A pedantic review of the Las Vegas loop
computer.rip
computer.rip
Does anybody know why not? Surely the Tesla autopilot software is well capable (the routes are very simple after all). Some regulatory problem holding them back?
The said photo: https://i.imgur.com/BlIpog1.png
Come on, it's not that bad. I'd admit it looks more like a monitoring room than control room, but in term of cheapness I think it's well within typical range.
There's a bunch of stuff where both they complain about LVCC not being very much (which is true, it's their first track, and while it was much more affordable than the competing bid and has exceeded requirements, it's also super short) and also in the same post talk about how the operating room doesn't stack up to other mass transit operating rooms (yes, why would it?).
The fire safety comparisons are reasonable but I would still like to ask when people make comparisons with historic tunnel fires, for said people to actually go look up why said historic tunnel fires were so bad. Vegas Loop isn't going to be carrying trucks full of flour and margarine alongside vehicles that stop working when said goods catch on fire. Ultimately the Loop is safe largely by combination of not including the set of things that make tunnels dangerous combined with having small vehicles with good failure isolation (electric powertrains, air filtration, etc.).
Comments about capacity are also a bit weird. LVCC's capacity is more than it needs. Vegas Loop's capacity is not as large as inordinately expensive subway systems, but also it's not an inordinately expensive subway system, and its claimed capacity compares favourably to many existing rail systems across the US. Maybe it's because they misread the passengers per hour stat as a passengers per day stat? That is a big difference!
And while prices might look good for the USA (I'm not sure), they are gigantic when compared to similar projects in Europe. And a mass-transport car tunnel has exactly 0 advantages over a rail tunnel.
It is obvious that having a huge goods fire from a commercial truck that shuts down people's vehicles is dangerous; that directly leads to death and directly prevents rescue. It is obvious that having isolated, separately functioning vehicles that can drive away, and a fire from a specific, planned-for factor of an understood quantity has a comparatively low potential for causing death.
I liked the article and thought it was a fun peek deeper into the regulatory and safety manual side of things.
You attacking it for being really weird and then about how _obviously_ it is or isn't certain ways compared to historic fires in other tunnels feels forced and out of place to me.
I agree the article was fun and had charm. My criticisms were more narrow than that.
This is designed to allow owners to drive through a wildfire, for example, and in testing has performed quite well.
I would love to see a video of testing the scenario discussed here. Enclosed tunnel with poor ventilation and fire safety equipment, the car in front of you catches fire, can you just sit there perfectly fine?
I have nothing in principle against tunnels, or even these tunnels except some things which should be simple like underground stations and passing places and making the thing buttery smooth-as seem to have been lost on the expedited need to do it cheap and fast. its CAP theorem for tunnels: you can have good, or you can have cheap and fast. you can't have all three. and if you want good you can't have two of them.
The boring company is a giant con job. TBM are well understood, as is the systematic processes to make tunnels at scale. LV is one of the cheapest places to dig, London used to be because the London clay was load bearing, waterproof and provided input stock for brick building. LV is at least not stone. London has so many tunnels they have to go deeper now. The clay is warming up too. You can't run trains for 100 years without dumping thermal into the system. If you have never seen the cleaner systems in the London Tube, think about what comes out of your ear and your belly button and then scale it up 1000x and add rats.
The main critique I have echoes things others will say better: It's just wrong to make this kind of thing private. Public transport should be built by the public for the public. Now, I know there's a heap of religion built up in that, but if you want to argue for private roads, go to the outskirts of D.C. and talk to any worker who has to transit over what Macquarie Bank calls the giant american cash machine. It's just wrong to do it this way.
Musk is a conman. This is shelbyville monorail class stuff.
I live in the Washington DC area and have no idea what this refers to. Can you clarify?
Roads like the Dulles greenway. I read they had a requested 40% price hike rejected recently so maybe things have got better.
There could have been a lot of hyperbole in their position, but I think up to 5 or more roads around DC got bought by Aussie companies bankrolled by Macquarie infrastructure investment.
WV to DC doesn’t make a lot of sense … I expect the amount of West Virginians who commute to DC to be rather non existent…
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2019&...
