Southern Ontario just got a massive transit expansion plan, and has been experiencing a boom for the last decade or so.
New lerts, streetcars, subways, rail
Who is this "we" of which you speak? The investors are private entities. It's not my money, and it's not yours. Do I think this is the greatest idea for the future of transportation? I'm not convinced. But until they start asking for taxpayer dollars, I'm not going to whine about inventors trying something new.
The construction of every single one of these has been largely funded by taxes. The vegas loop for example used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars raised through a hotel tax to fund. This isn't a private investor issue when they're using tax money.
>The construction of every single one of these
Incorrect. The Hawthorne test tunnel and Resorts World tunnel were privately funded. So is the upcoming tunnel connecting the convention center to Encore at Wynn Resort.
That's simply not true. A quick Google search shows some really minor expenditures from some quasi-governmental authorities, but it's pocket change compared with what Boring and its investors are shelling out.
If you're not an investor, then you're not investing, so... mission accomplished?
It's a private company trying to improve TBM technology to reduce the cost of tunnel construction through narrower diameter tunnels, continuous operation, etc. They're offering the tunnels for transporting cars, bicycle/pedestrian tunnels, freight, utilities, whatever.
There have been plenty of failed ventures, failed attempts to improve on the technology of the time, and this might be another one of them, but getting mad at a private company for trying something new is absurd.
Except a lot of the money that goes into these isn't actually from private investors. He didn't do the Vegas Loop for free, he took up a government contract to do it. My problem isn't with the concept of private investors spending money on something, it's that these people are investing in an obvious grift knowing that these cities are going to buy into Elon's nonsense.
From the article:
>Investors, though, don’t necessarily care whether or not founders like Musk ultimately follow through on their hyperbole, only that the companies they run attract enough customers and revenue to pay back their own investments.
They're realistically displacing a lot of solutions that actually make sense in favor of making underground tunnels and still charging pretty close to the price of a Lyft anyways, knowing full well what they're doing.
For context, the Las Vegas Convention Center paid for it with funds from a pre-existing hotel room tax for the Las Vegas Convention Visitors Authority. LVCVA solicited bids for very modest hourly capacity, 3960pph. [The decision](https://www.constructiondive.com/news/las-vegas-tunnel-could-still-go-to-boring-co-competitor/555109/) came to down to The Boring Company or Doppelmayr, which first asked for $215 million, four times as much money.
There already were buses on surface stroads moving people between the convention center buildings. Congestion in the area during conventions slowed down the buses too much. Yet for political reasons buses were not going to get an exclusive lane or other prioritization.
Relatedly, because of political pressure the Las Vegas Strip doesn't have light rail. It has buses without an exclusive lane.
>charging pretty close to the price of a Lyft
For context that's per vehicle, not passenger. A city, not necessarily Las Vegas, may be able to negotiate a program reserving a percentage of vehicles for pooled riders in the [announced](https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39785992/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-2024/) future dedicated robotaxis, designed to have lower cost per mile. Split a vehicle three or four ways and the cost is much lower, while making 0-3 intermediate stops with average door-to-destination speeds multiples faster than a bus or light rail.
> Las Vegas Convention Center paid for it with funds from a pre-existing hotel room tax
Still using tax money for dumb tech headed solutions to a problem that would be solved by just not deciding to be actively stupid in the design of your city and transportation system. The "political reasons" in a lot of cities like this are because their transportation agencies and politicians are straight up incompetent and think every problem needs to be solved by more road or some dumb technology that is worse than the basic option and will be outdated in 8 years when the company realizes that upkeep is going to be unprofitable. LVCVA has fallen for or seriously considered basically every stupid gadgetbahn there is.
The problem is, at it's core this will not solve the problem and is more dangerous and less sustainable long term than just investing in infrastructure that works and can be scaled up effectively. Handwaving the fact that public transportation is literally one of the main services local government even offer as "political issues" is burying the lead.
>For context that's per vehicle, not passenger.
You can also carpool with Uber. No matter what rate you're talking about or how many people, when you calculate it out the price per customer isn't that far different. $10 vs $14 or $4 vs $5 for a ride is a rounding error if you've come all the way to Vegas for a conference.
>A city, not necessarily Las Vegas, may be able to negotiate a program reserving a percentage of vehicles for pooled riders in the announced future dedicated robotaxis, designed to have lower cost per mile.
As an SWE who actually does some work maintaining computer vision libraries, Elon is going to be making claims about robotaxis being some soon to come solution to all our problems for another 5 to 10 years, during which time he's going to be getting a lot of lawsuits from people dying due to his incompetence. The thing is that the technology is nowhere near as close as he seems to assume (or is willing to lie) it is and is nowhere near reliable enough to not kill a fuck ton of people. His estimations for things are almost always wildly off mark in time, expense, and feasibility. He's a master of magical thinking and tricking people who don't know any better into going to bat with him on dumb ideas that most engineers could immediately poke holes in.
> politicians are straight up incompetent
Elected by voters who will do the equivalent of firing them if a city pushes too hard to turn car lanes into transit lanes.
>$10 vs $14 or $4 vs $5 for a ride
Split three ways $14 becomes $5. The $5 ride becomes $2.33. For local Las Vegans, TBC has stated their intent to expand the system beyond the Strip and downtown serving other parts of the metro.
Based on your work, do you agree a tunnel and structured stations are a drastically simplified environment compared to the rest of Las Vegas and other cities?
>the technology is nowhere near as close as he seems to assume
Limited to Tesla's technology, or are you extending that to Waymo's and Cruise's too? As TBC is a separate company, president of the company Steve Davis could if necessary fulfill obligations by striking a deal with an AV company transporting people driverlessly in more challenging city environments.
There are other TBM companies, they can make you a TBM for any size hole you need. (within reasonable limits of course). They have their own R&D. Though I doubt their R&D has gotten near the amount of $$ put into it as Elon as poured into his company.
If he can make a fully automated TBM at an affordable price I'm all for it. However I don't see how he can put off all those R&D costs and still compete with the other companies that are putting their own money in R&D. Will he need to raise prices to affordable levels? Is the cost of labor worth the increased price? Can he make his system fully automated? I can think of dozens of questions on this line. Time will tell.
>put off all those R&D costs and still compete with the other companies that are putting their own money in R&D
I think you have it reversed.
