Boring Company Gets Approval to Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network:
Las Vegas city officials have approved The Boring Company's request to expand its planned network of underground tunnels. The Las Vegas Loop will now feature a total of 69 stations and 65 miles, or 104 kilometers, of tunnels.
The Boring Company tweeted the news yesterday evening, following a meeting with the Clarke County Zoning Commission yesterday morning. The Las Vegas Loop was set to feature a combined 34 miles, or 55 kilometers, of tunnels and had stations that predominantly ran along the Las Vegas Strip. The Boring Company then asked in March to expand the Las Vegas loop, with the newly approved expansion adding 18 new stations and about 25 miles, 40 kilometers, of additional tunnels, according to a tweet from the county's official account yesterday.
[...] "This is a 100% developer funded project that will reduce traffic trips from our surface street public roadways, it will provide folks another easy and convenient alternative to get around, and as part of our revenue sharing agreement with the Boring Company, they will end up paying the City for use of our right of way," Las Vegas Executive Director of Infrastructure Mike Janssen told Gizmodo in an email. "So, I am excited to see the project continue to grow."
Attorney Stephanie Allen, representing the Boring Company, told county commissioners at yesterday's meeting that the Las Vegas loop currently has 2.2 miles constructed with 5 operational stops—four at the Las Vegas Convention Center and one at Resorts World. Allen further told commissioners that 1 million passengers have ridden through the network so far, with peak ridership in one day reaching over 32,000.
"The more opportunities we have on this map, the more opportunities for success with this system," Allen said during the meeting.
(Score: 3, Troll) by driverless on Sunday May 07, @09:57PM (13 children)
The first step at this point is to stop digging.
Love, Dear Abby.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 07, @10:15PM (1 child)
Nonsense! This is the kind of free market innovation that government cannot do, only pay for.
(Score: 2) by epitaxial on Monday May 08, @03:30PM
So far the tunnels are just Teslas that sit in bumper to bumper traffic. I can do that on the surface.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Sunday May 07, @10:46PM
The trick is to keep digging until the core maglev patents expire so the straightforwards decision of "lets just go with the cheapest contractor" becomes "we have to go with Musk since he owns all the tunnels".
compiling...
(Score: 4, Touché) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @01:26AM (9 children)
Digging tunnels for transport isn't a terrible idea. What could use some improvements is the vehicle system used in those tunnels. Like, maybe instead of having individual Tesla cars which can hold only about 4-5 people at most, instead have something significantly bigger that can hold 80-100 people in one. And maybe, if you've got a bunch of these going along the same route, instead of driving them individually, you hook them together to save on energy. And maybe just to make sure that these vehicles are going where they're supposed to, we should have special rails that keep the wheels where they should be.
Maybe we could call such a brand new invention that only Elon could have thought of a "subway".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @01:46AM (2 children)
The biggest improvement would be to run cargo underground. Let me ride topside and enjoy the sights!
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Monday May 08, @03:21PM (1 child)
I'd rather travel at 700 mph than 70. Of course, if it has TSA bullshit like airlines, I won't be riding it. Air travel was mostly pleasurable before 911, I refuse to fly now.
Carbon, The only element in the known universe to ever gain sentience
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09, @03:37AM
To travel across Vegas at 700 mph (a little less than 5 seconds per mile) will require some heavy acceleration and braking. Still cheaper to do it an airplane, and we can still have the view
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Monday May 08, @05:32AM
And have animated puppets singing along the route.
(Score: 1) by Se5a on Monday May 08, @05:36AM (4 children)
Rail has huge upfront costs. Maybe boring will do this later when it's more established.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @10:47AM (3 children)
And by "huge", we mean about $2 million per mile. So total cost for the length of the Vegas Loop would be around $4.4 million. Plus we'd need a couple of rail cars to have the same total capacity as the Loop currently has, and Google tells me each of those goes for $2 million, so tack on another $4 million for that.
Total cost: $8.4 million.
