Boring Company Receives Approval For Expanding Its Tunnels To Downtown Las Vegas (theverge.com) 88
Elon Musk's Boring Company has received unanimous approval to expand its system of tunnels beneath downtown Las Vegas. The Verge reports: The expansion will add stops at landmarks like the Stratosphere and Fremont Street, letting customers hop aboard a Tesla and travel from one part of the city to the next. The network of tunnels, called the Vegas Loop, is supposed to span 29 miles and have 51 stops when finished. But for now, only 1.7-mile tunnels are operational beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), turning what would be a 25-minute walk across the convention center into a two-minute ride.
This most recent expansion gets The Boring Company closer to its goal of building a transportation system that spans the most popular destinations in Las Vegas. "Thanks to the entire team at the City of Last Vegas!" The Boring Company wrote on Twitter in response to the city's approval. "Great discussion today, and TBC is excited to build a safe, convenient, and awesome transportation system in the City." [...] According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Steve Hill, the president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, expects the tunnel system beneath the Strip to start serving customers in 2023. Hill says the portion connecting the LVCC and Resorts World should be operational by the end of this year.
This most recent expansion gets The Boring Company closer to its goal of building a transportation system that spans the most popular destinations in Las Vegas. "Thanks to the entire team at the City of Last Vegas!" The Boring Company wrote on Twitter in response to the city's approval. "Great discussion today, and TBC is excited to build a safe, convenient, and awesome transportation system in the City." [...] According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Steve Hill, the president and CEO of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, expects the tunnel system beneath the Strip to start serving customers in 2023. Hill says the portion connecting the LVCC and Resorts World should be operational by the end of this year.
Tourist Attraction (Score:4, Insightful)
It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:2, Informative)
First, taxpayers are not paying for any of this. It's completely and totally without cost to taxpayers, with no subsidy of any kind. The tunnel is financed by Boring Company, and stations are paid for by the hotels and attractions that want to be connected to the loop.
Second, this is far and away the best transit option for Las Vegas. Trip times are incomparably faster with this system than all other transit options, for the simple reason that it is point-to-point, almost like Pod Rapid Transit, with passen
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You are so deeply confused, and you don't even know it. It really is amazing.
You're suggesting Las Vegas should spend $500m - $1b/mile building a slower system, instead of a completely free, significantly faster system, presumably because the metro would have higher capacity that will never be used.
It really is amazing how confidently wrong people can be, but there you go.
Re: It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:1)
Take your destructive car centric thinking back to the 1950s.
The Vegas strip could have amazing walkability and light rail focused transit if anybody bothered to try. Instead they squeeze pedestrians off to the side and into stupid labyrinths to make way for more single passenger autos.
If the strategy of people like you stopped being *widening roads over and over again* and *making concession after concession of PUBLIC SPACE to autos*, we would have excellent transit in every metropolitan area in the USA.
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Imagine getting so worked up about something you don't understand.
This is a transit system. It's a closed loop, with stations from which passengers embark, and disembark. This might be a Rubber Tire transit system, as opposed to Steel Wheel, but that's as far as the automobile comparisons go. Passengers are not driving these cars. The tunnels are underground, free of pedestrians.
This system is not a "poor man's light rail line," it is wildly better than light rail on nearly every metric. It is ridiculously
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This is not just a little bit better than light rail, it is dramatically better than light rail.
Except on capacity and probably maintenance. Basically all that it has going for it are frequency and maybe privacy?
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Light rail can run with ~90s frequency, and the capacity is many times that of a car. Also they are walk-on, walk-off, which is far faster than getting into a car. The passenger onboarding process is critical to not having delays and frustrated passengers. Sure, they are going to try avoiding this by having little branches into each hotel basement keeping the main line a moving 'token ring' style system, but in the end the cost of infrastructure is going to expand massively.
But it's still 4 people every 30s
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This is a transit system. It's a closed loop, with stations from which passengers embark, and disembark. This might be a Rubber Tire transit system, as opposed to Steel Wheel, but that's as far as the automobile comparisons go. Passengers are not driving these cars. The tunnels are underground, free of pedestrians.
This system is not a "poor man's light rail line," it is wildly better than light rail on nearly every metric. It is ridiculously faster, more energy efficient, with better throttling capability, perhaps 10-20% of the capital cost, with better ride quality, and more stations (55!) that you could never have in a rail system, since 55 stops would be insane.
