minutes ride underneath, but the system is still remarkably bad at moving large numbers of people per hour, the metric normally used to evaluate mass transit systems. While it was originally intended to move up to 4,400 people per hour, fire regulations will limit the system to moving between 800 and 1,200 people per hour. That said, it looks like the company still states the 4,400 number, when used with 62 cars in the tunnel, though based on the safety issues, this does not seem likely. That's in the same ballpark as normal vehicular street traffic for private cars (600 to 1,600 people per hour) and a lot less than a dedicated bus lane (4,000 to 8,000 per hour) — hell, normal 60-passenger buses can do about 1,800 per hour, if we have them going back and forth every two minutes or so.
A dumb old sidewalk can move 9,000 people an hour! But that's walking, which is what animals do, and it takes a while and has the potential to make you sweat. Proposed moving high-speed sidewalks, similar to the ThyssenKrupp ACCEL system used in the Toronto Pearson International airport, are expected to move about 7,000 people per hour, and such a system would be far cheaper and easier to build... As it stands now, we have a few Teslas driving around in long, narrow loops under the convention center, saving you a bit of walking but doing every other part of the job of moving people worse than almost any other solution.
Business Insider's report adds that the Boring Company "aims to expand the system to other Las Vegas destinations, including the airport and downtown" — and that the company also in talks with Miami officials about a similar project.
CNET's headline even calls the tunnel "lame," complaining that the project "is quickly turning into Tesla cars driving people underground, rather than some sort of futuristic transport system."
"Detractors say that makes The Boring Company's projects little more than reinvented subways with significantly less passenger capacity," adds Business Insider: Critics also point out that The Boring Company's noble aim of building congestion-alleviating tunnels under cities worldwide ignores the phenomenon of induced demand, which says that more roadways — even underground ones — will give way to more cars.
But Jalopnik had probably the harshest reaction to the Vegas Loop, noting that the speed of the system is "about 10 mph less than the top speed of a 1908 Ford Model T," and calling it "about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park..." Musk's The Boring Company own the machines that dug the tunnels, and those machines, some of which were heavily modified by the company, are capable of using the excess dirt from the tunnel to turn into bricks, which is pretty cool, I guess. Raw, humid thrills of brick-making aside, all this really is are some Teslas driving in tunnels lined with LED lights.
Sure, it's a 45-minute walk (correction, more like 20 minutes, sorry) on the surface and only a few minutes ride underneath, but the system is still remarkably bad at moving large numbers of people per hour, the metric normally used to evaluate mass transit systems. While it was originally intended to move up to 4,400 people per hour, fire regulations will limit the system to moving between 800 and 1,200 people per hour. That said, it looks like the company still states the 4,400 number, when used with 62 cars in the tunnel, though based on the safety issues, this does not seem likely. That's in the same ballpark as normal vehicular street traffic for private cars (600 to 1,600 people per hour) and a lot less than a dedicated bus lane (4,000 to 8,000 per hour) — hell, normal 60-passenger buses can do about 1,800 per hour, if we have them going back and forth every two minutes or so.
A dumb old sidewalk can move 9,000 people an hour! But that's walking, which is what animals do, and it takes a while and has the potential to make you sweat. Proposed moving high-speed sidewalks, similar to the ThyssenKrupp ACCEL system used in the Toronto Pearson International airport, are expected to move about 7,000 people per hour, and such a system would be far cheaper and easier to build... As it stands now, we have a few Teslas driving around in long, narrow loops under the convention center, saving you a bit of walking but doing every other part of the job of moving people worse than almost any other solution.
Business Insider's report adds that the Boring Company "aims to expand the system to other Las Vegas destinations, including the airport and downtown" — and that the company also in talks with Miami officials about a similar project.
On par for most of Elon's hype (Score:5, Interesting)
This is about par for what you get from Elon Musk hype vs. delivery. He promises the moon, delivers Arizona desert. I have been fooled by Elon a few times. For example I bought a car which Elon said was a 700hp car (actual website said 691hp, but close enough) and which will be able to find me anywhere on private property with the summon feature. It was the Tesla Model S P85D flagship model. What did I actually get? a 463hp car (took Tesla 2 years and a lawsuit to admit the truth, after trying everything including trying to convince people that electric horsepower is worth more), and a car which will drive up to 40 feet in a straight line forwards or backwards, while I hold a dead-man switch making sure the car doesn't hit anything (and if it does, it's my fault).
