8 ms·

A pedantic review of the Las Vegas loop

76 points by cratermoon 2y ago

BonoboIO 2y ago
„ The operations manual spends more page length on answering questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on fires.“ Does anybody need to know more about this whole operation?
stephen_g 2y ago
I think the basic story of the Boring Company is that they assumed that they would be able to optimise or disrupt what is actually a mature and optimised industry (tunneling) and completely failed to do so. 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…
- wahern 2y ago
  One of Musk's original points was that cost of tunneling isn't linear with diameter--double the size more than quadruples the price, or something like that. But then the insistence on using electric cars seems... counter productive. 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.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    And Musk's actual results were a tunnel that was more expensive and slower to build per km than the channel tunnel. And this one isn't built under the sea straddling two countries with entirely different legal systems, but under a tiny patch of desert in a very permissive legal environment. 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.
    - Veedrac 2y ago
      > more expensive and slower to build per km than the channel tunnel Channel Tunnel: ~$22B / 31mi ~ $700m/mi LVCC: $47m / 1.7mi ~ $28m/mi ??
      - orwin 2y ago
        You're correct, but eurotunnel cost was 4.6B in 1985 English pound, which seems to be half of $22B. I think the 22B figure is the total project cost, including the not-tunnel part. 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.
        Veedrac 2y ago
        As far as I'm aware LVCC cost $53m, which includes tunnels and stations. Where did you get $106m?
        orwin 2y ago
        Sorry, I don't find it back, but I remember distinctly reading about 106 millions for 2.2 miles (and not 53 for 1.7). It was quite recent (like two weeks ago). Aren't they opening new tunnels/stations? Maybe the difference in our data is there. It was just pedantery anyway, the cost are still an order of magnitude below the eurotunnel. [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.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  > with small pods you will never get the throughput with any kind of safety margin between them. 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.
  - karlgkk 2y ago
    > But it's not a particularly hard problem. Don't crash into the thing in front of you 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.
    - pintxo 2y ago
      But that’s the big safety advantage of pods over railcars. Only a small number of people can die in pods. /s
- Veedrac 2y ago
  It seems unreasonable to claim that Boring Company has failed when they were founded in 2017, won their first contract in 2019 which was executed to requirements and multiples cheaper than the competing bid, and Vegas Loop was approved in initial form in 2021, a design now >3x the length of all subway built in the US in the last 20 years and for which construction is happily underway. Imagine subways were held to this standard! Done in 3 years or bust!
- throwitaway1123 2y ago
  > Literally the only “innovation” is that they made the tunnels a bit cheaper by removing space for emergency egress 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-las-vegas-loop-tunnel-has-construction-safety-issues https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-26/elon-musk...
  - gruez 2y ago
    >If the reports are to be believed then there was another "innovation" as well: ignoring worker safety [1]. 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". [1] https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
    - throwitaway1123 2y ago
      > 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.boringcompany.com/lvcc https://web.archive.org/web/20240729111337/https://www.borin...
      - gruez 2y ago
        So your contention is that The Boring Company violates safety regulations just like many other construction companies, but The Boring Company stands out (or "innovating") because they're building (what you consider to be) frivolous projects?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  > they assumed that they would be able to optimise or disrupt what is actually a mature and optimised industry So ego and hubris.
ethagnawl 2y ago
> The operations manual spends more page length on answering questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on fires. This tells us exactly why Elon shouldn't be making any decisions affecting public/critical infrastructure.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- blt 2y ago
  This sentence was almost too perfect. Really says it all.
- pie420 2y ago
  every company manual should only tell employees to evacuate immediately in the event of a fire and to notify the fire department, and a map of exit routes, and meeting points. That's all you need.
zone411 2y ago
The Vegas Loop will have huge advantages over subways (cost, faster construction with fewer disruptions, smaller station footprint, mostly point-to-point service, more privacy for riders), and Vegas is the perfect place to showcase it to a large audience of visitors. Self-driving is much easier in such a controlled environment, and since it's clearly coming, focusing on the current use of a driver is pointless.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build, has had more disruptions, needs huge stations, is only one-way, and has terrible privacy (you're stuck with a stranger in the small space of a car instead of a the large space of a subway car). 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.
