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The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

citylab.com

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Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#61

Post by reaperducer »

dwighttk wrote: post #58
reaperducer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not for personal vehicles. It's for moving conventioneers from one end of the convention center to another. Think of it as one of those people movers they have at some airports.

so we are talking about it only because of Elon?

It feels that way. As much as I want Mr. Musk to succeed, this doesn't feel any better than the dozens of other small people movers that have been around for half a century or more.

The only point of difference I can see is that it's going to be more on-demand (though that's been done before), and it's going to be cheap.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#62

Post by swampthinker »

rayiner wrote: post #46
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads. Mos…

The area under elevated lines is unusable only if you make it that way. Tokyo is great at using space below bridges and elevated lines: https://images.app.goo.gl/zpq5T3m5FPSr4eoN6 . As to weather, Chicago has tons of it and manages fine: https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/1/31/18204627/chicago-cold-w...

The JR and Tokyo metro trains are significantly quieter and better maintained.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#63

Post by 3JPLW »

rayiner wrote: post #46
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads. Mos…

The area under elevated lines is unusable only if you make it that way. Tokyo is great at using space below bridges and elevated lines: https://images.app.goo.gl/zpq5T3m5FPSr4eoN6 . As to weather, Chicago has tons of it and manages fine: https://chicago.curbed.com/2019/1/31/18204627/chicago-cold-w...

Yeah, we just set our tracks on fire. It's fine.

(Well, that's the ground-level light rail — Metra — that does that)

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#64

Post by Traster »

ryantgtg wrote: post #39
pdq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Boring Tunnel is all hype so far. The demo tunnel doesn't look to have sufficient ventilation or emergency exits in case of fire, car crash, etc. They haven't addressed the ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel. How can a single elevator go up/down to handle 1000+ cars per hour (4400 passengers per hour)? Basic math gives you 3.6 seconds for the elevator to go down, wait for the car t…

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, there isn't a offramp/onramp in the latest design scheme. When Boring Company first unveiled the design, it had elevators that moved vehicles from grade-level to the tunnel. The vehicles then locked into a track. Then after reaching an "exit" the vehicle is brought back to the surface so the driver can continue the journey within that same vehicle. But they recently scrapped all that.…

Well it's a concept I'm sure all of us are familiar with, if you want 10Gbps of throughput you can have a 32 bit bus at 322MHz or 64 bit bus at 161MHz. So if you want a tunnel with 10 cars/second you need one tunnel with at a speed of 10 cars/second or you need 10 lanes of 1car/second. That's really where my question is - the 125mph isn't what interests me, it's how you get a thousand cars (or people into cars) that are stationary, and accelerate them up without having massive gaps between them.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#65

Post by bluGill »

untog wrote: post #53
bluGill wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Cars should be at surface levels. Going below ground or above ground is too expensive: cars (and more importantly trucks which this tunnel doesn't cover at all) are heavy and so they need expensive infrastructure. We can have tunnels and overpass in places where required, but in general cars belong at surface level. What we should be doing is moving humans up: we should be building sky ways between buildi…

I'm not sure I get your logic here. Why does the fact that trucks are heavy mean that they don't belong below ground and must be at surface level?

Trucks are large: they need bigger more expensive tunnels. It isn't that we cannot do it, it is just that tunnels are expensive, and the larger you make them the more expensive they become. While a car/truck less city sounds like a great idea, it isn't practical. There are a lot of goods that need to move around somehow for a city to work. While trains or horses could be used instead, both have issues as we get to the "last mile".

Thus I'm proposing get humans off the ground level - we have the technology to make this convenient today. The cost is not very high and it solves a lot of congestion problems on the street.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#66

Post by [deleted] »

breck wrote: post #2

Yes, it is. With one that caveat that if it's built 10x cheaper than comparable tunnels, it is. Moving our roads underground is a vastly superior transportation system than we have today. It can be safer, better for the air, better for light and noise pollution, unlock vast amounts of land in our urban areas for parks, etc. I grew up near Boston during the big dig and the city is a drastically different place before…

[deleted]

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#67

Post by calgoo »

I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization.

1. Electric cars for transport, Check.

2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check.

3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check.

4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check.

5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there.

Hopefully he will continue development to the point where the tech can be used on Mars.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#68

Post by guruz »

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #23
rayiner wrote: post #6

So what’s this fascination with tunnels? In Chicago, there are overhead elevated train tracks, and they work just fine. They seem a lot cheaper to build and maintain than tunnels. You can even build them over existing avenues. Why don’t we have more of that?

Have you ever lived near an elevated train? They're not pleasant areas, especially compared to subway stations. The area under the tracks aren't very usable, except as a roadway and parking lots. They're loud as hell, people on the trains can see into your home, the spaces around the elevated tracks are great places for people to do drugs and have crusty hobo sex. These criticisms apply equally to elevated roads. Mos…

That sounds like a typical US problem to me.

In contrast in Berlin, the areas with elevated subway belong to the most desireable living areas, e.g. the U2 in Prenzlauer Berg:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&biw=1047&bi...

Or check out the lovely bridges above Gleisdreieck-Park:

https://www.google.com/search?q=berlin+u-bahn+gleisdreieck+p...

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#69

Post by Touche »

rayiner wrote: post #48
reaperducer wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are electric trains—what pollution I suspect you've never been in a subway tunnel and noticed all the grime and dirt spewed all over the walls and ceiling by electric trains. Noise isn’t much higher once you’re even a block away Now I know you've never been in a city with an elevated train system. I once lived nine blocks away from an elevated train, and I could hear it all day and all night. And light and air…

I lived in Chicago for four years. I’ve walked under the L hundreds of times. It’s fine. And it is necessary. The alternative to a cheaper above-ground line isn’t a subway. Usually, it’s no rail at all.

In like 3 replies you've went from "elevated trains are as good as subways" to "elevated trains are better than nothing".

The noise is the thing. In New York you can stand directly over a subway station and not even know it, in Chicago you always know when you're with in a few blocks of a line.

Re: The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for Las Vegas

#70

Post by HillRat »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #31
pdq wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This Boring Tunnel is all hype so far. The demo tunnel doesn't look to have sufficient ventilation or emergency exits in case of fire, car crash, etc. They haven't addressed the ingress and egress congestion problems into and out of the tunnel. How can a single elevator go up/down to handle 1000+ cars per hour (4400 passengers per hour)? Basic math gives you 3.6 seconds for the elevator to go down, wait for the car t…

It's mostly hype yes, what do you expect from a startup? The strongest premise is the tunnel diameter is smaller, therefore quicker and cheaper to build. There may be efficiencies to be gained through improved engineering of tunneling machines as well, given SpaceX and Tesla's innovations. Yes, there are many problems left, however every start-up faces a number of problems. They're basically just lining up to build a…

The price tag for the tunnel is pretty much what you’d expect at the low end of civil engineering costs, so there’s no room in the pricing if things start to go south. Musk’s entire premise is that there are magical inefficiencies in the commercial tunnel boring machines he’s purchased, and he assumes that spacecraft and automotive engineering expertise is sufficiently transferable to uncover those opportunities and redesign a considerably more efficient and cheaper machine. Oh, and using commercial automobiles will be faster, cheaper, and more pax-intensive than light rail solutions. I’m … skeptical. Let’s go with “skeptical” on this one.
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