Elon's FSD Timeline

Stadia, unlike Las Vegas casinos, schedule “events.” Those start at a certain time, so you have maximum demand for an extremely short period of time. At 2:00pm, a gazillion people want to show up for their football/baseball game/concert/tractor pull and then they all want to leave at roughly the same time too. (Tailgating can stretch the start time, but not by significant enough numbers, plus those people want to use their own cars/trucks.)

Allegiant Stadium seats 65,000. The Boring Tunnel has a maximum capacity of 4,400 people per hour with every seat filled, which is not how most people ride. You see the problem? Even with multiple tunnels you’re treating a fraction of the problem, not the problem which is that demand overwhelms supply at certain times, and sits fallow the rest of the time. The wide part of the funnel versus the narrow part and all that.

1 Like

You can critique it, but the bar is high. He is executing.

1 Like

Couldn’t one branch and make a short parallel tunnel and do the loading and unloading in the side tunnel?

1 Like

I can’t see how that could work. Again, the tunnels are too small. The low height would block anything but passenger cars. You can’t use this for the trucks that “feed the buildings” that Goofy was describing - even a small box truck or a UPS truck wouldn’t fit into the tunnels. Even if you deliberately shortened a cargo truck, the tunnels are still so narrow that it doesn’t seem practical. Looking at the photo, it seems like there’s not much space between the car and the tunnel wall.

Sure, if you make the tunnels bigger, but when you do that the miraculous “we do it cheaper” vanishes so you’re back to where you were. Trucks are boxy. They’re wider than cars, and they have upper corners. You lose space at the bottom because a car/truck needs to have a flat bed to drive on. But if you’re going to have tall vehicles then you also lose at the top, because the trucks have corners. (If you’re going to just use cars, then yes, you could have a “side branch”, aka “local” while “express cars” continued to another station.) Of course I’ve just described “a station”, which is more expensive than “a tunnel.”

As for the wonders of “porposing” of the TBM’s, that’s common and has been for years. TBMs have to be able to turn left or right, up or down in order to 1) follow the geology, 2) avoid structure foundations or subway lines, or whatever, or 3) get to a destination that can’t be reached in a straight line. It’s usually faster and cheaper to start the tunnel with bulldozers and bucket shovels, then bring the TBM in once the opening has been started. But yeah, been going on for decades.

TBMs can be massively huge. The one in Seattle, I think, is one of the largest in the world, and can do a two lane road. Some are as small as 18 inches and are used to install sewer lines or other utilities; those are guided from above, the big ones from within.

The point is there’s really not a lot of magic here. TBMs I have gotten better and cheaper, but the improvements anymore are pretty incremental. Las Vegas, I have said before, is a special case. That doesn’t make it bad, it does make it inappropriate to think of as a template for most other situations, although I’m sure there are a few where it would work, economically speaking. The Seattle project, for anyone interested, was over $3B. Maybe that kind of dough can be recovered over time, it’ll be interesting to see if anyone other than the vanity owner steps up for this economic opportunity.

1 Like

My remark was intended only about the possibility of taking traffic that was not moving and getting it out of the moving lane. E.g., for a substation or underground access point.

You seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions to make your argument that don’t seem justified. No offense, but I think you should consider the possibility that the folks in Las Vegas know as much and are just as smart as you and have done their due diligence. These folks after all have skin in the game.

Las Vegas airport has initiated modernization plans that includes building multimodal transportation centers dedicated to public transportation and ride sharing. I suspect the Loop plans to connect to one of these. In effect, there will be expanded access to the Las Vegas airport from the city, which will be able to handle a larger number of more varied transportation options. The multimodal sites will handle vehicles in addition to the current road system.

What the airport is planning is equivalent to expanding the ride so that the two lines can load simultaneously.

The current Boring tunnel is a prototype. For example, there are sections that only allow one-way travel so cars have to take turns going through. Don’t you think it is at least possible that future iterations of the Loop will be significantly improved?