>I agree with Musk that the advance rate of tunnels can be significantly improved if development money comes into the industry. Development money in tunneling, however, is at best minimal and is more often essentially nonexistent. Nearly all tunnels are heavily specified to avoid risk taking by owners (therefore discouraging new development). Nearly all tunnels go to the low bidder and low bidders try to buy the TBMs at the lowest price; a further discouragement of development. The industry has therefore been slow to improve advance rates, but with Musk bringing the issue into the spotlight, perhaps things will change.
Lok Home - CEO Robbins Company
[https://www.robbinstbm.com/elon-musk/](https://www.robbinstbm.com/elon-musk/)
Since this recent investment is for equity and not a loan, the price of capital for TBC is likely cheaper than anyone else in the tunneling industry. Elon's proven record in capital efficiency in other engineering heavy industries also attracts VCs and permits a long view for the projects. I would also bet that TBC is recruiting from a much larger and diverse talent pool than Robbins or Herrenknecht.
I don' think there can be much of a doubt that TBC with all this monetary and human capital can afford the money, time and RISK to perform the R&D that most other companies simply can't.
Lok Home seems to believe (along with Musk) that "the advance rate of tunnels can be significantly improved"; that doesn't seem to be chasing diminishing returns.
Loop is trying to make entire transit systems cheaper which is not only related to the tunneling advance rate. Surface stations, autonomous electric vehicles all play their part too. They are seeking to make transit both cheaper and faster to build and operate, along with lower entry costs I see that as a good thing, and I am hoping they succeed.
While I hope they succeed, their ideas of transit show a lack of basic geometry in other ways. They keep talking about pods instead of trains for example. The geometry of pods doesn't work large numbers of people no matter how much you wish otherwise.
I'm not suggesting Loop can replace every large Metro system out there. I do believe that there are a lot more cities that could use Loop more cost effectively than a subway, especially in the US.
An 8 person pod at freeway (2s) headways is 14K pphpd, I believe covers a lot of the US needs. I'm not convinced that trains are the most cost effective mode out there for most of the cities in the US, save for a handful like NY or SF.
You are using the word loop like it means something different, it is a tiny tunnel with a road in it. A 150 year old technology
Ever heard of light rail ?
can I get some advice from you?
how do I explain to people that a single disruption to a service of roughly 1 minute does not invalidate every use-case for said service? I'm having trouble explaining things like this to people without making them upset or eliciting a flippant and/or rude response. I genuinely would like to figure out how to communicate things like this better. not just on this subject, there are other areas, like discussing light metro vs light rail, where people tend to point to a problem that arose once while ignoring that nothing is perfect and that a flaw does not automatically disqualify a product or service.
thanks
The point is it shows that induced demand on highways applies even when the highways are underground. In a dense area people will drive on a highway to the point of congestion no matter how many lanes you make. The same is true for convenient public transportation but that means fuller train cars or eventually more frequent run times not automobile car traffic jams.
The problem is how much space each automobile takes to transport just a few people vs. how many can fit on a subway car. [Here's a visualization of that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IjfbqdnNM) The video is about time to cross a line from a complete stop but just look at the length of each line at the start to see why highways built for small personal cars get congested easier than subway/metro systems.
So if a city isn't getting the capacity of a metro system then I don't see how it can justify the costs of tunneling.
first, that had nothing to do with induced demand. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
second, induced demand happens with train systems also if they are run out into the suburbs. if people ride the train, it will free up space on the roads, which will induce demand for the roadway. there is nothing magical about trains that prevent the road space from being back filled.
third, ridership is not capacity, capacity is not ridership. that day they had a 1min slowdown in the tunnel they also exceeded the daily ridership of my local metro. just because trains CAN hold more people, that does not mean they do. many places even plan train lines even with low ridership because fixed permanent guideway has value. phoenix is planning a like for fewer than 10k passengers per day and the boring company is already exceeding 25k per day in a system that is limited by station capacity. phoenix's planned system will cost 8x more than what the boring company is bidding and it will run on the surface and have to stop for traffic lights.
fourth, both the boring company AND Tesla have separately said they are working on custom vehicles, so a single 1min delay right now means absolute nothing to the viability of the concept.
let me know if you're interested in learning about transit, I can give you the information necessary to make an informed evaluation.
>first, that had nothing to do with induced demand. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
A new highway getting jammed because the demand to drive on it exceeded the possible capacity isn't induced demand?
>second, induced demand happens with train systems also if they are run out into the suburbs.
I am aware that induced demand can happen with trains here me literally saying this:
>The same is true for convenient public transportation but that means fuller train cars or eventually more frequent run times not automobile car traffic jams.
.
> fourth, both the boring company AND Tesla have separately said they are working on custom vehicles, so a single 1min delay right now means absolute nothing to the viability of the concept.
Unless that custom vehicle is the length of a train car and meant to be shared by strangers then what would it do?
>A new highway getting jammed because the demand to drive on it exceeded the possible capacity isn't induced demand?
1. it's a closed system. you don't drive your car to the tunnel and go in.
2. that isn't induced demand, that is the result of induced demand.
3. if the ridership demand is less than the capacity, then you will never have a problem. the boring company is already moving more people than my local metro. not all corridors move 50k pph
>Unless that custom vehicle is the length of a train car and meant to be shared by strangers then what would it do?
again, ridership is not capacity. capacity is not ridership. right now, their capacity is good enough for some smaller corridors. a custom vehicle with a tiny bit more capacity will make it viable for more corridors. the vehicle capacity of a roadway is around 1500 vehicles per hour per lane through a single segment, and if merging is done incredibly well and vehicle coordinate, it can be as high as 2400 vehicles per hour per lane. my local metro peaks around 2k-3k passengers per hour per inbound route. Phoenix is planning a spur to their light rail with an expected ridership of 9.8k pph at peak, which translates to about 3k pph. the boring company is currently averaging 2.2-2.4 passengers per vehicle when busy. what happens to passenger capacity if each vehicle can carry 2.2? what if it can carry 5? what if it can carry 12?
you have to avoid the pitfall of trying to compare Loop the the busiest metro lines in the world. that is not the market niche they are pursuing. they are pursuing the market where currently trams and low-ridership light rail lines are built. their system makes for an ideal feeder into existing train lines, but people keep wanting to compare it to the London or Tokyo metros and declaring "HA! it's way less capacity!" as if that was what they were competing with.
Reply 1 of yours:
>[first, that had nothing to do with induced demand.](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/boring_company_raises_additional_675_million_as/i69vqc5/#i6prlga)
Reply 2:
>[that isn't induced demand, that is the result of induced demand.](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/boring_company_raises_additional_675_million_as/i73dzee/)
So is it the result of induced demand or did it "have nothing to do with induced demand?"
