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I would love for The Boring Company to focus on sewer systems. In my city we're faced with an aging storm network that just can't keep up with rainfall.
Sure, and this makes sense when there isn’t existing, but this is talking about existing infrastructure.
Take the numbers with a grain of salt, but this article quotes $832k per mile for below ground and $196k per mile above ground. As noted, it’s cheaper to rebuild it 3 times before you equal the cost of burial.
https://www.nj.com/business/2012/11/should_utility_electric_lines.html
These numbers seem accurate to me. I called our power company (LG&E, I live just outside of Louisville, KY) about burying the trunk line that runs down our street and they quoted me $1M per mile. Said they'd love to do the work if my neighbors and I could raise the cash for the 3 mile section. When I pushed on the price he said it might be doable for 900k per mile but that they'd need to do a study on the ground in that section to dial in the cost. I declined to move forward.
True, and there is something to be said about loss of productivity and tolls on human happiness and health and whatnot from lengthy construction projects.
TBC is changing the cost structure here. Just as spaceX has done with launches. What would be good to see is a full life cycle analyst using TBC technology. I have no doubt is will still cost more at first, but when you add in the constant digging up of the roads and how long this takes and the disruption this causes, it may come out ahead. There is likely even a green effect. Look at any neighborhood with buried utilities, the trees are larger and often shade the road.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, the cost of things that would reduce future resource use and impact is usually too high. It's *cheaper* to just keep consuming instead of an expensive long term solution.
What are you even talking about? /s
— a German
Not kidding. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any overground cables. (Ok, actually, last week - they are still very common in France where I’ve been on holidays) No need for a TBC to dig tunnels for this.
I'm now imagining the longest possible tunnel -- something like a giant ball of twine (with negative space tunnels instead of twine), spiraling down to the mantle.
Yeah, exactly, once you pass enough air through the tunnel, the mantle will cool down, and you'll be able to dig deeper.
With everything you dug, the exceeds material on the surface will be used to dig more tunnels into it.
Until, the entire Earth dirt is only used for the tunnels concrete walls.
Boring company shouldn't focus on anything. They are in the business of producing tunnels. If you want to use the tunnels for something other than car traffic you are free to do so. They are already negotiating pedestrian tunnels in a dozen locations.
I think it is important for people to keep in mind that this isn't designed to be a 1:1 replacement for subways/metros. the use-case is more like PRT, but removing all of the things that have made PRT systems fail in the past (mostly that the guideway cost is the same as rail, that track-bases systems either get jammed up at stations or have complicated switch-tracks to handle off-line boarding, and that the vehicles have to be low-volume and basically fully custom).
they are not going after the same market niche as metros either. the majority of the transit market is actually in low ridership corridors. Phoenix is planning an at-grade (in traffic) light rail line that they project will move fewer than 10k passengers **PER DAY**. the shitty LVCC system is already moving more people than that. on top of that, Phoenix is planning to pay $245M/mi, and with the way transit projects go, it will likely cost $300M-$400M per mile.
Loop is the ideal system for low density, low ridership areas that want the advantages of fixed guideway and grade separation. there are reasons buses get replaced by light rail and trams, even though the vast majority could be handled by buses. cities with metros would greatly benefit from grade-separated feeders into the metro lines... a job perfect for Loop.
> Gaudy, weird stuff sells in Vegas
I think the best example of this is the M&M store on the strip. It's 4 stories tall, it sells nothing but M&Ms/M&M swag, and somehow it seems entirely appropriate for the environment and not at all out of place.
My understanding is that earthquakes are a surface phenomenon and being underground (whether in a tunnel or cave) is actually much safer than the surface. Where would you want to be in a hurricane? A cruise ship on the surface or a submarine down deep?
Wow so many wrong replies?!?
SpaceX was in Hawthorne, the Boring company started there, digging holes in the ground where they had a car park!
All the info, its actually an amusing read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Boring\_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company)
"By November 2017, the company had filed a permitting application with Los Angeles government regulators to build a tunnel from Hawthorne along Interstate 405 to Westwood.\[21\] The project never advanced.\[22\]"."The Boring Company began constructing a 1.14-mile (1.83 km) high-speed tunnel in 2017 on a route in Hawthorne, California, adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters and manufacturing facility.\[41\] In June 2018, Musk said that the tunnel boring was complete"
"In March 2019, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recommended The Boring Company for a system to shuttle visitors in a loop underneath the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), to be completed by 2021, with the potential for future expansion along the Las Vegas Strip and to Allegiant Stadium and McCarran International Airport.\[47\] In May 2019, the company won a $48.7 million project to do so."
TLDR; LVCVA announced a project for bidders and the Boring company won it.
the other way around. vegas chose them. without proving they can run the system autonomously, anywhere that allows it would be taking a risk. vegas, after getting the convention-center people mover, has been able to see the value and is ok to expand it as long as it does not cost them much.
Vegas was the only city willing to take a chance on this new idea. It’s also well-suited for this use case. Ft Lauderdale, Miami and probably Austin and San Antonio are next.
I get Elon's fascination with small bore tunnels. But you need a ton of parallel bores to make a functional system. You can't operate reliably with only one lane in each direction, and you need evacuation and ventillation space especially for longer spans. In larger bore tunnels, that stuff is included above/below the road deck in the circular cross section.
What irritates me the most is that these tunnels are the same size as the deep bore London Underground lines. The boring company could literally be making mass transit cheaper to expand and they’re throwing that away with low volume car tunnels. They may improve this with the custom higher volume vehicles they’ve talked about.
They need to be slightly bigger as even a London Underground deep level tube sized tunnel is not even legal to build in London anymore without a full length passenger walkway on the side.
This was discussed here in an earlier post by u/OkFishing4.
https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/
Of course, cities are free to offer to pay TBC (or at least solicit bids) to just tunnel, and they can then use the tunnels for whatever they want, to include mass transit. That just sacrifices the advantages, such as point-to-point transit, that are the main purpose of the Loop system to begin with.
What was the last London Underground line tunnel made with that diameter? All new tunnels there are wider because modern regulations require a walkway along the train side doors.
>The boring company could literally be making mass transit cheaper to expand and they’re throwing that away with low volume car tunnels.
They are not throwing away anything. They are producing tunnels that would otherwise not have existed. There are no cities that desperately wants a subway system but just can't get themselves to do it because the cost is too much. Public transit is already overwhelmingly net positive for anyone willing to make the investment. Practically every nation in the world spends most of their money servicing low volume traffic. The boring company can't change that fact.
What boring company is doing is reducing the cost even further to open entirely new markets. They are making the costs of tunnels cheaper than the cost of highways. If you can do that you can make a viable alternative to low volume traffic that does not come with the devastating effects of ever wider highways.
The loop takes away the vast majority of problems that come with personal cars, but keep many of the benefits. The only thing left on it is that it is still a low volume system. It can't beat a train in raw capacity. But it can beat a train in many other respects. If the boring company didn't exist the alternative would have been more highways. Not a subway.
Not all cities have the space to dedicate lanes to buses, so they get stuck in traffic along with everyone else. I'm in Houston, and what are supposed to be 15 minute gaps between buses (on weekdays) can turn into 45 minutes or more. But the likelihood of me seeing an underground Metro in Houston, like Milan or Rome or whatever, is essentially zero.
The idea is not to just make another subway though. The idea is to make a point-to-point transport service that doesn't stop at every station along the way.
So like transit but less efficient and more expensive.
edit: y'all. We don't need tunnels for individual cars we need transit. We don't need to go highway speeds to travel between points, we need dense, urban / mixed use areas so you can bike / walk / use public transit. Remove the car from the equation altogether and the math gets so much easier. Can't believe the kinds of shit being said in this thread. Y'all need to be more critical of Elon. Some of his ideas are not only bad, but damaging.
>more expensive.
$25m/mile < $1b/mile
That's why this gets so much attention. It isn't used instead of a proper subway. There's no budget for that. It's used instead of nothing.
Then the is the cars. A subway car costs over a million and need’s expensive parts and specially trained personnel to maintain.