I thought the point was that they don’t have skin in the game. That they’re not paying for this. They don’t necessarily care whether the Loop will ever have enough traffic volume to be anything other than a minor amenity - in fact, the Mayor of Las Vegas was pretty emphatic that she doesn’t believe for one second that it will. TPTB in Vegas also approved the Monorail, after all. Which didn’t solve congestion either.

My point isn’t that the Loop will go bankrupt, or “fail” in the sense of not offering customers a service at a nice price for value. It very well may do that. But it’s a low-capacity system with very limited throughput to any single point, so it can’t operate as a solution to urban traffic congestion.

Which is great. That’s a way that you can avoid car congestion at a destination. Reduce the number of cars going to that destination. Divert cars away from it to somewhere else (ie. a remote “multi-modal site”), and force those passengers to enter the airport as pedestrians. Or on shuttle buses. Again, transit on a higher density vehicles.

The effect on congestion is unrelated to how the cars get to the multimodal site. The Loop doesn’t affect it. If there’s still congestion at the multi-modal site, then that congestion will back up both the roads (ordinary taxis) and the tunnels (Loop cars). Those Loop cars still have leave the tunnel and merge into the other rideshare traffic flow, after all.

The multi-modal sites would be what alleviates congestion - not the Loop.

Not in a way that affects capacity. At least, not with the same system.

The constraint isn’t the one-way sections - it’s the size of the tunnels. The tunnels are small, so only passenger cars can go through them. Only X number of vehicles can go through the tunnel per hour, where X is about a thousand at most. The vehicles hold (at most) four people. Since the tunnel is too small for higher-capacity vehicles, you can’t increase the volume by “improving” the system. And that’s even before we get into the constraints imposed by the “stations.”

There are ways you can increase capacity, of course. Joking around, if you increased the tunnel diameter to 22’ and laid down tracks for rail vehicles, you could move a lot more than 4,400 people per hour. But then that really wouldn’t be the Loop any more…

1 Like

Do we know that for sure? Back when TBC was getting rolling there was lots of talk about building systems in places like LA, DC, and Chicago, maybe a few others too. Some of these examples were even on the TBC’s website.

But after a few years all the talk went away, and no new projects seem to be in the pipe. I suspect what happened is the planners broke out the calculators and couldn’t find any advantages.

3 Likes

I suspect folks realized that this is a risky and untested venture. No one knows if it will work, and the regulatory burdens of building anything large in America is daunting and expensive. TBC might minimize the upfront construction costs, but substantial government resources are still needed to get all the permitting. Once Las Vegas agreed to become the test case, it makes the most sense to wait and see what happens.

Recall that you were bringing up the cost of subway stations and estimating hundreds of millions of dollars, which we now can see was a misdirection. Giving up substantial parking/building space is still a major financial commitment for a hotel, but it is affordable.

The prototype, first generation Loop that is gradually expanding to move people into and out of the Las Vegas Convention Center has a capacity of about 4,000 cars/hour. The Las Vegas Convention Center parking area has about 10,000 spaces. The Loop can move the equivalent of 40% of the people per hour who park at the LVCC during a packed convention. How does that not relieve congestion?

The congestion is on the above ground roads around the airport. The Loop gets people to the multimodal station (from which they can walk to the terminal) without using the above ground roads. Therefore, there is less congestion on the above ground roads.

If the Loop can bring in 4000 cars/hour (which again is what their first generation system does, later iterations will be better) then that is 4000 cars/hour that are not using the above ground airport roads.

You keep bringing up trains and subways. We know that these are only financially practical at population densities not reached by the large majority of US urban areas. These urban areas need a radically different solution. An underground system that can be built at the fraction of the cost of a subway and that allows point-to-point transit has potential even if the capacity is not much greater than private vehicle usage.

