Las Vegas approves 68 miles of underground transportation tunnels
reviewjournal.com
reviewjournal.com
Outside somewhere like New York, a cheap low capacity system that goes more places is better than a high capacity subway that doesn’t go anywhere.
Your point still stands that America's approach to infrastructure (and underground in particular) is costly; however, those costs are not nearly as bad outside of major metropolitan cities. Underground work in the Vegas area is relatively inexpensive in my experience (I have worked on underground projects in all three of these locations within the last decade).
You could build a much smaller subway network. But at that point, the value proposition of the network in a sprawling city like Las Vegas evaporates. (Especially in a city as hot as Los Vegas, where long walks from subway stations to destinations will be miserable.) Baltimore is much denser than Las Vegas, and the one underground line has a ridership of just 2 million people annually. Limited subway networks that don’t go anywhere are worthless.
I find it entirely plausible that NYC would take on $750 billion in infrastructure projects over half a century. Hell, if NYC were to attempt to build their own subway network again using the Second Ave. number (and conceding that it's inflated), it would take nearly $5 TRILLION dollars. Handicap that number for the inflated cost and we're still looking at NYC having already spent multiples of the amount you are asserting NYC would equivalently have to take on on a project-to-project basis with this.
As to the rest of your post, I agree - this proposed 68 mile tunnel system in a place that lacks the requisite urban density for public transit efficiency will have limited ridership and will be worthless, if it's ever completed. More likely it will be abandoned partway through and will only serve to become a literal obstacle to future tunnels/development.
The NYC MTA spends $7 billion a year on capital expenditures, not $15 billion. Most of that is maintenance, not expansion. No transit system can spend anything close to 100% of their budget on expansion over that time horizon. So your $1 billion a year is probably more like $2 billion accounting for maintenance. That is more than the entire Las Vegas budget.
Perhaps a regular metro would suit Las Vega better, but if that's out of reach why not give this a shot? It's Las Vega after all.
Experimentation with alternatives is desperately needed.
They are electric and can start at street level and dig themselves down.
https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock
https://www.construction-europe.com/news/6-ways-tunnel-borin... -evolving/8026001.article
For example, what Boring Company is doing has already been done in the extreme limit: Herrenknecht sells a vertical shaft boring machine that is essentially a TBM turned 90 degrees. https://www.herrenknecht.com/en/products/productdetail/verti...
This one is reported as no cost to the city.
Public transportation systems all over the country currently have huge budget gaps because ridership keeps going down.
Meanwhile, this provides 68km of low throughput transport to the city, for the public price of zero.
This is really making good the enemy of the perfect. Especially When the general public doesn't agree on the perfect, or want to pay for it.
The pandemic basically destroyed ridership in a lot of places. Boston--both the subway and the commuter rail--have crept back up to "only" being about 30% below pre-pandemic levels (and has probably been impacted by some disruptive long-deferred maintenance as well). But one of the consequences is reduced schedules which makes public transit relatively less attractive.
COVID and remote work did this. Might be less of a concern for a captive tourist audience. A line to the airport and 4-5 big intersections or attractions could be pretty effective.
That seems incredibly high. My city in France just finished building a new subway line and the cost was ~100 million € per km (170 million $ per mile)
Not sure why there's an order of magnitude difference?
https://gothamist.com/news/cost-of-second-ave-subway-extensi...
Somewhat related: New York metro unveils $30M staircase
https://nypost.com/2022/05/16/mta-unveils-stunning-30m-stair...
only slightly less egregious, BART completes $41 million pedestrian bridge:
--- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#Deep-level_...
Vegas hyperloop was <30 million per mile, so somewhere between 3% and 0.6% the cost per mile.
Reportedly, in this expansion, private companies will carry the entire cost.
At the end of the day The boring company seems to be able to avoid these high costs using a combination of their technology, simplified goal, and business approach while nobody else has been able to bring costs down for a large tunnels in the US.
It would be great if someone could figure out how to bring large Tunnel cost down in the US, but until someone does, smaller tunnels costing a few percent of the cost have a competitive advantage.
My understanding is that the problems driving large tunnel construction costs in the US are driven by a shortage of labor expertise, Labor bloat compared to other countries, and institutional inability to manage large projects and avoid scope change.
This understanding is not correct. America's tunneling cost problem is driven by labor costs, unions, politics, and third party litigation. The institutional inability to manage large projects is a result of the latter three of these: the people in charge when the contract is signed are often not the people in charge when the job is half completed, and that change in leadership leads to scope changes that should (justifiably) be paid for.