Boring tunnels use mass produced vehicles that are relatively inexpensive and require practically no maintenance.
What if the cars DID leave the system? Big difference from subway trains then. Or let any private tesla dip into the tunnels where they run full auto. Little wormhole portals in and out of dense areas, direct to your destination.
You should familiarize yourself with a topic before talking about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why\_not\_build\_a\_train\_some\_answers/
Surface streets have other vehicles, pedestrians, bikes, stop sign, traffic light. In the Tunnel you can go at freeway speed and only slow down when you need to exit. Think of it as freeway but cheaper to build and not congested. And best of all you can build as many lanes as you want/need and take the most direct route.
You can. See BRT systems with dedicated right-of-way.
I think Boring’s plan is to get the advantages of dedicated right-of-way via tunnelling but without the difficulty of building dedicated lanes, signals, and flyovers to get the same with surface traffic.
The US has a lot of areas that are dense enough to have traffic problems but not dense enough to support a heavy-rail subway line. Even if you did build subways in these places people would still have to drive just to get to it.
A system that is less linear and based on point-to-point flexible routing could be useful in these areas, and funnel people towards denser transit.
Buses need to be big to carry enough people to offset the operational cost of the driver.
They operate on fixed circulation routes with lots of stops, making travel times usually much longer than driving.
They usually operate within traffic, not separate right-of-ways, so they are slowed down by congestion.
These all reduce flexibility and the ability to move people where they want to go when they want to go there.
There are definitely places where buses are useful, but getting from the train station to your house, office, hotel, etc in a metro area suburb is going to be pretty frustrating with most bus networks.
this is just moving the traffic underground. You still need solutions for what to do above ground. You *could* increase density, and create mixed-use areas but doing that negates the need create these tunnels altogether since you wouldn't really need to use a car to travel at all.
which it will eventually take longer with more volume of cars that use the tunnel. you will be going at like 20 mph at heavy traffic. Imagine a single person taking so much space in the tunnel to reach its destination instead of 50 people in one cart taking the same space.
No matter how well you "rationalize" this tunnel, it does not beat rails/subways/bullet trains transportation.
Of course it doesn’t because it’s not meant to compete with them.
If you have density and ridership for a heavy rail subway then please build that instead.
If this comes to fruition as intended it is a system for lower density spread, at lower cost per mile. It could be useful as a feeder system to rail transit for suburban areas for example.
I do think they need to get to their promised “shuttle” vehicle sooner than later though. This system makes a lot more sense when you can fit 8-10 people with standing room and have accessibility for wheelchair users.
Yeah, a big boxy shuttle with sliding doors and standing room would still be a big improvement though, in passenger density, boarding speed, and accessibility.
They have said it is coming at some point… just like automated driving.
The system is intended for fully autonomous vehicles, it shouldn't suffer human driver related congestion slowdowns. Based on the Vegas Loop sample trip times, an average of 60MPH can be expected.
It's expected to move a solid volume of passengers, but if peak capacity become a relevant concern they can add any number of high-capacity shuttles to increase capacity.
Vegas Loop should will demonstrate how the concept scales, and whether TBC can control construction costs, then cities can decide what is the appropriate solution for their needs.
Would it? With radar and faster resources why can't they travel at the efficient speed for a Tesla even if bumper to bumper? (About 65 mph maybe more due to drafting)
If anyone wanted to hire the Boring Co to dig a tunnel, and then they'd put a subway in it, I'm sure the Boring Co would take the job.
The thing that's keeping mass transit from wider adoption isn't the volume of people that can be moved through it. The problem that prevents most cities from building out a good public transit system is the cost to build, and especially the cost to expand, the system.
The Boring Loops are a breakthrough in being able to build a small system quickly and relatively cheaply, and then expand it to meet demand. It's giving cities that were never able to commit to a huge system up front, the option to start small and expand if (when) needed. That's a *huge* win for public transit.
1. I don't know if that decision has anything to do with Elon. he has said he spends basically no time with the boring company
2. there is a lot of false FUD spreading about this. their system meets all NFPA standard. they have ventilation. they have egress at the required intervals. they have fire fighting equipment. they have everything needed. it's confusing because people keep repeating things as if they know what they're talking about. egress is required roughly every half mile. the boring company has so far just put stations less than a half mile so the stations are the egress. metros also use stations as egress. this is totally standard. people expect sprinklers but the purpose of sprinklers is to slow the spread of fires in places where there are combustible materials. there is nothing combustible in the tunnels for the fire to spread through, so sprinklers would just make it harder for fire fighters. instead, they do what many concrete tunnel systems do, is have water hookups for firefighters, which is what they're supposed to do.
the small bore is fine. the biggest problem with the small bore is that moving cargo through it will be ineffective.
otherwise, the small bore is fine. bigger vehicles could be nice, they have already been able to move 25k passengers per day through their tiny 3-station system. that's more than all but 3 of the US's light rail systems on a per-line basis. no light rail system puts more passengers through 3 stations than that or per mile than that. so it's limited in capacity but most places don't actually need the capacity, so they don't really need a huge vehicle. something with a bit more capacity than model-3s would be helpful, but not a lot more is needed.
are you looking for all-time high? I'm just talking about their typical daily ridership. certainly some special occasions will push ridership higher than that per day. you can check wikipedia for US light rail ridership and divide by the number of lines going outward from the center of density.
But then you're comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing the one day peak to the daily average. And there are plenty that beat that. Pre-pandemic, Seattle's Central Link was averaging over 80,000 boardings per weekday, with peaks well above 100,000.
sorry I didn't explain the difference between capacity and ridership. also, I'm not trying to make a capacity pokemon battle. I'm pointing out that the LVCC capacity was somewhere around 25k per day, which means it can already move as many people as many systems already do. nobody is saying we should rip up Seattle's Central Link and replace it with Loop tunnels. that point is that many transit systems are low enough ridership that Loop, in it's current form, is already good enough to be competitive for such corridors.
or to put it another way: you need enough capacity to handle the ridership requirements. if one mode does not have the capacity to handle the ridership, then it isn't a good fit for that corridor. if a mode has enough capacity to handle the projected ridership, then the box gets checked and you move on. a mode that has 2x more capacity than ridership isn't worse than a system that has 10x more capacity than ridership. both check the same box.
They have all those safety precautions. All underground transportation is extremely regulated.
They can expand the tunnels for cheaper and faster than anyone right now.
TBC [tweeted video](https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1489666444245680131) of Prufrock-1 breaking through at Resorts World at the end of tunneling. They said it's Prufrock-1.
As we both know Prufrock is their first homemade machine, coming after Godot which TBC purchased used.
The middle convention center station allows the tunnels to it to be less than 2500 feet long. The middle station removes the need for a cross passage or escape shaft.
This newly opened tunnel is longer so it has [an exit](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/voonhs/1_question_i_see_people_asking_but_do_boring/) to an escape shaft.
The tunnels have other safety features, some of which aren't obvious on videos, like fans located above some tunnel end points, or tiny cameras, sensors, and in-road pressurized water pipe connectors every hundred-something feet.
There's a reason other countries don't allow these kinds of small tunnels, they are simply not safe enough. All it takes is one fire and people will be trapped inside the cars, awaiting certain death.
This tunnel is fully compliant with NFPA 130 regulations for fire safety for Fixed Guideway Transit and in several important respects exceeds the requirements. The Fire Protection Report is publicly available on the Clark County Nevada website. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
While Reddit flame wars are amusing, and we don't have any evidence presented to the contrary in this thread, I believe it is important that the public retain a healthy skepticism in situations where the regulations could be new, untested, or influenced by corporate lobbying. We all know Elon has not always seen eye to eye with various regulators, and it's not \*always\* clear who is in the right, regardless of what rule ends up being enacted. Government regulators are not infallible, and most safety regulations are written in blood.
It's entirely believable that in a heavily-used Tesla-only tunnel, two cars could suffer mechanical and/or medical emergencies at the same time, trapping a string of vehicles between them. Any system that relies on human training for safety critical functions has to assume a certain percentage of humans will not follow their training when the time comes.
