[HN Gopher] A pedantic review of the Las Vegas loop
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A pedantic review of the Las Vegas loop
Author : cratermoon
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-08-15 03:26 UTC (19 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (computer.rip)
| stephen_g wrote:
| I think the basic story of the Boring Company is that they
| assumed that they would be able to optimise or disrupt what is
| actually a mature and optimised industry (tunneling) and
| completely failed to do so.
|
| Literally the only "innovation" is that they made the tunnels a
| bit cheaper by removing space for emergency egress... Apart from
| that, the capacity is laughable and always will be, as long as it
| uses cars or pods. There's a reason the kind of transit systems
| that can move hundreds of thousands of people a day (in tunnels
| only about double the size) use trains that can fit so many
| people (up to 1500 per train for large systems like Crossrail in
| London) - with small pods you will never get the throughput with
| any kind of safety margin between them.
|
| I'm all for innovation and re-thinking the conventional wisdom,
| but the Boring Company just didn't actually ever seem to have any
| really practical ideas that would make something better than the
| kind of mass transit we see in Asia and Europe...
| wahern wrote:
| One of Musk's original points was that cost of tunneling isn't
| linear with diameter--double the size more than quadruples the
| price, or something like that. But then the insistence on using
| electric cars seems... counter productive.
|
| The London and Budapest subways use very narrow tunnels, about
| the size of Musk's tunnels. Their engineering is considered
| anachronistic, but given the cost formulas for tunneling one
| wonders if planners are being short-sighted or stubborn by
| insisting on larger tunnels. A subway with narrow cars is
| better than no subway at all. But then there's probably
| considerations, like handicapped accommodations (i.e. large
| wheel chairs) that make London or Budapest-sized subway cars a
| non-starter today, at least in the U.S., notwithstanding that
| it'd likely still be far cheaper to build a narrower subway and
| then pay for private, on-demand road transport for those
| physically unable to use the subway.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| And Musk's actual results were a tunnel that was more
| expensive and slower to build per km than the channel tunnel.
| And this one isn't built under the sea straddling two
| countries with entirely different legal systems, but under a
| tiny patch of desert in a very permissive legal environment.
|
| And the Channel tunnel probably carried more people through
| in its first few months than the LVCC will have transported
| in its first few decades.
|
| It's a monumental flop on every possible level.
| Veedrac wrote:
| > more expensive and slower to build per km than the
| channel tunnel
|
| Channel Tunnel: ~$22B / 31mi ~ $700m/mi
|
| LVCC: $47m / 1.7mi ~ $28m/mi
|
| ??
| orwin wrote:
| You're correct, but eurotunnel cost was 4.6B in 1985
| English pound, which seems to be half of $22B. I think
| the 22B figure is the total project cost, including the
| not-tunnel part.
|
| Your point is correct though, I don't see where
| eurotunnel can be cheaper than... Any tunnel in fact.
|
| [edit] you could also compare total costs: 22B for the
| eurotunnel, 106 for the Las Vegas loop. It's around the
| same difference proportionally.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I mean, it makes sense since the diameter is 1 dimensional
| while the boring area grows quadratically...
| floxy wrote:
| I'm not up to speed on tunnel boring. Do they really grind
| away the whole cross-sectional area, instead of doing
| something like a hole-saw? Where you only machine away some
| of the circumference?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hole_saw
| Arainach wrote:
| >One of Musk's original points was that cost of tunneling
| isn't linear with diameter--double the size more than
| quadruples the price
|
| Ignoring all the other challenges of scale, this would surely
| make sense because the area of a circle scales with the
| square of the diameter...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| > with small pods you will never get the throughput with any
| kind of safety margin between them.
|
| You assert this like it's a fact. But it seems like something
| that could be proven wrong. I don't see any real fundamental
| obstacles here.
|
| You'd need to do some engineering obviously. But it's not a
| particularly hard problem. Don't crash into the thing in front
| of you if it hits the brakes for whatever reason. That about
| sums up the scope of the issue.