So, promising 4400 people per hour at 120mph, delivering 800 at 35mph is about what you'd expect from Elon's hype to reality history.
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As usual the critics were shouted down but proven right in the end. 120 MPH would not have been safe, and the whole idea of using automobiles was half baked anyway.
Did you get a refund on your Tesla in the end? I'm waiting for the "full self driving" lawsuits to start flying when people realize that won't deliver either.
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"about as exciting as a sheet of unpainted drywall discarded in a closed office park..."
Hey, that's not accurate! If it's unpainted you can paint it, and then you'll have something to watch...
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This is about par for what you get from Elon Musk hype vs. delivery. He promises the moon, delivers Arizona desert. I have been fooled by Elon a few times. For example I bought a car which Elon said was a 700hp car (actual website said 691hp, but close enough) and which will be able to find me anywhere on private property with the summon feature. It was the Tesla Model S P85D flagship model. What did I actually get? a 463hp car (took Tesla 2 years and a lawsuit to admit the truth, after trying everything including trying to convince people that electric horsepower is worth more), and a car which will drive up to 40 feet in a straight line forwards or backwards, while I hold a dead-man switch making sure the car doesn't hit anything (and if it does, it's my fault).
So, promising 4400 people per hour at 120mph, delivering 800 at 35mph is about what you'd expect from Elon's hype to reality history.
To be fair: Does power matter, other than running out of battery quicker? If the actual metrics for acceleration and speed are correct, wouldn't that be more relevant?
On the self driving side: You are absolutely correct. They've promised the moon coming soon many, many times... remember when we were going to have millions of Tesla 3 robotaxis by 2020? [thedrive.com]. Your car could pay for itself [usatoday.com] by signing up to the Tesla network...
It looks as if they might even have believed it themselves... The Model 3 dashboard (th
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To be fair: Does power matter, other than running out of battery quicker? If the actual metrics for acceleration and speed are correct, wouldn't that be more relevant?
You obviously missed the point, which was that Elon doesn't deliver anywhere near what he sells. More specifically to your question, power absolutely matters to people who choose to pay for it. Model S Plaid costs $40K (50%) more than Model S Long Range, while offering more power (and reduced range), so obviously some people care, or they would not pay the extra $40K. Personally I paid ~$25K more for P85D vs 85D, for which my car was supposed to deliver 315hp more, instead I got 50hp. Had I known this, I wo
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Personally I paid ~$25K more for P85D vs 85D, for which my car was supposed to deliver 315hp more, instead I got 50hp.
Out of curiosity, why?
I don't disagree that if you were offered something and you agree to buy you should get what was offered. But, I'm puzzled as to why you would pay more for power. I could see paying more for more acceleration or maybe even for higher top speed, although personally I'd consider cornering and ride comfort to be much more important.
Did the vehicle meet the claimed performance numbers (i.e. 0-60, 1/4 mile, top speed, etc?)
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Power translates into acceleration. It's not just just for drag racing someone in a straight line, and especially not 0-60mph where the car is mostly traction limited. If you were ever to test drive a P85D and a 3rd gen P100D (which actually achieved the advertised 700hp), you'd feel the difference. 0-60 of P85D and P100D are not that different, yet you can absolutely tell the difference when merging or passing on a highway. I am not here to try to convince you that more hp is better for you, that is a pers
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fool is parted from money, remains buthurt several years later
This story and more next on News Channel Douche
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For example I bought a car which Elon said was a 700hp car (actual website said 691hp, but close enough) and which will be able to find me anywhere on private property with the summon feature. It was the Tesla Model S P85D flagship model. What did I actually get? a 463hp car (took Tesla 2 years and a lawsuit to admit the truth, after trying everything including trying to convince people that electric horsepower is worth more)
Comparing horsepower between a gasoline-powered vehicle and an electric vehicle seems kind of nonsensical to me. An electric vehicle's torque is constant up to a fairly high speed (e.g. 100 MPH in the Roadster). This gives EVs a lot more ability to accelerate at higher speeds than cars with a gasoline engine, typically.
For example, the current Model S P100D has only two-thirds the horsepower of a Lamborghini Aventador, but accelerates 0 to 60 half again faster (~2 seconds versus ~3). So in the speed rang
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It's one thing to hear him saying about what he wants and what he expects the products to do and another thing to see what the product sales docs produce.