For comparison, the whole Vegas Loop project cost $52.4 million, of which $2.1 million was spent on Teslas. So you'd have gone from $52 million to $61 million or so, a bit bigger but not "huge". And as an added bonus, you'd no longer have the problem of "somebody screws up in the tunnels and blocks the whole system".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday May 08, @02:48PM (2 children)
Being thick, but TFS says
> The Las Vegas Loop will now feature a total of 69 stations and 65 miles, or 104 kilometers, of tunnels.
65 miles * $2M is $130M?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @04:40PM (1 child)
The $52 million number I was quoting was for the original 2.2 miles of Loop. Which was a tiny fraction of what the Boring Company said it was going to deliver, I might add.
So, assuming the cost of the new tunnels is similar to the cost of the old ones, that means we're talking about going from a project costing $1.65 billion to $1.7 billion.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday May 08, @05:23PM
Thanks - I was indeed being thick!
(Score: 5, Informative) by dltaylor on Sunday May 07, @11:17PM (3 children)
LA did something as stupid, or worse. They gave Musk control over nearly all of the currently unused underground of the basin. At some point anyone trying to build in that space is going to trip over Musk's right-of-way.
Now Las Vegas has mindlessly followed the example.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday May 08, @12:32AM
Who's trying to build into that space? From the Boring website [boringcompany.com], they claim minimum depth is 30 feet down (~9 meters). Utilities have plenty of space, for example.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Se5a on Monday May 08, @01:22AM (1 child)
So your argument is that we shouldn't allow someone to use something that is currently unused incase someone else wants to use it in the future?
That makes perfect sense.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 08, @01:52AM
No, the argument is to not grant such widespread exclusivity to any single person/company that can lock out competitors
(Score: 2, Funny) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Sunday May 07, @11:42PM (1 child)
To connect Mar A Lago to Florida State Prison. Lots of back and forth anticipated. 492km/306mi of pure boring work to do.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Monday May 08, @05:39AM
More urgently needed is Hyannis Port to South Middlesex Correctional Center.
(Score: 2) by progo on Monday May 08, @01:53AM
Is he going to run slow-to-load low capacity taxis in the new tunnels? Or is he going to invent the subway train this time?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by pTamok on Monday May 08, @08:04AM (8 children)
I haven't looked at the engineering specifications for the tunnels.
That said, I'll opine anyway. It's what Internet commentators do, after all. Opine from zero-knowledge.
The snarky comments about Musk slowly re-inventing the metro/subway/underground train, badly miss a couple of points.
1) I would not be surprised if the tunnels The Boring Company are building are significantly cheaper than the rail infrastructure for a metro system.
2) Metro trains generally have particular minimum turn radiuses and maximum gradients they can cope with. That significantly constrains the tunnel geometry. Tesla cars are considerably shorter than metro carriages, so have much smaller turn radiuses, and they can also cope with steeper gradients, A tunnel bored for individual cars is unlikely to be suitable for metro rail, unless someone is prepared to spend a fortune on infrastructure that isn't going to be used in the near future, if at all.
One downside of using cars is the rubber tyres generate a lot of heat (there are other disadvantages - see the link). Several Paris metro lines uses rubber-tyred [wikipedia.org] rolling stock, so the engineering problems are well known.
The benefit of using Tesla cars is that they are a standard platform. It would be interesting if the tunnels came to the surface with a connection to the standard road network and you could sit in the same car all the way to your eventual destination, and/or order a Tesla taxi/metro so you could be picked up off-network too - obviously for a price premium. That's something you can't do with an ordinary metro.
The ideas being played with by The Boring Company are quite interesting. I've no idea if they will be successful, but it's fun to try.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @11:02AM (7 children)
The giant downside of the approach the Loop is taking is space used per passenger. 1 60-foot metro car can fit up to 200 people. To move the same number of people in the Loop takes 40 Teslas (and that's assuming everyone on the system is fine with squeezing in with 4 other people who might be total strangers), Each Tesla takes 17-feet at a bare minimum (16.6 feet for the car, 0.4 for the space between that and the car in front of them which is cutting it really really close, but we'll say for the sake of argument that Tesla navigation magic makes that work), so you're now at 680 feet long of tunnel space to move the same number of people as 1 rail car. So it's about 1/10th as space-efficient.