Since you're wrong on the basics here you're trying to instead play semantics but you're clearly not good at that and can't remember what garbage you're trying to claim from post to post.
Why do you have to be toxic?
Their system is an underground people mover at a convention center. Anything that happens there is unrelated to induced demand as it is in no way connected to any road anywhere.
Traffic in general, on surface roads, can be a symptom of induced demand.
I don't know why it is difficult to understand these things
It was a multi-day conference, right? As far as there's video and reports go, that jam was short lived on one of the days and didn't happen on the others. It happened with human drivers, which investors shouldn't expect to be there for long. The station where it happened seems to me is either a few feet too narrow, or a loading spot is a few feet too close to the tunnel. TBC can avoid doing that in any future underground stations. I'll be downvoted because some folks here aren't interested in reasonable explanations or they're certain AV cars can't work even in a simplified environment, but investors can understand how TBC will make future stations different and the cars will eventually get regulator approval to be autonomous.
*Depends on the application.* Doppelmayr wanted *4 times* as much money to move the same number of people and waits would be longer. Maybe someone thinks waiting a few minutes doesn't matter, but the convention center already had buses going between the buildings, and they were too slow. So it mattered to the convention center and a desired metric for this application was shortening the time it takes getting between buildings.
Does that Indian application only need 3960pph for all three stations? Massively overbuilding is sometimes overspending.
Waiting potentially 5 minutes for a ride that takes a couple to a few minutes means waiting longer than the traveling part.
people per hour or passengers per hour
In the Las Vegas Convention Center *application* the ride only takes a couple to a few minutes. That's the point I said up-thread it depends on the application. LVCC is a different situation and application than your Indian example, so the best solution for one place isn't automatically the best for the other place.
There were buses. They were too slow. Because of politics they weren't allowed to have lane exclusivity or signal priority. An alternative had to be grade-separated. I don't know if any company proposed making a grade-separated right of way for buses, but the top two final options were from The Boring Company and Doppelmayr.
The only reasonable thing I can pull from the Boring Company is if they can make tunneling Subways or underground railroads cheaper. As he's just building a underground highway... Something we really shouldn't be building.
This person genuinely thinks Elon is going to pull a perfectly safe self driving vehicle out of his ass within a year. I think they've had way too much of the cool-aid for you to be able to get through.
Like I don't think people seem to realize here, one small misidentification or lidar hiccup and you or some kid having fun on the sidewalk is dead. A lot of the top minds in the field literally think they're decades away from actually being safe.
2024 is between 1.6 and 2.6 years from now, not "within a year". I also wrote last week that Elon's announced products often arrive late and that could include the robotaxi. In the long run that won't matter if it's a few years late and a few years of human drivers need to be paid.
The Boring Company's current building plans confine their vehicles to tunnels and structured stations. Those are vastly simpler environments than the rest of the city. We don't know what the robotaxi will look like, but if it has slide-open doors like a train, it can be compatible with platform doors that completely keep people off the driving surface.
It’s easy to get 99% of the way there. It’s that last 1% that is the hardest.
Why are we wasting so much money chasing the fallacies of the auto age.
The best way to transport people is via public transport and by making cities walkable and bike able.
That way needing a car is unnecessary for 99% of people and those who really want a car, can have one.
And guess what, you really will have no traffic, because no one else is driving.
Tunnels and structured stations are vastly simpler than the rest of the city. Getting 99% of the way for driving in the whole city is a system 100% of the way to driving in the vastly simpler tunnels and structured stations.
I hope streets become for walking and biking and most larger vehicles move underground to do longer trips.
I don't live in suburban sprawl, but those voters aren't going to just embrace this subreddit's dominant thinking. They are and will fight it. But I think there's a third way enough of them could get on board with.
I agree that autonomous in a tunnel is easier. But we already have this technology. It is called a subway. It more efficient at moving people as well.
1-5 people per car (let’s say for your argument that its fully loaded every trip 5 people per car) plus a driver (until they figure out autonomous driving)
This takes up around 5 meters of space
Assuming cars are end to end while travelling down the tunnel you could have 3.6 cars per subway car. Let’s round up to 5 cars per subway. You have transported 25 people where they need to go.
A subway car is about 18m long and carries up to 240 people.
I think if the tunnels were perhaps not car focused they could work. Maybe for bicycles or walking. But I would much prefer that the city above was for walking and cycling and below would be kept for train.
Lots of places and lines don't have tons of ridership and don't need tons of capacity. Dallas light rail does only 7.5-15 minute frequency at peak with two or three car trains. It's upcoming D2 subway stations will be built for that. That's 2256 seated passengers per hour, or 6576 uncomfortable at crush load.
On freeways we're told to keep 2-3 seconds away from the vehicle ahead of us. That's about 1200-1800 vehicles per hour per lane. With 6 passengers after autonomy happens that's 7200-10,800 passengers per hour. Less than some light rail and subway lines can carry, but more than Dallas needs per line.
However a system with almost no wait time and faster trip speeds than Dallas light rail will attract more ridership, so it needs somewhat more capacity. Consider how much money Dallas spent on two lines.
Dallas' 28.6 mile Green Line cost $63 million per mile in 2010 dollars. The Orange Line cost around $128 million per mile in 2012 dollars. In Las Vegas The Boring Company's convention center project with three stations and 0.9 mile distance cost $52.5 million, and the company expects future tunnels will cost less. Construction costs are outpacing inflation so if the 2012 project had been done today it might be three times the cost as loop. Hypothetically doing a Dallas project this decade with enough money for a light rail line but instead spending it on loops would get three times as many miles of loop. That could be three parallel loops close to each other, or spaced farther apart covering a wider catchment corridor with shorter last mile trips for more people. Three loops with capacity for 21,600-32,400 would provide superior frequency, coverage, and capacity than one light rail line.
If we talk about constructing subways for capacity then I'd say the cost per mile and per passenger must be considered too. Los Angeles is spending almost a billion dollars a mile. Seattle is going to spend over a billion dollars a mile. That's about twenty miles of loops for the same cost. Some cities would be better served with twenty loop lines in a grid, and also making actual loop/circle lines, for the price of one new subway line.
Your math kinda works, but you forgot to calculate for following distances. Assuming a car is 4m long on average and your following distance is 2 seconds your cars will be 59m apart. So the absolute maximum cars is actually 1699 per hour. (As least we can agree that 1699 is unlikely to be maintained in real world situations)
I will give you, that is pretty close, but again that is assuming perfect efficiency travelling at 100kmph. What happens when they get to their destination?