If it was Tesla sales documentation then good for you fighting it in court to get the hype out of the literature.
But believing everything Elon Musk says as fact is not a bright move. But he is shooting for Mars and the Moon and making things h
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Remember the pods? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember when Elon seemed to be talking about actually reinventing mass transit rather than just putting his little cars into tunnels so they could avoid traffic?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/auto... [msn.com]
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Isn't that how all projects go? It's easy to dream until you've got a client. We have grand visions for something revolutionary, until we get underway and find out our revolutionary vision isn't actually the most practical way to meet the needs of the customer in the budget and time frame they want. So we deliver a bunch of compromises that borrow more from mature products.
Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:5, Interesting)
Subway trains can have a capacity of 80,000 people per hour [wikipedia.org] About 80 times higher than this system.
Who would have guessed that a technology that lets you put 2000 people in a single vehicle would be more effective than a technology that lets you put 4 people in a single vehicle?
If the Boring Company has made any advances that allow tunneling to performed more cheaply and faster, that would be very useful - for building subway tunnels. But there's not even any evidence of that. All I see is Musk reinventing standard tunneling and then wasting most of its capacity by using low-capacity vehicles.
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I wonder if the contract contained any delivery metrics, and if they will be able to meet them.
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Re: Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:2, Interesting)
The point is where this is headed, not where it is.
Limitations of a subway are obvious: you can only transport a large mass of people from specific station A to specific station B. Everyone that needs to get yo C, D, E... needs to get off, wait, switch trains etc.
With this, theoretically, yiu could get into a car, input destination B, C, D or E into your board computer, drive down the tunnel ramp at A and an automated guidance system would take it from there.
Note that I'm not necessarily talking "full self-
Re: Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:4, Insightful)
It's like your own train from the station closest to your home, to the station closest to your workplace. Nonstop. For everybody. Always.
Except it's not because trains can move a shitload of people and space is limited. All this seems to be is an automated way of sitting in traffic, which is what will happen when it's mediocre capacity is reached.
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Re: Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:4, Funny)
Why on earth do you think he should do that, when there are people perfectly happy to pay him to experiment as this story shows? Only an idiot would do something for free that they could get people to pay them to do.
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If automatic routing and driving is in place, you can move regular cars at 80 mph fender to fender.
And yet they are still more dangerous than trains, because of rubber tires and tarmac roads. Platooning is never going to make sense. They're going to roll it out for big rigs first, and then they will abandon it the first time a failed recap tears off, winds up destroying a bunch of other recaps, and essentially winds up in an effective "derailment" for a road "train" of 18 wheelers.
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There are plenty of trains where certain cars split off at different stations without one ever having to leave the train. It's quite common in big cities where main trunk lines require high capacity, but the requirement for capacity diminishes the farther out it goes and the stations begin to fragment, so the train is split up instead. Many of these also travel faster than the 120mph promised. I can see you also haven't spent much time in dense cities where cars are orders of magnitude worse than trains in
Re: Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:2, Interesting)
While that's possible, it's not automated, fine-grained, or common. It's being done to help the train, not the customer - as you said, it's for remote areas where the trains aren't even xlose to full. The difference being: in a downtown area, where trains are always full, it's not being done, for example. So people moving within downtown still have to switch trains if their stations are not aligned along the same track.
Name me one city that will take 50% or more of its public transport customers from within
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advances that allow tunneling to performed more cheaply and faster
That is their goal, and they have made some progress. The Vegas tunnel is insanely cheap already; using these smaller tunnels (they won't fit even a dinky London Tube car) can be a good option if you have demand for 1000 people an hour instead of 80000.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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All the pundits are so busy comparing bells and whistles, it's analogous to comparing NY-London travel times of a modern airliner to a Concorde.
Yes, Concorde was way faster. But there's a reason it doesn't fly anymore. Costs were an order of magnitude higher too, and with that fast came a ton of downsides making it basically unfit for purpose and irrelevant in all the places where modern airliners, despite being slower, are fit.
If you are any of a number of places that neither has modern subway infrastructu
Re:Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:5, Insightful)
Subway trains can have a capacity of 80,000 people per hour [wikipedia.org] About 80 times higher than this system.
New York's Second Avenue Subway (2017), similar in that it was put in using boring machines, was 1.8 miles. It came in at a cost of $2.5 billion per mile (and four years late)
Yes, subway trains can have high capacity... but you have to pay for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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That's less per km than the Big Dig [wikipedia.org], a comparable road project (with much lower capacity).