1 Like

Maybe it’s because my course of study in my earlier life was engineering (I planned on either mechanical or civil engineering, and wound up in media. Short, but happy story. Maybe over a beer sometime.) But I confess being intrigued by the idea of all these underground tunnels, even though - like the Mayor of Las Vegas who recently voted “yes” on the expansion - I have serious doubts about the viability of the whole thing.

Here’s a story, which includes a map of the many and various (for now theoretical) stops for the system, more than 90 when all is said and done (the recent city council vote authorizes a look-see at adding 21).

I note that they are not all in a straight line, and the question upthread about having sidings for loading and unloading got me thinking about the Boring tunnels. For instance, when you have a siding, or a branch, you can’t use one of those tunnels, because it’s hard to turn left when there’s a concrete ring in the way. But you need the ring for stability from the ground pressure so the whole thing doesn’t collapse.

This has been overcome in a variety of ways, of course, even with old school tunneling, else the subways of New York couldn’t exist. And in fact at least one of the Boring tunnels have done this in Las Vegas, using the old-school “cut and cover” method, rather than switching to a “twice the size” boring head so two lines could merge/diverge.

Sidebar: It seems to me an elliptical tunnel would have many of the same advantages: an arch support overhead, a flattened bottom, and wider space in between. And you can turn a circle into an ellipse just by angling it 30° or so, so if they chose to build a tunnel borer with a 30° angled head it would produce an ellipse rather than a flat plane circle. I’m sure they’ve thought of this, although I’ve never heard of it being employed anywhere. Sidebar off.

If you look at the map in the link above you will notice that all the eventual stations are not lined up in a nice straight line, like say a route from the airport to a hotel, or to the convention center might be. That argues not only for stations, but lots and lots of branches and turns, which means merges and splits of real time traffic and cars. (Not insurmountable by any stretch, just get the cars to talk to each other and merge, although they’re talking about having them run with only a few feet of separation in many cases, so that might be dicey.)

But now think about coming in from the airport and turning right. Simple, just branch off to the right. OK, suppose you need to turn left? Not so simple, assuming there’s another tunnel going back to the airport in the way. How do you do that? On the surface you do a stop light, or a ramp/flyover, or maybe even a cloverleaf if it’s a busy interchange. You could do all of those things underground, but your cost of tunneling is going to skyrocket - or you’re going to put stoplights in the way, or you’re going to risk collisions if you hope software allows direct crossing. (Anyone who has played with a model train setup with a 90° crossing knows what I’m talking about.)

So again, not insurmountable, just not as easy as “bore a hole” simple. You could ease this somewhat by having the two airport tunnels at different levels so a left turn would go under (or over) the one in the way, but then your ramps in and out are going to be longer, and there are still going to be times when the opposing tunnel is just in the wrong place. Darn it! And you’re going to be popping up and down if you want to cut costs by using the same level stations, so…

The comments of the reluctant Mayor of Las Vegas in the link above are interesting. Some are simple to dismiss, others not so much. I do hope that some of the planning for this involves a holistic approach. (For instance: A better subway for New York would have been one that stops every 4 blocks, regardless of what was above, rather than trying to hit the major points and leaving some places a 10 block walk from an entrance. In that way the maximum walk for anyone would have been 2 blocks, which would help the city spread more evenly and not leave “transit deserts”.)

As BT noted above, there is a multifaceted approach being taken, with multiple options for travel - and that’s good. I would guess the tunnel is the most expensive, and offers the least capacity of all of them, but then it’s Las Vegas: lots of touristy dollars not so concerned with “value” as “fun”, and it might work well for them. That whole city has been built on outlandish ideas, this could be the next.

Or not.

4 Likes

Bingo!

Something the Chinese Communist Party has totally messed up.

I am sure the smaller shopkeepers and restaurants appreciate all the traffic being below ground. Should do wonders for the tax base. Why see LV when you go to LV? Instead stay in a deep dark tunnel. Avoid the sun and desert. Come up only at the casino. The illegal skim will keep the hotel’s value down and chip further away at the tax base.