|
| There's probably a bit of math involved that tells you the
| minimum safe distance where emergency braking can still work
| given a certain speed. If you get humans out of the loop (which
| the Boring company obviously has not yet done), it's basically
| a function of how quickly individual pods can react to each
| other. Which would be measured in nano seconds probably. You
| should be able to get a pretty decent throughput.
|
| The nice thing with small cheap tunnels is that you don't have
| to squeeze everyone just through one of them because you can
| have more than one going all over the place. Most subway
| systems are a compromise on tunnel size where you basically end
| up with only a few of them because they are so expensive to
| build.
|
| They are literal bottlenecks because lots of people end up
| being funneled through a handful of stations via a small number
| of tunnels. By the millions.
|
| If you've ever tried to navigate the London underground during
| rush hour, it's not a pleasant experience. You basically have
| people shuffling back to back through tunnels and being crammed
| into railway carriages by the hundreds.
|
| The premise of the Boring company is very simple: digging
| smaller tunnels at scale is going to have economies of scale
| associated that means you can have vastly more of them for the
| same money.
|
| I agree their execution hasn't really delivered yet. But it
| still could. Probably waiting/hoping for FSD to solve the
| problem of routing wasn't the optimal move. But that doesn't
| invalidate the core premise. The tunnels they've dug aren't
| that expensive. So that part seems to be valid.
| karlgkk wrote:
| > But it's not a particularly hard problem. Don't crash into
| the thing in front of you
|
| It turns out that this is a particularly hard problem.
|
| Oh, and if you get it wrong, people will die. In some cases,
| dozens of people.
| pintxo wrote:
| But that's the big safety advantage of pods over railcars.
| Only a small number of people can die in pods. /s
| infotainment wrote:
| _> The premise of the Boring company is very simple: digging
| smaller tunnels at scale is going to have economies of scale
| associated that means you can have vastly more of them for
| the same money._
|
| ...so instead of 1 tunnel with a train in it, we could
| achieve the same throughput with 10 tunnels with single
| occupancy vehicles. Brilliant! Cost savings achieved! I 'm
| sure the math will just somehow work out that 10 tunnels is
| cheaper than 1.
| _nalply wrote:
| The trick to cost saving: stack the tunnels! Exploit the 3D
| feature of below ground!
|
| /s
| infotainment wrote:
| You know, I was thinking about how that would _actually_
| work, and I just can 't imagine it being anything
| remotely close to efficient.
|
| For example, if you were driving on tunnel level 26 (you
| had to go down there because it's rush hour and the
| higher levels are jammed up), wouldn't it be insanely
| annoying to get back to a higher level? Do we have
| massive spiral ramps connecting each tunnel level? What
| about interchanges onto other directions, do you need to
| be on a particular level, or do you need to spiral your
| way up to Level 15 West Tunnel Expressway Interconnection
| Point to transfer to Northeast Extended Tunnel Expressway
| Business Loop 2A?
| _nalply wrote:
| Haha, you spent a lot more thought than me!
| Veedrac wrote:
| Why would every level have easy and uniform connections
| to every other level? They are transport connections, not
| destinations. And 26 levels? Why would you ever need that
| much capacity?
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Economies of scale and learning effects are a pretty well
| studied phenomenon. So, yes, these are quite reasonable
| assumptions to make.
|
| I'm more talking about replacing 1 massive tunnel between a
| handful of destinations with hundreds of tunnels going to
| many destinations. Why stop at 10?
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| I seriously doubt you can leverage economy of scale in
| something as labor intensive as building tunnels.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Why? They literally throw away machines that dig tunnels
| because they are built just for one tunnel. There's
| decades in between tunnels being dug for most big cities
| operating underground railways. A company that would be
| tunneling non stop could make a lot of improvements
| probably and get really good at it.
|
| There is no basis whatsoever that learning effects don't
| apply to the business of tunneling.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| Making improvements != economy of scale. Digging 10
| tunnels in parallel using 10 machines and 10x the people
| I bet won't save you much in the grand scheme of things.
|
| And the reason why they "throw away machines" is because
| most of the time those are custom built based on the
| project and the wear and tear is substantial.
