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Boring Company Will Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network
- robohydrate 4y agoWhy can't they just build tracks and have trains running through this network of tunnels?
- bannedbybros 4y ago[dead]
- s1artibartfast 4y agoThe tunnels are a very different design than those used for trains
- mjhay 4y agoYes, much dumber and with poorer safety standards.
- jcranmer 4y agoThe tunnels are built too small to run trains in them.
- ianburrell 4y agoThe Las Vegas tunnel is 12ft diameter. The London Underground deep-level tube diameter is 11ft 8in. Underground is considered too small but is possible to run trains in tunnel that small. Plus, Las Vegas doesn’t need heavy rail but some light rail or pods would work well.
- lm28469 4y agoPublic transportation is for peasants and communists, don't you know
- advaer 4y agoThere are dozens of other US cities with trains running through tunnels, and they all operate at a loss. Why not try something new?
- bingaling 4y agothis is a pr/lobbying/marketing expense to delay train investment and sell cars, silly .. the purpose of these is to sell cars over trains
- brookst 4y agoHow dare a carmaker do that!
- ahoy 4y agoi think its bad when the private auto manufacturer prevents public infrastructure from being built, personally.
- brookst 4y agoWhy shouldn't everyone present their best case? Are you saying that no private company should compete with public services? I love transit and dislike car culture. But I find it hard to fault a car company for trying to present their product as a solution.
- ahahahahah 4y agoThe Boring Co isn't a carmaker.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoTrains tracks tend to be designed so that the trains must stop at each station, something that can add plenty of time to a trip. Ideally, the smaller cars/scooters/whatever can load and unload out of the main pathway making it possible for every trip to be non-stop.
- citrusybread 4y agothere's no passing lanes here. you can also run express services with rail.
- xhkkffbf 4y agoUh, it's not about the passing lane on the road. It's about the station. The passing happens at the stations. The car gets out of the way while people load and unload. That's the ideal design. Sharing a train or bus just forces everyone to stop at everyone's stop along the way.
- micwag 4y agoCurrently living in Switzerland, here they just use railroad switches. So express trains can run uninterrupted while e.g. another train is on a separate track in the station.
- jcranmer 4y agoThe actual practice behind metrorail and PRT operation, not to mention the actual operation of the system here, puts some lie to the theory you're working under. When you design a system so that vehicles have to shunt to and from a station, you strongly limit the capacity of the system by that shunting system. Unbranched metrorail lines can reach 45TPH in normal operation, while branched lines do worse, and systems with heavy reverse branching (splitting from one line to rejoin another, NY's and DC's systems do this something fierce) struggle to get 24TPH. PRTs get better headways because they're smaller vehicles, but they're not really any better than a standard highway lane in the best case (which is beaten out by just about any other rapid transit system in existence). If you look at the station design here, it's phenomenally bad from a throughput perspective. They appear to be using low sedans (which mean people take longer to get in and out of their seats compared to typical trainsets or buses). Furthermore, the parking spots are angled parking, which requires the cars to back into the travel lane to exit the station, backing up even traffic trying to "express" through the station. There are honest-to-god traffic jams on this system at even moderate capacity events. (Compare this with subway stations, where the station being at crush capacity utilization leads to trains skipping the station until it clears out; that's harder to do in this system.)
- guardiangod 4y agoTracks are expensive. Railcars are very expensive.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoI really hope this is successful. If we can automate delivery of goods, above ground roads could have a much longer lifetime as heavy truck damage could move underground.
- throwway120385 4y agoMaybe we could even build really long multi-trailer trucks with big diesel-electric engines. We could then use these trailer "trains" to move lots of goods over long distances economically.
- scottyah 4y agoMaybe we can even spend trillions of dollars and displace thousands of people for every mile! It also seems safe to run these things fast with dangerous chemicals, nothing bad could happen
- throwway120385 4y agoThat's a great idea! And then if we spill anything in the tunnels we can just set it on fire.
- mjhay 4y agoThen you'd have to repair the asphalt underground, at greater expense. What's the point? The hyperloop is one of the dumbest transport projects to ever be built.
- ianburrell 4y agoIt is important to distinguish between the Hyperloop, the long distance vacuum tube, and Loop intra-city tunnels. They are very different and they are both stupid.
- mjhay 4y agoAh yes, I got those confused. I'm sure the naming is deliberate to conflate a dumb and non-exciting idea with a dumb but exciting idea.