Re:Subway capacity is 80,000 people per hour (Score:4, Insightful)
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Life isn't always about the destination, but the journey too.
Bicycle.
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I want to enjoy the journey, and the end condition, and that means not wearing myself out and arriving exhausted and smelly.
I suppose I could take care of the wearing myself out with an e-bike, but for the same money I could buy a decent used car. And I'd still have to mix with traffic to get where I was going, greatly decreasing my chances of getting there.
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Life isn't always about the destination, but the journey too.
Bicycle.
I want to enjoy the journey, and the end condition
In that case, bicycle in Amsterdam.
And while you're there, go sailing too.
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Sounds nice, but I don't think they need me there.
Instead I'll drive to work (it's only about 7mi each way, I could easily do it with any EV that is highway-legal since I need to take the highway to get there — when they come down in price I'll buy a used one — and if it would do the job, I'd even consider a NEV, but it won't) and then I'll ride my MTB on trails on weekends.
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It can be even slower (Score:3, Interesting)
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Yeah but it's America you're talking about (and Vegas too, at that). Walking one mile? Perish the thought!
Perspective (Score:2, Insightful)
Jalopnik's article was harsh and cynical. (And funny.) But I think they miss the point. When was the last time mass transit made national news? Despite lacking conventional marketing, TBC has somehow captured the imagination of a lot of people. I know it has mine. Sure I was a bit let down when the Los Angeles tunnel scaled back its plans and they stuck a Tesla in there, but what right do we have to expect more? It's a young company with bold ambitions taking a fresh approach on mass transit, and it's run b
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
TBC has somehow captured the imagination of a lot of people
Yeah, but the problem is now it's turned out to be complete garbage people are going to be like "Hur hur we told you public transit SUCKS! Just build moar roads DUH!". And that is going to stick in a lot of people's minds.
I guess what I'm saying is, of course the first commercial project isn't going to be spectacular
Underground mass transit technology is over 150 years old. If your first commercial project is worse than something from the late 1800's then that's not a visionary move to push technology forward, it's an arrogant move that is holding progress on actual solutions back.
It's the same with hyperloop, in the same time that Musk has been going on about how easy it is China has covered their entire country in high speed rail. Musk's clearly unrealistic pet projects are holding public transit back by distracting from the solutions we have right now.
Nothing to do with perspective (Score:3, Insightful)
Its to do with facts. He's built a tunnel that uses guided cars utilising the same technology as guided buses. Big. Fucking. Deal. This might have been innovative in 1921, but its about as innovative as reinventing the wheel now and utterly pointless except for those people who own a tesla and are so desperate to skip traffic that they'll pay to use this.
"how can we look at the track record of these related companies and not expect this to grow into something impressive? Give it a chance. Sheesh!"
Of FFS, it
Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's basically that monorail episode of The Simpsons.
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When was the last time mass transit made national news?
Apparently five days ago [npr.org].
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This isn't mass transit, it's road cars in a tunnel.
Rails (Score:2)
Why don't they put rails on that? A train would travel faster and move much more people in each go.
If they insist on cars, they could even use "skates" for moving them instead of make them move slowly and yet still much more prone to accidents.
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The first one is that for electric vehicles could be used easily to supply the power.
The second one is that they solve the problem of steering and controlling the vehicle, permitting to put more carriages linked to another.
The third one is that they are more energy-efficient compared with rubber tyres on macadam or stone. This is because trams were initially horse-driven: to get same performance you could use less HP that at the time were literally horses
I could u
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The problem with Mercedes buses is the same as the problem with Mercedes cars: They are disposable. MBE diesels are parent bore, meaning that the engine has to come out for a rebuild, which is too expensive. But they are also awfully expensive to buy... too expensive to be disposable.
Detroit Diesel has the same problem... because they are just low-rent MBE motors now. CAT has the same problem, too.
In the real world, a fleet is better off with Gilligs with Cummins. Which is why you don't see them fancy Merce
This actually has nothing to do with mass transit (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm beginning to think that the sooner Musk fucks off to Mars the better.
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That's an interesting idea. I always suspected that Hyperloop was more about cheaper tunneling. Tunneling is an amazingly useful thing to be able to do, and globally the market in tunnel diggings is something like 1.5 trillion dollars. If you could make it just a little cheaper, not only would there be a huge payday for you, the global market would expand dramatically.
