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Comment by manuelabeledo | Hacker News Reader

These are Tesla Loop tunnels.

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.

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That people think a city should ban a company from building underground transit without even letting them try when the alternatives are robustly known to be almost literally (if not just literally) too expensive, too slow, and too encumbered to build, is exactly why transit is too expensive, too slow, and too encumbered to build. It shocks me to no end how much people want to shoot themselves in the foot.

What alternatives are you talking about? We know a subway would be significantly better than what they’re building now.

How much would a 68 mile subway under Vegas cost?

Probably marginally more than a 68 mile tunnel system for cars?

> The US has a range of subway construction costs of $600 million to $2.6 billion per mile. The US median price cluster is $800 million to $1 billion per mile.

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.

A modern 68-mile subway system under Vegas would cost probably $100 billion. LA just expanded its subway system for $1 billion a mile. In comparison, the Boring Company did the 1.7-mile Las Vegas Convention center tunnel for a $47 million fixed price.

Really? It seems totally reasonable to think that a failed solution is actually worse than no current solution. For example, are these tunnels going to be an obstacle if the city decides to build a real subway someday? Is a failure here going to destroy public appetite for "similar looking" projects? Can the people behind this project be trusted to build it in such a way that it doesn't become a death trap and strain on emergency services?

There are a variety of totally legitimate reasons not to let just anyone try to do something like this.

Is this an alternative, though.

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...

To pick just one point, vis a vis Brandolini's law,

> 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.

You ignored the lifespan of a train vs a Tesla vehicle. Maintenance is also a big cost factor. You can run a train for decades with very low maintenance costs, which is just not true for a car fleet. Your average car would suffer from some critical, perhaps non-repairable condition, at 300,000 miles. Train cars last for decades.

> 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.

Train maintenance is not cheap.

It is cheaper to maintain one train, than the equivalent number of cars.

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.

It's a bit amusing the city doesn't even think it will happen but is just approving it because all of the destinations told them to.

> 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,”

I don't believe the 1.2M number for a second.

Go try it yourself, or watch the videos people have uploaded.

Why would one or two arbitrary trips be indicative of an aggregate?

You can quickly see the inefficiency of the whole idea compared to public transportation

It's cars. Underground. How could you design a less efficient system? Unicycles driven by domesticated bears towing a fisher price cart?

Waiting for a large train that only carries a few people not quite to their destinations is pretty inefficient.

A train or bus that only carries a few people is not really a problem. Because labor costs are the majority of public transit operating costs not vehicles it makes sense to use the largest vehicle everywhere. Using minibuses or smaller train cars just means you get capacity issues during rush hour and you can't standardize on one vehicle.

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.

Absolutely. Small capacity vehicles make no sense if they contain a human driver.

1.2m over two years is 1640 people/day average. It looks like there are four operational stations, so 410 people/station/day?

Is that really hard to believe? It’s shockingly low for public transit but seems an easy bar to clear.

The video linked in another comment here said that she had been trying to film it for a year, but they only run the loop when there is an event going on at the convention center. Seems like that ought to depress the numbers massively.

Just to give a sense of how bad 1.2 million people over two years is: the NYC subway system carries significantly more people than that per day.

Those numbers aren’t possible literally anywhere else. Silver line phase II extension carried about 1.1 million people over six months. That’s the marquee project of the DC metro system—the only thing it has focused on building over the last decade (to the detriment of the rest of the system). Boring Company’s little demo carried a meaningful fraction as many passengers as that $3 billion dollar, decade-in-the-making transit project.

Is it a meaningful fraction? What is the theoretical daily capacity of the Boring Company tunnels vs. the DC silver line extension? Even at this meager capacity, we’ve already heard reports of traffic in the tunnels.

The theoretical capacity doesn’t matter because Silver Line ridership doesn’t come anywhere near capacity.

Why are we comparing a system that just has 4 stops on the Las Vegas Convention Center campus plus one at a nearby hotel to the much much much larger entire NYC subway system?

Sure, let's compare it per station. According to Wikipedia, NYC has 5.2 million daily riders and 472 stations [1] for an average of 11,000 riders per station per day — over 26x more than the Las Vegas Loop stations have been accommodating. Even if you adjust for population differences (LV ~600k, NYC ~8m) the Las Vegas Loop does significantly worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_New_York_City_Subway_s...

That still seems questionable to me because they are completely different kinds of systems.

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.

The MetroRail will cost at least $10B. For ~100X the cost, I certainly hope it's more useful.

The current line did not cost $10B.

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/project-connect-light...

That's the planned Project Connect, not the current line.

Even privately owned, there's the problem that whatever tunnels they do build are going to be in the low hanging fruit and in the way of building actual subway systems in the future if a sensible transport policy starts.

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