This is not just a little bit better than light rail, it is dramatically better than light rail.
Hi Elon, shouldn't you be busy firing people for not sucking up enough?
It's a dedicated taxi lane, in a tunnel. Driven by taxi drivers. It's not "poor man's light rail" because it's not mass transit.
Re: It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:1)
Re: It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:2)
They have a speed limit of 40mph on a very short segment. Holy shit you're a really fast walker.
And yeah they're exactly like a dedicated street as long as you ignore cross walks, stop lights for cross streets and all of the other issues with 2D pathing.
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Now vegas will be left with a pointless gimmick that benefits nobody but daddy Musk rather than actual useful infrastructure
Pointless gimmicks is kind of what Vegas is about, the real point is learning how to build hyperloop tunnels, it's a baby steps thing for now.
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Re:It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with this system is while it may work now, it has no capacity to scale past a certain point so if Vegas was actually interested in a proper public transit system, it would have to start over from square one. This is basically a glorified taxi-lane with a high cost
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> if Vegas was actually interested in a proper public transit system, it would have to start over from square one.
First of all, this is better than all other transit systems, full stop. You wouldn't want a different system, this is better than every other transit system, and it isn't close. It loses to large rail systems on capacity, but there is no need for that capacity. It loses to rail systems on operating costs, as self-driving is not yet working, so this is basically an Uber-like system. But on all
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It doesn't really matter how nice the cars are (at least now) if it doesn't have the capacity. Like I said, it's likely fine now because it's limited in the distance it goes and doesn't need to move many people, but if they wanted to extend it and push it to serve more people they would need to go with higher capacity transit, rail or bus service. It's not much more a transit service than a taxi with a taxi lane, that's not "light year better" that's early 20th century technology.
Scaling this means you ne
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What matters here is a) service quality, how fast do I get to my destination at what comfort level and b) total cost for a fare.
Service quality is reportedly poor, there's traffic backed up in that tunnel. So you don't get there very fast, either, a taxi would be quicker. Total cost for the fare is one thing, but also total cost for the system and what else they could have built with the money is another. They could have run a detachable gondola system [gondolaproject.com] over the middle of the strip for less money, which would be more of a tourist attraction, at all hours of day and night, and for decades to come.
Seriously, the tunnel just doesn't ma
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Part of the reason that service quality is poor is that Las Vegas insists on having drivers in the cars. A closed system like this is a perfect use case for autonomous vehicles, but the city insists on drivers to protect jobs. Autonomous vehicles could run at higher speeds and with less spacing, improving the capacity of the system substantially -- the reason is that they're not purely dependent on seeing each other, they would also communicate with each other by radio.
But even with that improvement, it's d
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What they could do eventually to fix the broken design is put some rails down in the tunnels, and run single carriage higher-capacity pods in place of the cars. It might be multi-stop, like a lift, as a result, but probably adequate because the on/off boarding would be far faster with the pods with walk-on, walk-off. Nobody cares about car-level comfort for a sub 10 minute trip, as long as there's some sort of seat and it's clean.
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First of all, this is better than all other transit systems, full stop. You wouldn't want a different system, this is better than every other transit system, and it isn't close. It loses to large rail systems on capacity, but there is no need for that capacity. It loses to rail systems on operating costs, as self-driving is not yet working, so this is basically an Uber-like system. But on all the metrics passengers care about, it is light years better than every other transit system.
Hhahaha.
I mean, if you want an expensive way to ferry fat tourists a short distance so they don't have to be in the same vehicle as a stranger, that might be in fact the best and only way.
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Yes, it's basically a high-speed, dedicated taxi lane, with no street crossings, no traffic lights, no pedestrians, no parking.
Those spaces the size of the cars, where they pull in to stop and wait indefinitely until someone uses the car - What name would one give to a spot for doing such a thing with a car?
Also if it's not an underground traffic jam, what does one call the situation of the cars being stopped in the tunnel and unable to move, on account of the other cars in the way?
It's also a death trap (Score:1, Troll)
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But thankfully, tunnels build by normal people account for that and include enough space to get out of the car and emergency exits.
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Well, not exactly square one. The tunnels are the expensive part and the tunnels could always be renovated to handle a larger capacity transit option.
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They're not that wide, perhaps a Glasgow or Budapest style metro subway could be fitted.
But the stations and curves are designed for cars, not trains.