I also thought that Tesla might secretly be more about batteries than cars.
It hadn't occurred to me, but absolutely both these things woul
35 mph is fast enough (Score:2)
Come on, it's less than 2 miles .. 35 miles per hour will get you there in well under 2 minutes. That's faster than crossing the strip in Las Vegas (you have to go up stairs and then across and then back down the stairs).
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Math typo fail. I meant under 4 minutes .. so what?
Or he could have just built a metro tunnel (Score:2)
Which would have carried 100x as many people per hour and been available to people other than rich tesla owners. But hey, new shiny shiny, right?
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Many modern airports have automated people movers which cover this sort of requirement trivially - fully automated, underground, high capacity, quick etc. Heathrow Airports T5 remote gates system for example, or Dubais link between its T3 buildings etc etc.
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All terminals at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson airport are connected with the Plane Train, which is 2.8 miles of automated "people mover" trains. It opened in 1980 (not at that length, since some terminals didn't exist yet then). It carries 200,000 people a day back and forth.
Really? (Score:2)
"about 10 mph less than the top speed of a 1908 Ford Model T,"
Try your Model T during rush hour above, to see if you reach that speed.
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It's called "induced demand". More roads attracts more traffic.
Whenever someone mentions "induced demand" I wonder if they mean that people are induced to go place that they didn't want to go or if they are induced to go someplace that would have like to go but wouldn't have gone if it had been more hassle.
If the former, one could use "induced demand" to argue against the entire invention of cars, wagons, domesticated horses, trains and canal/riverboats. Throughout much of history most people never traveled more than a few hours walk from the place they were born, but
To be fair... (Score:5, Funny)
Miami? (Score:2)
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Watching Paint Dry (Score:2)
It's a lot more interesting than you'd think.
Safety in case of a fire? (Score:2)
Does anyone know details about the safety of these tunnels? I only found some vague answers in an old FAQ: https://web.archive.org/web/20... [archive.org]
I have not found any details on the number of emergency exits or the distances between them. Based on the FAQ answer they seem to believe that they can handle a burning care mainly with the ventilation system. Given that even Tesla auto-mobiles occasionally burn (as any other car) and the small diameter of the tunnel, such an event will lead to enormous heat and substan
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So far every Tesla which has burned up has suffered some major insult, unlike gasoline cars which sometimes burst into flames for no apparent reason and when not abused in any way.
In fact, one of my earliest memories is of my dad's Toronado burning down in our driveway one night.
Musk and Bullshit (Score:2)
Hyperloop (Score:2)
Slashdotters are so unimaginative (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh, Boring Company made a tunnel for a real client! Awesome!
Slasdotters: "Boring","Same speed as a Model T", "Absolute garbage", etc.
I watched the video from Mick Ackers on the linked page [electrek.co] and it looked fine. Actually it looked like a very cool, utterly flexible transportation system, iteration 1.0, based on full self drive Teslas. Regardless of whether they are actually full self drive as of today. And it would be relatively easy to build busses based on Tesla tech with interiors in the same league as Shinkansen Gran Class [jrailpass.com] or Emirates First Class [emirates.com] interiors. Automated routing and charging will be developed iteratively. They can be connected with a software fix compared to trying to connect two subway lines which can take decades. If Boring can make tunnels cheaply and quickly then I could see a large network of these tunnels growing far more quickly and organically. Personally I would prefer two lanes just in case one breaks down, but as an easy win for their first project this is awesome. They are a tunneling company. If the client did not want to pay for a train in it, then they have this lower cost option and that is fine. It's neat that tunnels can be used for other things too.
Cost comparison (Score:3)
Putting aside whether the tunnel makes sense to move people or not, for a tunnel, it was completed cheaply:
LVCVA loop tunnel 12' diameter, w/ 3 stations
1.7mi for $53M, $31M/mi
NYC Second Ave subway tunnel ~24' diameter, w/ 3 stations
1.8mi for $4.5B, $2500M/mi [marketplace.org]
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No, it's because they're not putting a train in the vegas tunnel. Plenty of trains sold to airports fit that form factor (or even smaller for that matter). The way to move high volume through tunnels effectively is with a train.
