Elon Musk's Boring Company Gets Green Light For Las Vegas Tunnel System (theverge.com) 95
Elon Musk's Boring Company just won approval from local officials to move forward with building a network of vehicle tunnels underneath Las Vegas. The Verge reports: Elon Musk's Boring Company just won approval from local officials to move forward with building a network of vehicle tunnels underneath Las Vegas. The Boring Company already operates a small version of this "Teslas in Tunnels" system underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center, which opened earlier this year and involves two 0.8-mile tunnels. But Musk's startup proposed a massive city-wide expansion in December 2020 that largely lines up with what Clark County officials approved Wednesday.
The system that was approved involves 29 miles of tunnels and 51 stations. Clark County says as many as 57,000 passengers will be able to travel through it per hour and that no taxpayer money will be spent to build it. The Boring Company previously said that it would foot the bill for building the main tunnels but planned to ask hotel casinos or other businesses that want a station to pay for those construction costs. Each one of those stops has to go through its own permitting process, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The system that was approved involves 29 miles of tunnels and 51 stations. Clark County says as many as 57,000 passengers will be able to travel through it per hour and that no taxpayer money will be spent to build it. The Boring Company previously said that it would foot the bill for building the main tunnels but planned to ask hotel casinos or other businesses that want a station to pay for those construction costs. Each one of those stops has to go through its own permitting process, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
more of a shelbyville idea (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Isn't there already a ridiculous, overpriced, unused public transit system in Las Vegas?
Do you mean the monorail?
The main problem with the monorail is that it doesn't go anywhere useful, such as the airport.
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Disneyland made their monorail and steam locomotive train reasonably useful within their park.
So how did Las Vegas screw up theirs? Politics?
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Re:more of a shelbyville idea (Score:5, Informative)
So, in short, it sucks because it was never really conceived as much more than a gimmick, and it's entire development to this point was poorly-run private enterprise with a very limited vision. Thankfully, it hasn't been paid for by much in the way of public funds, but it also unfortunately served as a distraction preventing the development of an actual, good public transit system in Las Vegas.
Based on the ridership numbers of the Boring Company's tunnel already installed, I don't expect this expansion to turn out much better than the monorail, but the LVCVA and Clark County seem to be all for it instead of superior alternatives, simply because Boring Company is footing the bill and it won't take public finds to build. Basically the same story of how the monorail came into existence.
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Do people still go to Las Vegas casinos?
No one goes to the casinos any more. Way too crowded.
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I wonder how people can afford it any more - used to be cheap rooms & drink to lure people in but now even the cheap hotels are expensive with higher rates, resort fees and other bullshit. I suspect that is because the major
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Right - this option was available for station placement for the monorail - but the casinos blew it, putting it away from the casino complexes. And unless the casinos actually put these new stations inside the complex (with suitable modifications) this will have the same problem. "Tunnel" is not sufficiently magical to make people want to ride it.
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It still didn't go many useful places like the airport, and also was inconvenient for tourists, as the casinos didn't want the track and stations out front of their properties "messing up the view," (as the 'curb appeal' draws in tourists walking the strip). This meant the stations were a fair walk out of the way...
Those were not the only options (in fact, putting in front of existing casinos on The Strip would have been impossible unless it was built as an elevated system running over the strip). Sure, put it toward the rear of the casinos, but it didn't have to be a detached walk outside the casino.
The casinos are all about keeping you inside the complex. The stations could have been anywhere toward the rear, or immediately adjacent to the existing casino, and have the complex extended to surround it, and Disney-it-
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Small park with a huge population density, with basically little peaks and valleys. ... simply take place (no paperwork, not waiting for approvals, ...).
Small park make the infrastructure investment small (even when using expensive per-mile systems).
Huge population density with little peaks and valleys make the transportation run at peak efficiency (i.e. loaded).
Also, the "Transportation Department" of Disney must do a job, but is not compelled to make a profit.
Any changes in schedules, stations,
A large cit
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WDW monorail: 6 stops, 14.7mi of track, built in the swamp
Vegas monorail: 7 stops, 3.9mi of track., built in the desert
I can't disagree with your point about system efficiency, but terms of "infrastructure investment" the Vegas system should be much, much cheaper.
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No. Disney World (27,180 acres) made the monorail reasonably useful. That's the same saize as San Francisco. Disneyland (100 acres) is so small its basically just a slow ride.
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You are correct. And it is likely this will kill the tunnel as a business also in the end.
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Answer is almost no (Score:1)
Isn't there already a ridiculous, overpriced, unused public transit system in Las Vegas
The Vegas monorail is not really public transit. It's a casino to casino transit that happens to also stop at the convention center. It's basically unusable by the general public.