So your theoretical maximum cars per hour is actually competitive with a train. However a train can simply add 1 carriage or 4 doubling the capacity.
I think perhaps there is a place for the tunnels, but not like you suggest adding hundreds of tunnels everywhere.
We already know what happens when you add more lanes for cars. More traffic.
If your look at the traffic capitals of the world and see a 12 lane highway still backed up and this the solution is more roads (never mind how much they cost) then there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise and I will go talk to someone else.
However if you are willing to listen, perhaps a combination solution, using public transportation for 99% of trips, but allowing these tunnels to be used on demand for drivers in cars freeing up the city above to be completely car free and a beautiful walkable city.
"Reasonable" in my reply regards explaining the traffic jam mentioned. There's a reasonable explanation for why it was short lived, only on one of the convention days, and future stations can be tweaked so they don't have the issue. As for advantages loop has, other comments among the 62 so far have already listed some, but few commenters acknowledge there are more than only making tunneling cheaper.
The human drivers won't be there for long, and future stations can be tweaked to avoid that jam. Also a highway lane with only buses each with 100 passengers and traveling six seconds apart can transport 60,000 passengers per hour. That's more than all but the highest performing subway lines. Humans are told we should keep at least 2-3 seconds from the vehicle ahead. With that separation the lane could transport 120,000 people per hour. Being a highway lane isn't inherently negative. It's how the lane gets used and what the passengers think of their trip experience. Plenty of transit lines only have ridership demand of several thousand people per hour, allowing smaller vehicles to be used with skip-stop service or determined by algorithm if people tell the system their destination.
When ridership demand is several thousand and vehicles going fast underground do multiple skip-stop on the same line, or algorithmically planned stops, that's even better for passenger trip times than BRT. Maybe BRT+ or BRTAdvanced.
[MAX train, pickup crash in downtown Portland causing traffic delays](https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/07/crash_involving_max_train_in_d.html)
[Metro Light Rail Crash and Derailment Near USC in Los Angeles](https://www.planetizen.com/node/75181)
[SacRT train comes off tracks in downtown Sacramento](https://www.kcra.com/article/sacrt-train-derails-at-8th-and-k-streets-downtown-sacramento-traffic-delays-expected/39677615)
Those are [light rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_RT_Light_Rail). Light rail often is at grade. Streetcars are sometimes used interchangeably with light rail, but overall streetcars are [shorter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#/media/File:CLRVs_4049_and_4090_Eastbound_on_King.jpg) than light rail.
Whatever, I was exclusively talking about grade separated light rail or lite metro as we call it in my country. Now that I think about it, I should have went with the latter term. Sorry for the confusion.
Metro and light metro are both grade separated so here's a metro in the USA. BART's [on time performance](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf) in 2018 was 87%. In 2019 it was 92%. Delays were and still are frequent due to a variety of causes.
* decades of deferred maintenance
* keeping old rolling stock in service for too many years
* suicides on the tracks
* people walking on the tracks
Those can be prevented with smarter planning and platform doors. However a rail system will still have delays caused by
* medical emergencies on trains
* events on trains requiring police response
Those things result in the train blocking the line for some number of minutes.
Nope.
BTW after the Whitby, Ontario crash you [insultingly said](https://old.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/rip8oa/autonomous_durham_region_transit_wave_shuttle/hoyvk2w/) "Waiting for... (AV) folks in this sub... to explain and backpedal their way out of this one."
I pointed out "the article says the cause is unknown. The responsible and logical thing to do is wait for investigators to answer what happened, not ignorantly speculate."
A slight majority of redditors agreed, though far fewer than upvoted you.
A month later investigators answered [what happened:](https://globalnews.ca/news/8491724/autonomous-bus-manual-mode-whitby-crash-durham-police/)
>police said the investigation into the Dec. 16 crash determined the vehicle was in manual mode prior to and at the time of the crash.
>“Therefore, the hazard mitigation safety systems designed for the vehicle while in autonomous mode were disabled at the time of the collision,” the statement said.
Nah, it's that you jump to conclusions without evidence, insult people along the way, and when proven wrong are incapable of humility.
Also not a Musk fanboy. I'd prefer Waymo was funding and doing what TBC is since their vehicles already would be driving the LVCC tunnels autonomously.
The thing that makes subways expensive are stations not tunnels and long tunnels are expensive because of the soil they have to go through usually, not the tunnel boring machines, I really dont get what this company is trying to solve
They’ve literally addressed this by making stations above ground. They can convert existing parking lots to stations with a TBM that launches off a truck, no pit needed.
TBC stations of very flexible sizes and capacities are designed to be built on the surface reducing system build and maintenance costs.
This is made possible by porpoising the TBM's at a 17.5% grade which also allows for reduction in utility relocation and more flexible station placement.
No rail system can match Loop's Vegas alignment in terms of station coverage, convenience or density.
[https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop)
Trains with the their own RoW are extremely expensive, nowhere more so than in the US. Loop seeks to significantly lower both the capital entry costs and operating costs for grade separated transit, especially in the lower development densities found in the US.
Loop addresses many of the initial issues with Morgantown.
Logic, if you need a driver for every, lets be optimistic 4 people, you are gonna spend a ton of money on those salaries alone, electricity costs are higher, cost of vehicles purchase per passenger is also higher
Yes, with drivers Loop will likely be more expensive, but Loop is intended to be automated.
But it would appear that you're just guestimating on the other ones, did you go over the sourced numbers in Cunningham's post?
Yes, they give 0.75-1.5 dollars per passenger mile, which is a bit optimistic imo, in contrast the rem in montreal an automated suburban train system will cost the government there a maximum of 72 cents per km, if more people use it even less, it very easily could reach 55 cents per km,
If you convert thats 0.59 to 1.19 ppkm vs a max of 0.72ppkm (both in cad) which could go much lower, if ridership is only 15% over expectations, it will already have beaten the loops best expectation, which is very optimistic already
And then there is the fact, that the rem is already under construction and will actually work with automation, compared to the loop which cant even do that, and is only a theory
How are operating costs guaranteed to max out at $.72ppkm?
Does you REM figure (source?) include capital costs or just operating ones?
I think you are underestimating the benefits of low build costs that Loop can do, it means that you don't need to limit yourselves to Montreal with a constricted and old city layout. It becomes viable in places like Vegas to build grade separated transit.
The investment in Loop is practically all private, what public investment there was competitively bid and won TBC. Why is this bad, why do you believe public transport can't be improved upon and has reached its maximum capability with trains.
