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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

#101

Post by r3bl »

michaelleslie wrote: post #50
ryantgtg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?

The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.

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

#102

Post by komali2 »

bluGill wrote: post #86
jcranmer wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. The key cost savings that Musk envisions boils down to "build tunnels that are too small to put existing rolling stock in," which means that if the proposed personal rapid transit system turns out to be like every other PRT system and not work well, you're left with a tunnel that is too small to be useful for anything else.

Well this tunnel is only a couple miles long. Put in some lights and humans can walk the whole length to get around. It seems like a moving sidewalk could be put into this tunnel.

This would be pretty nice to have in hot as fuck Vegas.

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

#103

Post by tdb7893 »

spraak wrote: post #95
calgoo wrote: post #67

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 cont…

The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west

I think the idea is that they aren't mutually exclusive. I think in fact the projects are generally good examples of how you can do both.

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

#104

Post by _Microft »

ncallaway wrote: post #87
snazz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has he specifically called out the connection or is this your pet conspiracy theory? It doesn’t seem too far off, to be honest.

I don't think he's mentioned it specifically for each of the things in the checklist. I'm pretty sure I recall him mentioning electric vehicles and solar cells being important for mars, but I don't remember the interview. Elon and SpaceX have been pretty explicit about Starlink as a system for funding the development of Mars transit vehicles and initial colony, though I'm sure a mini-Starlink around Mars would be in…

It's not just that. The Boring Company wants to automate tunneling as much as possible (manual labour would be highly impractical in a spacesuit), speed it up and make it a continuous process. It also wants to power the boring machine by Tesla PowerPacks to remove the need for kilometers of cables. All of that seems suited not just for cheap tunneling but for Mars as well.

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

#105

Post by niftich »

aeternus wrote: post #76
michaelleslie wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a less-scalable metro system, a technology that predates this "innovation" by a century or so.

A more point-to-point metro system would be great. The airline industry has been embracing this change for quite awhile. People don't like a hub & spoke system and it doesn't make sense to take everyone to city center which just adds to the crowding and congestion, as many current metro systems do. Imagine a city that is crisscrossed with multiple direct metro lines. Design for extremely frequent departures, which li…

The airline industry embraced point-to-point routing in part because it reduces their costs on inelastic infrastructure on the ground, and allows them to tailor their schedule around demand at the two endpoints rather than on maintaining a network. They pay-as-they-use for airport gates and lessened their spending on hubs.

Fixed-guideway transport infrastructure (trains, busways) and dedicated structures (tunnels, bridges, airports, etc) come with high capex that must be borne by the builder. One advantage of road-based transport over rail-based transport is that the road is already there and will (often) already be built and expanded by the government just to allow private vehicles to come and go -- it's multipurpose -- while any other mode of transport requires this infrastructure to be purpose-built and maintained for the transport mode itself. That costs.

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

#106

Post by jsf01 »

I don’t see this doing $50M of good for easing congestion. I would prefer it if they’d commit to a much larger budget project connecting the airport to the convention center and several major hotels and casinos than this low density single lane tunnel.

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

#107

Post by gen220 »

guruz wrote: post #68
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…

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...

I used to take the U2 at Eberswalder Straße regularly, and agree it's a lovely station and blends in nicely with the charm of the neighborhood.

I think the main issue in the NYC metro area is that the offending trains/platforms do not seem to take noise pollution (let alone neighborhood flavor) into account at all. The result is that the platforms and trains are unfortunately more like alien oppressors than helpful neighbors.

It's also worth pointing out that today's Berlin is enjoying the fruits of an unique opportunity to rebuild their urban infrastructure post-ww2 (Gleisdreieck was an industrial train yard, for example). Much of the city was leveled, and then shortly thereafter occupied by East/West Germans with fiscally-backed ideological incentives to compete over who could build the most impressive X "for the people".

Lessons learned: Maybe we should tear down NYC, split each borough in half down the middle, and give one half of it to liberals and the other half to conservatives?

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

#108

Post by pesfandiar »

spraak wrote: post #95
calgoo wrote: post #67

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 cont…

The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west

Agreed. Let's first try and "colonize" places like Nevada. Getting safe drinking water to many major urban centres could become a challenging engineering problem in the upcoming decades, much more worthwhile to solve than living on Mars.

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

#109

Post by gnahckire »

spraak wrote: post #95
calgoo wrote: post #67

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 cont…

The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west

It sure is but, I believe the ultimate goal is to become an interplanetary species which would be pretty cool.

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

#110

Post by dredmorbius »

avar wrote: post #83
perennate wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that? Even accounting for the cost, I think many would still argue that it was worth it, replacing a highway system that divided the city with a walkable network of parks that effectively connects different neighborhoods like financial district north end, along with a new series of (underground) highways that provided improved traffic flow. Before and after photos: https://imgur.com/JbgPur6 If the cost…

That doesn't look worth it at all. It cost $22 billion and the result is a narrow 1-block park through the center of Boston. Most of those buildings next to what used to be the highway are at most 10-20 stories. A 60 story skyscraper was finished in Boston this year for $700[1]. So to a first approximation they could have had a full 2-3 blocks of parks around 15 new such skyscrapers to get the same building space aft…

$700 million.
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