I agree third party litigation warrants highlighting, but I consider that as part of institutional inability to manage large projects.
Likelwise, I see high labor costs and unions as equavalent to lack of skilled labor and bloated labor costs.
At the end of the day, we are saying the same thing. Cost of workers is higher, the US uses far more workers, and the US legal and political systems are not condusive to efficient execution.
For example, the labor shortage impacts all construction in America but tunnels require even more specialized laborers. Unions drive up the cost of all construction in America, but specific unions (like the Sandhogs) have specific provisions in their contracts that drive up the cost even more. Scope changes impact all construction, but scope changes underground cost orders of magnitude more than surface scope changes (add an offramp above ground versus add an offramp underground). Third party litigation impacts all construction, but the nature of tunneling increases the risk of third party litigation because settlement/sinkholes can occur vast distances away from the work.
Where I disagree is that the boring company is approach minimizes the magnitude and impact of these challenges.
For example, if the project scope isn't dictated by politicians, it is less susceptible to political whims and scope changes.
If the project scope is smaller, the we all challenges will be fewer. If the tunnels are smaller, service requirements are lower.
It would be interesting to know the boring company uses union labor or not.
I'm not sure what you mean by service requirements for a tunnel, but I assume you mean maintenance. Maintenance requirements for tunnels are only tangentially related to diameter once the final lining is in place, it is mostly driven by length. Realistically there is only so much maintenance that can happen for a tunnel or for any underground structure from the structural perspective since you can't look outside of the tunnel from the inside. So you overdesign. Maintenance requirements thus amount to visual inspections of the inside and maintenance of appurtenant mechanical/electrical systems. These mechanical/electrical systems become more reliable and more efficient with relation to tunnel diameter, and so your maintenance requirements actually decrease on an aggregate basis (i.e. - a tunnel that can support 2 lanes of traffic is less costly to maintain than 2 tunnels that support 1 lane of traffic).
And the idea that anything ran by Elon Musk is not susceptible to whims and scope changes is laughable.
I was first asking why they thought small tunnels are better, is that purely on financial grounds? Low cost, low benefit.
The primary advantages over a subway are:
1. They're point-to-point, requiring no stops between origin and destination
2. They integrate with the existing road system, allowing point-to-point transportation even between destinations where the tunnels don't run
3. They're compatible with existing electric cars, allowing owners to take their own private vehicles directly to their destination without needing to transfer between cars or share a space with strangers
4. Small tunnel diameter reduces the cost vs larger subway tunnels
Of those points, only #4 got implemented in the Vegas loop and even that is debatable. Plus a lot of other important features like automated driving and dedicated mass transit vehicles got left out, which greatly reduces the ridership capacity of the tunnels compared to what they theoretically could support.
Build a subway! High volumes of people get moved very efficiently. Moving small numbers of people in personal vehicles is a terrible idea. Flexibility is a bad feature here.
The strip is basically a walking area like a theme park, except that it’s cut down the middle by an eight lane road and supplemented with overpasses. Cars get priority over people, who ironically mostly don’t have a car while they’re on vacation in Vegas.
This is an avenue that’s already served by frequent double decker buses. The ridership volume is there at least for a light rail tram system.
Let’s say I’m staying at circus circus and I’m seeing a show at the MGM grand.
It’s an hour walk, 24 minute bus ride plus the wait for the bus (15 minutes divided by 2 on average), or a 12 minute drive.
The Vegas monorail exists but it isn’t anywhere near the actual street where the pedestrians are, and the station locations are so far from where you want to be that you might as well walk.
Therefore, if I’m a typical tourist I’m taking an Uber or a taxi for this trip.
That’s why the strip has so many lanes of traffic. I’m incentivized to get in a car and I haven’t even left the “theme park” boundaries.
Tesla announced it wants to make high-passenger-count commercial EVs (akin to vans and buses):
https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
EVs that carry 8, 12, or more passengers (perhaps by chaining the EVs) would significantly increase the efficiency and throughput of these tunnels.
And then there's a big question mark on self-driving, which, if achieved, would significantly improve the economics.
That would make the whole thing even dumber than I firstly thought.
I honestly cannot believe that a city would give permission to build such a pyrrhic public transportation system, even if it is privately owned. From the article:
"The convention center loop has been operational for about two years and has seen 1.2 million passengers over that span. The highest daily capacity of the system during that time is 32,000 riders."
The similarly planned Austin MetroRail has a yearly passenger volume of ~500,000, but at least it is more useful than this.