So I feel this idea is not viable either.
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There are already traffic jams in the tunnel. It can't cope with the current level.
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The problem with this system is while it may work now, it has no capacity to scale past a certain point so if Vegas was actually interested in a proper public transit system, it would have to start over from square one. This is basically a glorified taxi-lane with a high cost
Sin City is interested in a "public" transit system? If you don't have the money for at least a taxi, then what would you be doing in Vegas? A "high cost" taxi system, if that's true, would be a good way to shake off those who can't afford to gamble or watch the evil entertainment.
Re: It Costs Taxpayers Nothing (Score:2)
no capacity to scale past a certain point so if Vegas was actually interested in a proper public transit system, it would have to start over from square one.
It scales by replacing cars with larger pods. And then scales again by adding more tunnels. Unlike roads where adding lanes is a zero sum game you can just stack tunnels over and over theoretically infinitely.
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That's not really scaling well if the solution is "buy the whole thing again"
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The problem with this system is while it may work now, it has no capacity to scale past a certain point so if Vegas was actually interested in a proper public transit system, it would have to start over from square one.
Only if the tunnel is as shit as the idea of PRT on rubber. It takes a serious mental defective to say "we're going to run vehicles on a fixed, non-shared route, and none of it exists yet, so let's build a road and use pneumatic tires, then have to figure how out how to get the vehicles to steer reliably, and service all these moving parts we don't really need". The only way in which this system ever made sense is that he had the cars already, and wanted to advertise them.
But anyway, back to the tunnel, ass
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Of course it would. It works in Vegas for free, but it's still better than light rail in every environment. There are several other paid-for projects in the works, including a loop from downtown San Antonio to the airport, at a cost of about ~$200mm - wildly cheaper than any other proposal.
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It works in Vegas for free, but it's still better than light rail in every environment.
False dichotomy. There are other options, like PRT on a rail (PRT on tires is dumb, just like this is dumb) or detachable gondolas. The only advantage of a tunnel in this case is that you avoid needing much air conditioning in the vehicles. The disadvantages are everything else.
This is false (Score:2, Informative)
Even that car company only exists because of a government program where GM and Ford pay for carbon credits so they don't have to make more fuel efficient vehicles and bite into their
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... Musk told Suarez he could build a two-mile tunnel below the Miami River in six months for about $30 million — 3½ years sooner and about $870 million cheaper than county transit officials estimated the project would cost in 2017.
FL was going to build this anyway, they just get a cleaner and cheaper solution with the Boring Co.
Even that car company only exists because of a government program where GM and Ford pay for carbon credits so they don't have to make more fuel efficient vehicles and bite into their profits.
GM wouldn't exist without corporate welfare from the government, and GM is a huge Tesla competitor; Tesla could do much better without them. Tesla could also sell in many states without dealership laws. Saying that 1 government program that gave Tesla some marginal revenue is responsible for Tesla existing is disingenuous, at best.
Their CEO is and has always been a welfare Queen.
Musk has called for a
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Are you against efficient government?
When did you stop beating your wife?
FL was going to build this anyway, they just get a cleaner and cheaper solution with the Boring Co
That does not in any way shape or form alter the fact that it will be done with public money there.
GM wouldn't exist without corporate welfare from the government, and GM is a huge Tesla competitor; Tesla could do much better without them. Tesla could also sell in many states without dealership laws.
The dealership laws are irrelevant to GM, because the automakers did not want those laws and actually fought them, but failed because all the dealers wanted them for protectionism and got it. So that's just irrelevant handwaving fuckery.
Musk has called for all government subsidies to be ended.
That was disingenuous AF because they are ending for Tesla soon, and he wants them to be unavailable for would-be competitors. And you licke
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Are you against efficient government?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Complete non-sequitur. The parent is against the better solution because he's butt hurt about someone saying something mean on Twitter.
FL was going to build this anyway, they just get a cleaner and cheaper solution with the Boring Co
That does not in any way shape or form alter the fact that it will be done with public money there.
Again, public money doesn't have to be thrown away on the more expensive solution, despite what governments tend to do.
The dealership laws help prevent new car companies from starting, so they help GM.
When government wastes money on their fascist corporatism, corporations have to take what they can to compete in that environment. Musk publicly came out against subsidies
It's not a non sequitor (Score:2)
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And I'm a little confused—are you implying that I'm getting talking points from people on your team and the other sides' team? Again, I'm not, I don't play for either team, I prefer to think for myself.
