No.
Think of a funnel. If you add another path into the funnel, the flow is still restricted by the choke point. That is the congestion - the destination. You can’t push more flow through it by adding another bowl.
You are using the wrong example. The sewage system is not the destination. It is the funnel. If the flooding/congestion occurs at the destination, then adding wider sewage tunnels wont reduce the flooding at the destination.
All the smart people who know what they are talking about here seem to be forgetting that they are not Elon, and Elon says this is so. So… just saying. 
Has anyone noticed that the bulk of this topic has nothing to do with the title?
Are you new here? 
Don’t think so. Look at the Las Vegas expanded loop plan. Every station can go to multiple destinations by multiple paths. If you want to keep pushing the funnel analogy, it is a funnel with multiple outlets. There is no “funneling” of traffic to a single outlet.
Suppose all of Las Vegas wants to get to the Convention Center. If all roads lead to a single road into the Convention Center then I agree with you, we have a funnel where congestion is independent of the number of roads. But multiple roads connecting to different parking lots or stations within the convention center is a different ball game. If the number of cars is kept constant, then four roads going to different Convention Center parking lots/stations will have less congestion than a single road into the Center.
Now expand this to downtown Las Vegas. The Loop goal is to have a network of tunnels connecting different parts of the downtown. If a substantial amount of car traffic is moved below ground and the overall number of cars is constant then the number of cars on above ground roads is reduced. We call this reduced congestion.
The Holland Tunnel serving lower Manhattan may be instructive. It originally had more than one “exit”, that is different paths into Manhattan from the mouth of the tunnel, usually several blocks apart and served by dedicated lanes. Still, traffic flowing in was often backed up simply because the surface streets couldn’t accommodate the volume that poured in, especially at rush hour.
Many decades later the exit area was redesigned and a further fifth dedicated exit was added, they hoped to ease the congestion. Shortly after it opened the travel times went down, and within months increased to greater than it had been as commuters changed to take advantage of the “new reduced time”, and it has been as high or higher ever since. This is “induced demand” which we’ve been talking about for a hundred posts or so and which some still don’t believe to be true.
The Great Chicago Fire produced an anomaly: they had to rebuild the entire downtown area. So rather than build what had been there, they built it on two levels. There is an entire infrastructure below “street level”, filled with streets, stop lights, even little used sidewalks (it’s dark and, well, maybe not safe) and it’s where all the trucks go to feed the buildings. The loading docks are there, service entrances and such. When you walk at “street level” you will actually enter most buildings on the 2nd or 3rd floor (although to avoid confusion it’s called the first floor) and down below in the subterranean world the lifeblood of commerce thrives. (There are a few ramps that you can drive up or down to, but they are purposely located inconveniently for traffic so as not to encourage people to drive down there.)
I can see a partial analogy here: if there were “enough” exits from the Boring tunnels, you could cross half the city and then pop up a few blocks from your destination and be driven to your door, then the car would drive several more blocks at surface before disappearing again into the underworld. It’s hard to know how that would be policed, or work, but it would not be unlike Disney World where everything travels below ground, including the characters in costume (so Darth Vader isn’t seen in Frontierland) and there are secret entrances and exits by which the stores are serviced and the cast travels.
But in an already congested city such as Manhattan, Atlanta, etc. there is simply little space for “ramps”, although I suppose at some tremendous cost a few could be found. Still, it’s pretty iffy, by the time you get stations, tunnels, ramps in place it’s gonna be a new century or two, I think.
The problem lies in the popping. How do you “pop up” a few blocks from your destination? Early on, TBC had a dream of car elevators (which got scrapped for not surprising reasons). But if you don’t do that, you have to do the whole megillah - a ramp up from the underworld, taking up that full amount of space and merging and traffic control measures (probably street light signal timing) to manage the traffic flow onto the City streets. Which ends up transmitting the surface congestion down to the underworld.