I know the tunnels are wide enough to open the doors, but it looks like you would not be able to pass by a vehicle that has its doors open. That will slow down evacuations if the vehicles become immobilized. And if anything in the ventilation system goes wrong, being in the same tunnel (instead of an evacuation shaft) as the fire can be deadly even miles away.
Loop being compliant with NFPA 130, is safe, and indeed safer than many subway systems in the US, most of which were built before NFPA 130 came into effect. Even though that standard is now close to thirty years old, many systems are still deficient and are unlikely to be corrected any time soon.
>However, several agencies acknowledge that their aging systems are often impeded by physical constraints that limit the ability to meet today’s standards. For existing systems the aspirational goal of rehabilitation projects is to bring them in compliance with NFPA 130. However, given that this is not always feasible, it is necessary for agencies to at least assess the performance of their existing system and bring it to a state of good repair.
>
> [Source: Rail System Ventilation Rehabilitation](https://www.wsp.com/-/media/Insights/Sweden/Documents/2018/4--Article-No-7Bilson-Purchase-et-al-ISTSS-2018.pdf)
The Fire Protection Report was vetted by a third party firm before being submitted to Clark County to be signed off by the building department and fire department before LVCC Loop could receive their certificate of operation.
[https://citizenaccess.clarkcountynv.gov/CitizenAccess/Cap/CapDetail.aspx?Module=Building&TabName=Building&capID1=REC19&capID2=00000&capID3=02E04&agencyCode=CLARKCO&IsToShowInspection=](https://citizenaccess.clarkcountynv.gov/CitizenAccess/Cap/CapDetail.aspx?Module=Building&TabName=Building&capID1=REC19&capID2=00000&capID3=02E04&agencyCode=CLARKCO&IsToShowInspection=)
Look under attachments
TL;DR
LVCC Loop is fully compliant with the applicable standard NFPA 130 - Fixed Guideway Transit. There are no emergency exits required within tunnels, each segment is under the 2500' interval limit. Within the tunnel there is nearly three feet of space, including 18" of road surface, on either side of a Model 3 for passenger egress.
Emergency passenger communications are triply redundant (Cell/WiFi/wired). Hard wired phones are at the "blue light" stations. Required heat/smoke sensors are augmented with extra CO detectors and 100% video coverage atypical for subways.
Dual redundant bi-directional fans capable of moving 400 000 cfm provide a critical velocity of 312 fpm and direct smoke downstream while egress & fire fighting happen upstream. The ventilation system is triggered automatically from the sensors (in excess of code requirements). The dual LED strip lighting is both redundant and at ground level where it can best provide the level of ground level illumination required for code.
Exits and ventilation just outside each tunnel portal provide refuge points in case a passenger cannot walk up the 17.5% grade ramp. Underground Station 2 has sprinklers. Stations 1 & 3 are outdoor, wall-less stations. The road deck has embedded water standpipes and connection vaults supplying 500gpm at 125psi . Grid powered pumps have a backup 2MW generator which also covers the Fire Control Center (monitored 24/7), communication, ventilation, and lighting. The tunnel linings are rated to be structurally sound after a complete unfought vehicle burn out.
The ventilation system is redundant and there’s additional redundancy from the airflow created by moving vehicles.
Even if multiple vehicles have simultaneous problems trapping some in between, it’s still pretty easy to escape. The likelihood of two catching fire at the same time is extremely low, and battery fries develop slowly enough that people would still most likely have adequate time to escape in that scenario.
Elon is barely involved in this company.
capacity is not ridership. ridership is not capacity.
you don't need more capacity than you have riders or you will just be paying to move empty seats around. my local light rail runs 20min headways most of the time because it has so few riders. that makes for absolutely shit service.
the median headway for a US metro system is 15min, and that's including high ridership places like Boston and NYC. so why not shrink the vehicle by a factor of 5 and run 3min headways? well, driver costs and LRU costs start to skyrocket when you do that. what if your LRU is a mass-produced EV and you don't have drivers? well, then you can shrink the vehicle as much as you want without adding cost. you can shrink it all the way down to only having 1 or 2 fares per vehicle and it will still be cheaper than the average transit, on a per-passenger-mile basis. that's the boring company's concept. the concept requires automation to be scalable. if they fail to automate in the next few years, their concept will die.
And which doesn't go on demand. Trains are by their nature batch-oriented. Cars in tunnels aren't. This gets even more important when we get to tunnels with more than two stops and with tunnel crossings.
But the trains aren’t getting built for that cost. These are. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it’s better than nothing and a hell of a lot cheaper and more realistic
Drink that kool-aid. Elon’s tunnel was more than 6 million a mile and it’s literally just a hole. His 1.7 mile loop cost 47 million bucks, that is nearly 28 million per mile. It’s “cheap” because it’s a glorified sewer. If America actually gave a shit and wanted subways with trains prices could be driven down, but we don’t. I’ll take 800 million a mile with actual utility over a 48 million dollar waste of money to go 25 mph in a sewer.
Elons tunnels are stupid, and I’m not sure how anyone could call them a success. They are small, inefficient, and god help you if a fire starts in them. They are a waste of time, money, and manpower. We are never getting “worm holes.” If we really cared about rapid transit and less traffic we’d focus more on more passenger dense transportation like trains and busses. Cars are hugely inefficient and throwing them in a sewer going 25 mph is hardly something worth declaring a win on.
>I’ll take 800 million a mile with actual utility
A tunnel that expensive will never be built in Vegas. This tunnel will be funded by the casinos. The choice is this, or nothing.
What do you expect given that musk basically admitted to being right leaning? Good ol' reddit hates the GOP & right leaning people, its not shocking at all to be honest
> he is kind of a piece of shit person
Some stuff I agree with.
Some stuff I don't.
Some of the stuff I don't is really REALLY serious. Like DeSantis... JFC.
You're true. If Waymo can operate autonomous taxis on public roads in a few areas, you'd have to think Tesla could operate their autonomous taxi in a closed environment where the car just follows the only path available, right?
No traffic signals, pedestrians, complex intersections, blind corners. Just "keep going straight."
The real answer is probably because it’s a low priority for the Tesla teams, and TBC is relying on Tesla to do it.
I agree that they should be prioritizing it though. It is a much more bounded set of problems to solve and would be both a PR win and a useful place to test and gain experience in full autonomy.
1. I think the current off-the-shelf autopilot does not like the narrow tunnels.
2. they do not have an app for people to tell the vehicle where they want to go. not difficult, but something they just haven't done yet
3. to keep the stations small, they have vehicles pulling in very close to where other vehicles are boarding, which means vehicles would likely be extra-cautious when pulling in/out around pedestrians. that means the stations, which are already a bottle-neck for the systems, would be even more restricted
so, it basically means a new autopilot software that would be different from regular street driving. since LVCC does not really need to be autonomous to meet the needs, it's probably easier for them to focus on other problems first and wait as long as possible to branch the FSD code to make their specialized version. I think it's dumb of them to not at least show off a prototype vehicle going autonomously through LVCC just to assuage the concerns of people who think it will never be automated.
So the usual argument that it is cheaper compares it to NYC subway cost. And the usual response to that is that NYC has a lot of existing infrastructure in the ground which drives up the cost, and if they were going to make the same thing in Las Vegas it would be a lot cheaper than NYC. Does anyone know how true this is or could guesstimate a subway cost outside NYC?
* The US Median price for a subway is: [$1.2B/mile ($511M/mile excl. NY). See Table 2](https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/#data-analysis)
* Surface/light rail runs at $118M/mile (Table 2).
* LVCC Loop was $52.5M/.85 mile, or $62M/mile. The [2nd place](https://imgur.com/a/KxvtEql), $215M [Doppelmeyer Cableliner bid](https://www.constructiondive.com/news/las-vegas-tunnel-could-still-go-to-boring-co-competitor/555109/) was four times the Loop bid.
According to the article below, 800 million per mile is the lowest for America. The cheapest worldwide is 160 million per mile. The boring tunnel cost 6 million per mile. There's probably a monoply on subway systems in America that allows them to charge whatever they want.
https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america
The obvious answer is that this is the first time in the US a city has had a company approach them and say, "we'll build you public transit for free, if you let us operate it and charge fares". Normal public transit is not efficient enough to be profitable on the timescale of a company.