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I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of the traffic going down up and down the strip is taxis, uber / lyft or shuttle buses. The monorail system at the back sucks for lack of stations and the effort t
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If you are speaking of the monorail, yes there is a ridiculous overpriced unused public transit system that goes from nowhere to nowhere.
If you look at the proposed stations and map on this, it actually goes to things people want to go to, presumably without having to deal with Las Vegas Blvd or Interstate 15. For example, the proposed tunnel from the airport to literally any of the major hotels on Las Vegas Blvd all the way up to Fremont Street, which you cannot do on any system that exists today except t
needs to go to airport & downtown unlike monor (Score:3)
needs to go to airport & downtown unlike monorail.
And cost less then an taxi.
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Looks like Musk is doing just fine without California!
Have you seen how many cars Tesla sells to California?
Yes a few points needed... (Score:1)
If all Musk does is link the end of the strips to the middle (or maybe four points along the strip) the airport as you said, and the Fremont Street Experience (as you also said) then he will have MASSIVE success and make Vegas lots more pleasant for tourists.
Vegas roads are just way too annoying for public transit (or even your own car), it takes forever, and the wait to find any kind of taxi can be horrendous.
Vegas is one of the places that makes an excellent first location for a real tunnel transport syst
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will they not allow local hops that walk ways / ta (Score:2)
will they not allow local hops that walk ways / free trams have now.
Like you will use this to go from MGM Grand to new york new york.
Or New york New york to excalibur
Maybe bellagio to park MGM but the MGM group may say no for that move
Same for Mandaly bay to excalibur
This video says it all (Score:3)
The whole cars-in-tunnels thing is massively stupid. See the video [youtube.com].
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And insane. Run cargo underground, on rails. I want to see the sights while moving around, not tunnel walls
Are you sure? (Score:1)
And insane. Run cargo underground, on rails. I want to see the sights while moving around, not tunnel walls
Yeah I have walked the whole strip a number of times. Do you know how long that takes though? Have you done it when it's 109 F outside?
Tunnels in a place like Vegas make a ton of sense because a lot of times people just want to rapidly get from one area to another, and transport is tough to acquire.
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Have you done it when it's 109 F outside?
I have, but normally I'm by the pool during those hours.The strip should just be full of big comfortable air conditioned electric trolley buses. A moving sidewalk up and down Fremont would be nice. Trucks and freight trains, and I guess regular commuters can go in the tunnel
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The whole cars-in-tunnels thing is massively stupid. See the video [youtube.com].
According to the video you linked to, the reason the tunnels are stupid is ... driving a car causes the tires to eventually wear out.
Really? That's it?
That is not an argument against a road in a tunnel, but against roads in general.
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I don't know what's in the video, but cars in tunnels are stupid because cars have capacity of 4 people while subways have a capacity of 2000 people. That means much lower passenger capacity, and much higher driver costs per passenger.
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The problem with a subway is that when you reach your destination, you don't have a car.
That may make sense in NYC. It makes no sense in Nevada.
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This is Las Vegas. There are a limited number of destinations for the target audience - airport, this casino, that casino, some hotels, maybe downtown - each one will have an adjacent station so riders will not need a car at the end.
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The problem with a subway is that when you reach your destination, you don't have a car.
Modern city subway systems such as the London Underground (and the proposed LV system I understand) have stations close enough that you don't need (or want) a car within the city. If you live in the city suburbs or beyond you can always drive to a peripheral station and get the train from there on in. That is what London commuters do.
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This whole thing is obviously a prototype.
The endgame is having autonomous driving cars form on-demand road-trains. It's still less efficient than a subway, but a LOT of people avoid the subway for personal reasons (noise, homeless or creepy people, etc.)
I don't know if it'll work, because once there isn't a driver anymore, people are sure to show the same antisocial behaviour they show in the subway - littering, spraying, etc.
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Why was there a need to prototype cars in tunnels? Cars in tunnels have been known to work for more than a hundred years.
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No, roads going through tunnels have been known.
A subway-like system with people getting on and off at stations? Show me if there's one and I didn't know about it.
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cars in tunnels are stupid because cars have capacity of 4 people while subways have a capacity of 2000 people.
Cars on roads are stupid because cars have a capacity of 4 people while subways have a capacity of 2000 people.
Cars carrying groceries are stupid because cars have a capacity of 15 cubic feet but trains have a capacity of 6000 cubic feet.
People on bicycles are stupid because bikes have a capacity of 1 person but airplanes have a capacity of 150 people.
Sorry for the coy response. I see tunnels as just another form of road, but one that makes the roads out-of-sight. It lets us route roadways in 3 dimensions
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You didn't watch the whole video, did you.
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There is a reason why most subway systems don't use rubber tyres. The ones that do have discovered that they aren't such a great solution.