| philjohn wrote:
| Listen to "Well There's your Problem" podcast on this. The
| maths don't math compared to literally any other form of mass
| underground transit.
| stephen_g wrote:
| Let's take the Elizabeth Line (Crossrail), where they run 24
| trains per hour peak (every 2.4 minutes!) with up to 1500
| people per train. That's a theoretical maximum capacity of
| 36K passengers per hour.
|
| Let's say our four passenger Teslas can be dispatched every
| 10 seconds into the tunnel. That's 360 vehicles per hour,
| four passengers per vehicle, or 1440 passengers per hour.
|
| Up the pod size to 20 pax and you still only have 7,200 pax
| per hour. Halve the safety margin to 5 seconds and you still
| only have 14.4K per hour, 40% of the capacity of the
| conventional train. And filling and dispatching 20 people per
| pod every 5 seconds is a pretty tricky logistics problem!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| So, increase the number of tunnels and remove bottlenecks
| where people are piling up by creating tunnels to where
| they actually want to go.
|
| What would the London underground look like with 100x more
| tunnels and stations? A lot less busy in each tunnel
| probably. Plenty of room under London. The issue is the
| cost of tunneling and building these massively huge
| stations. Smaller could be a lot cheaper.
| stephen_g wrote:
| That would be ludicrously expensive - again, they had
| that idea at the Boring Company, and it hinged on finding
| cheaper ways of building tunnels (beyond just making them
| too small to fit emergency egress). As we've already
| seen, that never came to be, tunnelling is pretty
| optimised as it is.
|
| With your 100 tunnels you could probably just reach the
| capacity of the Elizabeth Line (again, just one example)
| but at 75x the cost...
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| > You assert this like it's a fact. But it seems like
| something that could be proven wrong. I don't see any real
| fundamental obstacles here.
|
| I think it's just a safe conclusion based on some reasonable
| assumptions. Just to pick one as an example, Wiki tells me a
| NY subway train is usually 8 to 10 cars. I'll use 10 to make
| the math easier. They're between 15m to 23m long so I'll go
| with 20 and that's 200m. Capacity is around 200 people each
| which gives us 2000 people per train.
|
| A model Y is 4.7m long and can seat up to 4 people. To get to
| 2000 people capacity you then need 500 model Y.
|
| 500 Model Y, one after the other in a straight line is 2350m
| so already to get to the same capacity you need 10x the space
| without even factoring in the fact you need to add space in
| beteen each and every one of those 500 cars as a safety
| measure.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| The only reason it's interesting to share farts and bad
| breath with that many people is that subway tunnels in NY
| are really expensive to make. They cost many billions to
| dig and even minor extensions to existing tunnels seem to
| to turn into multi billion$ projects. And then you need
| these massive subway stations that also cost billions.
| Doing things at that scale seems really expensive and ripe
| for disruption.
|
| Your assumption is that there would be just 1 tunnel
| instead of many. Probably because you are assuming tunnels
| are super expensive and that that is something that cannot
| improved. The premise of the Boring company was that they
| would be able to cut cost by some orders of magnitude by
| doing things at scale. They haven't yet, obviously. But
| that doesn't prove the basic premise wrong.
|
| Cheap tunnels mean you could have many more tunnels between
| many more destinations; not all of which need to be super
| dense cities like New York. Which means you don't have to
| squeeze millions of people through a single one of them.
| The cheaper the tunnels, the less the capacity matters.
| Just add tunnels to scale if things get congested.
|
| And of course the model Y is hardly the final answer in pod
| design. There's no good reason why we can't have a mix of
| smaller and bigger ones. In fact, using a big lump of an
| SUV designed for road traffic for this seems not very
| optimal.
| Veedrac wrote:
| Note that 2350m is 6 minute headway at a 17mph average
| subway speed, which isn't at all crazy for a subway.
|
| A single-tunnel Boring Loop isn't competing against the
| 10th busiest subway, though. Even if Boring Loop were
| competing against New York City Subway, at $2.5B/mi you
| could build something like 50 parallel lanes at the same
| cost, and 2350m/50 is only ~50m. Space them out a bit so
| it's actually driveable and you're probably still ahead
| with Boring Loop, even assuming the trains are running full
| (which is not default).
|
| Now, if you did invest enough for 50 parallel lanes you
| clearly wouldn't want to do 50 parallel lanes; they pack
| awkwardly, don't make sense to centralize that much if you
| design doesn't force you to, and you go from having a
| regulatory advantage of being able to build under city
| roads to a regulatory nightmare of asking to build 50
| parallel lanes underground. It makes much more sense to
| build point-to-point connections out like a road network,
| and bring in more traditional mass transit where you have
| particularly busy connections that can't be handled with a
| reasonable number of lanes.