There are a variety of totally legitimate reasons not to let just anyone try to do something like this.
Loops don't provide the same capacity, frequency, or efficiency, of the underground train. For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Another thing is that Tesla tunnels are completely bare, with pretty much zero safety and accessibility measures [0]. Tesla build them in Vegas because it is a dry, mostly stable environment. This would be a complete disaster pretty much anywhere else in the world.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/22/review-of-elon-musks-dc-to...
> For starters, the cost of Tesla vehicles needed to transport the same number of people as a train, with the same life span, would be prohibitively expensive.
Some quick math:
> ...the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) plans to spend $3.686 billion in the order. The contract is split into three parts: R211A, R211S, and R211T. The majority of the 535-car base order will comprise 440 R211A cars...
$3.686B / 535 cars / 30 seats/car ~ $230k/seat.
Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty. And anyway,
$3.686B / 535 cars / 240 sardines/car ~ $29k/sardine.
If there's an advantage to train cars here, it's not as obvious as you state. Maybe the cost of mass produced road cars is somehow worse, but it's certainly not obviously worse enough to make the project illegal over.
> Of course, you can sardine people into trains more than you can squeeze people into cars, but we've ignored the cost of rail, larger tunnels, and large underground stations needed to run subways, and cars can handle load variance more cheaply than trains, which often run near-empty.
It seems that you are really concerned about personal space, but anyway.
"Larger" tunnels and stations are needed for several reasons, one of them being able to handle passenger volume and accessibility. What you are saying is, essentially, that underground train infrastructure is "more expensive" because it is just better: it can handle more passengers, has to comply with safety regulations, and needs to be accessible.
Simply put, there is no way a Tesla car would run 30+ years without having to replace batteries and motors several times.
If an average Tesla car would run for, say, 1 mile per minute, and kept it for 12 hours a day (nothing unusual for an average train line), that would average to over +500,000 miles in less than two years. These cars would definitely need to be fully rebuilt or replaced, and I'm not even counting interior wear and tear.
68 miles would cost the city around $50B, if past trends hold true. Contra, Vegas Loop is being fully covered by private funds.
In defense, one subway mile is likely worth more than one Loop mile.
> Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman isn’t sure the project will ever come to fruition, but voted in favor of the extension anyway, due to the urging of the various resorts and other entities in downtown.
> “I am one who just does not believe will come to be, certainly not in my lifetime,”
Go try it yourself, or watch the videos people have uploaded.
Is that really hard to believe? It’s shockingly low for public transit but seems an easy bar to clear.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_s...
The NYC system is serving an entire city with stops near a large number of businesses of all kinds. It's a system that almost anyone in the city might have reason to use.
The LV system has stops at just two businesses (four at the convention center and one at a nearby hotel). It's a system that is only useful to people who need to move between locations at the convention center or between the convention center and that one hotel.
You are right that public transit does not go door to door. Riders are expected to walk a block to the nearest station. If a transit system tries to replicate taxi service it would be too expensive or would really inflate waiting times for a ride.
The whole premise of cities is efficiency through collaborative infrastructure. It's really wild how badly we do it.
It... what? How do you get from the six sentence linked article to that?[1].
Can't it just be a silly boondoggle? I mean: how does public funding of transportation infrastructure (however silly) even remotely follow from "hyperindividualism"?
[1] I mean, I know how you got there. It's got nothing to do with tunnels and everything to do with how fun it is to hate the nutjob that runs the tunnel company.
When Tesla decides they don't care about it any more, then the tax payer becomes responsible. This is the classic "public-private partnership" where the responsibilities and liabilities are on the tax payer while the profits and power are privatized.
It's a raw deal. The most famous example of how this works is Conrail, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail
It was initially private until it couldn't be profitable and then it became public until it was profitable because the public stewardship was trying to do a service and not simply milk the consumer, then they privatized it again when it was profitable.
So when it loses money it's our responsibility when it makes money it's their benefit and we don't see any of it.
It's totally insane but we have ideologies that demand it to be this way so that's what we get
For example when LAX, which is government controlled by the city of Los Angeles, was expanding in the 1950s on up to today, all of the costs of expanding the airport were not controversial up to where it's now servicing 100,000 people daily.
You know what was controversial? Public transit there. Building an airport that can fly in and out 100,000 people was not expensive, was not complicated, was not some huge cost for the taxpayer.
Those adjectives were not assigned to that project.
However the idea of putting a train there, that is complicated, that is expensive and that is a huge cost to taxpayer because people have decided to use those adjectives there.