It seems that a lot of projects decide on a diameter and then order a TBM for the expected materials that will have to be ground up [sic]. Would it be any significant savings (if you were in Great Britain for instance) to deliberately engineer your whole infrastructure design, and funding, and timeline, to use the exact same diameter as England's High Speed 2's TBM and then run that TBM after they are done with it? There must be a lot of single-use TBMs but I don't know what their builders reuse from one machine to the next.
But I believe a lot of TBM dig themselves into a not so shallow grave and stay underground: it's expensive to remove them. They drill a headway off to one side and stop like a sad loco in the thomas the tank engine books.
Anything that is of value is stripped anyway, and.. the cutting shield is lost (but... who knows, maybe not, as that needs a lot of serviceability anyway, maybe the valuable stuff is removed even from that?)
I'm no snitch but I don't think this was followed particularly well when I was there last week.
Flamethrower!? Can anyone explain what this means?
Does anybody need to know more about this whole operation?
Literally the only “innovation” is that they made the tunnels a bit cheaper by removing space for emergency egress… Apart from that, the capacity is laughable and always will be, as long as it uses cars or pods. There’s a reason the kind of transit systems that can move hundreds of thousands of people a day (in tunnels only about double the size) use trains that can fit so many people (up to 1500 per train for large systems like Crossrail in London) - with small pods you will never get the throughput with any kind of safety margin between them.
I’m all for innovation and re-thinking the conventional wisdom, but the Boring Company just didn’t actually ever seem to have any really practical ideas that would make something better than the kind of mass transit we see in Asia and Europe…
If the reports are to be believed then there was another "innovation" as well: ignoring worker safety [1].
"An investigation by the state OSHA, which Bloomberg Businessweek has obtained via a freedom of information request, describes workers being scarred permanently on their arms and legs [...] In an interview with Businessweek, one of the tunnel workers recalls the feeling of exposure to the chemicals: “You’d be like, ‘Why am I on fire?’”"
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-26/elon-musk...
And incumbent construction companies are known for being paragons of worker safety? Construction related standards make up 5 of the top 10 violated standards[1] by osha. The Boring Company might not have the best safety record, but let's not pretend "ignoring worker safety" was one of their "innovations".
If there's another company out there mutilating their workers via chemical burns to shuffle people 1.7 miles around a convention center [1], then I'll gladly bestow upon them the innovator award as well. Stating that constructing things is generally dangerous feels like something out of the PR department at the Boring Company.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240729111337/https://www.borin...
I don't think frivolity is necessarily binary — it's more of a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum you have tunnels that connect landmasses separated by massive bodies of water, and allow emergency services to operate efficiently (where the only alternative is a giant suspension bridge).
On the other end of the spectrum you have tunnels such as the LVCC Loop which help convention goers and tourists avoid what is effectively a brisk walk or bike ride (this is also largely a glorified Tesla marketing campaign).
> just like many other construction companies
I'm not sure I believe disfiguring blue collar construction workers is just standard business practice while building a small tunnel just because you posted a link stating that construction can be dangerous. Of course construction as an industry is going to be more dangerous than childcare for instance (and therefore over-represented as an industry in statistics), but that doesn't mean you waive off every accident and chalk it up to a business expense.
My original comment was "Construction related standards make up 5 of the top 10 violated standards[1] by osha.". The link contains a section called "Most frequently violated standards". I'm not sure how you came to conclusion that I thought construction industry was merely dangerous, rather than being frequent violators of safety standards.
The construction industry violates more OSHA standards than other industries because it's more tightly regulated by OSHA, which is of course because it's a dangerous industry. This is the equivalent of saying that hedge funds are overrepresented in SEC violations, or oil companies are overrepresented in EPA violations. It's almost a tautology.
The London and Budapest subways use very narrow tunnels, about the size of Musk's tunnels. Their engineering is considered anachronistic, but given the cost formulas for tunneling one wonders if planners are being short-sighted or stubborn by insisting on larger tunnels. A subway with narrow cars is better than no subway at all. But then there's probably considerations, like handicapped accommodations (i.e. large wheel chairs) that make London or Budapest-sized subway cars a non-starter today, at least in the U.S., notwithstanding that it'd likely still be far cheaper to build a narrower subway and then pay for private, on-demand road transport for those physically unable to use the subway.