That becomes a big problem if you get large numbers of people trying to use this system.
Another alternative approach to moving large numbers of people around Vegas would be to make use of the surface streets, and have a professional driver moving around in a larger vehicle, maybe around 40 feet long, that can hold something like 50 passengers. 4 of those would cover the same capacity as that metro car, and be about 170 feet of traffic space. You of course would know this system as a "municipal bus".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday May 08, @12:11PM (2 children)
You are not wrong with your space calculations. It's a good point.
But.
The municipal bus takes up surface street space.
The Loop doesn't - it is an addition to current infrastructure, whereas buses subtract from it - and if run well, the Loop will have a reasonably predictable journey duration. In heavy traffic, buses become hugely unreliable.
Don't get me wrong, I can see significant problems with the Loop concept, just as anyone else can, which is why I think it is an interesting experiment we can learn from. It holds a promise of extremely convenient public transport.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @04:51PM (1 child)
The point of bringing busses into the discussion is that those are by far the cheapest option in terms of up-front infrastructure when you're talking about solutions for moving a lot of people around quickly. And each person on a bus would probably be in a car on the same road if they don't have a bus option, and 1 bus is about the size of 2-3 cars, so it doesn't take a lot of people riding on the bus to make it a net reducer of congestion (plus you don't have to have a place to park the car).
And as it turns out, Vegas has a pretty good bus system, with fairly frequent (15-minute) service on well-used routes, mostly used by the locals who staff the casinos rather than the tourists. Because busses are icky, or something.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 09, @07:56AM
Don't get me wrong, I think buses are great, but a Loop based system has some material differences worth exploring, in my opinion.
I've been lucky enough to live in a couple of places where the headway between buses going to my destination was 6 minutes. Both were highly congested, which meant that journey times had a huge variance. Best case, the journey took 20 minutes, worst case was over an hour, and at peak times you never knew how long it would take. In addition, it meant you got 'clumping', where buses would travel in threes*, so you could be waiting for at least 18 minutes, A benefit of metro systems is they tend to be much more regular in frequency and predictable in journey time. Traditional metro has higher capacity, as well; which is not a benefit of The Loop. The Loop will fail, hard, if more people want to exit at a particular station than it has parking capacity for - there are mitigation strategies (including bypassing the congested station), but finding out how a Loop system works in practice is all part of the fun.
I'm not so starry-eyed as to think the a Loop system is the solution to all public transport needs; I think it's worth trying the experiment: it might give another sensible choice among the many possibilities. Or it might not. Let's find out.
*The Conversation: Transport experts explain why buses come in threes – and which one you should get on [theconversation.com](includes link to academic study behind paywall); CityMonitor: Why do buses come in threes? It’s a mathematical inevitability [citymonitor.ai]
(Score: 2) by GloomMower on Monday May 08, @02:49PM
If desired could the smaller teslas be switched out for electric busses in the future? Perhaps a tesla bus?
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday May 08, @02:55PM (2 children)
The upside is that each passenger gets routed to their destination. On a conventional "spokes and wheel" metro system, like the london tube, there is a concentration of transit through the hub which causes a lot of congestion in the centre. May be that this system enables more efficient routing that prevents congestion in the hub by routing passengers through the "wheel". Also may be that this system enables more efficient routing, reducing the number of passenger miles required to reach a given destination.
It's interesting to try a different idea, and at $100M it is not so expensive for a city like Las Vegas.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 08, @04:55PM (1 child)
When you look at London's Tube map [tfl.gov.uk], there's a lot of options for moving around the outside of the core - the Overground in particular acts as a "wheel" fairly far from central London. The reason that a lot of spoke-and-wheel systems have central congestion is that they build the spokes and then never bother to build the wheel.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday May 08, @05:20PM
Well, the overground is not very well integrated with the underground - stations are often not very close together etc. That's a good example of something that is automatically fixed by this Tesla set up, where stations don't exist.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Opportunist on Monday May 08, @09:18AM
if it was an exciting company!