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Comment by ozten | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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...

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

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?

But a metro does.

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