You could do a “second street” level below ground, like the utilidors in Disney or what you describe in Chicago. But TBC’s tunnels can’t be that, because they’re too small. A car can’t stop for loading/unloading, or to discharge passengers, or do anything really except travel from a ramp/station to another ramp/station. That can happen on a street, because street rights of way are wide enough for that to happen (even if the roadway pavement is narrow there is sidewalk for those functions to happen in). The TBC tunnels are not big enough to serve any other function other than being a through route.
That seems unnecessarily mean-spirited, and only half right. I readily admit to being ignorant on this topic, so why folks are bothering to take the time to read my “dumb” posts even if only to ridicule them is beyond me. What is incorrect is that I am defending these tunnels because of Elon.
I admit the Loop project is speculative and risky and could very well not succeed in its present form. I give it the benefit of the doubt however because it has been in operation for 3 years and I am pretty sure the City of Las Vegas and the 60+ hotels/resorts/casinos who have agreed to be part of the expansion plan have access to all the ridership, economic, and traffic impact data. Since the prototype Loop was primarily privately funded it should be easy for the city to bail out if the data were as bad as albaby keeps arguing it should be.
Yet the city and the hotels and casinos and resorts are all in on the expansion. So I find it odd that so many here are so certain that the Loop will fail, even to the point of arguing that its success would violate the laws of physics (!). What do folks here know that the owners of Resort World do not? What expert opinion is available to folks here that is not available to Wynn Resorts or the Westin Hotel or to the physicists at UNLV?
Tunneling technology seems to be improving rapidly. Tunnel boring machines will get faster, bigger, and more efficient. As that happens, I am confident that more governments will be looking for innovative approaches for using cheap tunnels to alleviate problems such as traffic congestion. No reason why the Boring Company can’t be part of that tech wave.
Forgot to mention that the Resorts World Loop station is underground. It was built in the underground parking garage of the resort.
Resorts World opened on June 24, 2021, more than six years after construction began. Sibella said the station was a good fit in the underground garage below the resort. https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/las-vegas-loop-station-opens-at-resorts-world-on-the-strip/#
The planned station at the Fashion Show Mall is also being built in an underground parking area. Will result in the removal of 100 parking spaces. Boring Co. Firms Up Vegas Loop Stop at Fashion Show Mall
Apparently underground Loop stations are not cost prohibitive for private companies to foot the bill.
I suspect underground parking is fairly common in urban areas so “popping up” may not have to happen all that often.
Have you looked at the Resorts World station?
They didn’t build an underground “station.” They didn’t really build anything. There was an existing driveway that ran from Vegas Boulevard that ran into the property under the existing garage. That space was wide enough that they just cordoned off an area with some construction fencing and fabric, and some pavement striping and bollards to guide everyone around. The entire space was previously existing, and ordinary road traffic still goes through around the “station” - which again, is nothing more than some cordoned off area of pavement.
You can see the station in the below video - and the picture shows where the tunnel is at the base of the previously existing driveway. All they did was regrade the ramp - everything else was the space that was already there.
Oh I don’t know that it will fail. Las Vegas is a very special case, 1) similar businesses 2) lined up nicely along a specific geography, 3) plenty of space and 4) parking lots, and 5) probably not a lot of already built subterranean infrastructure (hard to think of another urban area that matches even two of those criteria), so maybe for Las Vegas it will work fine.
But not LA: too spread out.
Not NY: too dense
Not Chicago: high water table, rivers, crowded
Not Pittsburgh, not Miami, not Baltimore, not…
I’d guess there’s another couple of places where it might work but as some kind of panacea for urban congestion, no, it’s a pipe dream.
Actually not a lot. Back to physics. There’s an upper limit to everything: safe speed in a car, top speed in an airplane, how long concrete has to cure before it’s safe, etc. The bigger you make the tunnels the slower they go. Each step bigger means 4x the spoil, 4x the diameter that has to be shored up with concrete rings, and 4x the problems. TBMs are also only consistent with certain geologies. Certain kinds of clay, for instance (common) bog them right down.