Probably designed for Mars (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing these sort of projects are just practice runs for using this tech on Mars. I'm guessing the real design goal of this thing is off-planet habitat construction, which would explain why it also creates bricks out of excess dirt, a trick of dubious value on earth. Using this tech for projects on earth is just his way of billing the taxpayer for his R&D.
Sidewalks (Score:3)
Okay wait, so the capacity of a regular sidewalk is 9000 people per hour, but the capacity of a moving high-speed sidewalk is only 7000 people per hour? Something's not right here.
Has no-one actually ever been to a convention (Score:3)
The summary writer certainly doens't think much of the ability to move from one end of the massive convention center to the other in minutes instead of 20-30 minutes...
Has he actually been to a convention? Yes you could walk, but guess what - that is what most people at a convention have been doing for several hours already!
Meanwhile you are bathing up material or soem purchases, making that would even rougher...
There is a tremendous amount of value in what the convention tunnel is doing, even at the lower speeds it's currently being forced to run. For that short a distance, more speed would not add a lot anyway - they need to remove the regulations limiting throughput first.
The notion that a bus could easily replace this tunnel ignores the huge problem that tunnels utterly avoid - space. Where are you going to put that dedicated bus lane that runs around the convention center? That would take up a ton of space that could be used for more interior space or more traffic near the center.
Also, any notion that vehicles are equivalent in speed is by someone who has never tried to take ANY wheeled transport out of a busy CES or other large convention in Vegas... it was a 20 minute walk to the strip but I did that every time as it was faster than trying to get a cab out.
Re: Scepticism (Score:2)
Horse-buses could actually be better in this case.
Besides they have a byproduct too, and the whole operation is green, organic and circular economish.
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, for all the armchair critics, here's your task. You're assigned to build a system:
* For a bit over 4k passengers per hour (the required peak capacity on the leg)
* With zero waiting in most circumstances
* With two minute transfer times direct-to-destination across what's normally a 20-30 minute walk on the long leg, up to 60 minutes during crowded times
* The surface is already built out
* It's Vegas, so it should be exciting.
* Your budget is about $50M.
Go.
(We're not even going to bother getting into the PRT/direct-to-destination expansion possibilities, which are already underway)
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
I also love how Slashdot decided to quote only armchair critics who haven't even been there. Let's see the reactions of reporters who were [youtube.com] actually there [youtube.com].
Also, complaining about the top speed? Exactly what top speed do you want in a 1-mile leg?
Re: Scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like one of those Disneyland rides. Waiting for one of the drivers to crash in the tunnel, since the cars aren't actually guided. I wonder if they put some special software on them to limit their top speed.
They must have somewhere to charge all those cars overnight too. Seems like a lot of hassle when they could just have used an electric train powered directly.
It's deeply unimpressive. Just a basic, fairly small tunnel and ordinary cars. We have been able to do this for a century, and in no way is it better than using a train. What is the point of it? Why not just install rails and massively increase the capacity and reliability?
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
I'll repeat:
Please share with me your design for a no-waiting 2-minute direct-to-destination exciting $50M subway.
As a reminder:
Fairly small is the point, since tunneling costs are proportional to cross section. Also, there's nothing "basic" about the cost for which this tunneling project was achieved, and it was still just an early prototype (not even a variant of Prufrock). The whole point of projects like this is to get experience while developing Prufrock, which is designed to be:
* Mostly automated (minimal labour)
* Mass produced (low unit cost)
* Road transportable on a cradle
* Able to start tunneling at an angle directly off of its cradle, and surface directly off of a cradle on the other side (no initial pit)
According to reporters on site (which Slashdot did not bother to include in its rush to link all the hit pieces they could find), they intend to make larger vehicles specifically for Loop as the project expands. Using existing vehicles speeds up the development process. The entire point however remains that vehicles are of limited size because this is PRT, direct to destination, in a highway structure (onramps / offramps / arterials / branching side routes), rather than a linear, stop-at-every-station (or for major routes, every X stations), go-the-wrong-way- and-then-back, start-and-end-far-from- where-you-want-to-be system built around large vehicles.
I'll reiterate that one of the key points of the "challenge" I listed above is to point out the balance between route passenger demands, vehicle size, and departure frequency. If you have a route that has a peak demand of 4200 passengers per hour (usually much less), and you want to use 1000-passenger subway cars, you're looking at one departure every 15 minutes, rather than instantly. You're also looking at slower acceleration times, maybe 4 minute rides if it's an express rather than 2 minutes. But if you're doing both expresses and direct routes, and you still want to stick with 1000-passenger vehicles, now they're departing every half hour.