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| 2350 is just the length of the cars one next to each
| other without factoring in any distance you obviously
| need to have between each car for safety.
|
| Stopping distance at 40mph is apparently around 20m
| (without human reaction time)
|
| With reaction time included is about double. So you need
| at least another extra 40m between each car.
|
| There's 499 gaps between those 500 cars so that gives you
| an extra 20km.
|
| So your "train" of Model Y need roughly 23.5km worth of
| tunnel to move 2000 people.
|
| Doesn't look very efficient if you ask me.
| rrnechmech wrote:
| Fascinating to think about if and when FSD is perfected
| (or heaven forbid before) what a world with cars moving
| about with near zero reaction time would look like. That
| is to say, completely removing reaction time out of the
| equation at scale
| manuelmoreale wrote:
| It would cut some space for sure but you still need space
| in between no matter what. You also need to factor in
| space because these cars have to stop, people have to
| move in and out of them and that takes time.
| cornholio wrote:
| At a 2 seconds clearance between vehicles, the Tesla system
| at peak capacity of 4 passengers will move 2 people per
| second. So it's equivalent with a subway train at crush
| capacity running every 1000 seconds or 16 minutes. That
| kind of frequency is typical for some longer haul train
| links, airport trains with underground sections like the
| RER etc.
|
| Of course, there are other factors that preclude running
| Loop at 2s frequency, like station capacity and ensuing
| bottlenecks on ramps etc., but bear in mind there is no
| comparison between a train filled at crush capacity, with
| most people standing and smelling someone else's armpit,
| that you have to wait for a quarter of an hour, vs a
| leather seated car that takes you point to point to your
| destination without stopping at any intermediary station.
|
| The point is, they are very different systems that don't
| compete against each other. If you need a subway and have
| the money for a subway, by all means, build a subway. Loop
| competes with light rail, and it says it can do better than
| most of the light rail systems in operation, at least in
| the US. Both its claimed pphpd and per mile cost are
| sufficient to be financially competitive, to the point that
| it can attract private capital and generate profits.
|
| And the pphpd they demonstrated, of nearly 5000, was
| achieved with Tesla cars. If they manage to introduce 8-12
| seaters and cracks self driving in the tunnels (a much
| simpler problem then full on road self driving) than it
| could compete with many of the less congested subway
| networks.
|
| It seems very irrational not to let them demonstrate what
| they claim, as long as they are using their own money. It's
| transport capacity that does not compete with other transit
| options and does not capture significant urban real estate.
| eesmith wrote:
| > the Tesla system at peak capacity of 4 passengers will
| move 2 people per second.
|
| Your analysis is incomplete. A moving sidewalk on the
| airport can move far more than 2 people per second, and
| needs no driver. Where is the call to revive that form of
| travel descried in Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" and
| Asimov's "The Caves of Steel"?
|
| You are missing speed, and acceleration, and load time.
|
| > So it's equivalent with a subway train at crush
| capacity running every 1000 seconds or 16 minutes.
|
| Well-frequented London lines run with something like 2-3
| minute intervals, not 16 minute intervals. And you can
| easily carry luggage with you, push a stroller, or roll
| your wheelchair on in.
|
| > and smelling someone else's armpit
|
| Yes, it appeals to rich people who want to use their
| money to avoid even minor irritations, and don't want to
| pay taxes to support mass transit that helps everyone.
| (From the link, "some press and discussion around the
| Loop figures it as more of a luxury option: something
| that casinos can comp for high rollers, that will spare
| people dealing with the general disaster of getting
| around the strip".)