- brianbreslin 4y agoWhy can't they put electric vans or buses in these tunnels? shuttling everyone in 4 person cars seems inefficient... Lay down a track, and they can be autonomous very easily (compared to relying on tesla self driving tech)
- ahoy 4y agomusk's companies do this precisely in part because it's inefficient. By lobbying hard against good transit infrastructure and building flashy but sucky alternatives, they lock in dependance on their product, automobiles.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoLobbying against transit succeeded long before Musk was born.
- red-iron-pine 4y agoGM made that happen in the 1950s and 60s.
- guardiangod 4y agoTesla doesn't have an EV platform designed for vans. Musk said (if you believe his words) that's one of the goals.
- otabdeveloper4 4y ago> Let's reinvent the subway but call it an "electric van" so that Americans don't feel squeamish. This is comedy gold.
- jandrese 4y agoBecause Tesla is a car company. Literally, they only things they currently build are sedans, a crossover, and a handful of semi-developmental semis. They're building factories as fast as they can and still can't keep up with demand. Plus you have that corporate "synergy" with everybody using the self driving tech to produce more test data, although enclosed single lane tunnels populated only by self driving vehicles should be a trivial use case for it. In some ways using Teslas as the cars is nice. If the system is lightly loaded the waiting time is always short. There's no "waiting for the next train/bus to arrive". The downside is that if it gets busy the system doesn't scale well, maximum capacity is low, but that's a future problem and it is trivial for Tesla to swap out the cars with higher capacity vehicles once they are building them. One of the nice things is that the per-car cost is far lower than it is for a train car (which typically cost on the order of $2 million[1] each), and the cars can be sold on the secondary market to make back some of the capital costs. The secondary market for metro cars is far smaller. [1] https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last-of-its-7000-series-rail-cars/ https://wamu.org/story/20/02/27/metro-just-received-the-last...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mritun 4y agoThese are uniduct tunnels. There’s no emergency exit. Any fire in these tunnels will be a disaster. nb. In tunnels, the smoke kills.
- fooker 4y agoHow is this working out for planes?
- electroly 4y agoTake a look at the number of deaths from smoke inhalation in any plane crash report, and that's with emergency exits. That's people who survived the actual crash and died from the fire. A fire in a plane is indeed a disaster. Fortunately, planes don't crash nearly as often as cars do.
- 0_____0 4y agoReally well, thanks for asking. It's amazing what a culture that takes safety extremely seriously, and has pragmatic systems in place to learn from incidents, can produce. Commercial air transport is THE safest mode of transportation in terms of deaths per distance traveled.
- dmonitor 4y agoDo you have a source for the tunnels not having emergency exits or being dangerous?
- martythemaniak 4y agoHave you ever seen a real subway system? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#/media/File:Why_London_Underground_is_nicknamed_The_Tube.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Underground#/media/File... TBC tunnels have more room to exit and maneuver than most older subway tunnels.
- RankingMember 4y agoIt's like a train, but with monumentally less carrying capacity- it's basically special tunnels for taxis. This is a real head-scratcher and calls into question the basic competence of LV government.
- jcranmer 4y agoActually, what it's closest to is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), which is a transit idea that has generally always underwhelmed every place it's been introduced, starting from Morgantown in 1975.
- jcrawfordor 4y agoIt's kind of unimaginably worse... PRT has basically always assumed automation, with practical PRTs having very few implementation differences from AGT. But the Boring solution is manually operated, so it's going to have all the downsides of PRT (really more since the boarding time is worse) with the extra operating expense of paying an operator for each vehicle. I wonder if it would be possible to fit a commercial AGT like Mitsubishi Crystal Mover into the Boring tunnels. They're wide enough I think but I don't know if the height clearance is sufficient. And of course AGTs are always constructed with a fire egress walkway which wouldn't fit, but Boring seems to have already accepted that significant safety limitation.
- jcranmer 4y ago> But the Boring solution is manually operated The intent is that it's supposed to be autonomous cars moving around, but it seems Elon vastly overestimated the speed with which autonomous cars can actually be delivered, so the manual operation is just a stopgap solution. Then again, it's pretty telling that he's struggling to recreate the features of systems developed 50 years ago.
- jandrese 4y agoWait, the LV underground Teslas have to be manually driven? An enclosed track like that is basically ideal for self driving, there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do it with their current tech.