  - Veedrac 2y ago
    > The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build [than subway] 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.
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      If you're comparing just to the US, maybe. It's still much more expensive to operate, per passenger.
      - Veedrac 2y ago
        Compare it to Europe, same deal, the large constants are just slightly less large.
ggm 2y ago
This has a wonderful retro-science-fiction "what if we dug tunnels badly in the 1950s and drove around in them" feel to it. Like Asimov "caves of steel" but .. smaller. Because who has the time to make giant underground caverns for post-destructionist revolutionaries to meet in as autonomous cars whizz by. (what kind of a name is Elijah anyway? at least his wife had a decent name like Jezabel) 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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- glompers 2y ago
  Quick slightly-on-topic questions: I always read local press releases about how a major local rail or road or stormwater tunnel project "has gotten its TBM" and is assembling it in a portal dug for the initial staging. 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.
spiritplumber 2y ago
At least Benny will be able to use it to escape to the Fort.
aaron695 2y ago
[dead]
Veedrac 2y ago
Really weird article. Starting with the whole claim that the tunnel built is the Las Vegas Loop (actually known by LVCC) which is the same as the 93 stop full rollout (actually known as Vegas Loop); they are connected but the terminology was very muddying. This makes it really confusing when they're eg. objecting to calling it a underground system and not really making clear what they're talking about (Vegas Loop is very clearly an underground system, the whole loop is underground). 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!
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  I hope you realize that lithium-ion battery fires are much worse than margarine or flour fires, and almost impossible to extinguish, especially in the confines of a tunnel. 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.
  - Veedrac 2y ago
    How hard it is to extinguish is vastly, vastly less important than ‘does it stop people safely escaping’ and ‘does it overwhelm the safety equipment’. 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.
saagarjha 2y ago
> Drivers are required to wear a provided uniform with plain black shoes and no jewelry or accessories, and are prohibited from initiating conversations with passengers. I'm no snitch but I don't think this was followed particularly well when I was there last week.
- GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
  I'm surprised Tesla doesn't make them dress up as their Optimus "robot"
thrdbndndn 2y ago
> One interesting aspect of the Loop, that has been rather heavily reported on, is that the whole thing feels remarkably cheap. Perhaps that's not surprising, as The Boring Company's central claim is to be able to construct underground transit on a tight budget. They have indeed delivered on this promise in the construction of the Loop, but it's hard not to feel like they did so more by pinching pennies and eating development costs than by innovation. Nothing speaks to this more than the photo of the OCC the manual provides, which depicts two cheap office chairs at a long desk in a room with worn linoleum floors and distinctly portable-building vibes. It is, by far, the most underwhelming mass-transit control room I have ever seen. I strongly suspect that the OCC is a reuse of the old on-site construction office. To be fair, they will surely have to build something more sophisticated for future expansion, as the current space only accommodates two operators. We will assume it is temporary. The said photo: https://i.imgur.com/BlIpog1.png 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.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  To second this sentiment: I toured a couple of city run traffic control facilities during my stint as a city employee and this doesn’t look radically different or “cheaper” than the ones I saw. And local government budgets are already pretty tight.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  How much would a proper control room cost? A hundred thousand? Couple hundred thousand? Considering you want maybe at least 2 people monitoring system 24/7. So 3 shifts? That is what 300k minimum a year, if not few times more...
munchler 2y ago
> There is a surprisingly long (in comparison to other items) script for answering questions about the flamethrower. Flamethrower!? Can anyone explain what this means?
- el_oni 2y ago
  The boring company released a flamethrower[0] presumably to raise some capital. [0]https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower
everfrustrated 2y ago
I didn't realize the cars had drivers - I presumed they had long been replaced with self-driving. 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?
- katbyte 2y ago
  My guess is simply no. No it’s not.
- Tanoc 2y ago
  It's a single track design with no fallback. If one of the vehicles has a malfunction with the software it's stuck there and blocks the entire tunnel. Not even staff can get past without climbing over the cars. They have to have a person in the car because if they didn't then it would be a safety disaster in the event of a fire.
wkat4242 2y ago
Eek this is weird. Why not make it a real subway system with trains? It would make so much more sense than this.

