True. But I don’t think this site will accept the acronym for “Teslas In Tunnels.”
It’s a fair point, and not just because they don’t allow Lexuses (Lexii?). What Loop is doing is a bit novel - and it’s not technically a Lexus Lane, because no one other than Loop is allowed to drive on those roads, even though they’re (mostly) on public property. People will get government to grant them exclusive use of public property to let them build private facilities in a host of circumstances - a lot of sports stadia get built that way. I’m not aware of people doing that with roads in the U.S., though.
Maybe “Limit Lanes”? “Luxury Lanes,” if we’re keeping the same perjorative denotation?
Of course there are tunnels all over the world, mostly not bored tunnels, but some notable ones are, like the Chunnel between England & France. That took years and years of figuring out the geology before the first scoop full, though, because there was only a thin layer of appropriate material which a TBM could use. The “chalk marl” was the only stuff the TBM could easily handle and which would not crack above or sink underneath.
It still took 6 years once digging started, working from both ends, but it’s a marvel. Subject of many documentaries I have seen. Note: autos not allowed except as carried on trains. Trains, of course, are “true” and you can predict exactly how wide the tunnel needs to be, etc. Cars not so much, even self-driving ones, at least to this point. (A wider tunnel would help with this, but it gets geometrically more expensive the wider you go.)
Just ask Seattle how their TBM project went. They had one get stuck, couldn’t make it go forward or backward, finally just left it in place as I recall and started with another. Boring machines have trouble with sol too soft, too wet, or rocks too hard, which means bedrock better not be anywhere nearby (in NYC, for instance, the tallest buildings are sunk down to the Manhattan schist, which would choke a TBM.)
Anyway, sure, fun idea for a few things, even wonderful things. Not really a meaningful solution to “traffic” now & forever.
I don’t know if the full story is worse or better. They had a giant TBM, what was the largest diameter in the world at the time, and still the largest EPB. They are drilling along and the seals overheat. By some unbelievable stroke of luck they were in a location where there was a parking area above it. Had it gone another 500 or so feet they would have been cooked. So they dig like 120 deep straight down (something like that), dismantle the cutting head, bring it back up to the surface, fix it, and then drop it back down and reassemble it. That whole process takes like two years and a bazillion extra dollars and everybody is all mad at everybody. Then they fire it back up and start digging and everything is fine.
On that we agree and I do appreciate your sharing your expertise on the subject.
My point is that making a better tunnel borer is not a bad idea, nor is trying to find new uses for such machines. The Chinese have made a commitment to improving this technology and controls about 70% of the boring market. Such a machine recently completed a 9-km tunnel in the nation of Georgia. It is an industry with lots of potential.
The Boring Company is trying to do develop a transit system based on smaller cheaper tunnels and off-the-shelf BEVs and is testing its ideas in a major city with minimal use of public dollars. To do this TBC has convinced casino and hotel owners to spend their own money to build stations while TBC finances the tunneling. Big business taking all the financial risks to develop a novel transit system that could significantly benefit the general public. Seriously, what’s not to like?
I suspect the cost savings are due to the same general reasons that Tesla can build BEVs for a lower cost than GM, vertical integration, innovative methodology, and the ability to apply technological improvements rapidly. The ability of Prufrock to porpoise for example means that tunneling can begin within 48 hours of the borer arriving at the site and the tunnel walls/supports are prefabricated and are added as the borer advances. The latter allows for continuous boring.
I suspect it is because the proposed projects were novel and risky and Musk has a well-know tendency to overpromise. He generally gets to where he wants to go, but the path tends be much longer and rockier than expected. The current TBC strategy makes a lot more sense, focus on one major project and gradually work out the technological kinks while also assessing the practicality. Musk was setting TBC up for failure with all those early projects and promises. Now I think they have a decent chance at gradually developing something in Las Vegas that can be applied elsewhere.
There’s nothing not to like. It’s just that there’s not really anything to suggest that this is a “novel transit system” that can meaningfully affect the transportation network in an urban area.
Hotels have long been willing to spend modest money on transportation amenities as a way to attract guests - airport shuttles, buses to local attractions, and the like.
The outlay for Loop access seems like it would be pretty modest for these first stations. None seem to have purpose-built buildings, but rather just used existing areas (surface or the first floor of a garage) that the borer dolphined up into. For example, the Westgate hotel station, right by the monorail, is just a surface lot:
…while the Resorts World “station” was just converting an existing basement that the tunnel punched into, not a new building area.