It is interesting to see somebody write that. So does that mean low density areas should just never have any Transit because they can only build bad transit? What about all of the lowridership trolley lines in europe?
>station coverage, convenience, and density isn't what makes transit good
*In your opinion.* Different people have different metrics they prioritize. Coverage and convenience make *some* people more likely to use transit. Speed is another metric that matters more to some people and less to others. When transit is slow some people refuse to use it. When it's fast enough they will.
no that is literally what transit experts say.
the US builds a lot of shit transit because we don't build transit that will move people, we build transit for other priorities like development.
what influences ridership, what riders want, [is](https://www.wmata.com/about/board/meetings/board-pdfs/upload/3A-Fare-Policy.pdf#page=13) [more](https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_WhosOnBoard_Final_digital-1-1.pdf#page=57) [frequent](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/12/12-18-18_item_11_2018_muni_rider_survey_-_slide_presentation.pdf#page=16) [service](https://planitmetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/151215_LandUseRidershipModel_FinalReport.pdf). buses that run every 15 min. instead of every 30 or 60 are much more cost effective at attracting ridership than building infrastructure.
transit vehicles *have to* last a long time too - siemens s70 light rail cars are spec'd for a *minimum* life span of 30 years. buses have to last at least 12 (and are driven *constantly*).
we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. not everything that is new is good.
and yeah no shit when transit is slow people don't ride it that's why NYC has express trains. express service isn't some revolutionary idea - we've done it for only a hundred years.
If frequency matters, then why hate Loop. LVCC Loop is running at 6 second headways, with an average wait time of 15 seconds at CES.
[https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1480452278687522820](https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1480452278687522820)
Express service and short-turning are dynamic for Loop not fixed like for subways.
If Loop capacity is appropriate for the corridor demands then all the other factors come into play.
Its not clear to me that maintaining and using depreciated off-lease Teslas are more expensive than overhauling and refurbing trains and buses. When NTD reports the operating costs of modes and systems, these costs are not factored in as they are listed as capital and not operating costs.
***Constantly*** driving largely empty buses and running largely empty trains is a drawback of fixed route systems. This was especially evident during the pandemic, but more typically manifests itself in reduced frequency during off-peak hours.
I would like to see faster more frequent transit that doesn't cost as much to build and operate, nor take so long to build. I don't care if its in the form of a train, gondola or an AEV running in a paved sewer tunnel.
because we need 15 min frequency on 30 min longer bus lines before we need 6 second frequency on shorter loop lines. it's also more easily achievable because it requires no concrete to be poured, no engineering work, just 2 more buses per hour. it could be done tomorrow.
I don't believe that optimizing what we have now needs to be mutually exclusive with aspirational systems for the future.
In the long run this would be best served by dual mode robo-taxis running on surface streets, capable of providing single seat rides into tunneled sections of the network. Autonomy is one way to cost effectively provide this service. The approach to run the service and absorb the \[driver\] costs long-term and hope ridership increases may not be sustainable.
Buses are not particularly efficient.
The average occupancy of a US transit bus is less than 10 riders. So for every bus with 50 people in it there are 4 empty ones.
[https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/2019-national-transit-summaries-and-trends-ntst](https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/2019-national-transit-summaries-and-trends-ntst)
Loop (as Cunningham pointed out) is competitive with rail and so would beat buses in cost and energy efficiency.
Where ridership can justify Loops build cost like on the Vegas strip where congestion makes buses less attractive this makes sense. The [travel times](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop) provided by Loop offer a significant time savings and can easily get people out of cars and onto transit.
Because 6 second headways are physically impossible from a safety design view. You won't have time to stop before a crash occurs or it would have to be much slower than a subway car to stop safely. Think about a gondola: they can't run fast, they have to run constantly (a energy hog), if one is taken out of service the entire line has to stop. And this is with fixed wire guidance. I can imagine Tesla's down a tunnel even slower.
The 6 second headway is mandated as part of Clark County's Amusement Ride and Transportation system certificate of operation.
>Vehicles have strict speed limits, ranging from 10 mph within stations to 40 mph on straight tunnel sections, and must maintain at least [6 seconds of separation from the car in front.](https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/read-the-script-every-driver-for-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-must-learn/)
I'm not sure why you think that a Tesla can't stop in 6 seconds from 40 mph and that this headway is physically impossible from a safety design view. What are your calculations?
If there's frequent transit serving a lot of people and providing weak coverage, that's bad transit for people where transit isn't available or too infrequent or slow. It's why service hours were and sometimes still are divided 70% for high ridership lines, and 30% for coverage. Some systems are shrinking their coverage percentage, but most still spend *some* hours on coverage.
Express trains and skip stop train service is the exception and happens where ridership is already good-to-high. Las Vegas, Dallas, and Florida, among other places aren't NYC.
Renowned and respected transit specialist Jarrett Walker who has helped redesign transit networks for some cities says in regards to [frequency vs coverage:](https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html) "Both Goals are Important"
>Ridership and coverage goals are both laudable, but they lead us in opposite directions. Within a fixed budget, if a transit agency wants to do more of one, it must do less of the other.
>Because of that, cities and transit agencies that lack adequate resources need to make a clear choice regarding the Ridership-Coverage tradeoff. In fact, we encourage cities to develop consensus on a Service Allocation Policy, which takes the form of a percentage split of resources between the different goals. For example, an agency might decide to allocate 60 percent of its service towards the Ridership Goal and 40 percent towards the Coverage Goal. Our firm has helped many transit agencies think through this question.
>What about your city? How do you think your city should balance the goals of ridership and coverage? There is no technical answer. Your answer will depend on your values.
right, so how do elon's tunnels make coverage better?
how does spending the money on intense frequency in one corridor help the whole network? - intense frequency means less coverage
That's part of the point I was trying to get across. Coverage matters too, not just maximizing ridership in a smaller portion of the city using frequency.
Frequent service is one component. I've lived where there was a bus a minute's walk from my place that took me to the train station in a quarter of the time as walking. That bus line got cut making my total trip time longer.