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Are you against efficient government?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Complete non-sequitur.
That was the point, yes. The efficient government question was a complete non-sequitur. In fact, it is specifically a logically fallacious loaded question.
The dealership laws help prevent new car companies from starting, so they help GM.
If you could simplify the world to single issues at a time, then it would be sufficiently simple to analyze actual situations that you would have a fighting chance at understanding them. But in fact the world is never that simple. The large, entrenched auto manufacturers would absolutely, positively, and in all other ways love to eliminate every single au
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Everyone is a hypocrite when you deal in absolutes.
If you have a source for Musk coming over with a stack of cash, I'd welcome that, too. It looks like lies to me.
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I don't see legacy auto fighting car dealership laws
That's because you aren't paying attention [slashdot.org]. But since you aren't, stop presenting yourself as knowledgeable when you are not.
If I'm not seeing the entire picture here, I'd welcome alternate sources.
Pay attention
If you have a source for Musk coming over with a stack of cash, I'd welcome that, too. It looks like lies to me.
Let's have a citation that shows he only had two grand other than his self-aggrandizing claim. He lies all the time.
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But since you aren't, stop presenting yourself as knowledgeable when you are not.
I'm relatively informed, and constantly working on it.
Let's have a citation that shows he only had two grand other than his self-aggrandizing claim. He lies all the time.
You're the one that stated he started with a stack of cash. I gave you the firsthand account from Musk himself, but you have no source. Please stop repeating unfounded lies.
Mod parent up! (Score:2)
Re: This is false (Score:2)
He'd still be rich from his parents emerald mines and the absence of government money
Elon and his brother took a whopping $40k investment from their abusive father.
Not exactly a mountain of jewels.
It was clearly more than that (Score:2)
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I mean at least it could be turned into a metro. The tunnels are rather small, but London tube stock could be fitted into it to give it better capacity.
The experience at the Vegas convention center has shown that in its current form it doesn't even have enough capacity for busy days there. The two big problems being the large size of vehicles for the number of passengers, and the very slow loading/unloading process.
The Teslas could conceivably be replaced with cylinder-shaped PRT vehicles that supported wal
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Thinking about this, the problem with public transit is always the last mile problem. You can't build a stop density enough to do much about that, and the denser you make stops the slower the system goes.
With this system you can densely pack the stops without slowing down the rest of the system as cars go from point A to point B without stopping for other riders. We're also not talking about a system for commuters to get to work but to move mostly tourists around.
Unlike light rail or bus systems you don't h
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Thinking about this, the problem with public transit is always the last mile problem. You can't build a stop density enough to do much about that, and the denser you make stops the slower the system goes.
There's a solution to these problems right now, and that solution is PRT on or descended from an elevated rail. It's lightweight enough that the rail cost is competitive with roads, it it mounted just to footings rather than a continuous ribbon of road so it can be placed pretty much anywhere with much less footprint. Cars are somewhere in the minivan size range, powered from the rail, and each one is powerful enough to push another one in case one fails. Some pilot systems have been built that prove the po
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Since this is being funded by The Boring Company and businesses why not give it a try and learn what we can from this kind of system, see how it works, and doesn't, and improve future iterations?
Because it's the same lesson we learned from the Morgantown PRT. It has all of the disadvantages of rail transport with all of the disadvantages of a share taxi. So it doesn't scale, move that many people, or work all that efficiently but boy does it burn money!
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In my city central downtown in connected by pedestrian tunnels. When it is over 90 degrees for months on end, it can be a real life saver.
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It's a pity, the city could've had real public transit. Instead they're blowing money on this bizarre scheme of driving taxis slowly through narrow tunnels. This is hardly a transportation system. The only way this makes sense is if you think of it as just another Vegas tourist attraction.
Yes, you'd think they'd at least drive Mini Coopers through the tunnels quickly.
Part of Elon's master plan (Score:2)
Seattle Could Sure Use This! (Score:2)
But the city government would surely find a way to destroy any prospect of it. Sound Transit isn't interested in anything that costs less than the GDP of Norway.
For example, they bored a new tunnel under Seattle. What to do with the dirt they dug out? Why, stuff it in the old tunnel! Net improvement - Zero.