76 points by cratermoon 2y ago

„ The operations manual spends more page length on answering questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on fires.“ Does anybody need to know more about this whole operation?

stephen_g 2y ago

I think the basic story of the Boring Company is that they assumed that they would be able to optimise or disrupt what is actually a mature and optimised industry (tunneling) and completely failed to do so. 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…

wahern 2y ago
One of Musk's original points was that cost of tunneling isn't linear with diameter--double the size more than quadruples the price, or something like that. But then the insistence on using electric cars seems... counter productive. 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.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  And Musk's actual results were a tunnel that was more expensive and slower to build per km than the channel tunnel. And this one isn't built under the sea straddling two countries with entirely different legal systems, but under a tiny patch of desert in a very permissive legal environment. 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.
  - Veedrac 2y ago
    > more expensive and slower to build per km than the channel tunnel Channel Tunnel: ~$22B / 31mi ~ $700m/mi LVCC: $47m / 1.7mi ~ $28m/mi ??
    - orwin 2y ago
      You're correct, but eurotunnel cost was 4.6B in 1985 English pound, which seems to be half of $22B. I think the 22B figure is the total project cost, including the not-tunnel part. 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.
      - Veedrac 2y ago
        As far as I'm aware LVCC cost $53m, which includes tunnels and stations. Where did you get $106m?
        orwin 2y ago
        Sorry, I don't find it back, but I remember distinctly reading about 106 millions for 2.2 miles (and not 53 for 1.7). It was quite recent (like two weeks ago). Aren't they opening new tunnels/stations? Maybe the difference in our data is there. It was just pedantery anyway, the cost are still an order of magnitude below the eurotunnel. [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.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
> with small pods you will never get the throughput with any kind of safety margin between them. 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.
- karlgkk 2y ago
  > But it's not a particularly hard problem. Don't crash into the thing in front of you 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.
  - pintxo 2y ago
    But that’s the big safety advantage of pods over railcars. Only a small number of people can die in pods. /s
Veedrac 2y ago
It seems unreasonable to claim that Boring Company has failed when they were founded in 2017, won their first contract in 2019 which was executed to requirements and multiples cheaper than the competing bid, and Vegas Loop was approved in initial form in 2021, a design now >3x the length of all subway built in the US in the last 20 years and for which construction is happily underway. Imagine subways were held to this standard! Done in 3 years or bust!
throwitaway1123 2y ago
> Literally the only “innovation” is that they made the tunnels a bit cheaper by removing space for emergency egress 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-las-vegas-loop-tunnel-has-construction-safety-issues https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-26/elon-musk...
- gruez 2y ago
  >If the reports are to be believed then there was another "innovation" as well: ignoring worker safety [1]. 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". [1] https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats
  - throwitaway1123 2y ago
    > 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.boringcompany.com/lvcc https://web.archive.org/web/20240729111337/https://www.borin...
    - gruez 2y ago
      So your contention is that The Boring Company violates safety regulations just like many other construction companies, but The Boring Company stands out (or "innovating") because they're building (what you consider to be) frivolous projects?
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
> they assumed that they would be able to optimise or disrupt what is actually a mature and optimised industry So ego and hubris.

ethagnawl 2y ago

> The operations manual spends more page length on answering questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on fires. This tells us exactly why Elon shouldn't be making any decisions affecting public/critical infrastructure.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
blt 2y ago
This sentence was almost too perfect. Really says it all.
pie420 2y ago
every company manual should only tell employees to evacuate immediately in the event of a fire and to notify the fire department, and a map of exit routes, and meeting points. That's all you need.

zone411 2y ago

The Vegas Loop will have huge advantages over subways (cost, faster construction with fewer disruptions, smaller station footprint, mostly point-to-point service, more privacy for riders), and Vegas is the perfect place to showcase it to a large audience of visitors. Self-driving is much easier in such a controlled environment, and since it's clearly coming, focusing on the current use of a driver is pointless.

tsimionescu 2y ago
The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build, has had more disruptions, needs huge stations, is only one-way, and has terrible privacy (you're stuck with a stranger in the small space of a car instead of a the large space of a subway car). 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.
- Veedrac 2y ago
  > The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build [than subway] 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.
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    If you're comparing just to the US, maybe. It's still much more expensive to operate, per passenger.
    - Veedrac 2y ago
      Compare it to Europe, same deal, the large constants are just slightly less large.

ggm 2y ago

This has a wonderful retro-science-fiction "what if we dug tunnels badly in the 1950s and drove around in them" feel to it. Like Asimov "caves of steel" but .. smaller. Because who has the time to make giant underground caverns for post-destructionist revolutionaries to meet in as autonomous cars whizz by. (what kind of a name is Elijah anyway? at least his wife had a decent name like Jezabel) 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.