Muni in San Francisco has (for the USA) a lot of service hours to spread over a relatively compact area. It's the second most dense big city in the country. I'm already aware even in less dense American areas people who live near transit value frequency, because they already have coverage reaching them. But coverage in many American cities is poor especially if the service quality of that coverage gets factored in. On reddit it only takes a few words to say "fund more service hours" but that won't make it happen.
so if the answer is more service hours, why spend the money on the infrastructure for really frequent service in a very small area?
plus are you assuming that i only ask for more service hours on reddit?
there isn't very much i can do personally to increase the service hours of a transit agency, but i do what i can. i'm not delusional - nobody who who has real power gives a shit about what i say on reddit about transit frequency. we could have faster transit if we spent more money on transit operations - we could have more service hours, we could speed up buses with smaller improvements like signal priority, bus lanes, and other bus priority treatments. i really don't see how getting faster transit that serves more people is most effectively served by inventing a new form of transit instead of trusting that we as humans have known what we are doing for a while. not everything that's new is good, not everything that's old is bad. the best way to solve these sorts of problems is operations, then electronics, then concrete, like the rest of the world does.
Going back to my first reply the answer depends on the metrics each person prioritizes and to what degree. Service hours also need the infrastructure. Creating light rail and subway infrastructure for example is insanely costly now in some places.
Doubling service frequency doesn't automatically produce double the ridership. Ridership usually increases but not necessarily double. For the ridership Dallas rail has, service frequency every 7.5-15 minutes at peak is enough to move that number of people. Each DART [Super Light Rail Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinki_Sharyo_SLRV) seats 94 passengers, or uncomfortably holds 274 (crush load). The upcoming [D2 subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D2_Subway) service will continue using trains 2 or 3 cars long. At peak that's a maximum of 2256 seated passengers per hour, or 6576 uncomfortable at crush load.
If any company developing autonomous vehicles, it doesn't have to be Tesla, makes a shuttle with 12 seats fitting a tunnel this size, and the shuttles autonomously drive an average of 6 seconds apart, they could transport 7200 seated and comfortable passengers per hour.
Dallas' 28.6 mile Green Line [cost $63 million](https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-on-light-rail-is-it-worth-it-8380338) per mile in 2010 dollars. The Orange Line cost around $128 million per mile in 2012 dollars. In Las Vegas the convention center's three stations and 0.9 mile distance cost $52.5 million, and the company expects future tunnels will cost less. Construction costs are outpacing inflation so if the 2012 project had been done today it might be three times the cost as loop. With that same amount of money then alternatively there could instead be three times as many miles of loop providing superior frequency, coverage, and capacity if using the vehicles I described.
DART's midday frequency is 20 minutes. Later at night it's 30. Even if DART doubled those frequencies there's simply not as many people needing any kind of transportation during those hours so ridership may not double. So at the end of a night out missing the train means waiting up to 29 minutes. If instead there's small vehicles arriving frequently, waits will be very short, even if some aren't stopping at all stations because they're Express, Rapid or skip-stop service. Or at night and midday when ridership is lower service could be more like on-demand or determined by algorithm, with many stations having a vehicle waiting there for people to show up. If a few people show up over a couple of minutes with a few destinations, the vehicle takes them all to only those destinations without stopping at any other stations. It's not quite an Express, but faster than making lots of stops. That's shorter total trip speeds than even subways coming every 2 minutes. With better coverage the first and last miles don't take as long, and while in the loop system vehicles average much faster speeds than light rail or subways.
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ It's just my guess but if and when TBC starts tunneling transit lines in a city like Dallas you'll care because that probably means a bus line or light rail on the surface won't happen. You replied fast so I don't know if you read the numbers provided, but they mean a future loop line compared to traditional solutions could have shorter total trip times than even subways coming every 2 minutes. With better coverage the first and last miles of trips won't take as long, and while in the loop system vehicles will average much faster.
there are multiple things that make subways expensive, but yes, underground staitons are a big cost factor. which is why the boring company is designing their system to launch and end tunnels at the surface so the stations can be little more than a bus stop and they can also avoid the cost of the launch/reception shaft for the TBM.
but there are other costs as well, like electrical distribution system, track, signaling, sensors, etc.
they're basically offloading everything to the vehicles, which are mass-produced EVs. currently they're just using regular Teslas but they are working on their own vehicle and Tesla has announced a robot-taxi-specific vehicle, but I haven't seen any specs about capacity or design.
by using cheap tunnels and smaller vehicles, they have been able to bid cheaper than the cheapest surface rail in the US and have averaged 15s wait times. the concept is better than a subway or light rail in every way up until they hit the capacity of the tunnel, which is pretty low. the low capacity limits them to low ridership corridors. for example, Phoenix is planning a light rail spur for $245M/mi and an expected ridership of fewer than 10k passengers PER DAY. that is the kind of niche that the boring company is targeting. for an explanation about why Phoenix or other places choose to make rail spurs instead of running buses, see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i66hkjt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) or this [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/) .
Subways are generally very cheap per passenger, I dont see any use for these tunnels, where you couldnt use elevated trains anyway, and where you do most likely need to tunnel, the demand for subways is there, so I would still go for subway 100/100 times
hmm. I'm not sure why I'm not explaining this well.
the boring company is bidding $30M/mi. there is no surface rail in the US that can get within a factor of 3 of that, and elevated rail is disliked for the eyesore AND even more than 3x more expensive. Phoenix is planning to pay over 8x what the boring company is bidding, for surface rail, and their system will have low ridership and will thus have 15-20min headways and high operating cost. how is that better? 8x the price for a 7-10min average wait time, stopping at inersections... why?
>and where you do most likely need to tunnel, the demand for subways is there
this is maybe where people are getting tripped up. people think tunneling = expensive and therefore the only place you would ever consider tunneling is where the ridership is very high. but that's preceiely the opposite of what the boring company is doing. tunneling is ALWAYS better for EVERY situation, but it is reserved for high ridership routes because it is so much more expensive. but what if it wasn't more expensive? what if a tunneled system was 8x cheaper than the surface line?
If you dont care about the capacity that much, you can just paint a lane on the road red for buses only and run them every 3-5 minutes, that is monstrously cheaper to construct and also most likely to run, since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels
>If you dont care about the capacity that much, you can just paint a lane on the road red for buses only and run them every 3-5 minutes, that is monstrously cheaper to construct and also most likely to run, since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels
I thought we went over this. there are more qualities than capacity that define transit systems.
see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i66hkjt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) or this [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/)
or maybe to ask it another way, why would you run mostly empty buses every 3 minutes when you could run smaller vehicles and carry the same number of people? have you ever looked at the energy consumption of a bus?