And of course, $50M for even a short subway project under Vegas would be an unheard-of low price. And wouldn't be anywhere near as comfortable or convenient.
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Interesting)
* Surface directly onto a cradle
Seriously, though, what exactly is your issue with the project? That it was cheap? That it was built quickly, even during a pandemic? That there's no waiting? That it's fast (2 minutes)? That it's direct to destination? That it's comfortable? That it's expandable? That people don't have to be crammed in with a bunch of strangers? What exactly IS your problem with it (apart from the fact that it involved a certain Elon Musk)?
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd mod this up if I could. I'm not a huge fan of Musk, but the company is clearly building up its capability. This is the Musk m.o.: use technology developed within one Musk company (Tesla) to support another technology (Boring Co). Anyone who's surprised that they're using a Tesla in v.0 hasn't been paying attention to Musk. Why hold up the project reinventing the transport when they could make it work in 1.5 years with existing transport solutions?
Of course cars will eventually be larger/different. Eventually they will be self driving (this should be cake for a self driving solution). Eventually they will be faster (within safe limits).
The error on Boring Co.'s part was to bring reporters out at all. Musk hypes so much they everyone expects a technological miracle whenever they're invited to see a demonstration.
One aspect I'm a bit confused by is why not have the transport rail mounted? Why bother with the self driving aspect (assuming that's the long term goal)? Will the system eventually be able to leave the closed loop?
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Funny)
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"Use technology developed within one Musk company (Tesla) to support another technology (Boring Co)". I would rather they used SpaceX vehicles in the tunnel. Now *THAT* would be exciting!
I have a suspicion that this whole hyperloop deal is just an excuse to create The Boring Company. Note that Musk hasn't really been much involved in any hyperloop project, but did create a tunneling company. Why? Perhaps he intends to put tunnel boring machines on starships and send them to Mars.
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I'd mod this up if I could. I'm not a huge fan of Musk, but the company is clearly building up its capability. This is the Musk m.o.: use technology developed within one Musk company (Tesla) to support another technology (Boring Co). Anyone who's surprised that they're using a Tesla in v.0 hasn't been paying attention to Musk.
Well, also it makes sense to use an electric car in an underground tunnel; saves a lot on ventilation requirements.
...One aspect I'm a bit confused by is why not have the transport rail mounted?
Speed of implementation, I'd expect. Don't have to develop a rail system for the Tesla, but can use the off-the shelf components.
Secondarily, allows easy transport of the vehicles when they're not on the system.
Why bother with the self driving aspect (assuming that's the long term goal)?
Cost of hiring drivers.
Besides, in a tunnel, on a known path, no cross traffic, consistent lighting and no rain/snow/fog: this is the ideal self-driving environment.
Re: Scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
Will the system eventually be able to leave the closed loop?
This is what I expect. They're being forward thinking in how the system is used and banking on Autopilot's FSD improvements which should be doable if they placed a strong focus on the LV area in data collection (ie: similar to Waymo in Phoenix).
Theoretically you could call a "Tesla Cab" to pick you up at your house and then it would drive to the nearest tunnel station and enter there, exit near destination, then drop you off at your destination. The tunnels are just another road lane, but you can build more of them than you can surface lanes.
Re: Scepticism (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the expansion part that really gets it. The larger it gets the worse all the problems get.
The peak capacity assumes it won't grow, and the contract price of $50M is not the build cost. The actual cost of that tunnel is not public but presumably they expect to make some money from fares.
Using smaller light trains that are walk-on rather than sit-down like a car would mean you could have them arriving every minute or two, and they would be much more accessible for people with disabilities or luggage. Remember that many people have difficulty lifting luggage so roll on/off is ideal, and if it's something like a pushchair it's also a lot of hassle to get the child out, fold it, and then do all the reverse.
Speaking of which, how are the cars accessible? And do they have child seats? What are the laws governing their operation?
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Insightful)
Incorrect. It works like a highway (onramps, offramps, arterials, etc), except for lacking the primary disadvantage of highways (the huge amount of space they take up in 2D). It scales at constant cost with passengers (or benefits sublinearly, if you go up to e.g. ~20 passenger vehicles), constant with respect to distance, and benefits logarithmically from an increasing number of destinations (which implies an increasing number of possible routes to get there, because unlike with a subway, everyone takes an optimal route to their destination). What works well on the small scale works just as well or better on the large scale.