|
| But that means having an alternative for us poor stinking
| masses. The Loop is not that solution.
|
| By the time the subway system gets to the crowd level you
| describe, a Loop-type system would be well over capacity.
| You'll be stuck in a line waiting for the next Tesla to
| arrive, surrounded by stinky people.
|
| > was achieved with Tesla cars. If they manage to
| introduce 8-12 seaters
|
| Why are they using Teslas? As the article notes, "due to
| their larger seating capacity and faster
| boarding/deboarding, the Loop would likely achieve a
| higher capacity if they just shifted operations entirely
| to the Club Cars".
|
| With "four rows of seats", it's likely something like
| https://www.clubcar.com/en-
| us/commercial/transport/villager-... which says "A long
| time classic on resorts, the Villager 8 moves up to eight
| passengers in a single trip and can replace expensive
| vans. Yet it also travels narrow areas not accessible to
| conventional vehicles."
|
| It seems they could easily increase capacity now by
| simply changing vehicle type.
|
| Also, since the capacity numbers were achieved with Tesla
| cars, that means it excluded the GEM carts which the
| article says is uses for people with wheelchairs. That
| suggests the "nearly 5000" number does not include people
| with mobility issues, which would need to be supported
| under ADA requirements.
|
| At peak capacity, even a small disturbance can greatly
| reduce flow.
|
| > It seems very irrational not to let them demonstrate
| what they claim
|
| The page says their claim is that the fully expanded
| system will target only 90k passengers per day. It seems
| very irrational to not draw conclusions from that.
| tlb wrote:
| Travel speed matters too. At non-peak times, when queues
| are short, going 100 kph will give much shorter commute
| times than moving sidewalks (5 kph) or club cars (25
| kph).
| eesmith wrote:
| Yes, travel speed is the first part of 'You are missing
| speed, and acceleration, and load time.' :)
|
| In those SF stories, moving sidewalks were more then
| 5kph. "The Caves of Steel" had parallel strips, each at a
| faster speed. Quoting https://archive.org/details/robotno
| vels0000isaa/page/10/mode... :
|
| "He stepped from strip to strip with the ease of a
| lifetime's practice. Children learned to "hop the strips"
| as soon as they learned to walk. Baley scarcely felt the
| jerk of acceleration as his velocity increased with each
| step. He was not even aware that he leaned forward
| against the force. In thirty seconds he had reached the
| final sixty mile-an-hour strip and could step aboard the
| railed and glassed-in moving platform that was the
| expressway.'"
|
| 60 mph is 100 kph.
|
| "The Roads Must Roll" had a similar design. The first
| version (quoting https://archive.org/details/pastthrought
| omor0000robe/page/42... ) was:
|
| "based on the ore belt conveyors of ten years earlier.
| The fastest strip moved only thirty miles per hour, and
| Was quite narrow, for no one had thought of the
| possibility of locating retail trade on the strips
| themselves. Nevertheless, it was a prototype of social
| pattern which was to dominate the American scene within
| the next two decades--neither rural, nor urban, but
| partaking equally of both, and based on rapid, safe,
| cheap, convenient transportation."
|
| The first high-speed road went 80 mph. https://archive.or
| g/details/pastthroughtomor0000robe/page/44... .
|
| If we look to the moving sidewalks of now to understand
| the future dreams of the 1950s, then we should of course
| also look at the PRT systems of now to understand the
| problems with the Las Vegas loop.
| Gud wrote:
| >At a 2 seconds clearance between vehicles, the Tesla
| system at peak capacity of 4 passengers will move 2
| people per second. So it's equivalent with a subway train
| at crush capacity running every 1000 seconds or 16
| minutes. That kind of frequency is typical for some
| longer haul train links, airport trains with underground
| sections like the RER etc.
|
| Typical where? Any well functioning subway system I've
| been on has a much higher frequency than that. Every 3-5
| minutes.
| kmacleod wrote:
| I don't know why you're getting downvoted.