And that's the only reason.
Here's another example. Cincinnati built a 400 million dollar sports stadium on the tax dollars dime.
When it wasn't profitable they ended up having to sell off hospitals and raid their savings. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ohio-county-stadium-debts-cin...
The stadium didn't get assigned the adjectives that say a 400 million park or housing project would have gotten, regardless of the fact that a 400 million dollar housing project would have far more predictable revenue and wouldn't lead to the city being forced to sell off hospitals.
No that would have gotten the adjectives complicated difficult expensive and all those other negative modifiers because of the underlying ideologies. Those adjectives are assigned to reflect the ideological commitments
I wrote a related article about this 6 years ago
https://kristopolous.medium.com/public-private-partnerships-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37048877
This is not about principles or ideology, just self-interest re: how to deploy political/actual capital imo in all directions. Public infrastructure projects are expensive and the benefits of them are not evenly distributed and that's why the fights over them are so intense these years, now that the country is more mature and billions of dollars of wealth are potentially in the balance every time one comes up.
Lots of subsidies and bailouts go swiftly to very specialized interests without such public grumblings. It's happened multiple times in the past 15 years on the scale of trillions
Parks, community college and library funding, which is public and ostensibly for everyone, are under far more scrutiny than say, the billions in subsidies to Amazon, which you probably didn't realize existed.
Under your hypothesized system, free healthcare, preschool, generous maternity leave, free college, these would all be easy victories.
They are not because of an ideology of hyperindividualism and a dogmatic commitment to an amorphous ideology called "the free market" which is seen as so sacrosanct and holy that some people get wobbly knees and raise an accusatory finger if someone has the gall to dare to question whether the current cowboy capitalism peddled under the label "free market" is actually a good idea.
The insanity of fundamentalism has invisibly inserted itself into our daily life by Tartuffian free marketeers who suckle the public teet.
The analysis of reality fails your proposed tests. The ones I've suggested map to reality more faithfully without any rationalizing or circuitous logic required.
You can believe whatever you want. Some beliefs, however, are more accurate than others
The long term ROI may be huge economically and environmentally, but that’s far to abstract to motivate most people.
I am more interested if the Boring's TBM technology actually dig any faster.
He's starting from the other way around, sell snake oil to corpos and politicians, get all the bureaucracy out of the way, and then take his sweet ass time to actually deliver.
In our current system, this is the best way. Example, in Toronto our politicians literally spent a decade and half debating, approving, then disallowing, then commissioned studies for a ~10 mile long subway line.
That's even before taking into account safety issues they have had. Consider all the idiots you see on the highway, now think about what would happen if there was no way to go around them
> As a point of reference, less than 20 miles of underground subway tunnel has been constructed in the United States in the last 20 years.
The most important point of their design should not be thought of as it being express transport, though it is, nor anything special about their throughput, though it's competitive — it's just that underground transit is good, the regulatory environment is bad, and Teslas-in-tunnels is about the least encumbered way of making it happen.
Happy to be corrected, my numbers are best-effort.
[a] https://www.tesla.com/ns_videos/Tesla-Master-Plan-Part-3.pdf
https://www.casino.org/vitalvegas/vegas-loop-experiences-mul...
If it’s privately funded, I don’t think the foolishness of this plan can do a lot of long-term damage to the city.
“It’s not like a subway where you stop at a bunch of stops along the way,” said attorney Stephanie Allen, of law firm Kaempfer Crowell, who spoke on Boring Company’s behalf. “It goes directly from Point A to Point B and saves a lot of time in doing so.”
Maybe it could work in Vegas, given how unwalkable it is, and how many people are there without cars, looking to move from a specific resort to a specific resort for shows/dining etc.
First reaction: it isn't that high, but it's interesting.
Second reaction, after looking at the pictures and where the cars can stop and take passengers: filthy liars.
I cannot take this seriously.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs&ab_channel=Thund...
Novelty services that serve tourists going to the convention center don't move the needle on daily users being able to get rid of cars and the car lifestyle unless they can rely on the system at all hours.
Even 20/6 means you still need a car.
those life boat seats look uncomfortable!
Can we please invent cost effective low-speed maglev trains.
China is moving in the right direction: https://youtu.be/9u4lG0HuICg
> China is moving in the right direction: https://youtu.be/9u4lG0HuICg
This looks like it has all the advantages of a traditional train, with all the disadvantages of maglev.
Yes, faster, quieter, and smoother.
People will give up their cars when mass transit is faster and more convenient.