Now, subway costs do benefit linearly with route density (up to a point), scale with a constant factor with respect to distance, but suffer negatively linearly with increasing numbers of destinations - as well as having a very high base cost to begin with. Hence, subways only work where you have a combination of both high densities and low numbers of stops.
There are no fares on the LVCC loop. The only revenue is from advertising, sponsorship, and facility rentals, which is to pay for maintenance and operation costs.
The expanded Vegas loop intends to charge low fares but not capital costs; they plan to cover the full cost of capital themselves.
The peak capacity of 4200 per hour equates to 70 per minute. You have two separate destinations, so halve the amount of destination (35 per minute). How small are these "trains" exactly? And 1-2 minutes wait, plus slower acceleration, so 3-4 minutes travel, equals 5 minutes per trip, vs. 2. Now show me someone who's built a 1 mile underground light train system with three stations for $50M.
Do light trains have child seats?
And FYI, are you really going to complain about passenger comfort in a Tesla vs. on a light train? Seriously?
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Rei's rider throughput number for the monorail appears to be one he just made up.
The 4 car Mark VI monorail train accommodates 222 passengers and the trains arrive every four to eight minutes which is a range of 1665 to 3330 people an hour not the "620" he pulls from nowhere.
And as noted in several stories linked to in TFS the actual maximum capacity of the Tesla Tunnel looks like 800-1200, with the lower number looking as the most likely, due to those pesky fire safety regulations which are totally unneces
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
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Hey, you're on topic for once! Nice job.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Let's contrast the Vegas Loop with the Vegas Monorail, shall we?
4,200 passengers per hour vs. 620
1.5 years to build vs. 4yrs
Zero wait time vs. 6 minutes
$52m for 1,1mi vs. $650m for 4mi
Oh, but OMG, Loop is so horrible because you're not having to share the ride with a bunch of strangers!
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4,200 passengers per hour vs. 620
Per TFS, it is 800-1200 passengers per hour vs. 620.
Still a win, but not as big a win as you imply.
Maybe later it will be. We'll see.
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You could compare it to the Holocaust too. I'm sure that would be even more effective at distracting people from what was delivered.
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* Cardiovascular workout, re: obesity crisis
* Riders are in open air not enclosed space, re: virus transmission
* Low pollution
* Easily manufacturable with few materials
* User-repairable
Re: Scepticism (Score:2)
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And even a badly designed conventional subway can move over 100,000 passengers per hour [intelligenttransport.com].
This is utterly pitiful.
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Anything to distract from the solution delivered, right?
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Let's all hope that the driven cars are just a stopgap, to quickly get that first short section of tunnel into use by the first trickle of passengers. Does Musk's method of tunneling and chosen bore size save significant money in tunneling across cities? Save money at least in cities like Las Vegas? If it does, then replacing the cars by small automated purpose-built capsules could be made to behave like a horizontal elevator with offline stops, whisking small groups of passengers to destinations with few i
Re: Scepticism (Score:5, Informative)
They are building rockets and spaceships, for cheaper than NASA or any other country on the planet. They are making boosters that can land back and be reused instead of being dumped like garbage in the oceans. They are pushing the space industry forward in ways we haven't seen since the USA vs USSR era decades ago.
They are building a world-wide internet access service with Starlink using SpaceX.
They are building electric cars and basically forced other car companies to finally start making electric cars. Remember how GM was the first one with the EV-1 but later scraped the whole thing, they would have been decades ahead of the competition.
They are building factories to make batteries for electric cars. They're innovating the way we're making batteries, both in the manufacturing process and the chemical makeup.
They are building solar roofs, house battery packs and even power plant battery packs. Ask Australia about this one.
They are building tunnels, even if this one fell very short of their proposal.
So yes, they have "failures". But for the most part, those failures are for not reaching their pie-in-the-sky goals. But they're still doing a lot, more than most companies out there. You're complaining about someone saying he's going to make a million dollars and laugh at him when he only makes 950K.
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Hey! That flamethrowers is a perfectly good $60^H^H^H $500 roofing torch!
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What product are you referring to? The "Not A Flamethrower"?
Really, now, what kind of person would buy a "Not A Flamethrower" and expect to get a flamethrower?