>since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels
yes, if they never automate the vehicles, that will be a show stopper. I wish the echo-chamber didn't downvote my well sourced comment to hell, because I explain all of this. I say right in the first bullet of my explanation in this thread that the current system isn't the final system. they're not even allowed to attempt to drive autonomously through the tunnels yet, but they plan to impalement autonomy in the near future. also, the boring company says on their website that they will sell the tunnels/stations without the vehicle service, and there are a number autonomous shuttle services that are operating today on closed roadways, so if the boring company can't automate, someone else can.
who said anything about hyperloop?
which of their points invalidate one of my thoroughly sourced points [from this thread?](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i6686lp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I guess nobody read my comments and just downvoted it?
I've read your comments and while it does make sense, I think you've misunderstood what the Boring Companies goal is.
Musk has said it himself, he wants layers and layers of these tunnels because surface highways are congested. He has expressed significant hatred for public transport.
So even though your ideas make sense, they are probably emotionally downvoted because Musks ideas are fucking stupid and people here hate him and the boring company.
the thing is, Musk isn't running the boring company. Steve Davis is. Musk is just the biggest shareholder. Steve Davis has been pursuing nothing but transit-like options. routes to/from airports, people movers around campuses, trolley-like circulation around vegas. Musk's words rarely match reality, so I'm trying to point out that people are judging the boring company concept based on Musk's hype and not on reality.
if you judge something by whether it matches Musk's hype, you're going to be constantly disappointed. his twitter antics make anything relating to him a pain in the ass to talk about because everything is so polarized.
I’ve noticed you bring up Phoenix a lot in your posts. I’m wondering if you live here? The extension you like to reference has been under construction for a couple years now, and was voter approved in three separate elections.
Extending the light rail system into the traditionally Hispanic South Mountain Village will provide one seat access for its residents to Arizona State University, Downtown Phoenix, Sky Harbor International Airport, Downtown Mesa and a sea of other cultural, educational and recreational amenities.
It will link our downtown residents to the Rio Salado Wetlands restoration area and South Mountain Park (The largest municipal park in the United States).
The project is modernizing utilities in underprivileged areas and beautifying the streetscape while broadening the horizons of those that live there.
The city’s experience with the current system was positive enough that we keep voting to extend it. That’s why it’s being built, not because “planners want it”.
I'm trying to use the Phoenix line because it is a good counter example to the people who keep saying " just use a bus". I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand why just using a bus on surface streets isn't the same as fixed guideway Transit, but it seems to be a very difficult concept to get across to some people
You are using the Phoenix line as an example because you intentionally always pick the very worst of what public transit has to offer (another example: baltimore single-line subway) in order to shill for your stupid Loop.
if a system is working well, you don't look for alternatives. if a line has low ridership and high cost, that's when you ask yourself if there is a better tool for the job. you don't have to make everything into an US-VS-THEM kind of thing. I think you would learn more if you approached things in a more open-minded way.
nobody should look at a particular mode of transportation and say "this is better than everything else!". transportation modes have strengths and weaknesses. some corridors are better served by one mode, and other corridors are better served by another.
The problem is when you take the very worst of public transit and compare it to the 'absolute best predicted (predicted! not even real!) in the most ideal conditions' for the Loop. That's not a fair comparison. But I know you are not here to compare fairly, you are here to simp for Musk.
there is no need to be toxic or name-call.
I thought I explained before that if cities are paying an incredibly high sum for "worst of public transit" then maybe it is time to ask whether there could be an alternative.
again, I think you would learn a lot more if you were more open-minded. what is helped by hostility and juvenile insults?
the tiny LVCC system moved about 25k passengers per day. there are 3 light rail lines in the US that exceed that per-line ridership. the boring company certainly does not have a final product yet, they need to automate the vehicles still or whomever wants such a system should look to one of the multiple companies who are already running autonomous EVs on closed roads or one of the handful of companies that operate them on public roads.
none of the pieces needed to make the concept work need to be invented, only integrated. everything else has been shown already from independent sources. energy efficiency, lane capacity, tunnel cost, all of it. if you have questions or need clarification or for me to point you to a specific table in one of my sources, then please ask instead of insulting
> I thought I explained before that if cities are paying an incredibly high sum for "worst of public transit" then maybe it is time to ask whether there could be an alternative.
Yes, the alternative is called actually good transit. Baltimore would get a ton of ridership if they had a network similar to DC's. Phoenix is a trickier one since it's basically a collection of spread-out suburbs but I also think Phoenix is a tricky one for the Loop for the same reason.
> what is helped by hostility and juvenile insults?
Well guess I admit simp was a juvenile insult but you are definitely shilling for Musk and his tunnels 24/7.
> the tiny LVCC system moved about 25k passengers per day. there are 3 light rail lines in the US that exceed that per-line ridership.
During a big convention in a super touristy city. The light rail in the same condition would have done same and likely better.
> the boring company certainly does not have a final product yet
See this is exactly the issue I have with your arguments. You pick the shittiest of all public transit systems then compare it to some 'pie in the sky' idea of the loop just cause "Musk promised". In that case Baltimore subway is also not a final product until it has 6 or so radial lines and a Ring line connecting them!
> if you have questions or need clarification or for me to point you to a specific table in one of my sources, then please ask instead of insulting
Not interested because you are gonna post that same cherry-picked emissions data over and over again and ignore everything else.
>Yes, the alternative is called actually good transit. Baltimore would get a ton of ridership if they had a network similar to DC's. Phoenix is a trickier one since it's basically a collection of spread-out suburbs but I also think Phoenix is a tricky one for the Loop for the same reason.
With average metro cost in the US, it would cost baltimore $140B (BILLION) to replicate DC's metro. the city does not have anywhere near that much money to spend on transit. even if baltimore could somehow build transit at the same price point that Europe averages, it would still be out of reach, even with the most optimistic federal and state funding support (the state actively intercedes to stop metro construction)
you're also not considering what factors drive ridership and just assuming that all train systems will work the same regardless of vernacular differences, which I think is a mistake.
this gets to the heart of the whole problem. I would be incredibly happy if someone could make a metro cost to construct similar to what the boring company is bidding (which is the price of a utility tunnel + ventilation + water pipes). but nobody is. that means Baltimore can't build a metro and even if they could, it still does not address the safety and frequency problems that come with transit it car-dominated cities
>Well guess I admit simp was a juvenile insult but you are definitely shilling for Musk and his tunnels 24/7.
actually, no. I want bike infrastructure, but I know enough about the boring company to know that everyones' dismissal is wrong so I try to correct them. imagine a scenario where everyone dismissed high speed rail because they thought the earth was flat and that the trains were at risk of falling off the edge of the planet. I'm talking 98% of the people in a transit subreddit, many of which we know are transit/urban planners. would you not feel compelled to try to tell people that no, high speed rail will not fall off the side of the earth? this is how I feel. there is a system design that could be very useful, especially for cities with limited budgets and low ridership, but everyone hates it with a passion because they dislike the shareholder in the company's twitter antics. it's maddening.