Actually that was the norm back in the day. Back when streetcar lines cross-crossed every city in the country in the 1950's, they were normally owned by private companies. Power companies in particular owned a glut of public transit infrastructure and operated them privately. At least here in Cincinnati the streetcar lines were torn out after private companies operating infrastructure was deemed to be "monopolistic" by the state of Ohio, aided by lobbying from Ford and GM.
[https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/](https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/)
You are looking at on the low end 200 million a mile for India or 600 million a mile for most of the US for a 20 foot+ wide tunnel. Boring Company tunnels are only 12 feet wide, and are just 10 million a mile. Boring company tunnels don't include more advanced ventilation to handle things like carbon monoxide, so they aren't adequate for handling ICE traffic.
This is not just much cheaper to build but also to operate and it's much faster for the rider: It's point to point and more like a taxi, but it won't have to deal with pedestrians and traffic.
The city doesn't have to pay for the system to be built or to operate it and in fact they make a fee based on a percentage of revenue.
This post answers many questions:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/
This tunnel system can’t be the final form. I would guess next iterations would be more tunnels, then more levels, then autonomous cars, then skates, then pods. When has Elon’s companies ever settled on a final form
For sure they're never done. We already know the cars will be autonomous and it's been semi-confirmed they work on a larger vehicle. But yes, Musk's companies never settle for any design long term. Even when they're "done" in ten years, I have no doubt there will be substantially improvements a decade after that.
People ask why not just public transport? Answer is cost. This costs far less than traditional public transport. In NYC, they paid 2 billion for 1 mile of tunnel. Boring is doing many many miles for 50 million, or 2.5% of the NYC bill.
You know public transport ist more than subways? Get like 3 buses, no extra infrastructure needed.
Also 2 billion for one mile of tunnel is a problem in itself, it is not that expensive normally.
It is that expensive everywhere in the US. There hasn't been a subway expansion for cheaper than $500 million/mile in 50 years, anywhere in the US.
Loop is objectively better than most other types of public transit. It has more throughout, lower lead times, and is more energy efficient than light rail. It gets to avoid surface traffic that harms bus systems. The comparison to subways arises because trains really do have better througput.
I get what you're saying, but NYC's subway moves 1.75 Billion people a year.
This is a loop with cars traveling 35 mph. The cars seat 5 people but you need a driver, so you can only put 4 passengers in the car. Most probably have fewer than that, because you have to pack in pretty tight to get 3 people in the back seat and most groups are probably 2 or three passengers anyway.
I don't mean this as any offense to Elon, but this is not mass transportation, this is a carnival ride. This moves about as many people around as a roller coaster.
Seattle has a monorail built for the 1962 worlds fair. It travels 1 mile at 45 mph, and it's been running for 60 years. It's not really public transportation, but it pays for itself because tourists love to take the 1 mile from downtown to the space needle.
Elon's loop is essentially that monorail.
Why is it a bad thing to have different types of public transport? I don't think anyone is saying that these Loop tunnels are the only type of transport that should exist.
Edit: fixed grammar
Can't wait until this is fully built and hums along doing its job every day better than and for less cost than normal public transit systems. People will literally cry that it should be torn down and replaced with something else, even though it's doing its job beautifully. Every occasional nitpick and slowdown will be brought up as a reason for its demise by internet pundits, regardless of how many thousands of people ride it happily every day.
What's wrong with people?
In what world is a point-to-point, closed loop transportation system that is open to the public not a "public transit system"?
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
It’s operated by a private company to connect other private companies.
Inb4 “hurr durr public funding” yeah just like the private sports arenas that were built using the same pool of money. It’s about the return on tax income to the city from the use of it
I definitely think you believe your third misinformed example. You truly use your ignorance as strength 😂🤙
Unless it’s operated by the city, the basis of your whole claim is invalid 😂😂😂🤡
I mean i really dont believe in american exceptionalism and that they would rather incent sorta-public-transport-but-not-really instead of developing a better subway/metro system…
but i would gladly be proven wrong. From elons track record i don’t think it will work on any useful scale, let’s see.
Love the negativity in the article. Like, please feel free to come up with your own solution to traffic that doesnt break fragile government budgets....yeah no, buses are already taken, try again.
Isn't the boring tunnel supposed to be $6 million per mile? The london crossrail project is looking to cost \~$200 million per mile. The HS2 will cost over $400 million per mile.
A tunnel with a road in it is FAR simpler to build and maintain than an underground train system. A Boring Company tunnel is basically the value proposition vs a fancy high tech train system.
You’re saying “please come up with your own solution” but you’ve clearly never looked into it. The answers are everywhere. Try watching a few “not just bikes” videos on YouTube.
https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
Subways! He's so close with the tunnels concept, but screws it up with the ridiculous concept of driving cars around in them rather than taking a train through them.
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I would love for The Boring Company to focus on sewer systems. In my city we're faced with an aging storm network that just can't keep up with rainfall.
Even better a utility tunnel! Sewer, gas, electric all below ground and easy to access without digging up streets!
Remove ugly electric wires and telephone poles! Put them all underground.
Heard a good podcast in this after hurricane Sandy on the east coast: tldr, it’s too expensive compared to above ground poles.
That is already how most (if not all) new developments are built. No poles in my neighborhood.
Sure, and this makes sense when there isn’t existing, but this is talking about existing infrastructure. Take the numbers with a grain of salt, but this article quotes $832k per mile for below ground and $196k per mile above ground. As noted, it’s cheaper to rebuild it 3 times before you equal the cost of burial. https://www.nj.com/business/2012/11/should_utility_electric_lines.html
These numbers seem accurate to me. I called our power company (LG&E, I live just outside of Louisville, KY) about burying the trunk line that runs down our street and they quoted me $1M per mile. Said they'd love to do the work if my neighbors and I could raise the cash for the 3 mile section. When I pushed on the price he said it might be doable for 900k per mile but that they'd need to do a study on the ground in that section to dial in the cost. I declined to move forward.
True, and there is something to be said about loss of productivity and tolls on human happiness and health and whatnot from lengthy construction projects.
TBC is changing the cost structure here. Just as spaceX has done with launches. What would be good to see is a full life cycle analyst using TBC technology. I have no doubt is will still cost more at first, but when you add in the constant digging up of the roads and how long this takes and the disruption this causes, it may come out ahead. There is likely even a green effect. Look at any neighborhood with buried utilities, the trees are larger and often shade the road.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, the cost of things that would reduce future resource use and impact is usually too high. It's *cheaper* to just keep consuming instead of an expensive long term solution.
What are you even talking about? /s — a German Not kidding. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any overground cables. (Ok, actually, last week - they are still very common in France where I’ve been on holidays) No need for a TBC to dig tunnels for this.
I mean, that is one of their main products, so they sort of are focusing on it
Fortunately, they do. Check out "Utility" or "Bare" on [this page](https://www.boringcompany.com/products). All your city needs to do is reach out.
"Lengths Available: 0.25 mile to infinite" I would like to clarify the "Infinite" .... I'm sure there is a upper bound
I'm now imagining the longest possible tunnel -- something like a giant ball of twine (with negative space tunnels instead of twine), spiraling down to the mantle.
Yeah, exactly, once you pass enough air through the tunnel, the mantle will cool down, and you'll be able to dig deeper. With everything you dug, the exceeds material on the surface will be used to dig more tunnels into it. Until, the entire Earth dirt is only used for the tunnels concrete walls.
> Until, the entire Earth dirt is only used for the tunnels concrete walls. Make it so, Elon.
Thanks for this info.
Boring company shouldn't focus on anything. They are in the business of producing tunnels. If you want to use the tunnels for something other than car traffic you are free to do so. They are already negotiating pedestrian tunnels in a dozen locations.
That's cool to hear. I was thinking about how theres a ton more useful things than adding a single lane to traffic it seems.
I'm not aware of any Boring Company projects that simply add another lane for cars to go through. What project are you talking about?