Check out the December 2018 forecast costs for Crossrail [1]. 3676 million for seven stations, plus "station tunnels east", the construction of the station tunnels at Liverpool Street and Moorgate. 1708 million for running tunnels. 439 million for portals and shafts. 956 for tracks and electrics.
[1] https://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/crossrail-huge-cost...
Learning how to build more affordable, utilitarian stations, just like tunneling, is a lost skill. Like any skill, developing it requires iteration and repetition, and over time the output will become more refined. But to achieve frequent iteration will require dramatic reductions in costs.
Ignoring all the other challenges of scale, this would surely make sense because the area of a circle scales with the square of the diameter...
And the Channel tunnel probably carried more people through in its first few months than the LVCC will have transported in its first few decades.
It's a monumental flop on every possible level.
Channel Tunnel: ~$22B / 31mi ~ $700m/mi
LVCC: $47m / 1.7mi ~ $28m/mi
??
Your point is correct though, I don't see where eurotunnel can be cheaper than... Any tunnel in fact.
[edit] you could also compare total costs: 22B for the eurotunnel, 106 for the Las Vegas loop. It's around the same difference proportionally.
[edit] weirdly I can't find cost nowhere. Everywhere it is said that it cost LVC 52.5 millions to build the first 3 stations and 1.7 miles, now there is 5 stations and 2.2 miles, they upgraded all the cars and the cost is still reported as 52.5 millions. There is also no report on what cost what either, this is really obfuscated. I don't care about the exact labor/material cost, but I'd like to know if the subterranean station did cost as much as the tunnels? less? How much? What about the outside stations?
Did you find anything yourself ?
I was never interested in that company, now I find the lack of transparency baffling.
So ego and hubris.
You assert this like it's a fact. But it seems like something that could be proven wrong. I don't see any real fundamental obstacles here.
You'd need to do some engineering obviously. But it's not a particularly hard problem. Don't crash into the thing in front of you if it hits the brakes for whatever reason. That about sums up the scope of the issue.
There's probably a bit of math involved that tells you the minimum safe distance where emergency braking can still work given a certain speed. If you get humans out of the loop (which the Boring company obviously has not yet done), it's basically a function of how quickly individual pods can react to each other. Which would be measured in nano seconds probably. You should be able to get a pretty decent throughput.
The nice thing with small cheap tunnels is that you don't have to squeeze everyone just through one of them because you can have more than one going all over the place. Most subway systems are a compromise on tunnel size where you basically end up with only a few of them because they are so expensive to build.
They are literal bottlenecks because lots of people end up being funneled through a handful of stations via a small number of tunnels. By the millions.
If you've ever tried to navigate the London underground during rush hour, it's not a pleasant experience. You basically have people shuffling back to back through tunnels and being crammed into railway carriages by the hundreds.
The premise of the Boring company is very simple: digging smaller tunnels at scale is going to have economies of scale associated that means you can have vastly more of them for the same money.
I agree their execution hasn't really delivered yet. But it still could. Probably waiting/hoping for FSD to solve the problem of routing wasn't the optimal move. But that doesn't invalidate the core premise. The tunnels they've dug aren't that expensive. So that part seems to be valid.
I think it's just a safe conclusion based on some reasonable assumptions. Just to pick one as an example, Wiki tells me a NY subway train is usually 8 to 10 cars. I'll use 10 to make the math easier. They're between 15m to 23m long so I'll go with 20 and that's 200m. Capacity is around 200 people each which gives us 2000 people per train.
A model Y is 4.7m long and can seat up to 4 people. To get to 2000 people capacity you then need 500 model Y.
500 Model Y, one after the other in a straight line is 2350m so already to get to the same capacity you need 10x the space without even factoring in the fact you need to add space in beteen each and every one of those 500 cars as a safety measure.