|
| I used to work for a PRT (podcar) company and for anything up
| to a large commuter train or major New York subway, compared
| seat-mile for seat-mile the networks of small vehicles are
| just as efficient as most urban transit. And then as a bonus
| you get no-transfer, direct point-to-point commutes. Even the
| loading and unloading is comparable between them for stadium
| event traffic.
| Veedrac wrote:
| It seems unreasonable to claim that Boring Company has failed
| when they were founded in 2017, won their first contract in
| 2019 which was executed to requirements and multiples cheaper
| than the competing bid, and Vegas Loop was approved in initial
| form in 2021, a design now >3x the length of all subway built
| in the US in the last 20 years and for which construction is
| happily underway. Imagine subways were held to this standard!
| Done in 3 years or bust!
| throwitaway1123 wrote:
| > Literally the only "innovation" is that they made the tunnels
| a bit cheaper by removing space for emergency egress
|
| If the reports are to be believed then there was another
| "innovation" as well: ignoring worker safety [1].
|
| "An investigation by the state OSHA, which Bloomberg
| Businessweek has obtained via a freedom of information request,
| describes workers being scarred permanently on their arms and
| legs [...] In an interview with Businessweek, one of the tunnel
| workers recalls the feeling of exposure to the chemicals:
| "You'd be like, 'Why am I on fire?'""
|
| [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-02-26/elon-
| musk...
| ethagnawl wrote:
| > The operations manual spends more page length on answering
| questions about Elon Musk and The Boring Company than it does on
| fires.
|
| This tells us exactly why Elon shouldn't be making any decisions
| affecting public/critical infrastructure.
| blt wrote:
| This sentence was almost too perfect. Really says it all.
| zone411 wrote:
| The Vegas Loop will have huge advantages over subways (cost,
| faster construction with fewer disruptions, smaller station
| footprint, mostly point-to-point service, more privacy for
| riders), and Vegas is the perfect place to showcase it to a large
| audience of visitors. Self-driving is much easier in such a
| controlled environment, and since it's clearly coming, focusing
| on the current use of a driver is pointless.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build, has had
| more disruptions, needs huge stations, is only one-way, and has
| terrible privacy (you're stuck with a stranger in the small
| space of a car instead of a the large space of a subway car).
|
| It's worse than a subway in every possible way. And it will
| always be worse than a subway in every possible way, because
| cars are an extremely inefficient way of carrying people
| around. You can make a train with more private space per
| passenger than a car and still fit way more people in one than
| in the equivalent amount of car. There will _never_ be a way to
| make cars as economical as trains, for very very very basic
| geometric reasons.
| Veedrac wrote:
| > The LVCC so far is more expensive, slower to build [than
| subway]
|
| This is just factually false. LVCC was something like 4x
| cheaper than its competing non-subway bid and something like
| 20-30x cheaper than just the amortized cost per mile of
| subway in the US. Subway also ages to construct in the US.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| If you're comparing just to the US, maybe.
|
| It's still much more expensive to operate, per passenger.
| Veedrac wrote:
| Compare it to Europe, same deal, the large constants are
| just slightly less large.
| ggm wrote:
| This has a wonderful retro-science-fiction "what if we dug
| tunnels badly in the 1950s and drove around in them" feel to it.
| Like Asimov "caves of steel" but .. smaller. Because who has the
| time to make giant underground caverns for post-destructionist
| revolutionaries to meet in as autonomous cars whizz by. (what
| kind of a name is Elijah anyway? at least his wife had a decent
| name like Jezabel)
|
| I have nothing in principle against tunnels, or even these
| tunnels except some things which should be simple like
| underground stations and passing places and making the thing
| buttery smooth-as seem to have been lost on the expedited need to
| do it cheap and fast. its CAP theorem for tunnels: you can have
| good, or you can have cheap and fast. you can't have all three.
| and if you want good you can't have two of them.
|
| The boring company is a giant con job. TBM are well understood,
| as is the systematic processes to make tunnels at scale. LV is
| one of the cheapest places to dig, London used to be because the
| London clay was load bearing, waterproof and provided input stock
| for brick building. LV is at least not stone. London has so many
| tunnels they have to go deeper now. The clay is warming up too.