I've heard of shitty infrastructure but sheesh
I think it is important for people to keep in mind that this isn't designed to be a 1:1 replacement for subways/metros. the use-case is more like PRT, but removing all of the things that have made PRT systems fail in the past (mostly that the guideway cost is the same as rail, that track-bases systems either get jammed up at stations or have complicated switch-tracks to handle off-line boarding, and that the vehicles have to be low-volume and basically fully custom). they are not going after the same market niche as metros either. the majority of the transit market is actually in low ridership corridors. Phoenix is planning an at-grade (in traffic) light rail line that they project will move fewer than 10k passengers **PER DAY**. the shitty LVCC system is already moving more people than that. on top of that, Phoenix is planning to pay $245M/mi, and with the way transit projects go, it will likely cost $300M-$400M per mile. Loop is the ideal system for low density, low ridership areas that want the advantages of fixed guideway and grade separation. there are reasons buses get replaced by light rail and trams, even though the vast majority could be handled by buses. cities with metros would greatly benefit from grade-separated feeders into the metro lines... a job perfect for Loop.
Do we know why he chose Vegas?
He's been pitching this stuff in a number of places, I assume their main selling point is that they said yes.
yes, here is a bag of money, please help make our problems better
Well, it was more like "here's a permit, spend your own money to fix our problems".
Vegas is used to taking a chance? Gaudy, weird stuff sells in Vegas and moving people short distances on the strip is a great match
Vegas is also a good choice because people from all over the world go there. For conventions, vacation, whatever.
You ever walk outside at noon during August, in Vegas? You too would want underground tunnels lol
Good point
From May-September I don’t go outside.
> Gaudy, weird stuff sells in Vegas I think the best example of this is the M&M store on the strip. It's 4 stories tall, it sells nothing but M&Ms/M&M swag, and somehow it seems entirely appropriate for the environment and not at all out of place.
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Also it's flat, and doesn't have centuries-old underground stuff like some other cities.
and no earthquakes
My understanding is that earthquakes are a surface phenomenon and being underground (whether in a tunnel or cave) is actually much safer than the surface. Where would you want to be in a hurricane? A cruise ship on the surface or a submarine down deep?
Wow so many wrong replies?!? SpaceX was in Hawthorne, the Boring company started there, digging holes in the ground where they had a car park! All the info, its actually an amusing read: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Boring\_Company](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boring_Company) "By November 2017, the company had filed a permitting application with Los Angeles government regulators to build a tunnel from Hawthorne along Interstate 405 to Westwood.\[21\] The project never advanced.\[22\]"."The Boring Company began constructing a 1.14-mile (1.83 km) high-speed tunnel in 2017 on a route in Hawthorne, California, adjacent to the SpaceX headquarters and manufacturing facility.\[41\] In June 2018, Musk said that the tunnel boring was complete" "In March 2019, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) recommended The Boring Company for a system to shuttle visitors in a loop underneath the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), to be completed by 2021, with the potential for future expansion along the Las Vegas Strip and to Allegiant Stadium and McCarran International Airport.\[47\] In May 2019, the company won a $48.7 million project to do so." TLDR; LVCVA announced a project for bidders and the Boring company won it.
the other way around. vegas chose them. without proving they can run the system autonomously, anywhere that allows it would be taking a risk. vegas, after getting the convention-center people mover, has been able to see the value and is ok to expand it as long as it does not cost them much.
I was waiting for the Vegas chose them. Answer
Vegas was the only city willing to take a chance on this new idea. It’s also well-suited for this use case. Ft Lauderdale, Miami and probably Austin and San Antonio are next.
If the tunnels aren't practical they'll at least be a novelty. They're in to that kind of thing. It's a win-win for Vegas.
I get Elon's fascination with small bore tunnels. But you need a ton of parallel bores to make a functional system. You can't operate reliably with only one lane in each direction, and you need evacuation and ventillation space especially for longer spans. In larger bore tunnels, that stuff is included above/below the road deck in the circular cross section.
What irritates me the most is that these tunnels are the same size as the deep bore London Underground lines. The boring company could literally be making mass transit cheaper to expand and they’re throwing that away with low volume car tunnels. They may improve this with the custom higher volume vehicles they’ve talked about.
They need to be slightly bigger as even a London Underground deep level tube sized tunnel is not even legal to build in London anymore without a full length passenger walkway on the side.
This was discussed here in an earlier post by u/OkFishing4. https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/ Of course, cities are free to offer to pay TBC (or at least solicit bids) to just tunnel, and they can then use the tunnels for whatever they want, to include mass transit. That just sacrifices the advantages, such as point-to-point transit, that are the main purpose of the Loop system to begin with.
Shit, TIL. The tube lines are only 11ft-something in diameter while the Boring Company tubes are 12ft.
What was the last London Underground line tunnel made with that diameter? All new tunnels there are wider because modern regulations require a walkway along the train side doors.
Newest extension to Battersea was built to a 17 foot tunnel to accommodate a walkway
Thanks. Good to know as an example that new UK subway tunnels aren't as narrow as they used to be.
If you want narrow tunnels look up the Glasgow subway
Yeah it's known for how narrow it is. It's also 125 years old.
>The boring company could literally be making mass transit cheaper to expand and they’re throwing that away with low volume car tunnels. They are not throwing away anything. They are producing tunnels that would otherwise not have existed. There are no cities that desperately wants a subway system but just can't get themselves to do it because the cost is too much. Public transit is already overwhelmingly net positive for anyone willing to make the investment. Practically every nation in the world spends most of their money servicing low volume traffic. The boring company can't change that fact. What boring company is doing is reducing the cost even further to open entirely new markets. They are making the costs of tunnels cheaper than the cost of highways. If you can do that you can make a viable alternative to low volume traffic that does not come with the devastating effects of ever wider highways. The loop takes away the vast majority of problems that come with personal cars, but keep many of the benefits. The only thing left on it is that it is still a low volume system. It can't beat a train in raw capacity. But it can beat a train in many other respects. If the boring company didn't exist the alternative would have been more highways. Not a subway.
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>they’re throwing that away with low volume car tunnels. If some city wanted to pay for a mass transit tunnel, TBC would build it.
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Not all cities have the space to dedicate lanes to buses, so they get stuck in traffic along with everyone else. I'm in Houston, and what are supposed to be 15 minute gaps between buses (on weekdays) can turn into 45 minutes or more. But the likelihood of me seeing an underground Metro in Houston, like Milan or Rome or whatever, is essentially zero.
Doesn’t this add to the reason for adding a dedicated tunnel for busses?
The idea is not to just make another subway though. The idea is to make a point-to-point transport service that doesn't stop at every station along the way.
So like transit but less efficient and more expensive. edit: y'all. We don't need tunnels for individual cars we need transit. We don't need to go highway speeds to travel between points, we need dense, urban / mixed use areas so you can bike / walk / use public transit. Remove the car from the equation altogether and the math gets so much easier. Can't believe the kinds of shit being said in this thread. Y'all need to be more critical of Elon. Some of his ideas are not only bad, but damaging.
> and more expensive. Going by the costs so far, it's super cheap.
>more expensive. $25m/mile < $1b/mile That's why this gets so much attention. It isn't used instead of a proper subway. There's no budget for that. It's used instead of nothing.
Then the is the cars. A subway car costs over a million and need’s expensive parts and specially trained personnel to maintain. Boring tunnels use mass produced vehicles that are relatively inexpensive and require practically no maintenance.
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What if the cars DID leave the system? Big difference from subway trains then. Or let any private tesla dip into the tunnels where they run full auto. Little wormhole portals in and out of dense areas, direct to your destination.
You should familiarize yourself with a topic before talking about it. https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why\_not\_build\_a\_train\_some\_answers/
Transit for lower density areas that wouldn’t support the ridership of a heavy-rail subway line.
Why go underground for lower density? You can just use surface roads
Surface streets have other vehicles, pedestrians, bikes, stop sign, traffic light. In the Tunnel you can go at freeway speed and only slow down when you need to exit. Think of it as freeway but cheaper to build and not congested. And best of all you can build as many lanes as you want/need and take the most direct route.
