Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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That's not a good take at all. The author tries to make out as if Elon Musk is nothing more than a crony capitalist, pointing out that SpaceX has $15B in govt contracts. This conveniently ignores the reason SpaceX has those contracts in the first place, which is because they have consistently been the best available supplier to NASA/DoD/etc.

You can contrast what SpaceX has been delivering with Falcon and Starship vs what Boeing has been delivering with Starliner to get a tiny glimpse into how silly a claim it is that Musk is doing this to gift himself government contracts. Or compare how little the other billionaire-funded space company (Blue Origin) has delivered, even though they were actually founded before SpaceX. Musk doesn't need to (somehow) give his company a leg up via DOGE, his company is already the best provider available by a huge margin.

From there, the author says:

> consider the track record of Musk’s Boring Company, which is responsible for several of the worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles of the past few years.

In what sense is that true, even a tiny bit? TBC delivered the Las Vegas loop first phase for a cost of $31M per mile, which is significantly cheaper than what anyone else is digging tunnels for. A significant portion of that is station cost, which obviously becomes much less of the overall cost if you build longer tunnels. They completed this project in about 15 months. This was their first real project, before they had much opportunity to iterate on TBM designs (which if you look at the history of SpaceX, iteration speed is clearly a strong point in favor of Musk-led companies).

You can compare that to Cali's high speed rail project, which has a Phase 1 projected cost of $106.2B for 494 miles of track, which works out to $215M per mile, and that's not even a tunnel. They began in 2015 (before TBC was even incorporated) and there is not yet a single mile in operation.

The arguments about the relative costs of the Las Vegas tunnel versus the cost of the CA rail project are interesting. You mention that the bulk of the cost is actually in the stations, yet tell us the per mile cost. How many fully accessible stations integrated with existing transport infrastructure are to be built on the high-speed rail project? The Vegas tunnel is currently unidirectional isn’t it? That would be less useful for the high speed rail project. It’s a bit different to consider a largely pleasure route which can largely be routed anyway from a transport project which is much less restricted in where it can be routed. A rail project has additional costs and complexities like laying track and signalling. I’ll assume your argument is that these are unnecessary, we can just use existing autonomous cars to solve this. In which case might we be better comparing cost by passenger throughput rather than per mile.

The LVCC Loop is bi-directional – it has two tunnels, one for each direction. I'd say the main reason routing is less of an issue for the loop is not because it is "leisure" (strange phrasing, the LVCC Loop is also public transit) but because it is an underground tunnel, which is kinda the point – tunnels have significantly less issues with routing assuming you can get the digging cost to be much cheaper than status quo, which is the purpose of TBC (and so far I'd say they have demonstrated significant progress in this goal).

Definitely agree that a high-speed rail project and an electric car ferry tunnel project are not apples-to-apples comparable, my point is rather that even if you want to call TBC projects "boondoggles" (which again I struggle to see how that is the case even in isolation), the idea that you'd call them boondoggles in the presence of municipal infrastructure projects like CAHSR betrays incredible prejudice (or myopia) on the part of the author.

I stand corrected on the directional nature.

By routing I mean that the choice of destinations for the first phase at least is less constrained than what would it’s possible with a high-speed rail project connecting existing cities. Leisure isn’t the best phrase I agree but for example there is a difference between the ridership of the San Francisco cable car versus the buses and light rail of the Muni. I am not saying that people do not commute on the cable car but I would expect the vast proportion of riders are not commuters. I’m but sure how else to phrase that.

By and large I don’t know that have any disagreement with ether the original comment or the reply. I agree completely that we have to be careful when comparing a high-speed rail project to the Las Vegas loop. Whatever your opinion of the former

The Vegas loop is also connecting existing infrastructure, not sure why that would be less constrained in terms of destination than any other public transit project.

Again though, the reason I was comparing the two is because The Boring Company delivered what they promised on budget and in 15mo, which to me sounds like a success story, not one of the "worst municipal infrastructure boondoggles in recent years", especially when compared to CAHSR which is about a decade behind and $80B (or 250%) over budget (so far).

This in turn is why, in my judgement, the response posted by the davidw is not a "good take".

It's really an apples to kiwis comparison. The California project is certainly worth studying for how far off the rails it's gone, but the LV stuff is a toy project that's not really going to solve any real transportation problems long term.

Where it's really at in terms of learning how we could do better is to study places like Spain that are building the Madrid metro as well as long distance, high speed trains for relatively low prices. It's a thorny problem and it's not just "stuff costs less in Spain in general".

But what we'll get is more of this huckster selling us flashy stuff and not delivering, as well as California continuing to not deliver either.

> more of this huckster selling us flashy stuff and not delivering

But... the LVCC loop has literally been delivered? They are continuing to build it out and more stations will be opened in the very near future. You might want to take a step back and ask if bias is clouding your judgement at all.

Moving people around in automobiles underground is a fun Disney-esque ride, but not a serious transit system.

No True Scotsman.

If busses are from Glasgow and trains from Edinburgh, then that loop thing is indeed from Tahiti.

https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/teslas-in-tunnels-i...

https://san.com/cc/vegas-loop-faces-numerous-trespassers-and...

Think about the capacity of an automobile vs a bus or a subway with several cars.

I'm too busy thinking about the capacity of nothing at all, which is zero.

Are the costs for the loop based on phase one or do they also include the planned extensions of the system? How many different land owners were involved in this phase? How well does the loop integrate with existing public transport infrastructure?

The loop is being extended as we speak, I'd expect more stations to open up in the next few months. Not sure how much existing public transport infrastructure Las Vegas has, but I would expect connecting anything available would be desirable for everyone involved. To my knowledge a lot of the stations are being paid for by casinos/hotels who want to be connected to the network. I assume if the city of LV wants further connection points, TBC will be happy for to build those too.

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