Of course, there are other factors that preclude running Loop at 2s frequency, like station capacity and ensuing bottlenecks on ramps etc., but bear in mind there is no comparison between a train filled at crush capacity, with most people standing and smelling someone else's armpit, that you have to wait for a quarter of an hour, vs a leather seated car that takes you point to point to your destination without stopping at any intermediary station.
The point is, they are very different systems that don't compete against each other. If you need a subway and have the money for a subway, by all means, build a subway. Loop competes with light rail, and it says it can do better than most of the light rail systems in operation, at least in the US. Both its claimed pphpd and per mile cost are sufficient to be financially competitive, to the point that it can attract private capital and generate profits.
And the pphpd they demonstrated, of nearly 5000, was achieved with Tesla cars. If they manage to introduce 8-12 seaters and cracks self driving in the tunnels (a much simpler problem then full on road self driving) than it could compete with many of the less congested subway networks.
It seems very irrational not to let them demonstrate what they claim, as long as they are using their own money. It's transport capacity that does not compete with other transit options and does not capture significant urban real estate.
Typical where? Any well functioning subway system I’ve been on has a much higher frequency than that. Every 3-5 minutes.
I am certainly aware of the frequency most subways run at, that's why I clearly defined a comparable system, and later in the post underlined that Loop is not a direct competitor with subways but with above ground light rail.
I have no idea why people get triggered so easily and jump to type out a response without finishing reading the post - or, in this case, the sentence - they are replying to. It must have something to do with the compressed attention spans that come with smartphones.
The Berlin subway typically runs 4-minute and 5-minute intervals (except at the periphery) and they're seeking to upgrade it. Some more advanced systems in the world run at 2-minute or even 90-second intervals. So, by your calculation, the tunnel has the capacity of 1/4 of an old subway and 1/10 of a cutting-edge subway.
Yes, if you use it with 4 passengers Model Ys spaced 2 seconds apart. There is nothing in principle that precludes using 8-16 minibuses (2-4x increase in raw tunnel capacity) or even linking multiple such cars to form a train, building essentially a rubber tired subway.
The point is, the tunnel diameter is not limiting throughput. It's a flexible system where you can mix multiple types of vehicles with various density, comfort, price points, number of stops to destination etc. In the extreme, you can have multiple station designs, so that a limited number of larger stations can handle the multi-cart trains, on a fixed schedule and stopping in every such large station, while a small number of lower capacity stations and spurs can handle the luxury point to point cab service in Model Ys or similar that will take you from your hotel to you casino or airport.
Essentially, Loop has its own private transport infrastructure and they will search a mix of vehicle types and station designs and locations that will maximize revenue and infrastructure utilization. It's mind boggling that some call it a failure when it's only beginning to create the system and unlock the network effects.
And sure enough 5000 ppl is a far cry from 25,000 it’s rated for with mark 2 trains
Your analysis is incomplete. A moving sidewalk on the airport can move far more than 2 people per second, and needs no driver. Where is the call to revive that form of travel descried in Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" and Asimov's "The Caves of Steel"?
You are missing speed, and acceleration, and load time.
> So it's equivalent with a subway train at crush capacity running every 1000 seconds or 16 minutes.
Well-frequented London lines run with something like 2-3 minute intervals, not 16 minute intervals. And you can easily carry luggage with you, push a stroller, or roll your wheelchair on in.
> and smelling someone else's armpit
Yes, it appeals to rich people who want to use their money to avoid even minor irritations, and don't want to pay taxes to support mass transit that helps everyone. (From the link, "some press and discussion around the Loop figures it as more of a luxury option: something that casinos can comp for high rollers, that will spare people dealing with the general disaster of getting around the strip".)
But that means having an alternative for us poor stinking masses. The Loop is not that solution.
By the time the subway system gets to the crowd level you describe, a Loop-type system would be well over capacity. You'll be stuck in a line waiting for the next Tesla to arrive, surrounded by stinky people.
> was achieved with Tesla cars. If they manage to introduce 8-12 seaters
Why are they using Teslas? As the article notes, "due to their larger seating capacity and faster boarding/deboarding, the Loop would likely achieve a higher capacity if they just shifted operations entirely to the Club Cars".