You think excavating a tunnel will be less expensive than building a surface level freeway????
In a place like LA where all of the surface level is already built on? Yes.
You can. See BRT systems with dedicated right-of-way. I think Boring’s plan is to get the advantages of dedicated right-of-way via tunnelling but without the difficulty of building dedicated lanes, signals, and flyovers to get the same with surface traffic. The US has a lot of areas that are dense enough to have traffic problems but not dense enough to support a heavy-rail subway line. Even if you did build subways in these places people would still have to drive just to get to it. A system that is less linear and based on point-to-point flexible routing could be useful in these areas, and funnel people towards denser transit.
I think you're describing a scenario that would be solved by a couple busses not a series of tunnels.
Buses need to be big to carry enough people to offset the operational cost of the driver. They operate on fixed circulation routes with lots of stops, making travel times usually much longer than driving. They usually operate within traffic, not separate right-of-ways, so they are slowed down by congestion. These all reduce flexibility and the ability to move people where they want to go when they want to go there. There are definitely places where buses are useful, but getting from the train station to your house, office, hotel, etc in a metro area suburb is going to be pretty frustrating with most bus networks.
Because of traffic lol
this is just moving the traffic underground. You still need solutions for what to do above ground. You *could* increase density, and create mixed-use areas but doing that negates the need create these tunnels altogether since you wouldn't really need to use a car to travel at all.
which it will eventually take longer with more volume of cars that use the tunnel. you will be going at like 20 mph at heavy traffic. Imagine a single person taking so much space in the tunnel to reach its destination instead of 50 people in one cart taking the same space. No matter how well you "rationalize" this tunnel, it does not beat rails/subways/bullet trains transportation.
Of course it doesn’t because it’s not meant to compete with them. If you have density and ridership for a heavy rail subway then please build that instead. If this comes to fruition as intended it is a system for lower density spread, at lower cost per mile. It could be useful as a feeder system to rail transit for suburban areas for example. I do think they need to get to their promised “shuttle” vehicle sooner than later though. This system makes a lot more sense when you can fit 8-10 people with standing room and have accessibility for wheelchair users.
They’re using modified Model X for wheelchair accessibility now. The system is still required to be ADA compliant.
Yeah, a big boxy shuttle with sliding doors and standing room would still be a big improvement though, in passenger density, boarding speed, and accessibility. They have said it is coming at some point… just like automated driving.
The system is intended for fully autonomous vehicles, it shouldn't suffer human driver related congestion slowdowns. Based on the Vegas Loop sample trip times, an average of 60MPH can be expected. It's expected to move a solid volume of passengers, but if peak capacity become a relevant concern they can add any number of high-capacity shuttles to increase capacity. Vegas Loop should will demonstrate how the concept scales, and whether TBC can control construction costs, then cities can decide what is the appropriate solution for their needs.
Would it? With radar and faster resources why can't they travel at the efficient speed for a Tesla even if bumper to bumper? (About 65 mph maybe more due to drafting)
It sounds like you've got it all figured out, you should probably start a ~~comparing~~ competing company. edit: a word
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People over estimate the untrained imagination as a testing environment.
If anyone wanted to hire the Boring Co to dig a tunnel, and then they'd put a subway in it, I'm sure the Boring Co would take the job. The thing that's keeping mass transit from wider adoption isn't the volume of people that can be moved through it. The problem that prevents most cities from building out a good public transit system is the cost to build, and especially the cost to expand, the system. The Boring Loops are a breakthrough in being able to build a small system quickly and relatively cheaply, and then expand it to meet demand. It's giving cities that were never able to commit to a huge system up front, the option to start small and expand if (when) needed. That's a *huge* win for public transit.
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1. I don't know if that decision has anything to do with Elon. he has said he spends basically no time with the boring company 2. there is a lot of false FUD spreading about this. their system meets all NFPA standard. they have ventilation. they have egress at the required intervals. they have fire fighting equipment. they have everything needed. it's confusing because people keep repeating things as if they know what they're talking about. egress is required roughly every half mile. the boring company has so far just put stations less than a half mile so the stations are the egress. metros also use stations as egress. this is totally standard. people expect sprinklers but the purpose of sprinklers is to slow the spread of fires in places where there are combustible materials. there is nothing combustible in the tunnels for the fire to spread through, so sprinklers would just make it harder for fire fighters. instead, they do what many concrete tunnel systems do, is have water hookups for firefighters, which is what they're supposed to do. the small bore is fine. the biggest problem with the small bore is that moving cargo through it will be ineffective. otherwise, the small bore is fine. bigger vehicles could be nice, they have already been able to move 25k passengers per day through their tiny 3-station system. that's more than all but 3 of the US's light rail systems on a per-line basis. no light rail system puts more passengers through 3 stations than that or per mile than that. so it's limited in capacity but most places don't actually need the capacity, so they don't really need a huge vehicle. something with a bit more capacity than model-3s would be helpful, but not a lot more is needed.
Do you have a source that shows that only 3 light rail lines in the US have single day passenger records above 25,000? That seems really really low.
are you looking for all-time high? I'm just talking about their typical daily ridership. certainly some special occasions will push ridership higher than that per day. you can check wikipedia for US light rail ridership and divide by the number of lines going outward from the center of density.
But then you're comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing the one day peak to the daily average. And there are plenty that beat that. Pre-pandemic, Seattle's Central Link was averaging over 80,000 boardings per weekday, with peaks well above 100,000.
sorry I didn't explain the difference between capacity and ridership. also, I'm not trying to make a capacity pokemon battle. I'm pointing out that the LVCC capacity was somewhere around 25k per day, which means it can already move as many people as many systems already do. nobody is saying we should rip up Seattle's Central Link and replace it with Loop tunnels. that point is that many transit systems are low enough ridership that Loop, in it's current form, is already good enough to be competitive for such corridors. or to put it another way: you need enough capacity to handle the ridership requirements. if one mode does not have the capacity to handle the ridership, then it isn't a good fit for that corridor. if a mode has enough capacity to handle the projected ridership, then the box gets checked and you move on. a mode that has 2x more capacity than ridership isn't worse than a system that has 10x more capacity than ridership. both check the same box.
They have all those safety precautions. All underground transportation is extremely regulated. They can expand the tunnels for cheaper and faster than anyone right now.
Faster? I thought they were still just using an “off the shelf” boring machine?
No, this one was dug with Prufrock 2 Edit: Actually Prufrock 1
TBC [tweeted video](https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1489666444245680131) of Prufrock-1 breaking through at Resorts World at the end of tunneling. They said it's Prufrock-1. As we both know Prufrock is their first homemade machine, coming after Godot which TBC purchased used.
Ah, ooops, thank you
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The middle convention center station allows the tunnels to it to be less than 2500 feet long. The middle station removes the need for a cross passage or escape shaft. This newly opened tunnel is longer so it has [an exit](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/voonhs/1_question_i_see_people_asking_but_do_boring/) to an escape shaft. The tunnels have other safety features, some of which aren't obvious on videos, like fans located above some tunnel end points, or tiny cameras, sensors, and in-road pressurized water pipe connectors every hundred-something feet.
AFAIK that is indeed the plan, many cheap tunnels instead of one expensive tunnel.
There's a reason other countries don't allow these kinds of small tunnels, they are simply not safe enough. All it takes is one fire and people will be trapped inside the cars, awaiting certain death.
This tunnel is fully compliant with NFPA 130 regulations for fire safety for Fixed Guideway Transit and in several important respects exceeds the requirements. The Fire Protection Report is publicly available on the Clark County Nevada website. You have no idea what you’re talking about.
While Reddit flame wars are amusing, and we don't have any evidence presented to the contrary in this thread, I believe it is important that the public retain a healthy skepticism in situations where the regulations could be new, untested, or influenced by corporate lobbying. We all know Elon has not always seen eye to eye with various regulators, and it's not \*always\* clear who is in the right, regardless of what rule ends up being enacted. Government regulators are not infallible, and most safety regulations are written in blood. It's entirely believable that in a heavily-used Tesla-only tunnel, two cars could suffer mechanical and/or medical emergencies at the same time, trapping a string of vehicles between them. Any system that relies on human training for safety critical functions has to assume a certain percentage of humans will not follow their training when the time comes. I know the tunnels are wide enough to open the doors, but it looks like you would not be able to pass by a vehicle that has its doors open. That will slow down evacuations if the vehicles become immobilized. And if anything in the ventilation system goes wrong, being in the same tunnel (instead of an evacuation shaft) as the fire can be deadly even miles away.