Which is not to criticize this approach - it’s good that these first few stations don’t actually require building new structures. That’s one of the perks of rubber-tire transit (whether Loop or shuttle bus) - you don’t need to build much of a facility to accommodate them. But I don’t think that these first hotels made much of an investment. The only new physical structures appear to be the tunnels. The rest seems is paving and restriping of the surfaces, with some bus shelter structures at the Westgate one and just some furniture at Resorts World. (And honestly, I couldn’t find anything that said that either hotel paid for any part of the improvements).
Not a knock on them - both hotels did have to give up space on their property. They’re clearly willing to participate. But I don’t think it’s evidence that they think that the Loop is guaranteed (or even likely) to grow into an actual transit system - because even if it never becomes much more than just a private way to get to the LVCC and the airport, that low level of outlay probably pencils out.
This might be the first time I’ve seen a public transport system being described as a “cash cow”. And maybe also the first time I’ve seen one IPO at scale.
Okay, so rather than hundreds of millions the cost of Loop stations are “pretty modest”.
Okay, so sloping up from subterranean to surface in urban areas is not much of an issue for the Boring Company.
Okay, to sum up, the TBC uses small tunnels of modest cost, stations of modest cost, cars off the lot that can double as above ground robotaxis as needed, and seems to have no problems connecting subterranean roads to surface stations in urban areas.
Okay, you spent a lot of words in earlier posts outlining problems/costs associated with conventional underground transit systems that you now provide empirical evidence showing do not apply to the Vegas Loop. I dunno, the Loop seems pretty novel.
Related topic is/was the massive uncompensated confiscation of public streets by private automobiles, supported by vicious laws outlawing “jaywalking” pedestrians, hand carts, and the terroriization of children playing on the streets. I am sufficiently ancient to have learned to play baseball in the 1950’s automobile crazed Los Angeles on the street in front of my house, the older kids flagging down cars and forcing them to stop and WAIT (oh the horror!) until a batter was struck out or on base, and the same held true on most streets even on the now hopelessly clogged and congested island of Manhattan.
Private automobiles are EVIL. There, I’ve said it. So stone me.
Right. Because Las Vegas is a very low-density urban area characterized by large surface parking lots and no existing subway system. So you can have set up a system of underground tunnels like this. But this isn’t very useful as a transit system, for the reasons we’ve discussed above.
First, most of the areas that are both congested and have a high enough density to support transit don’t have these characteristics, and certainly don’t have them in the central urban district that a lot of people need to get to in the peak times.
Second, the trade-off involved in rubber-tire systems generally (and micro-transit like private passenger cars specifically) is between capital infrastructure and the operating cost of the rolling stock. Subway cars carry scores of people during the peak times and last for decades of full-time use; passenger cars carry no more than three or four people and wear out after four to six years of full-time use as a taxi. And, of course, doing this is utterly unworkable if you have to have drivers - which you might need to have, even if autonomy tech exists, depending on safety/security needs of the passengers. So the single subway car that carries 200 peak riders for forty years will need about 350 cars to provide the same capacity over the same time frame, or about 12x the capital cost.
Third, because this type of system is so low-density it either has to be restricted in the number of vehicles that use it (a la a Lexus Lane) or it will become just as congested as surface traffic. The reason that mass transit like subways and commuter rail and buses can get more people into a small area like a CBD is because they have very high ridership density during peak times. A crowded subway car can hold more than 200 people, and it’s the size of about four passenger cars.
Again, depending on costs this thing can work as a low-capacity premium amenity that allows a small portion of commuters to “skip the line” and bypass congestion. But it’s highly unlikely to ever function as a transit system that can reduce congestion.
Try Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Berlin, and even mismanaged London, (never mind most of Japan that I have heard bragged of but never visited) all of which afford me magnums of your three-F’s with no hefty initial capital investment, minimal ongoing costs, much less stress and threatened injury and mortalit, and far more joy in every step.
Overgrown status competitive wealthy boy-men brought us noisy murderous inefficient modern day over-trafficked USAian cities, with contagion murdering Mexico City, Rome, and most of the developing world.