With "four rows of seats", it's likely something like https://www.clubcar.com/en-us/commercial/transport/villager-... which says "A long time classic on resorts, the Villager 8 moves up to eight passengers in a single trip and can replace expensive vans. Yet it also travels narrow areas not accessible to conventional vehicles."
It seems they could easily increase capacity now by simply changing vehicle type.
Also, since the capacity numbers were achieved with Tesla cars, that means it excluded the GEM carts which the article says is uses for people with wheelchairs. That suggests the "nearly 5000" number does not include people with mobility issues, which would need to be supported under ADA requirements.
At peak capacity, even a small disturbance can greatly reduce flow.
> It seems very irrational not to let them demonstrate what they claim
The page says their claim is that the fully expanded system will target only 90k passengers per day. It seems very irrational to not draw conclusions from that.
Even if you would have the money required to build a mile of bidirectional walkways and the necessary enclosure (without which they would break down at the first rain), you still don't have the required right of way. And if you do get it, you would be completely harebrained to employ it for this project to double the walking speed of travelers, instead of, say, a BRT system, a bike or electric scooter lane etc. that are in every way superior solutions.
Loop is comparable with subways because in each case we are talking about dedicated infrastructure that does not compete in the fixed sum struggle for street space. And it's primarily a tunnel network that has very high per tunnel theoretical throughput, see for example the London subways. The exact vehicle mix that's revenue maximizing for that infrastucture is still to be determined. It could remain a luxury taxi service or it could well evolve into a rubber wheeled metro. Probably they will do both at the same time.
> Why are they using Teslas?
Because it's the minimal viable product that allow them to meet city milestones and continue to evolve the system. Developing a completely new and custom vehicle for passenger transport is a massive risk, money and time sink that will be justified only later. Golf carts won't cut it for a variety of reasons.
You do realize I'm referring to an electric walkway in a dedicated tunnel, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway lists quite a few of those, including in the several-hundred meter range, for place where "a BRT system, a bike or electric scooter lane etc." are not superior solutions.
> Developing a completely new and custom vehicle for passenger transport
Very unlikely. As the article points out, the current system already supports golf cart systems, likely as an ADA requirement.
Why do they need a new and custom vehicle? The expense of special-purpose designs is one of the reasons monorails aren't popular.
What does a Tesla demonstrate - in terms of mass transit goals, not "cool, it's a Tesla" - over a golf cart system, or golf cart train, with higher capacity and better accessibility?
It's highly unlikely they would work in tunnels, where real estate is even more constrained than at street level, and where the capital investment is substantial. Walkways are a compromise between ingress delay and wait time (at which they kick ass) vs total speed, they only make sense for relatively short runs; you just wouldn't spend tens of millions per mile to double or treble walking speed.
But it any case, once you build the Loop network, there is nothing in principle stopping you to retrofit a moving walkway into the tunnels. Your initial retort was more of a reduction ad absurdum "if we don't do this with moving walkways... then surely using Tesla is worse idea". That line of argument simply doesn't work, a system using Tesla can hit two relevant metrics (pphpd and average speed) while the walkway system can hit only one (pphdd), and the good performance on that metric for that does not make up for the latter, especially considering the eye watering costs.
The club cars are used for tunnel evacuation, they are not disabled friendly; disabled passengers are handled with a few specialty minivans. So club cars are an unsafe and low autonomy solution that can get the most people out of the tunnel in a few trips, without worrying about speed, crash rating, if the doors open etc. (they have no doors). They would certainly be unacceptable as daily drivers at 40Mph+
In those SF stories, moving sidewalks were more then 5kph. "The Caves of Steel" had parallel strips, each at a faster speed. Quoting https://archive.org/details/robotnovels0000isaa/page/10/mode... :
"He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a lifetime’s practice. Children learned to “hop the strips” as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the final sixty mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the expressway.'"
60 mph is 100 kph.
"The Roads Must Roll" had a similar design. The first version (quoting https://archive.org/details/pastthroughtomor0000robe/page/42... ) was:
"based on the ore belt conveyors of ten years earlier. The fastest strip moved only thirty miles per hour, and Was quite narrow, for no one had thought of the possibility of locating retail trade on the strips themselves. Nevertheless, it was a prototype of social pattern which was to dominate the American scene within the next two decades—neither rural, nor urban, but partaking equally of both, and based on rapid, safe, cheap, convenient transportation."
