The Boring Company will dig a 68-mile tunnel network under Las Vegas | Hacker News Reader

The Boring Company will dig a 68-mile tunnel network under Las Vegas

arstechnica.com

19 pointsrbanffy46 comments

A light-rail or other time tested solution would be cheaper and faster.

This vanity project works in Vegas because it creates news and supports tourism.

I'm glad that people try new things even if it's more expensive at first and sometimes turns out to be a bad idea in the end.

The problems with this thing are visible at the beginning, in the planning and analysis phase.

Trying new things doesn't require that you go all the way to the end.

Tunnels are not a new thing. Making the tunnel slightly smaller is not innovation.

A light rail doesn’t have the same option to scale in three dimensions though…

But a metro does.

Does using smaller tracks and train cars suddenly mean that you can't put it in a tunnel the way we do with heavy rail or with this idiotic proposal?

Once the tunnels are there and after the company running them goes bankrupt, someone sensible can buy those tunnels for cheap and do something sensible with them. Like have an actual mass transit system.

Last I knew the Boring company wasn't making full size tunnels, but weird undersized tunnels that just barely fit a Tesla and have zero room for emergencies.

Good point. I know next to nothing about making tunnels, but I wonder how hard it is to increase the tunnel diameter after it's originally dug out.

Quite likely more time consuming, expensive and dangerous than digging entirely new tunnels if the existing ones have a lot of concrete lining, shoring, soil nails, or other structural features that must be removed as part of the process.

It is probably a major engineering project. Normally you choose a tunnel boring machine with a certain diameter and it basically drills your tunnel and seals the walls with concrete at the same time. That is a concrete layer that is built to both seal potential water/rockslides out and to not have the tunnel collapse.

That means in order to make the tunnel wider you'd have to destroy that concrete layer over the whole length and add a new one. I am not an expert, but my guess would be that drilling a new one and using the smaller one as a maintenance tunnel might be more reasonable and cheaper.

That sounds expensive and slow. And sensible. So I'm guessing the Boring Company does things differently, but I have no basis for that.

Those tunnel boring machines that dig and put the concrete etc up are super cool though

They are the fastest way to dig tunnels, their only limitation is that they can't do narrow radii.

I saw a video of one and it looked terrifying. absolutely no room, if there was a fire no one would get out

Looking forward to the future Vegas Catacombs tourism.

That is certainly the case for the existing tunnel that links the Las Vegas conference center to the hotels nearby. Its a tiny narrow one way tunnel that holds one car width. You meet the Tesla and driver from the entry point and they, slowly, drive you through the tunnel, at about 25mph. Mass rapid transit it is not.

Underground travel won't ever be feasible in Las Vegas. Believe it or not, the area's prone to flash flooding.

There is already an extensive series of tunnels under Vegas for storm runoff, and people even live in them—but when it rains it gets ugly. https://www.undercity.org/las-vegas-tunnels

I rate this as a daft waste of time PR project for a slew of reasons, many that appear elsewhere in this thread.

That said, flash floods aren't one. Done properly you can even have a tunnel with a permanent flood above it and heavy rains at both ends:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Tunnel

etc.

The time and cost to acquire the land for such a system would be enormous, if it is possible at all.

As far as I know, the monorail has been prepared to extend to the airport for years, and Fremont St is only a mile and a half away. It already runs through multiple casinos up and down the strip. Vegas has an existing mass transit system and after being constantly mystified that I can't use it to get between the strip and the airport it's a little frustrating to see so much capital poured into building a new road network directly underneath Vegas' existing overcongested road network.

A light rail on Maryland St has also been discussed [0]. I don't think the only option to improve transit options in Vegas is to dig a new, cramped road network underneath the existing one.

[0]https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/apr/16/q-a-rtc-official-ou...

Promoted comment at ars:

>The 4,500 is based on future hypothetical capacity if the Teslas were replaced with fully autonomous high capacity people movers operating at 155 mph that don't exist.

>Real world it does about 800 persons per hour with peak being around 1,300. Vehicles average around 30 mph but when considering time for loading and unloading it is closer to 12 mph.

>Yes there are routinely traffic jams in the existing tunnel even though it is a single lane going only one way with no branches or merging traffic. Pretty sure the issue is Boring failed to properly simulate how long it takes to load and unload people so the stations become backed up meaning the traffic in the tunnel backs up waiting for an open spot in the station.

That's worse than many Disney park attractions. They could take a lesson or two from their operations folks.

That requires Elon actually wanting to improve public transportation instead of kneecapping it to push more car sales.

800 per hour is an absolute failure of a mass transport system.

It’s a limited system at the moment because it’s just goes from the convention center to one hotel. They just don’t have the riders at the moment

If it ever gets up to some critical mass, Tesla will be able to design and build an ideal transportation van that increases capacity and loading/unloading time at the same time.