Subterranean roads to surface street is a huge impediment in urban areas. Where are you going to locate that in Chicago’s Loop? In Mid-town Manhattan? In Atlanta’s Peachtree area? Sure, you could have underground stations as a subway does, but then your riders can’t just “robotaxi” off 4 blocks away, so you have the same issues as a traditional subway except “more comfortable but less efficient” for part of the ride.
Stations that are fully underground will not be “of modest cost”. The hardware (cars) will be vastly more expensive than a subway car, given life and use expectancy.
None of these issues are insurmountable, but your rosy eyed view that they are not important is as cockamamie as saying they can’t be overcome, either.
Which is pretty typical of American cities. Las Vegas population density is about the same as Dallas, Houston, Portland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Denver, and San Diego as just some examples. I believe you yourself have often argued that conventional high capacity public transit doesn’t work well in most American cities because of low density.
The key is ridership. The Loop may have lower capacity than a subway, but if it has higher ridership then it could have a greater impact on congestion.
Subway cars often carry very few people during non-peak times, which is probably most of the day. In contrast, the Loop taxis only move when carrying passengers, so they are much more efficient that way. Seems to me that the statistic you really need is operational/maintenance cost per passenger-mile.
This just seems like conjecture. It is publicly stated:
It’s not capacity or ridership of the overall system that matters. It’s the density of the passengers in the vehicles.
Congestion typically occurs because you have more vehicles traveling to a specific place at a specific point in time than can fit in the network at that place and time. It’s a geometric problem. It’s not about the capacity of the system overall - it’s about the capacity of the system to deliver large numbers of people to specific areas at specific times. If you’re interested, for a very accessible discussion of the issue, I’ve linked to an overview from a prominent urban transportation planner down below - it’s a pretty easy read for laypeople.
The limitation of a system like the Loop is that it’s low density - meaning that it can only deliver a modest number of people to a specific place at peak travel times, because they’re riding in very low-density vehicles. A peak subway car can fit 200+ riders in the same footprint as four passenger cars.
So any given Loop line or station isn’t going to be able to move more than two or three thousand riders per hour. You can’t run any more than that through a small tunnel in passenger cars that have to all unload. Meanwhile, a single subway train can have that many riders. A subway/metro station can move multiple tens of thousands of riders during peak hour; a Loop station never will be able to do that. Because the cars take up so much more volume.
You’re absolutely right that I frequently point out that low-density areas can’t support transit at more than trivial levels - because for transit to work, you need to aggregate large numbers of riders into smaller and compact vehicles, and without population density that’s not very practical. The Loop doesn’t do that, which means that it can function the same way private passenger cars do (as a good fit for disaggregated travelers). But it also means that the Loop is equally unable to provide the benefits of transit on congestion, which stem from the fact that the passengers are compressed into a smaller volume.
Again, the Loop is (functionally) not much different than just building another lane on surface streets. It just provides another lane for cars to go on. If you don’t restrict access to that lane, the traffic will equalize so that all the lanes (the surface and Loop) will have the same level of congestion again. The Loop plan (AIUI) is that they will restrict access to the lane - they’ll only run as many cars as it can handle without backing up. Because of that, any individual Loop line or station will have a relatively modest capacity (no matter what the capacity of the overall network in other parts of the city), and one that’s way too low to have any appreciable effect on overall congestion. But because it’s restricted to the limited vehicles that get access to it, those people will be able to bypass the congestion that everyone else has to sit through. Just like a Lexus Lane - low volume for selected passengers to get a congestion bypass.
I suspect adding an extra lane or two to a congested highway would reduce congestion. That’s what the Loop does except that it puts those lanes underground and uses electric robotaxis.
For example, rather than thousands of conventioneers renting cars and driving from their hotels to park at the convention center for $10, they spend $5 for unlimited daily trips on The Loop. How does that not reduce congestion around the convention center?
You would suspect that. But it usually doesn’t. That’s because while the extra lane looks like it adds a lot of capacity to that highway, it’s usually not much of an addition relative to the overall network leading into the congested area. So you end up with lots of trips shifting from other routes. The widened route is briefly a quicker way to the congested destination (like a downtown) - but that effect disappears quickly, once people that were taking other routes to avoid the wait on the highway shift into it. People will inevitably adjust into the quicker route by enough volume that there isn’t a quicker route any more.
Since an extra lane or two is typically not a very large overall capacity addition for a congested metro, it typically doesn’t have a very large impact on overall congestion. A little one, and usually not very noticeable.