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glompers 2y ago
Quick slightly-on-topic questions: I always read local press releases about how a major local rail or road or stormwater tunnel project "has gotten its TBM" and is assembling it in a portal dug for the initial staging. 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.

spiritplumber 2y ago

At least Benny will be able to use it to escape to the Fort.

aaron695 2y ago

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Veedrac 2y ago

Really weird article. Starting with the whole claim that the tunnel built is the Las Vegas Loop (actually known by LVCC) which is the same as the 93 stop full rollout (actually known as Vegas Loop); they are connected but the terminology was very muddying. This makes it really confusing when they're eg. objecting to calling it a underground system and not really making clear what they're talking about (Vegas Loop is very clearly an underground system, the whole loop is underground). 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!

tsimionescu 2y ago
I hope you realize that lithium-ion battery fires are much worse than margarine or flour fires, and almost impossible to extinguish, especially in the confines of a tunnel. 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.
- Veedrac 2y ago
  How hard it is to extinguish is vastly, vastly less important than ‘does it stop people safely escaping’ and ‘does it overwhelm the safety equipment’. 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.

saagarjha 2y ago

> Drivers are required to wear a provided uniform with plain black shoes and no jewelry or accessories, and are prohibited from initiating conversations with passengers. I'm no snitch but I don't think this was followed particularly well when I was there last week.

GaryNumanVevo 2y ago
I'm surprised Tesla doesn't make them dress up as their Optimus "robot"

thrdbndndn 2y ago

> One interesting aspect of the Loop, that has been rather heavily reported on, is that the whole thing feels remarkably cheap. Perhaps that's not surprising, as The Boring Company's central claim is to be able to construct underground transit on a tight budget. They have indeed delivered on this promise in the construction of the Loop, but it's hard not to feel like they did so more by pinching pennies and eating development costs than by innovation. Nothing speaks to this more than the photo of the OCC the manual provides, which depicts two cheap office chairs at a long desk in a room with worn linoleum floors and distinctly portable-building vibes. It is, by far, the most underwhelming mass-transit control room I have ever seen. I strongly suspect that the OCC is a reuse of the old on-site construction office. To be fair, they will surely have to build something more sophisticated for future expansion, as the current space only accommodates two operators. We will assume it is temporary. The said photo: https://i.imgur.com/BlIpog1.png 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.

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
To second this sentiment: I toured a couple of city run traffic control facilities during my stint as a city employee and this doesn’t look radically different or “cheaper” than the ones I saw. And local government budgets are already pretty tight.
Ekaros 2y ago
How much would a proper control room cost? A hundred thousand? Couple hundred thousand? Considering you want maybe at least 2 people monitoring system 24/7. So 3 shifts? That is what 300k minimum a year, if not few times more...

munchler 2y ago

> There is a surprisingly long (in comparison to other items) script for answering questions about the flamethrower. Flamethrower!? Can anyone explain what this means?

el_oni 2y ago
The boring company released a flamethrower[0] presumably to raise some capital. [0]https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower

everfrustrated 2y ago

I didn't realize the cars had drivers - I presumed they had long been replaced with self-driving. 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?

katbyte 2y ago
My guess is simply no. No it’s not.
Tanoc 2y ago
It's a single track design with no fallback. If one of the vehicles has a malfunction with the software it's stuck there and blocks the entire tunnel. Not even staff can get past without climbing over the cars. They have to have a person in the car because if they didn't then it would be a safety disaster in the event of a fire.

wkat4242 2y ago

Eek this is weird. Why not make it a real subway system with trains? It would make so much more sense than this.