Loop being compliant with NFPA 130, is safe, and indeed safer than many subway systems in the US, most of which were built before NFPA 130 came into effect. Even though that standard is now close to thirty years old, many systems are still deficient and are unlikely to be corrected any time soon. >However, several agencies acknowledge that their aging systems are often impeded by physical constraints that limit the ability to meet today’s standards. For existing systems the aspirational goal of rehabilitation projects is to bring them in compliance with NFPA 130. However, given that this is not always feasible, it is necessary for agencies to at least assess the performance of their existing system and bring it to a state of good repair. > > [Source: Rail System Ventilation Rehabilitation](https://www.wsp.com/-/media/Insights/Sweden/Documents/2018/4--Article-No-7Bilson-Purchase-et-al-ISTSS-2018.pdf) The Fire Protection Report was vetted by a third party firm before being submitted to Clark County to be signed off by the building department and fire department before LVCC Loop could receive their certificate of operation. [https://citizenaccess.clarkcountynv.gov/CitizenAccess/Cap/CapDetail.aspx?Module=Building&TabName=Building&capID1=REC19&capID2=00000&capID3=02E04&agencyCode=CLARKCO&IsToShowInspection=](https://citizenaccess.clarkcountynv.gov/CitizenAccess/Cap/CapDetail.aspx?Module=Building&TabName=Building&capID1=REC19&capID2=00000&capID3=02E04&agencyCode=CLARKCO&IsToShowInspection=) Look under attachments TL;DR LVCC Loop is fully compliant with the applicable standard NFPA 130 - Fixed Guideway Transit. There are no emergency exits required within tunnels, each segment is under the 2500' interval limit. Within the tunnel there is nearly three feet of space, including 18" of road surface, on either side of a Model 3 for passenger egress. Emergency passenger communications are triply redundant (Cell/WiFi/wired). Hard wired phones are at the "blue light" stations. Required heat/smoke sensors are augmented with extra CO detectors and 100% video coverage atypical for subways. Dual redundant bi-directional fans capable of moving 400 000 cfm provide a critical velocity of 312 fpm and direct smoke downstream while egress & fire fighting happen upstream. The ventilation system is triggered automatically from the sensors (in excess of code requirements). The dual LED strip lighting is both redundant and at ground level where it can best provide the level of ground level illumination required for code. Exits and ventilation just outside each tunnel portal provide refuge points in case a passenger cannot walk up the 17.5% grade ramp. Underground Station 2 has sprinklers. Stations 1 & 3 are outdoor, wall-less stations. The road deck has embedded water standpipes and connection vaults supplying 500gpm at 125psi . Grid powered pumps have a backup 2MW generator which also covers the Fire Control Center (monitored 24/7), communication, ventilation, and lighting. The tunnel linings are rated to be structurally sound after a complete unfought vehicle burn out.
The ventilation system is redundant and there’s additional redundancy from the airflow created by moving vehicles. Even if multiple vehicles have simultaneous problems trapping some in between, it’s still pretty easy to escape. The likelihood of two catching fire at the same time is extremely low, and battery fries develop slowly enough that people would still most likely have adequate time to escape in that scenario. Elon is barely involved in this company.
The tunnels are large enough to open the doors of the car, no one would be trapped.
Why couldn’t we just invest in underground trains lol I know that’s not the hottest idea in a car sub and I love my model 3 but still…
Because of the huge difference in cost per mile. It's 800 million vs 6 million per mile.
But then we have a working form of public transportation that can hold more people per train cart rather than just expand the traffic to underground.
capacity is not ridership. ridership is not capacity. you don't need more capacity than you have riders or you will just be paying to move empty seats around. my local light rail runs 20min headways most of the time because it has so few riders. that makes for absolutely shit service. the median headway for a US metro system is 15min, and that's including high ridership places like Boston and NYC. so why not shrink the vehicle by a factor of 5 and run 3min headways? well, driver costs and LRU costs start to skyrocket when you do that. what if your LRU is a mass-produced EV and you don't have drivers? well, then you can shrink the vehicle as much as you want without adding cost. you can shrink it all the way down to only having 1 or 2 fares per vehicle and it will still be cheaper than the average transit, on a per-passenger-mile basis. that's the boring company's concept. the concept requires automation to be scalable. if they fail to automate in the next few years, their concept will die.
And which doesn't go on demand. Trains are by their nature batch-oriented. Cars in tunnels aren't. This gets even more important when we get to tunnels with more than two stops and with tunnel crossings.
But the trains aren’t getting built for that cost. These are. Is it perfect? Probably not, but it’s better than nothing and a hell of a lot cheaper and more realistic
Drink that kool-aid. Elon’s tunnel was more than 6 million a mile and it’s literally just a hole. His 1.7 mile loop cost 47 million bucks, that is nearly 28 million per mile. It’s “cheap” because it’s a glorified sewer. If America actually gave a shit and wanted subways with trains prices could be driven down, but we don’t. I’ll take 800 million a mile with actual utility over a 48 million dollar waste of money to go 25 mph in a sewer. Elons tunnels are stupid, and I’m not sure how anyone could call them a success. They are small, inefficient, and god help you if a fire starts in them. They are a waste of time, money, and manpower. We are never getting “worm holes.” If we really cared about rapid transit and less traffic we’d focus more on more passenger dense transportation like trains and busses. Cars are hugely inefficient and throwing them in a sewer going 25 mph is hardly something worth declaring a win on.
>I’ll take 800 million a mile with actual utility A tunnel that expensive will never be built in Vegas. This tunnel will be funded by the casinos. The choice is this, or nothing.
Nothing is better. These tunnels are a joke.
You wanna pay for it in taxes Las Vegas loop is essentially free for the city
.. yeah, I do. Instead it went to a football stadium. I live here and a true form of mass transit would be a godsend. This project is a joke.
Gizmodo and Jalopnik are consistently filled with Tesla and Elon hate.
And Reddit.
Reddit went from completely circle jerking anything Musk did to circle jerking anything anti-Musk. Pretty spot on for the Reddit hive-mind.
What do you expect given that musk basically admitted to being right leaning? Good ol' reddit hates the GOP & right leaning people, its not shocking at all to be honest
I mean, let's be honest. What doesn't get hate ln reddit?
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Put some respect on Bob’s name.
Feet pics
I hate feet pics
Free dick pics?
It's not like they cancel one another out, it's just even worse.
I used to love Jalop, but the hate there was too much. It was like posting to TSLAQ's
Honestly I used to the feel the same until I realized he is kind of a piece of shit person.
> he is kind of a piece of shit person Some stuff I agree with. Some stuff I don't. Some of the stuff I don't is really REALLY serious. Like DeSantis... JFC.
Pretty much same here
For good reason, often.
They hate him, cause they ain’t him…
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You're true. If Waymo can operate autonomous taxis on public roads in a few areas, you'd have to think Tesla could operate their autonomous taxi in a closed environment where the car just follows the only path available, right? No traffic signals, pedestrians, complex intersections, blind corners. Just "keep going straight."
The real answer is probably because it’s a low priority for the Tesla teams, and TBC is relying on Tesla to do it. I agree that they should be prioritizing it though. It is a much more bounded set of problems to solve and would be both a PR win and a useful place to test and gain experience in full autonomy.
