Boring Company will build a 34-mile tunnel network underneath Las Vegas

This is because Las Vegas doesn't want to become a mass transit + cycling + walking city. It wants to stay car first. TBH, given the climate in that desert, I can't really blame them...

It’s worse than a subway as Teslas going single file through a tiny tunnel is inherently low capacity. Fire safety seems sub par too. But at least there isn’t a vagrant sitting in the same metal box as you.

Walkable urban areas and infrastructure are not a sexy marketable product. Most transportation networks run at a loss without subsidies: airports, highways, domestically built boats. Profitable enterprises depend on transportation but stay a layer higher.

"Traffic jams, but underground!" does not seem very appealing.

My take is that vegas is into showy attractions, and this qualifies.

I remember walking down the strip (in the HOT burning sun) and I came across a people mover just going "somewhere". I stepped on and voila... found myself in an air conditioned casino.

Maybe that's what these tunnels will do.

This may work when designing a city but does little to help cities that already exist. Las Vegas is also in the middle of a desert where temperatures routinely soar above 100 and people die of exposure. Bike lanes aren't going to cut it there.

Building 10 smaller tunnels actually costs more than building 1 regular tunnel; Boring Co's own projects in Hawthorne and Vegas demonstrate that on a per-mile basis they're only saving a few pennies on the dollar, and all of that comes from avoiding the things like fire escapes (the Vegas tunnels don't have any mid-tunnel), tunnels smooth enough for the vehicle/train to go through at fast speeds (the Vegas tunnels are so rough that speeds are limited to less than 35 mph), stations big enough to handle meaningful amounts of passenger (the biggest station can handle fewer than 1000 people an hour), high-strength concrete and surfaces for the massive volumes of traffic, etc.

In other words, Boring Co tunnels are cheap because they're bargain-basement quality tunnels with limited use and lifespan. And so Vegas is getting what they paid for: a "public transportation" system that has less throughput than a sidewalk.

Well, if they're already building the tunnel they can just add markers every 10 meters or so, and patch their "self-driving" software to recognize these markers.

The $2 million/mile number is misleading, since Boring Co only includes the cost of tunneling itself, but public projects usually fold in all of the other costs related to the project into their per mile figures.

Generally, the actual cost of tunneling depends on the soil and route conditions; for example, most subways are tunneled under existing infrastructure and buildings and thus the process of tunneling also includes numerous measures to prevent damage to existing structures. Urban tunnels must also contend with undeclared but still utilized utility and power lines which must be rerouted. Additionally, businesses and residents impacted by the construction are usually compensated for harms caused by the construction (i.e., excess noise, loss of accessibility, etc.) When you're tunneling under a city it's going to be expensive, and that's generally where you want to tunnel because that's where people actually want to go.

The Vegas tunnel has avoided that so far because it's built under a low-use private road), but that's going to change when it has to go under the Strip and under the Casinos. They're suddenly going to discover why public transportation tunnels are so expensive.

Note that the LA Metro subways (specifically, the current Purple Line Extension) cost significantly less than $1 billion/mile where they get to tunnel under roads, but more than $1 billion/mile where they are tunneling under buildings or near the tar pits. Similarly, the "Regional Connector" project was ahead of schedule...until it ran into undisclosed utility lines downtown and had to spend a year rerouting hundreds of unmapped utilities lines.

The Boring company doesn't have any new tech that makes their tunnels cheaper, they are just smaller [1]. Smaller tunnels also mean less capacity, that's why I would argue that the total cost doesn't matter as much as the "cost per capacity". Even if Boring tunnels and stations are cheaper, how big is the throughput?

A New York Subway car [2] can carry up to 240 people per car and costs $2 million. If four people sit in a Tesla that would be 60 Teslas just to match that and cost $3 million. The Loop apparently can only transport 800 people an hour, for a 0.8-mile track [3]. The one subway car could (assuming conservatively 5min at the station and 5min for travel) transport 1440 people an hour. Two subway cars, 2880 people an hour. A subway can scale, Teslas which each need a parking space for entering and exiting can't. Also, a ticket on the Vegas loop may cost $12, that is not a public transport solution but a joyride vanity project.

[1] https://observer.com/2021/07/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R160_(New_York_City_Subway_car... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/16/elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-...

Agreed. But subways cost so much more, $1 billion per mile in many cases. The Boring tunnels look to be around $10 million per mile.