| You can't run trains for 100 years without dumping thermal into
| the system. If you have never seen the cleaner systems in the
| London Tube, think about what comes out of your ear and your
| belly button and then scale it up 1000x and add rats.
|
| The main critique I have echoes things others will say better:
| It's just wrong to make this kind of thing private. Public
| transport should be built by the public for the public. Now, I
| know there's a heap of religion built up in that, but if you want
| to argue for private roads, go to the outskirts of D.C. and talk
| to any worker who has to transit over what Macquarie Bank calls
| the giant american cash machine. It's just wrong to do it this
| way.
|
| Musk is a conman. This is shelbyville monorail class stuff.
| glompers wrote:
| Quick slightly-on-topic questions: I always read local press
| releases about how a major local rail or road or stormwater
| tunnel project "has gotten its TBM" and is assembling it in a
| portal dug for the initial staging.
|
| It seems that a lot of projects decide on a diameter and then
| order a TBM for the expected materials that will have to be
| ground up [sic]. Would it be any significant savings (if you
| were in Great Britain for instance) to deliberately engineer
| your whole infrastructure design, and funding, and timeline, to
| use the exact same diameter as England's High Speed 2's TBM and
| then run that TBM after they are done with it? There must be a
| lot of single-use TBMs but I don't know what their builders
| reuse from one machine to the next.
| ggm wrote:
| I would think so, from every part of the supply chain it
| would make sense to use the same segment size, grout, rail
| method, even manufacturing yards if they're on a train
| network.
|
| But I believe a lot of TBM dig themselves into a not so
| shallow grave and stay underground: it's expensive to remove
| them. They drill a headway off to one side and stop like a
| sad loco in the thomas the tank engine books.
| pas wrote:
| They probably would need major refurbishment anyway, right?
|
| Anything that is of value is stripped anyway, and.. the
| cutting shield is lost (but... who knows, maybe not, as
| that needs a lot of serviceability anyway, maybe the
| valuable stuff is removed even from that?)
| pas wrote:
| As long as the planning, permitting, and logistics dwarf the
| unit costs it doesn't really matter how much one can
| theoretically save on linking up projects. :/
| munchler wrote:
| > go to the outskirts of D.C. and talk to any worker who has to
| transit over what Macquarie Bank calls the giant american cash
| machine.
|
| I live in the Washington DC area and have no idea what this
| refers to. Can you clarify?
| ggm wrote:
| Maybe it's changed. Friends who lived WV/VA and worked DC
| said the toll roads were a nightmare and they timed their
| drives quite carefully. Those toll roads were bought by
| Macquarie bank and provided a very healthy income stream.
|
| Roads like the Dulles greenway. I read they had a requested
| 40% price hike rejected recently so maybe things have got
| better.
|
| There could have been a lot of hyperbole in their position,
| but I think up to 5 or more roads around DC got bought by
| Aussie companies bankrolled by Macquarie infrastructure
| investment.
| floxy wrote:
| >(what kind of a name is Elijah anyway? at least his wife had a
| decent name like Jezabel)
|
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20kings%2019&...
| spiritplumber wrote:
| At least Benny will be able to use it to escape to the Fort.
| Veedrac wrote:
| Really weird article. Starting with the whole claim that the
| tunnel built is the Las Vegas Loop (actually known by LVCC) which
| is the same as the 93 stop full rollout (actually known as Vegas
| Loop); they are connected but the terminology was very muddying.
| This makes it really confusing when they're eg. objecting to
| calling it a underground system and not really making clear what
| they're talking about (Vegas Loop is very clearly an underground
| system, the whole loop is underground).
|
| There's a bunch of stuff where both they complain about LVCC not
| being very much (which is true, it's their first track, and while
| it was much more affordable than the competing bid and has
| exceeded requirements, it's also super short) and also in the
| same post talk about how the operating room doesn't stack up to
| other mass transit operating rooms (yes, why would it?).