- fabian2k 4y agoSo those are much smaller tunnels than usually used for both trains and cars as far as I understand. How are the fire safety issues handled here? Large tunnels usually have a smaller escape tunnel at the side. That doesn't seem to be the case here. Do regulations that mandate escape routes in tunnels not exist in the US? Or are these tunnels different enough that they don't apply? Or do they have safety measures that are not visible on the images here?
- jcranmer 4y ago> Do regulations that mandate escape routes in tunnels not exist in the US? As far as I'm aware, not only do they exist, they are more stringent than in Europe generally. So I don't know how these things are working under US fire codes.
- HillRat 4y agoThe current tunnel conforms to NFPA 130, which is intended for passenger rail and mass transit (whether a bunch of passenger cars counts as this is an interesting question), and is less-stringent than federal vehicle tunnel requirements. Essentially, the key requirements here are that you need to have no more than 2,500 feet (760 meters) between exits and cross-tunnel passages no more than 800 feet (245 meters) apart. In the case of the LV "loop," it's a single tunnel shorter than 2,500 feet, so they basically don't need tunnel egress; having said that, imagine an electrical fire in a crowded tunnel with hundreds of tourists in varying degrees of intoxication trying to get out using narrow, 3-ft passages on either side of the cars. It's ... concerning.
- jandrese 4y ago> narrow, 3-ft passages Is this a "fat Americans" joke? If it were 1 or 2 foot wide I could see calling it narrow, but 3 feet is plenty wide. Doubly so because there are passages on either side so it's 6 feet of walkway. The low maximum capacity of the system also helps in this regard, it will never need to evacuate thousands of people at once. Just the handful that were in the cars at the time. This might change if Tesla changes out the current cars for higher capacity ones, but it doesn't seem like it should be an issue currently.
- demygale 4y agoThis will never exist. The announcement is the final product.
- erulabs 4y agoI’ll wait to hear more details rather than assuming everyone doing anything I have any question about is a liar or a grifter. Tunnels are cool. Small tunnels maybe less cool - but one can still imagine the uses. Here’s one: put it deep enough only the DOD knows it exists and run oil pipelines without public controversy.
- awestroke 4y agoOr fill one with slaves that make stuff for you without public controversy. The possibilities are endless
- partiallypro 4y agoAt this point...why doesn't Elon just turn this into a subway?
- SketchySeaBeast 4y agoI just checked the Tesla site and don't seem to see any subway trains for sale there.
- sorenjan 4y agoI've never been to Las Vegas, but every video I've seen of the Boring tunnels is either underwhelming or just seems plain stupid. It looks like something Tesla could use to get around their own campus as a fun PR stunt, not a city infrastructure project. It seems to have less capacity, be less safe, and more complicated than the alternatives. I don't even see any theoretical advantages, and the execution looks even worse. It's amazing that this got built in the first place, and now it's expanding? And by the way, if Tesla cars can't be autonomous in purpose built tunnels built by a sister company, then why would anyone expect them to handle traffic on actual roads? I consider this to be negative PR for them.
- ryandvm 4y agoAgreed. Seems like an excellent PR deal for Tesla but beyond that, it's just silly. I'm completely lost on how Las Vegas compared modern subway systems with an underground version of that amusement park ride where they put you in a car on a track and somehow decided to go with the latter.
- bryanlarsen 4y agoIt's pretty easy to understand why Las Vegas approved the project -- it doesn't cost them anything. If somebody proposed building a subway at no cost to Las Vegas they would have approved that too.
- vm 4y agoThese look like underground, single vehicle tunnels. It got me wondering why tunnels instead of building above ground. It looks like 1) tunnels are much less expensive in dense areas than above-ground roads, and 2) more tunnels can be added as needed by digging deeper (so the company says). This is cool. I have no idea if they'll solve traffic jams or succeed as a business. There are many issues to solve (ventilation, safety exits, traffic from accidents and exit queuing, etc.). But, having lived in LA and seen how traffic alters livability of a region, I love that they're trying.
- bananapub 4y agowhat's with this crappy and incorrect post title? the article title is: > Boring Company Gets Approval to Expand Las Vegas Tunnels to 65-Mile Network which is also actually truthful - the Boring Company announcing something and £7 will get you a pint in Zone 1 these days.
- xref 4y ago> Electrek reported that vehicles only cruised at 35 miles per hour, instead of the roaring 150 miles per hour that the company has touted Residential neighborhood speeds for 21st century mass transit, dream big.