Boring Company Will Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network
gizmodo.com
gizmodo.com
Subways have a capacity of about 50,000 people per hour. TBC's tunnels have a capacity of 4,000 people per hour.
So 8% of the capacity for 1% of the cost.
Even if the numbers are an order of magnitude out, it would still be attractive. 8% of the capacity for 10% of the cost would be fabulously useful in smaller cities like Vegas.
The 4,000 passenger number is afair only for the current section, the planned expansion will have a capacity of 2,000 passenger per hour.
The Las Vegas Loop makes sense as a vanity project.
No they don't. The most expensive subway in the country costs $1B per mile. Typical costs are much cheaper (and could be even cheaper, but that's another story).
Subways at $120M/mile would be pretty freaking awesome.
This means that need to put down rails and control systems in the tunnels. I can't see that being $10M/mile.
The huge cost for subway systems are stations. What do the Boring stations cost? I bet the $10M/mile doesn't include the stations. Fairly simple stations for Las Vegas should be pretty cheap.
If this is the way that economies of (small-) scale work w.r.t. tunnels, then how 'bout we shoot coffin-like pods down pneumatic tubes for something close to free ?
I was under the impression you had a driver take you through the existing tunnel, all those wages can’t be cost effective for users.
actually, I'm not even kidding.
One could imagine a city where the streets are only for bikes/pedestrians/scooters/etc... and deliveries happen via underground tunnels where there is parking every other block and a freight elevator to bring the goods to the surface. A kind of futurist ideal that will never work because it would be horrendously expensive and the elevators would always be breaking down and as the city grew the system would be trapped at its current size and become increasingly overloaded over time.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-longest-cycling-tu...
It amazes me that a lot of these green cities haven't incorporated a small golf cart lanes as most people work within a range of a golf cart distance to travel.
The cost would be a lot cheaper than a car, no need for insurance premiums(if so, very little) , and less maintenance than . Also could likely double the lane traffic within the equivalent car lanes. The consumer would be more than willing to get on board using and buying golf carts just for the financial benefit of it.
Not saying that ebikes are bad but it would also be more appealing for the masses to embrace golf carts over bikes as a replacement for their vehicles.
I wonder if it would be possible to fit a commercial AGT like Mitsubishi Crystal Mover into the Boring tunnels. They're wide enough I think but I don't know if the height clearance is sufficient. And of course AGTs are always constructed with a fire egress walkway which wouldn't fit, but Boring seems to have already accepted that significant safety limitation.
The intent is that it's supposed to be autonomous cars moving around, but it seems Elon vastly overestimated the speed with which autonomous cars can actually be delivered, so the manual operation is just a stopgap solution.
Then again, it's pretty telling that he's struggling to recreate the features of systems developed 50 years ago.
Ultimately I think Boring/Tesla would introduce automation to the Las Vegas tunnels faster if they just bought a commercial moving-block system like Cityflo and adapted the vehicles. The fact that they don't seem to be pursuing this makes me think that the automation goal was never serious outside of its potential as a marketing tool for Tesla, which they are perhaps ironically also failing to deliver.
And by the way, if Tesla cars can't be autonomous in purpose built tunnels built by a sister company, then why would anyone expect them to handle traffic on actual roads? I consider this to be negative PR for them.
Do regulations that mandate escape routes in tunnels not exist in the US? Or are these tunnels different enough that they don't apply? Or do they have safety measures that are not visible on the images here?
In the case of the LV "loop," it's a single tunnel shorter than 2,500 feet, so they basically don't need tunnel egress; having said that, imagine an electrical fire in a crowded tunnel with hundreds of tourists in varying degrees of intoxication trying to get out using narrow, 3-ft passages on either side of the cars. It's ... concerning.
Is this a "fat Americans" joke? If it were 1 or 2 foot wide I could see calling it narrow, but 3 feet is plenty wide. Doubly so because there are passages on either side so it's 6 feet of walkway. The low maximum capacity of the system also helps in this regard, it will never need to evacuate thousands of people at once. Just the handful that were in the cars at the time.
This might change if Tesla changes out the current cars for higher capacity ones, but it doesn't seem like it should be an issue currently.
The standard width for walkways per NFPA 130 is 3.75 ft, so 3 ft is definitely narrower than the US standard. (The European standard (SRT TSI) is 2.6 ft though.)
at 2ft wide, most people would not be able to walk down it and have to turn sideways, let alone evacuate.
The 95th percentile male hasshoulders ~23 in wide, and eblows protrude further.
As far as I'm aware, not only do they exist, they are more stringent than in Europe generally.
So I don't know how these things are working under US fire codes.
Dunno if the Vegas system would qualify as a road tunnel (thus NFPA 502) or some sort of transit tunnel, which might be a different thing. (I've not seen such exits provided in subway tunnels; emergency procedure seems to be "walk back to the station".)
But in a short shallow system like in Vegas, they could have periodic cross-passages or stairs to the surface. Dunno if they do; never been in it.
Even if there was an escape tunnel, you might not be able to get out of the car to get to it.
In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller.
[1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...
This is comedy gold.
Are you saying that no private company should compete with public services?
I love transit and dislike car culture. But I find it hard to fault a car company for trying to present their product as a solution.
When you design a system so that vehicles have to shunt to and from a station, you strongly limit the capacity of the system by that shunting system. Unbranched metrorail lines can reach 45TPH in normal operation, while branched lines do worse, and systems with heavy reverse branching (splitting from one line to rejoin another, NY's and DC's systems do this something fierce) struggle to get 24TPH. PRTs get better headways because they're smaller vehicles, but they're not really any better than a standard highway lane in the best case (which is beaten out by just about any other rapid transit system in existence).
If you look at the station design here, it's phenomenally bad from a throughput perspective. They appear to be using low sedans (which mean people take longer to get in and out of their seats compared to typical trainsets or buses). Furthermore, the parking spots are angled parking, which requires the cars to back into the travel lane to exit the station, backing up even traffic trying to "express" through the station. There are honest-to-god traffic jams on this system at even moderate capacity events. (Compare this with subway stations, where the station being at crush capacity utilization leads to trains skipping the station until it clears out; that's harder to do in this system.)
you can also run express services with rail.
Sharing a train or bus just forces everyone to stop at everyone's stop along the way.
nb. In tunnels, the smoke kills.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#/media/File...
TBC tunnels have more room to exit and maneuver than most older subway tunnels.
Commercial air transport is THE safest mode of transportation in terms of deaths per distance traveled.
This is cool. I have no idea if they'll solve traffic jams or succeed as a business. There are many issues to solve (ventilation, safety exits, traffic from accidents and exit queuing, etc.). But, having lived in LA and seen how traffic alters livability of a region, I love that they're trying.
Residential neighborhood speeds for 21st century mass transit, dream big.
the article title is:
> Boring Company Gets Approval to Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network
which is also actually truthful - the Boring Company announcing something and £7 will get you a pint in Zone 1 these days.
Well, water can erode away the material underneath the road, but if this is happening in your tunnel you have serious problems.
uh... is that why many roads in California are shot, too?
https://www.google.com/amp/s/spectrum.ieee.org/amp/cargo-sou...
Tunnels are cool. Small tunnels maybe less cool - but one can still imagine the uses. Here’s one: put it deep enough only the DOD knows it exists and run oil pipelines without public controversy.