|
| The fire safety comparisons are reasonable but I would still like
| to ask when people make comparisons with historic tunnel fires,
| for said people to actually go look up why said historic tunnel
| fires were so bad. Vegas Loop isn't going to be carrying trucks
| full of flour and margarine alongside vehicles that stop working
| when said goods catch on fire. Ultimately the Loop is safe
| largely by combination of not including the set of things that
| make tunnels dangerous combined with having small vehicles with
| good failure isolation (electric powertrains, air filtration,
| etc.).
|
| Comments about capacity are also a bit weird. LVCC's capacity is
| more than it needs. Vegas Loop's capacity is not as large as
| inordinately expensive subway systems, but also it's not an
| inordinately expensive subway system, and its claimed capacity
| compares favourably to many existing rail systems across the US.
| Maybe it's because they misread the passengers per hour stat as a
| passengers per day stat? That is a big difference!
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I hope you realize that lithium-ion battery fires are _much_
| worse than margarine or flour fires, and almost impossible to
| extinguish, especially in the confines of a tunnel.
|
| And while prices might look good for the USA (I'm not sure),
| they are gigantic when compared to similar projects in Europe.
| And a mass-transport car tunnel has exactly 0 advantages over a
| rail tunnel.
| Veedrac wrote:
| How hard it is to extinguish is vastly, vastly less important
| than 'does it stop people safely escaping' and 'does it
| overwhelm the safety equipment'.
|
| It is obvious that having a huge goods fire from a commercial
| truck that shuts down people's vehicles is dangerous; that
| directly leads to death and directly prevents rescue. It is
| obvious that having isolated, separately functioning vehicles
| that can drive away, and a fire from a specific, planned-for
| factor of an understood quantity has a comparatively low
| potential for causing death.
| saagarjha wrote:
| > Drivers are required to wear a provided uniform with plain
| black shoes and no jewelry or accessories, and are prohibited
| from initiating conversations with passengers.
|
| I'm no snitch but I don't think this was followed particularly
| well when I was there last week.
| GaryNumanVevo wrote:
| I'm surprised Tesla doesn't make them dress up as their Optimus
| "robot"
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > One interesting aspect of the Loop, that has been rather
| heavily reported on, is that the whole thing feels remarkably
| cheap. Perhaps that's not surprising, as The Boring Company's
| central claim is to be able to construct underground transit on a
| tight budget. They have indeed delivered on this promise in the
| construction of the Loop, but it's hard not to feel like they did
| so more by pinching pennies and eating development costs than by
| innovation. Nothing speaks to this more than the photo of the OCC
| the manual provides, which depicts two cheap office chairs at a
| long desk in a room with worn linoleum floors and distinctly
| portable-building vibes. It is, by far, the most underwhelming
| mass-transit control room I have ever seen. I strongly suspect
| that the OCC is a reuse of the old on-site construction office.
| To be fair, they will surely have to build something more
| sophisticated for future expansion, as the current space only
| accommodates two operators. We will assume it is temporary.
|
| The said photo: https://i.imgur.com/BlIpog1.png
|
| Come on, it's not that bad. I'd admit it looks more like a
| monitoring room than control room, but in term of cheapness I
| think it's well within typical range.
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| To second this sentiment: I toured a couple of city run traffic
| control facilities during my stint as a city employee and this
| doesn't look radically different or "cheaper" than the ones I
| saw. And local government budgets are already pretty tight.
| Ekaros wrote:
| How much would a proper control room cost? A hundred thousand?
| Couple hundred thousand? Considering you want maybe at least 2
| people monitoring system 24/7. So 3 shifts? That is what 300k
| minimum a year, if not few times more...
| munchler wrote:
| > There is a surprisingly long (in comparison to other items)
| script for answering questions about the flamethrower.
|
| Flamethrower!? Can anyone explain what this means?
| el_oni wrote:
| The boring company released a flamethrower[0] presumably to
| raise some capital.
|
| [0]https://www.boringcompany.com/not-a-flamethrower
| everfrustrated wrote:
| I didn't realize the cars had drivers - I presumed they had long
| been replaced with self-driving.
|
| Does anybody know why not? Surely the Tesla autopilot software is
| well capable (the routes are very simple after all). Some
| regulatory problem holding them back?
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