And underground station has to be quite big to be useful. Cars have to pull over, out of the way. They have to be stationed, waiting for a pickup. If the traffic is more in one direction (inbound vs outbound, for instance) then you need a holding area, and cars take a lot of room if you have more than a few. I suppose you could have the cars run around empty, but then you’re adding wear & tear without purpose, so…
The tunnels themselves are nice: straight and true (even if curved) and you only have to worry about breakdowns. But it’s at the terminus where you have issues, as people have pointed out if many and various examples.
If there’s underground parking it’s usually a level or two, and surprisingly it’s usually already making a lot of money by, um, parking. But maybe underground parking owners will give Boring tunnels the right of way to break through their walls so Musk’s cars can exit, somehow, without running down the parking attendants and gates?
The bar is pretty high if you are going to contradict Elon.
He is not arguing it is ‘bad’; merely stating it is not a solution to congestion.
JimA
I don’t think it’s certain to fail - as Jim points out, I just think it can’t solve congestion.
At small volumes, this operates as a line-skipping service, like a “Lexus Lane.” That certainly can work. It does work! If you have a limited access express lane, you can let the people in that express lane “cut the line” ahead of everyone else. People will pay for that. If TBC can charge enough for the premium access to cover their capital and operating costs, they can make money!
For places like Resorts World that have some big unused space that requires virtually no work (it was at grade under a building, not underground), that can be a fine proposition. Same with the Fashion Mall or Westgate - convert one or two thousand square feet of parking area into a pickup/dropoff area, and you get access to the express lane for your guests at virtually no cost. And guests will pay for that.
But it’s not possible to give a lane that lets everyone skip the line - if you do, the “skip” just becomes “the line.” If you build a second line to get onto a ride at Disney World, but let everyone get into that second line, you just end up with two lines with the same wait time as if you had a single line. It doesn’t help. The way it “works” is that you charge money to be in the second line, and then sell only a limited number of those spots in the second line so it moves faster.
Even so, I think it’s unlikely to spread to too many places other than Vegas, for the reasons that Goofy described. And I think you’re overstating the vote of confidence that that’s being given, here. The costs to the Vegas hotels are so low they don’t need this thing to be a major success - if it’s just a fancified shuttle bus to the convention center, it’s worth the cost of the paint for the restriping and crosswalks. The mayor of Las Vegas is no fan, so I don’t know if the City is quite as “all in” as you suggest.
Still awaiting “real” FSD. The bar does not have to be very high to slither under it…
In 2017 Musk said he would have paying customers going to the moon by 2018. That didn’t happen. He then set a goal of having paying customers going to the moon by 2023. That didn’t happen.
In early 2020 he predicted that there would be “close to zero cases” of Covid in the US “by April”. That didn’t happen.
In 2016 he predicted that “within two years” you would be able to drive hands-free in any place in the US “connected by land”. That didn’t happen. “Time-wise, we could probably do a coast-to-coast drive in 3 months, 6 months in the outside,” Musk claimed in February 2018. That didn’t happen.
He made the “Full Self Driving” promise “within a year” in 2017. That didn’t happen. And in 2018. That didn’t happen. And in 2019. That didn’t happen. And in 2020. That didn’t happen. And in 2021. That didn’t happen. Etc.
In 2018 he tweeted “I am starting a candy company,. I’m super super serious.” That didn’t happen.
In September 2015 he said “My guess is probably we could break 1,000 kilometers [of range for Teslas] within a year or two. I’d say 2017 for sure.” That didn’t happen, and still hasn’t happened.
Musk tweeted in 2018 he had secured financing to take Tesla private. That didn’t happen.
In 2012 he said “Tesla does not need another round of funding.” Since then Tesla has undertaken 14 rounds of fund raising.
Promoting HyperLoop One he promised speeds through California up to 700 mph. After raising half a billion dollars, tests maxed out at 100mph, and HyperLoop One was shut down last year.
In 2014 he said that people could be taken to Mars in 10-12 years. That didn’t happen.