Which is why, of course, congested metro areas are still congested, even though most (many? all?) have had highway widening projects from time to time.
And that’s before you get into the phenomenon of induced demand. In addition to the brief reduction in congestion being eroded by people shifting their trips, any remaining reduction in congestion induces people to take more trips on the system.
It can. Just not by very much. Peak occupancy of the LVCC is probably just under 200K attendees. The Loop probably can’t move more than 2-3K people per hour into or out of the LVCC area, and probably not that many. They’re constrained by the throughput into the stations. That’s a small proportion in the peak hours for arrival/departure. A few percentage points at most - especially since some of those seats will be filled not by people avoiding a rental car and parking fee, but by pulling folks off the many shuttle buses operated by the larger hotels and the conventions themselves.
There is no law of physics saying one cannot build enough roads to relieve congestion. The limitation is a practical one, no space to build more roads. But that’s only the case if one limits those roads to above ground.
Have you ever been to South Korea? One thing that impressed about Daegu and Seoul were the networks of underground shopping with all sorts of tunnels that allow one to walk across the city underground.
Tokyo also has a network of underground pedestrian tunnels that allow one to avoid the above ground streets. Pedestrians don’t have to cross busy intersections.
Asian cities make good use of the vast area below ground to improve pedestrian traffic. If tunneling is made less expensive I have little doubt that underground roads serviced by robotaxis will be connecting the major subterranean malls. Much cheaper than subway extensions in areas with insufficient traffic to support trains.
The Loop concept potentially provides a new alternative for city transit, one that is much cheaper than subways and can be adjusted to efficiently service ridership that is too low to financially support subways or trains (which we agree is the case for most of urban America). Underground robocabs for low traffic areas, robovans for higher traffic routes.
I am referring to the expanded loop in which 60+ hotels/casinos/resorts are connected by tunnels. The current loop is a test where TBC can assess what works and what needs to be improved. Current bottlenecks are short sections serviced by only a single tunnel that does not allow simultaneous two-way travel. That can be fixed.
All those buses become unnecessary with the expanded Loop and are taken off the above ground streets.
Cars take up a certain amount of volume, and carry a certain number of passengers. They take up physical space. Vastly more physical space per number of passengers than other modes, like subways. It’s low density.
The central business districts of larger cities are space constrained. Suburbs and exurbs, and even other parts of a larger metro, often are not. Which is why they can easily be served by cars. But the places that are congested are areas where large numbers of people are trying to get into a relatively small area.
Which means you can’t solve that problem by building roads for passenger cars. Cars take up too much volume per passenger. Even if you expand capacity to get to the CBD, the CBD can’t absorb cars any faster. Think of a narrow pipe. It can only take so much water into the pipe and out the other end. If you build more and more, and bigger and bigger, pipes leading into that narrow pipe, you still can’t move the water through it any faster. The destination is space constrained.
Which is why subways and buses. Or the pedestrian tunnels you mentioned. Nothing can move more people in less volume than walking. Close to that is the subway.
Again, the expanded Loop won’t be able to carry enough passengers to the convention center when they need to get there. No matter how many additions are made to the lines to the rest of the City, there’s only so many cars that can enter the LVCC stations per hour - and those cars can only carry so many passengers. The capacity to carry peak hour passengers to those destinations is vastly lower than the number of people going there. It’s not a big enough “pipe.”
So the Loop, even when fully built out, can only have a modest impact on congestion around the LVCC. It’s only going to carry a few thousand people into the LVCC in a given hour (and not all those people will be pulled from cars). It’s too low a volume.
Nope, I asked a physicist colleague and he assures me there is no physical law saying traffic will always be greater than road capacity.
You lack imagination. Again using the convention center as the example. An expanded loop greatly increases the number of hotels that are convenient for convention goers. That disperses the travel to and from the convention center thereby reducing congestion on any single route. When demand requires, robocabs can be replaced with robovans or even robobuses (for lots of people going to a single location, like the airport), greatly increasing ridership capacity even when using the same tunnels.
During the opening, closing, and lunch periods of the convention the Westgate resort (for example) can run 12-passenger vans on the loop to/from the convention center. On the first and last days of the convention, Loop buses can provide a direct underground route to/from the airport.
Just takes a little imagination and a touch of positivity.