It’s not a misdirection. This system is cheap in a city like Las Vegas because you don’t need to build underground stations. It can’t be cheap in a city like NYC, because there you have to build underground stations. So comparing the cost of this system to the cost of systems like the Second Avenue Subway is inapt. TBC hasn’t figured out a way to make a transit system for a city like New York more efficiently or cheaply - they’ve simply made a road and tunnel system that can only work where it can be served by large numbers of surface stations. And any transit agency can build surface stations cheaply - that’s not the problem. What makes subways expensive is that you have to build underground stations.

Because only a small number of people who travel to the LVCC park there. A big convention will have upwards of 100K attendees, plus all the staff and employees and whatnot. The Loop can’t carry more than 2K or so attendees into the LVCC per hour per tunnel (that 4K capacity per hour is the whole system, not per tunnel). With only two entry points planned into the LVCC complex, that’s a relatively small capacity. Since the congestion is caused by all the people who travel to the LVCC, and not just the people who park there, the Loop isn’t going to have a big effect on the congestion. Especially since some non-trivial number of people in those Loop seats would have take shuttles or the Monorail to the LVCC, so not all of them are net “cars off the road.”

Does it? From your map, the plan is to have a Loop station outside the airport boundary. It’s on the east side of Paradise Road. Seems like the Loop cars will be exiting the tunnel and driving into the airport like everyone else. When the multi-modal facility is built, they’ll be driving out of the tunnel and into the multi-modal facility like everyone else. So if the multi-modal facility starts getting congested, it will back up both the surface roads and the tunnels (because the Loop cars will also have to queue to get into the facility.

It has potential to make money, sure. It has potential to offer a premium service to people who want to skip the congestion on the surface roads, absolutely (again, we know how to make systems like that already). It just doesn’t have the potential to relieve congestion in the urban areas.

1 Like

Note that some of the planned stations are above ground. A tunnel taxi could do most travel in tunnels but go above ground for the more difficult sections you describe.

Spread out and low density Las Vegas is more similar to the average American city than Manhattan.

Does it matter? So instead of walking to the terminal they take a high capacity shuttle bus. The point is that instead taking an Uber or taxi using above ground airport roads to reach their terminal, a lot of passengers will take a tunnel taxi and shuttle bus.

So you keep saying. But I think removing 4,000 cars/hour from above ground roads in a given location probably does have potential to relieve congestion.

1 Like

It is not cheap. It kills commerce in the city. See much less buy much less spend much less. Lose it at a table that does not report honestly.

Sure. But most American cities also don’t have the same transit construction costs as Manhattan, either. So comparing the Loop’s construction costs to those of a typical subway (which most American cities don’t have) doesn’t give you much insight into whether they’ve done anything especially useful in lowering costs. Especially since they’re still on “easy mode” in terms of their rolling stock costs, because the system is so short.

Yes, it matters.

Typically, airport congestion isn’t caused by capacity constraints on the roadway leading to the airport. It’s caused by the constraints on the airport’s ability to absorb as many cars as want to enter the airport. The MM facility will almost certainly be the same thing. If the Loop vehicles are coming into the MM facility through the same entrance as the Ubers and Lyfts and taxis, then they will be adding to the congestion of the MM facility in exactly the same way as those other cars.

Again, think of the funnel analogy. Adding a second bowl to the funnel doesn’t move things through the funnel any faster. You’re not removing 4K cars per hour from the part that’s causing the congestion. The congestion backs up onto the surface roads, but the choke point is the facility where the number of cars trying to get there at peak times exceeds the capacity to absorb it.

In a congested transportation system, most of the people are going to where most of the people are going. That destination is what’s causing the congestion - the narrow part of the funnel, not the bowl leading into it. A different path through the bowl, but that ends at the same narrow part, can’t help relieve congestion.

So a Loop system to a downtown CBD won’t relieve congestion. The Loop tunnels into the CBD will just get backed up to the same extent, and an equilibrium wait time, as the surface roads.

2 Likes