I certainly celebrate his achievements, (note the emphasis) but let’s not pretend that the boy genius doesn’t often get things wrong. The bar is not “low” to criticize a plan with obvious and numerous issues, most of which are apparent to those who have worked around those kinds of problems, and even to us mere mortals.
FYI, the “boy” genius is now more than half a century old (born 1971).
DB2
I think the potential market is pretty large. Any city built around the automobile lacks the density needed to support conventional transit. There are a lot of cities where an extensive subway would be a money drain and lack the space to add more roads in their congested areas. Not a whole lot of other options.
Why? A busy Loop underground station need only be the size of an airport taxi stand. Even the above ground stations appear pretty compact. Much less space needed than adding a lane to an existing road.
That is the beauty of the Loop system. The infrastructure costs are remarkably low compared to traditional transit. So low that private companies believe it is possible to run such a system profitably without need of government support.
The TBC Prufrock can porpoise, so it builds its own tunnel down and back up again as part of its normal operation. Stations can be below or above ground without much added cost depending on what the destination site wants. It’s brilliant.
It is interesting how Goofy emphasizes how valuable these underground parking sites are "If there’s underground parking it’s usually a level or two, and surprisingly it’s usually already making a lot of money by, um, parking…" to suggest they won’t be given up for Loop stations, while albaby focuses on their lack of value in order to minimized the financial commitment to the Loop.
And I just don’t find the reasoning to be very convincing. If the system is “not bad” that means that it works at some level. The question then is if it can be scaled up to where it does impact congestion. Albaby says it cannot based on conjecture. Opinions are fine, but I’m just suggesting that level of certainty is premature.
Why wouldn’t a tunnel system connecting the airport to the convention center relieve airport congestion? Why wouldn’t tunnels connecting Allegiant stadium to peripheral parking lots relieve congestion around the stadium?
The current loop is a prototype. If one can build one tunnel, why not a second one if demand justifies it? Or a third? Tunneling machines can get bigger. Tunnel cars can be designed to carry more passengers.
The point is the experiment is being done. The main economic players in Las Vegas have seen the preliminary results are all in on the expansion. We should all be hoping that it works because it might provide an answer to traffic congestion. Why not reserve judgement?
No argument that the infrastructure costs for surface stations are lower than underground stations. But TBC hasn’t unearthed some secret magic there. It’s true of public transit as well. Subways (technically heavy rail when they’re above ground) have surface stations as well. Think the Green Line in Boston once you get past Copley (see photo below). Those are super-cheap to build - but in most cities, you don’t have the space available on the surface to create new surface stations.
But you were arguing that these hotels had made significant investments in this system. They haven’t. They just set aside some existing surface area.
Goofy and I are saying fairly similar things. Again, the key point is that congested urban areas are generally space constrained. In Vegas, there’s lots of surface land available (especially on the big hotel sites), so there’s a very low cost to setting aside a few thousand square feet for a low-capacity surface station. Many properties will just have extra land “lying around,” as it were - like the unused space at the Resorts World.
But in any urban environment that’s dense enough and space-constrained enough to have underground parking (like NYC), land is going to be very much at a super-high premium. Building space underground is expensive. So the Loop model doesn’t translate to most congested places - because again, most congested places are space constrained where they’re congested.
Because you’re still sending the same number of cars to the airport. The airport can only process so many cars per hour. So a second path for cars to get to the airport entrance doesn’t speed anything up.
Again, think of a line at Disney World. There’s a 60-minute line to get onto the Tea Cup ride. So you make a second line. Great! Now you don’t have to wait in that terrible long line - you can go in the new line instead! But the new line also goes to the same entrance to the Tea Cup ride. You now have two lines going to the same place - but the number of riders per hour hasn’t changed. So the wait time is unchanged - you just have two queues instead of one.
This isn’t “conjecture.” There’s decades of public transportation research showing that increasing the capacity of roadways leading into a congested area doesn’t end up reducing congestion, because the new paths to the congested area don’t increase the capacity of the congested area to “process” all those cars.
No longer a boy AND no longer a genius. PLUS, he keeps you off his grass.