If the vehicles are only used in these dumb tunnels, they aren't going to need to meet all sorts of federal regulations like side impact and roof crush standards. Think of something like the Model X falcon wing doors but for the entire side of the car (just spitballing here...)

You're describing a metro..

No, I'm not.

A metro is bad. A Tesla tunnel is good.

The future Brightline station, Harry Reid Airport, the Strip, the Art District, and Downtown/Fremont St are practically in a straight line, yet the transit options in the Las Vegas area are fragmented and limited in frequency today. It's baffling to someone who lives and has lived in places with relatively good transit (San Francisco, Philadelphia, Munich, and Berlin) as better transit would be so easy to implement with existing, "boring" transit solutions.

While the idea of cars in tunnels is questionable at scale, perhaps the Boring Company tunnels could be retrofitted with automated people movers (like you see at airports) or some form of small light rail in the future.

I am for the project if it exposes the insanity of running cars in tunnels with higher demand, and then people vote to replace it with rail in the tunnels. But wouldn't it make more sense to do one of the following? - Run more frequent Deuce buses up and down the strip and send them to the airport, potentially in a dedicated lane (BRT style) - Extend the monorail to the airport, or build a cheaper rail system between the airport and the MGM monorail station with a cross-platform transfer or similar - Then build a second rail line running from the Brightline station to the airport, then running up the west side of the strip from the Mandalay Bay to the Arts District and downtown

Traffic is not solved by moving the roads underground...

Just one more lane bro, I promise it will fix traffic, come on please bro I know it will work this time

I'm genuinely surprised they're stopping at mile 68.

Lol. You know musk will do another 1.420 miles

The problem with the Boring Company is that it doesn't actually function in the "uninteresting" nature the eponym suggests. The fact that they continue ramming these underwhelming Vegas projects through without the necessary resources/planning to build something more useful than just running efficient ride-haling or buses speaks volumes.

It's like everything they build is a demo and they have to drum up PR around it. Hasn't this been continually happening for the better part of the last decade?

It would be wise to move away from the VC mentality for critical things like state/federal infrastructure.

You could say the same about musk + spacex.

At first lots of rockets falling over and mostly PR.

But now he's put up 4300+ satellites. Last month he put up 183+ satellites.

So I guess two 34 mile tunnels in the shape of a recently removed logo?

Ok but what if we made a Titan sub but with Teslas in it..

and what happens when there is a Li battery fire?

boring company = subway, but worse

I see it as more of a potentially disruptive innovation. In some ways it is obviously worse, but it is also much cheaper. They might eventually be able to keep most of the cheapness while improving the capacity partway toward large expensive systems.

Might end up very competitive in terms of capacity versus cost.

It's only cheaper because it's demonstrably worse in every way. The tunnels are too small for a proper metro, it's incredibly inaccessible, loading and unloading passengers takes forever, and in the event of an issue the safety is abysmal.

The expensive part of underground metros is not really the tunnels; stations suck up all the time and budget since they can't be done by TBM and require extensive excavation. This solution doesn't do anything to address the real problem; they need the exact same giant, expensive underground caverns a real metro would need.

Montreal just opened the first phase of 67 km of grade separated, fully automated metro that can handle 2-3 minute headways all for a price tag around $7 billion CDN ($5 billion US). The REM can handle 14,000 people per per hour; this Vegas plan can only handle 4500 in a fanciful future with vehicles that don't even exist yet. REM solves real regional transportation issues. This boring company project is just a distraction from real solutions.

We can do a cost comparison using the Montreal rail data. Montreal built 67 km for a price tag of 7 billion. The boring company is building 110 km for a price tag of $0 to the city.

If I'm doing my math right, the hyperloop is infinitely cheaper.

You can do the same analysis per passenger and you'll get the same result

The boring company could pay Las Vegas billions to install this thing and it would still be a bad deal. They are putting in awful tunnels to ruin (perhaps forever) the prospects of mass transit in what is likely the single lowest-hanging fruit currently available in the US.

The tiny tunnels can't support any real sustained people movement, so even if this system does see adoption the capacity limits are so low it won't make any real difference in Las Vegas traffic patterns. Re-constructing or modifying the tunnels into something useful will almost certainly be cost prohibitive or too dangerous to attempt (likely both). Boring company will take the most ideal route a proper system could have used, making a proper metro use either sub-optimal routing or make it so cost prohibitive the project is never approved.

If the project goes perfectly to plan Las Vegas gets a weird gadget bahn that can't ever grow beyond a weird curiosity, something they already have in their monorail. If it were in the middle of the desert in no one way then it's fine it doesn't cost the city anything. The fact it will permanently steal incredibly prime routing for a real metro is bordering on theft of a public good.

Oh dear, not using up a tiny portion of the vast Subterranean space and causing a suboptimal route.

This is just concern trolling. If the city ever gets it shit together for a real Subway, they can go 5 meters to the side.

US infrastructure is a joke

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