And what do they do with the tunnel boring machine? Sell it for scrap! After all, we wouldn't want to re-use the machine for the next tunnel, when a new one could be bought for $$.
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But the city government would surely find a way to destroy any prospect of it. Sound Transit isn't interested in anything that costs less than the GDP of Norway.
Almost like good infrastructure costs a crapton of money when you subcontract the shit out of it.
For example, they bored a new tunnel under Seattle. What to do with the dirt they dug out? Why, stuff it in the old tunnel! Net improvement - Zero.
And what do they do with the tunnel boring machine? Sell it for scrap! After all, we wouldn't want to re-use the machine for the next tunnel, when a new one could be bought for $$.
They're usually custom built for the one purpose they were built for. Boring Company bought an old clapped out sewer tunnel machine from Los Angeles and thought that would revolutionize transportation when they really just invented the Wish.com knockoff of the London Underground circa 1890.
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Correction, Boring Company purchase their very first tunnel boring machine, Godot. They have since built their own, Prufrock-2, which is faster, builds walls as it tunnels, and porpoises (can launch by digging itself into the ground, rather than being dropped-in to a pre-dug pit on a crane). Development of Prufrock-2 seems to be a bit slower, and there might be some problems with porpoising currently, but they continue to iterate quickly on it.
Separately, note that Boring Company's business objective is to
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builds walls as it tunnels
That's pretty standard these days.
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Good news for Seattle (Score:3)
Cars are rapidly becoming unaffordable, so it's going to b
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advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
> turning what would be a 25-minute walk across the convention center into a two-minute ride
A 25 minute walk that can move lots and lots of people with high throughput. A 2 minute ride that move just a few people at a time, with lower overall throughput.
Re: advertising (Score:2)
It's been moving more than 17,000 people per day. That's a respectable transit line.
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It also doesn't make sense. It doesn't take 25 minutes to walk across the convention center, which is only a couple of blocks across. It takes less than an hour to walk the whole strip if you hit the lights right and it's not too busy that day, and you only stop once or twice to look at shit. Which after you've seen the whole strip once, is pretty much what you do. Except if you know it really well, you probably won't walk it at all unless it's night, the only time that it's bearable to be outside anyway. Y
needs to go to airport! (Score:3)
needs to go to airport!
Las Vegas won't be around much longer (Score:1)
if they don't start getting rain in the southwest here soon.
Tunnels? (Score:2)
Are they just boring out tunnels and using a proven underground train system? I'd thumbs up that. If it's some magical fairy dust "hyperloop" with vacuum pressures and such craziness, I'd tell NV they should vote out their politicians immediately or get stuck with expensive broken "pipe dream".
Re: Tunnels? (Score:2)
They're boring out tunnels and using commodity/ proven electric SUVs.
Adam something (Score:2)
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Have you ever been to Vegas and tried the available public transportation along the strip ?
- On one side of the strip is the shaky monorail with great views of the trash cans behind all the hotels. Each station is in the butt end of a casino then 500ft more, then you go up & down the stairs;
- The other side of the strip has, just between a few casinos, that kiddie carnival train-thingy which comes every... half hour or so. And then you hear on the PA that the whole train is reserved for a private party
Cheaper is what Vegas needs (Score:2)
What Vegas really needs is for someone to build transit in Vegas that has cheaper fares than taxis/Uber/etc AND that connects all the major destinations (especially the airport but also the NFL stadium, the convention centre, the big strip hotels and the other areas that see a lot of tourist/visitor traffic.
I am sure there are plenty of visitors to Vegas who would use such a system if it was cheaper than paying for a taxi or Uber ride while still connecting to where they need to go AND not being annoying to
Las Vegas? Really? (Score:2)
You'd think that of all the cities in the US, they know marketing enough that they don't give contracts to boring companies and instead would give them to entertaining ones.
Boondoggle for a dying city (Score:1)
Lake Meade is drying up fast.
One thing is for sure, if lake Meade dries up, so will Las Vegas. They'll have to shut it down. Pouring any more money into Vegas doesn't make any sense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
30mph average speed - yops (Score:2)
Assuming each stop is 1 minute long (parking brake lock wheels to unlock wheels), and neglecting the real limits of the standing or sitting human frame with regard to acceleration, that's still 29 miles in at least 52 minutes - 30mph - and probably a lot slower.
Or, of course, they've got some way of routing a "car" with no spare seats and no passengers for the next stop around the "car" in front, whi