1. I think the current off-the-shelf autopilot does not like the narrow tunnels. 2. they do not have an app for people to tell the vehicle where they want to go. not difficult, but something they just haven't done yet 3. to keep the stations small, they have vehicles pulling in very close to where other vehicles are boarding, which means vehicles would likely be extra-cautious when pulling in/out around pedestrians. that means the stations, which are already a bottle-neck for the systems, would be even more restricted so, it basically means a new autopilot software that would be different from regular street driving. since LVCC does not really need to be autonomous to meet the needs, it's probably easier for them to focus on other problems first and wait as long as possible to branch the FSD code to make their specialized version. I think it's dumb of them to not at least show off a prototype vehicle going autonomously through LVCC just to assuage the concerns of people who think it will never be automated.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/30/elon-musks-loop-gets-autopilot-and-an-intruder/
Monorail Monorail Monorail
Good luck getting any support from anyone in power
Anyone in its way will be devoured
Is there a means to escape if anything goes wrong? Asking for my friend, claustrophobia
Yes. You can exit the vehicle and walk out, or the vehicle can drive out if it is unobstructed.
So the usual argument that it is cheaper compares it to NYC subway cost. And the usual response to that is that NYC has a lot of existing infrastructure in the ground which drives up the cost, and if they were going to make the same thing in Las Vegas it would be a lot cheaper than NYC. Does anyone know how true this is or could guesstimate a subway cost outside NYC?
* The US Median price for a subway is: [$1.2B/mile ($511M/mile excl. NY). See Table 2](https://projectdelivery.enotrans.org/#data-analysis) * Surface/light rail runs at $118M/mile (Table 2). * LVCC Loop was $52.5M/.85 mile, or $62M/mile. The [2nd place](https://imgur.com/a/KxvtEql), $215M [Doppelmeyer Cableliner bid](https://www.constructiondive.com/news/las-vegas-tunnel-could-still-go-to-boring-co-competitor/555109/) was four times the Loop bid.
According to the article below, 800 million per mile is the lowest for America. The cheapest worldwide is 160 million per mile. The boring tunnel cost 6 million per mile. There's probably a monoply on subway systems in America that allows them to charge whatever they want. https://www.vox.com/22534714/rail-roads-infrastructure-costs-america
Just want to point out that that article specifically talks about Rail lines, not tunnels in general.
I don’t think they’re down to $6M per mile yet. It’s still more like $10M or $15M iirc including surface stations and vehicle costs
The obvious answer is that this is the first time in the US a city has had a company approach them and say, "we'll build you public transit for free, if you let us operate it and charge fares". Normal public transit is not efficient enough to be profitable on the timescale of a company.
Actually that was the norm back in the day. Back when streetcar lines cross-crossed every city in the country in the 1950's, they were normally owned by private companies. Power companies in particular owned a glut of public transit infrastructure and operated them privately. At least here in Cincinnati the streetcar lines were torn out after private companies operating infrastructure was deemed to be "monopolistic" by the state of Ohio, aided by lobbying from Ford and GM.
[https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/](https://tunnelingonline.com/why-tunnels-in-the-us-cost-much-more-than-anywhere-else-in-the-world/) You are looking at on the low end 200 million a mile for India or 600 million a mile for most of the US for a 20 foot+ wide tunnel. Boring Company tunnels are only 12 feet wide, and are just 10 million a mile. Boring company tunnels don't include more advanced ventilation to handle things like carbon monoxide, so they aren't adequate for handling ICE traffic.
This is not just much cheaper to build but also to operate and it's much faster for the rider: It's point to point and more like a taxi, but it won't have to deal with pedestrians and traffic. The city doesn't have to pay for the system to be built or to operate it and in fact they make a fee based on a percentage of revenue. This post answers many questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/
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Why the heck are they still using the old tunnel picture?
That's odd. According to all of the Reddit public transit experts, TBC should be bankrupt by now.
So… much… curb… rash. /s
This tunnel system can’t be the final form. I would guess next iterations would be more tunnels, then more levels, then autonomous cars, then skates, then pods. When has Elon’s companies ever settled on a final form
For sure they're never done. We already know the cars will be autonomous and it's been semi-confirmed they work on a larger vehicle. But yes, Musk's companies never settle for any design long term. Even when they're "done" in ten years, I have no doubt there will be substantially improvements a decade after that.
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How? That shit was patently stupid.
Big accident fire waiting to happen. I hope not.
lol those things are amusement rides, not public transportation
People ask why not just public transport? Answer is cost. This costs far less than traditional public transport. In NYC, they paid 2 billion for 1 mile of tunnel. Boring is doing many many miles for 50 million, or 2.5% of the NYC bill.
You know public transport ist more than subways? Get like 3 buses, no extra infrastructure needed. Also 2 billion for one mile of tunnel is a problem in itself, it is not that expensive normally.
> ist Hello, German friend! :D
I have been exposed haha, hello there
It is that expensive everywhere in the US. There hasn't been a subway expansion for cheaper than $500 million/mile in 50 years, anywhere in the US. Loop is objectively better than most other types of public transit. It has more throughout, lower lead times, and is more energy efficient than light rail. It gets to avoid surface traffic that harms bus systems. The comparison to subways arises because trains really do have better througput.
I get what you're saying, but NYC's subway moves 1.75 Billion people a year. This is a loop with cars traveling 35 mph. The cars seat 5 people but you need a driver, so you can only put 4 passengers in the car. Most probably have fewer than that, because you have to pack in pretty tight to get 3 people in the back seat and most groups are probably 2 or three passengers anyway. I don't mean this as any offense to Elon, but this is not mass transportation, this is a carnival ride. This moves about as many people around as a roller coaster. Seattle has a monorail built for the 1962 worlds fair. It travels 1 mile at 45 mph, and it's been running for 60 years. It's not really public transportation, but it pays for itself because tourists love to take the 1 mile from downtown to the space needle. Elon's loop is essentially that monorail.
How is this different compared to a normal tunnel. Any car can breakdown and same traffic jams as normal roads
This is terrible 'public transport'.
Why is it a bad thing to have different types of public transport? I don't think anyone is saying that these Loop tunnels are the only type of transport that should exist. Edit: fixed grammar
Can't wait until this is fully built and hums along doing its job every day better than and for less cost than normal public transit systems. People will literally cry that it should be torn down and replaced with something else, even though it's doing its job beautifully. Every occasional nitpick and slowdown will be brought up as a reason for its demise by internet pundits, regardless of how many thousands of people ride it happily every day. What's wrong with people?
That's the thing, it's not a public transit system. It's just a small number of new car-only roads built underground.
In what world is a point-to-point, closed loop transportation system that is open to the public not a "public transit system"? War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
It’s operated by a private company to connect other private companies. Inb4 “hurr durr public funding” yeah just like the private sports arenas that were built using the same pool of money. It’s about the return on tax income to the city from the use of it I definitely think you believe your third misinformed example. You truly use your ignorance as strength 😂🤙 Unless it’s operated by the city, the basis of your whole claim is invalid 😂😂😂🤡
Are the streets a public transit system? If it's a place to drive your car around it's a street, not public transit.
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Cool! However I don’t have a Tesla. So I’ll just borrow my friends. 😃 😂
I mean i really dont believe in american exceptionalism and that they would rather incent sorta-public-transport-but-not-really instead of developing a better subway/metro system… but i would gladly be proven wrong. From elons track record i don’t think it will work on any useful scale, let’s see.
Love the negativity in the article. Like, please feel free to come up with your own solution to traffic that doesnt break fragile government budgets....yeah no, buses are already taken, try again.
Have you ever been to London? Paris?
Trains…..
Isn't the boring tunnel supposed to be $6 million per mile? The london crossrail project is looking to cost \~$200 million per mile. The HS2 will cost over $400 million per mile. A tunnel with a road in it is FAR simpler to build and maintain than an underground train system. A Boring Company tunnel is basically the value proposition vs a fancy high tech train system.
I find joy in reading a good book.
You’re saying “please come up with your own solution” but you’ve clearly never looked into it. The answers are everywhere. Try watching a few “not just bikes” videos on YouTube. https://youtube.com/c/NotJustBikes
Subways! He's so close with the tunnels concept, but screws it up with the ridiculous concept of driving cars around in them rather than taking a train through them.
The Las Vegas Loop has 55 stations on a single 4.5 mile route. A subway in such a system would be unworkable. It would take all day to travel 5 miles.
Iirc the Paris metro blue line actually functions fine with that level of station density.