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Comment by kramerger | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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.

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