The video is about far more than that though. The basic idea is dumb, because cars have a low capacity and require a driver. I'm sure Musk intends for AI to drive the cars, but he hasn't got that working yet and even when he does... Why not just have AI drive a train? That already works, there is no steering required and the capacity is much higher than a single vehicle.
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Tesla's self-driving tech is probably good enough to drive in these tunnels, they are such a simplified environment.
You could also definitely build cars you can just roll on and off, although they would better be described as vans or buses.
The big problem with cars continues to be rubber tires, they are stupid if you don't need them and in this context they don't. Rail makes just dramatically more sense.
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Subway systems also can't drive to the front door of a hotel or utilize existing airport curbside pickup and drop off infrastructure. Trains require expensive dedicated stations and can't utilize surface streets in the event of tunnel incident.
We had a breakdown in our subway tunnel and I missed my plane because they had to call in a bunch of busses from around the city and find new drivers to start an ad-hoc bus route to carry passengers. That's the only plane I've ever missed in my life.
A road legal veh
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Musks cars in a tunnel can't drive to the front door either.
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You clearly did not watch the entire video.
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The whole cars-in-tunnels thing is massively stupid. See the video [youtube.com].
According to the video you linked to, the reason the tunnels are stupid is ... driving a car causes the tires to eventually wear out.
Really? That's it?
That is not an argument against a road in a tunnel, but against roads in general.
The whole thing can really be broken down that his creative accounting hides the fact his tunnels don't really cost any less than a traditional subway per mile. Frame of reference: Paris.
I think Paris has a fairly good Metro system. You hop on the side lines, get on the M1 and take a ride to La Defense for work. On the way home reverse that trip. Localized enough to make most things only a couple blocks. Predictable as heck when there isn't a strike. Doesn't take you down three escalators like London, o
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If they want to make it fit for purpose they'd put a proper cabin on a lengthened Tesla platform where 6 or 8 people can board a single vehicle from a single door, walk to their seats standing up and have space for their luggage. Like a shuttle bus. And no driver, but some routing system that tries to heuristically bin pack passengers according to their destination.
I've got to hope they're planning to do that because having Teslas going that only carry a couple
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Vanity project (Score:1)
You know, I figured solving the problem of soul-destroying traffic would be less vehicles and better public transport, but what do I know?
Also, apparently, tunnels won't fall on your head. Hmm. Well, they can do.
So, at a prohibitive cost, that I guess only somewhere like Las Veg
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The solution to sould destroying traffic is better urban planning, and chosing a lifestyle that is compatible with urban living. The latter part isn’t for everybody, for different reasons. The former is perpetually fskd.
Barring that, you need an inexpensive guideway that is segregated from other vehicles and pedestrians, and a system that can have competitive travel times and cost when compared to a private vehicle. You also need it to accommodate a wide variety of trip endpoints.
The Boring Company
Re: Vanity project (Score:2)
Both you and the OP post reasonable solutions. The problem is Americans are not reasonable. Good urban planning and using public transportation means people need to walk more which is just not what most Americans want..
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The solution to sould destroying traffic is better urban planning,
Yes, but... local optimisation (i.e. businesses chosing where to put their offices and shops) gets you just the opposite. It gets you concentrated clusters. The business district, the shopping malls, the city center where for pure image reasons every upscale brand needs to have their shops.
Urban planning has known the concepts for decades. Heck, I learned about sub-centres in SCHOOL. But the real-world isn't like that. You still need to drive into the city center all the time because that's where things are
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The Boring Companyâ(TM)s selling point is cheap tunnels and inexpensive âoetrains,â augmented by point-to-point routing. If they can build a system for $5 million/mile plus $5 million/station and make it work then it will be huge. My cityâ(TM)s miserable attempt at mass transit is at $300 million/mile plus $300 million/station, and is designed for a peak ridership of around 50-60,000 people. (and about one year per mile average completion rate.)
The issue is that what the BC can make is a shitty tunnel that can only fit a passenger car at a cost proportional to the smaller size of the tunnel. We can already see that in practice it's extremely stupid.
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The 0.8 mile existing loop cost $50 million approximately. That's a bit more than $5 million per mile. It's so short that they could skimp on things like providing escape routes and ventilation. So upscaling is unlikely to make the tunnels cheaper.
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That's surprising, if true. 0.8 miles is long enough to need an escape route walkway to either end and emergency ventilation in case of fire, at least.
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Their tunnels are deathtraps reminiscent of the unregulated turn of the centry building.. which is the time period a lot of the supporters idealize.
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It is ~1.6 miles of tunnels, plus 3 stations. $22 million by my formula. Another $4 million for the cars. Cost isn’t there yet, but getting there.
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You know, I figured solving the problem of soul-destroying traffic would be less vehicles and better public transport, but what do I know?
Vienna, Austria, has one of the best public transport systems in the world.