The first high-speed road went 80 mph. https://archive.org/details/pastthroughtomor0000robe/page/44... .
If we look to the moving sidewalks of now to understand the future dreams of the 1950s, then we should of course also look at the PRT systems of now to understand the problems with the Las Vegas loop.
Your assumption is that there would be just 1 tunnel instead of many. Probably because you are assuming tunnels are super expensive and that that is something that cannot improved. The premise of the Boring company was that they would be able to cut cost by some orders of magnitude by doing things at scale. They haven't yet, obviously. But that doesn't prove the basic premise wrong.
Cheap tunnels mean you could have many more tunnels between many more destinations; not all of which need to be super dense cities like New York. Which means you don't have to squeeze millions of people through a single one of them. The cheaper the tunnels, the less the capacity matters. Just add tunnels to scale if things get congested.
And of course the model Y is hardly the final answer in pod design. There's no good reason why we can't have a mix of smaller and bigger ones. In fact, using a big lump of an SUV designed for road traffic for this seems not very optimal.
A single-tunnel Boring Loop isn't competing against the 10th busiest subway, though. Even if Boring Loop were competing against New York City Subway, at $2.5B/mi you could build something like 50 parallel lanes at the same cost, and 2350m/50 is only ~50m. Space them out a bit so it's actually driveable and you're probably still ahead with Boring Loop, even assuming the trains are running full (which is not default).
Now, if you did invest enough for 50 parallel lanes you clearly wouldn't want to do 50 parallel lanes; they pack awkwardly, don't make sense to centralize that much if you design doesn't force you to, and you go from having a regulatory advantage of being able to build under city roads to a regulatory nightmare of asking to build 50 parallel lanes underground. It makes much more sense to build point-to-point connections out like a road network, and bring in more traditional mass transit where you have particularly busy connections that can't be handled with a reasonable number of lanes.
Stopping distance at 40mph is apparently around 20m (without human reaction time)
With reaction time included is about double. So you need at least another extra 40m between each car.
There’s 499 gaps between those 500 cars so that gives you an extra 20km.
So your “train” of Model Y need roughly 23.5km worth of tunnel to move 2000 people.
Doesn’t look very efficient if you ask me.
Let’s say our four passenger Teslas can be dispatched every 10 seconds into the tunnel. That’s 360 vehicles per hour, four passengers per vehicle, or 1440 passengers per hour.
Up the pod size to 20 pax and you still only have 7,200 pax per hour. Halve the safety margin to 5 seconds and you still only have 14.4K per hour, 40% of the capacity of the conventional train. And filling and dispatching 20 people per pod every 5 seconds is a pretty tricky logistics problem!
What would the London underground look like with 100x more tunnels and stations? A lot less busy in each tunnel probably. Plenty of room under London. The issue is the cost of tunneling and building these massively huge stations. Smaller could be a lot cheaper.
With your 100 tunnels you could probably just reach the capacity of the Elizabeth Line (again, just one example) but at 75x the cost...
It turns out that this is a particularly hard problem.
Oh, and if you get it wrong, people will die. In some cases, dozens of people.
My city has had and automated metro for nearly 40 years.
It’s rather easy with rail.
This isn't a real metro.
> My city has had and automated metro for nearly 40 years.
Every year, in every country, there are failures that lead to fatalities. They are, thanks to technology, decreasing.
> It’s rather easy with rail.
It takes hundreds of engineers years to safely design and implement a train control system, and it branches out with complexity. Every year, cascading failures cause serious issues.
It sounds easy. It's not.
40. Years.
So yea it is a solved problem from the perspective of living in an area with a large metro that has been fully automated for as long as I’ve been alive with very few failures and zero of these “serious issues” you think happen.
They were able to do it here with 40 year old tech, it should be easier and cheaper to do now
And it is easy when you are on rails in a controlled grade separate environment compared to automating cars/whatever Tesla is failing to do with cameras alone
And you say it’s not metro but people here are acting like the Tesla loop is “metro” and can compare/be better/cheaper then real metro by “just have multiple tunnels”
First of all, you seem to be assuming that I’m saying it’s not doable. It obviously is doable.
But you know, maybe go and read up some of the postmortems of train control systems failing.
And easy _compared to_ vision based systems? Sure! But that’s not even close to the same as “it’s easy”
> And you say it’s not metro but people here are acting like the Tesla loop is “metro” and can compare/be better/cheaper then real metro by “just have multiple tunnels”
I do not know what point you are trying to make here and I’m not sure you do either.
Your missing the point: this was a solved problem 40 years ago and Tesla has decided to reinvent what works, for less capacity, with a far more difficult problem to solve and it’s somehow better?
You called it not metro, other people in this thread are calling it a metro and it “will be better then a metro
I never said it was or wasn't unsolved. I also agree with that, and I do not understand how you could confuse what I've said as some sort of approval for Tesla. Like, I didn't say it was unsolved, just that it's a difficult problem. I didn't say their approach was good. And I sure didn't say it's better!
> You called it not metro, other people in this thread are calling it a metro and it “will be better then a metro
What? Okay? What's that got to do with me?
Like for real, you're just making stuff up in your head and getting mad at me over it, and I don't see a point of continuing this conversation if YOU'RE going to keep doing it.
...so instead of 1 tunnel with a train in it, we could achieve the same throughput with 10 tunnels with single occupancy vehicles. Brilliant! Cost savings achieved! I'm sure the math will just somehow work out that 10 tunnels is cheaper than 1.
I'm more talking about replacing 1 massive tunnel between a handful of destinations with hundreds of tunnels going to many destinations. Why stop at 10?
There is no basis whatsoever that learning effects don't apply to the business of tunneling.
And the reason why they "throw away machines" is because most of the time those are custom built based on the project and the wear and tear is substantial.
/s
For example, if you were driving on tunnel level 26 (you had to go down there because it's rush hour and the higher levels are jammed up), wouldn't it be insanely annoying to get back to a higher level? Do we have massive spiral ramps connecting each tunnel level? What about interchanges onto other directions, do you need to be on a particular level, or do you need to spiral your way up to Level 15 West Tunnel Expressway Interconnection Point to transfer to Northeast Extended Tunnel Expressway Business Loop 2A?
It’s just a separate road system with pods driven by a person or computer.
What are the significant differences?
* Take surface space that can be better used for walkable densification, or are already taken by roads.
* Produce significant atmospheric and noise pollution, even from EVs.
* Conflict at cross-traffic, especially so for dense road networks like grids.
* Have to navigate around building geography, so for example can't support high speed turns.
* Conflict with pedestrians so are limited in speed and have to support frequent stopping points.
* Have no central routing and control for journeys so suffer unbounded traffic, even where additional vehicles lower capacity.
* Are hard to add to existing developments that need additional capacity.
* Don't have out-of-line stations for on- and off-boarding.
Add to this the differences you've already mentioned, like uniform taxies rather than mixed private cars, a comparative ease of automation, and being additive to existing network capacity rather than conflicting with it.
It’s still just roads in tunnels with taxies.
I used to work for a PRT (podcar) company and for anything up to a large commuter train or major New York subway, compared seat-mile for seat-mile the networks of small vehicles are just as efficient as most urban transit. And then as a bonus you get no-transfer, direct point-to-point commutes. Even the loading and unloading is comparable between them for stadium event traffic.
This tells us exactly why Elon shouldn't be making any decisions affecting public/critical infrastructure.
It's worse than a subway in every possible way. And it will always be worse than a subway in every possible way, because cars are an extremely inefficient way of carrying people around. You can make a train with more private space per passenger than a car and still fit way more people in one than in the equivalent amount of car. There will never be a way to make cars as economical as trains, for very very very basic geometric reasons.
This is just factually false. LVCC was something like 4x cheaper than its competing non-subway bid and something like 20-30x cheaper than just the amortized cost per mile of subway in the US. Subway also ages to construct in the US.
It's still much more expensive to operate, per passenger.