And yet, the main highway going through the city is lovingly called "Austrias largest parking space" because of the extreme congestion during rush hour.
So no, public transport doesn't solve the problem.
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Public transportation doesn't prevent congestion, but it does offer an alternative, provided it's in a form that doesn't get stuck in traffic. This is why railways (and their like) are so critical to successful high-volume public transport systems.
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To shave a few minutes off travel time, assuming one of these tunnels is actually going to your destination?
It's taken me like an hour to make it the 3 miles to the airport before. Las Vegas traffic can be horrific during big conventions.
unless it hooks into the wider transportation network - what is it really for?
Going between hotels and the airport and the convention center. There is no wider transportation network need because 99% of the traffic is along the strip.
at a prohibitive cost,
The LA Purple line cost $1,000,000,000 per mile. This entire project will be cheaper. Why? Because it doesn't need any stations, it just needs a ramp somewhere in a parking lot. The hotels already built taxi stands/valet car
Motorcycles (Score:2)
I disagree that train would be better. In fact I would go the opposite direction, I think it would have been better to have one, two, or three seater autonomous pods. Like basically enclosed electric scooters maybe the size of south asian three wheeler vehicles. Autonomous of course.
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Disagree on both.
Using Teslas has several advantages. One is the until this system becomes large enough to justify designing and manufacturing its own special parts, Teslas are off-the-shelf components. The other is that you can simply drive them out of the tunnel to a station that connects on ground-level with the rest of the transport network. You can even have a station exit a hundred metres away from the hotel main entrance, yet pick up and deliver passengers straight to the entrance.
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Because nobody in America can walk 100 metres.
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That's what I got from things I read about the USA, yes.
Snide remarks aside, there are people with heavy bags, elderly or disabled, etc.
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True.
I could answer that there are rich elderly, but that would be beside the point.
Yes, this is not a replacement for public transport. It is a replacement for taxis, shuttle busses, rental cars and similiar road traffic.
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Wow (Score:2)
Just think what he could have gotten if he invested just a bit of money into marketing to make his company interesting instead of boring.
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This guy does manage to keep doing impossible stuf (Score:2)
Most of the things this guy keeps on managing to do are what I always believed to be impossible !
Then thought it's all just a scam.
Then thought he just got lucky.
Am beginning to think he may actually be able to pull this off too.
It's a trial run for Mars. (Score:4, Interesting)
He's doing the prototypes on Earth, while the ultimate aim is Mars.
Musk is an early investor in Tesla, for electric and maybe one day autonomous vehicles. Certainly likely to be able to be autonomous on Mars, with their low traffic volume and carefully planned 'roads'.
To get there, he needs spaceships. SpaceX does that.
Once there he needs electric power, and he's heavily invested in Solar Power tech and batteries (which help Tesla, too).
Traveling on Mars needs to be safe, to tunnels are most likely (maybe? I dunno!) and that's what the Boring company does.
I've no doubt that Musk has invested in several dozens of other businesses, startups and wannabes that all trend towards being able to be used on Mars, like hydroponics, oxygen producers, CO2 (and everything else) recycling, lab grown meat, 3D printing of buildings and VR systems as well as wireless mesh networks for complete low latency high speed internet (like... Starlink, but for Mars, not Earth, maybe more satellites at lower altitudes (less atmosphere) for better & faster connections)?
I wouldn't bet against Elon Musk dying on Mars, as I think it's his aim to settle and colonise that planet.
Re:It's a trial run for Mars. (Score:4, Funny)
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This comment made me spit my tea out. Nice work.
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Skip the tunnel, just pack Boris into a rocket right now and send him to Mars without a tunnel...
Re:It's a trial run for Mars. (Score:4, Interesting)
You know with Mars having ~1/3 the gravity of Earth, that its likely that if someone spends any appreciable time there they won't EVER be able to return to Earth. Their bodies just couldn't take the stress.
Look at space station astronauts who have spent a year in space. The can't even walk when they return. And those are some of the healthiest and fittest people. And with the round trip travel time being 14-18 months at the least, even the time in space for a "weekend" on Mars would likely be too long to safely return.
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And with the round trip travel time being 14-18 months at the least, even the time in space for a "weekend" on Mars would likely be too long to safely return.
Yeah, it may be necessary to provide some spin-generated gravity on the trip. Perhaps by tethering a couple of Starships together and rotating them. Something could also be done on Mars, too, not continuously, but maybe for exercise periods, or maybe for sleeping (not sure how useful that is).
Re: It's a trial run for Mars. (Score:2)
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Musk is an early investor in Tesla, for electric and maybe one day autonomous vehicles. Certainly likely to be able to be autonomous on Mars...
I swear I heard the faint sound of solutions looking for problems, amidst the idiotic gibbering...
I have a good idea (Score:2)