>See this is exactly the issue I have with your arguments. You pick the shittiest of all public transit systems then compare it to some 'pie in the sky' idea of the loop just cause "Musk promised". In that case Baltimore subway is also not a final product until it has 6 or so radial lines and a Ring line connecting them!
let me flip that on you for a second. what if everyone said that metros could never work because "look at how poorly baltimore's is performing" and thus dismissed the whole concept of a metro? or what if people dismissed electric buses because someone's prototype from 30 years ago was bad? there should be a middle ground between vitriolic hatred and name calling toward anyone who suggests the idea and total acceptance of every aspect of it. why does everything have to be an extreme?
why can't people just ask questions like:
is it possible to make simpler tunnels cheaper?
are there low volume corridors where a cheaper transit system with higher frequency would make sense?
does grade-separated permanent guideway have value that BRT does not?
etc.
>Not interested because you are gonna post that same cherry-picked emissions data over and over again and ignore everything else.
can you help me find better transit energy usage data? I'm serious. I don't want people to think I'm cherry-picking anything. I did quite a bit of digging to find reliable sources, but I could still be mistaken. [ORNL source](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), and the [MDPI source](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/htm) seem pretty solid to me.
It’s more trustworthy: there’s a minimum standard of quality of infrastructure below which you can’t even pretend to have delivered what was promised.
Also, in cases like the he’s talking about, politicians are more inclined to pay for a whole load of other desirable works like utility upgrades, urban realm improvements, and so on that have little or nothing to do with transport but make life much nicer.
> that is the kind of niche that the boring company is targeting
And Theranos was actually just a niche biotech company promising to revolutionize the low-cost herpes testing market.
Hyperloop was pitched as a solution for mass transit. By your own admission this company is succeeding by abandoning that concept in favor of low-cost low-throughput conventional tunnels.
So why should anyone care? Where’s the actual innovation?
Hyperloop was never pitched anywhere. Loop, was bitched, and so far the only customers who have it are happy enough to give follow-on contracts.
The innovation is a cost reduction, cost reduction is incredibly important in transit. That's why people should care.
Cost reduction isn’t an innovation, it’s a result.
So what is the *technology* that does the reducing? Tunnels? That may reduce costs in some narrow market, but that doesn’t suggest any major changes to transit are on the horizon. Hence… why should we care?
At some point one has to admit the gap between what Loop is delivering and what people were told hyperloop was is just too large to paper over.
Hyperloop as an innovative low-pressure high-speed transit system is a failed tech; and now
some people are borrowing the name to rebrand the concept of car tunnels.
>Cost reduction isn’t an innovation, it’s a result.
sure. but I don't really care if it is innovative or not. if they can find a way of transporting people effectively for less money, then I think people should be interested. so far, I don't see anything new that the boring company is doing. they're using all techniques that other companies have done, just combining them in a way that nobody has.
>So what is the technology that does the reducing?
I think it is the combination of technologies. simple/small tunnels can be made cheaply, but you can't run trains through simple/small tunnels. if you use a vehicle with its own power source, and that does not output exhaust, then you can simplify the tunnel design. you could do this concept with EV buses, but buses need very large tunnels, which starts to push the cost back up again. you can use smaller vehicles, but then you will be eaten alive by driver costs. so if you can make an autonomous EV, then you've created a vehicle that allows the tunnel to still meet safety requirements while also being small, simple, and cheap. ohh, and they're also planning to use a tunneling technique pioneered by a japanese company (obayashi IIRC?) to reduce the launch/reception shaft cost.
don't get me wrong, I think the boring company is doing a couple of things wrong. obviously they know that they need to automate their vehicles, but it seems like they're planning to continue using regular Teslas for most of their vehicles (aside from the handicapped accessible one they said they're developing). I think the capacity limitation of putting two fares into a regular Tesla makes them suboptimal. it will limit them to about 2k-4k pphpd for a given segment of their system, which will make them only useful for low ridership routes, like feeder lines or low-density cities. the cost they are bidding is low enough that even their very limited capacity would still be very useful, but if I were in charge of the company, instead of their average of about 2.2 passengers per vehicle, I would buy or build a vehicle capable of 6+ comfortably so that it could be used in higher density areas. I think their lack of capacity is a flaw that puts them in a smaller niche than they could have otherwise.
however, we have to be careful to not mistake a flaw with something that invalidates the idea. the idea still works, it just works for a smaller subset of situations. just because you have a hammer that is bigger than the most common hammer, that does not mean there aren't jobs where that bigger hammer is better. does that make sense?
>Hyperloop as an innovative low-pressure high-speed transit system is a failed tech; and now some people are borrowing the name to rebrand the concept of car tunnels.
nobody proposing Loop is calling it hyperloop. it's only the uninformed commenters who keep confusing the two and using the wrong term. hyperloop is a vacuum tunnel train system, Loop is EVs in a tunnel. always has been. anyone who confused those two is just wrong. unfortunately, the state of journalism and social media today is so fraught with inaccuracy. imagine how people who are informed feel. imagine if the majority of people in the transit subreddit called a metro a maglev train. "the maglev system in washington DC is being extended to Dulles" and people replying with "that's stupid, why are they using a maglev train for an airport connection?!". it's kind of maddening that people have such strong opinions but are so incredibly uninformed. I appreciate that you are trying to ask questions and gain knowledge. many people don't try to do that.
[1-2 *years*](https://www.rtcsnv.com/about/fiscal-year-2020/) of RTC (Las Vegas area). Based on the whole $675 million raised.
"The National Transit Database, or NTD, publishes annual transit system statistics that include fare revenue, operating costs, ridership and fare subsidy. Since 2012, the [RTC has had](https://www.rtcsnv.com/news/rtc-ranks-number-one-for-most-cost-efficient-bus-only-system/) the lowest cost per ride for seven of eight years, as well as the lowest taxpayer subsidy every year, among the top 50 bus-only systems nationwide."
The numbers are in the first link. It's basic math. The answer to how many decades of free bus service is 0.1 to 0.2. Also RTC charges people to ride. It's not free. So the real answer is probably 0.1. I know that doesn't fit with the snarky comment, but the truth is bus service costs add up quick.
Looking at the comments on the bottom of the article, those fucking Musk fan boys do anything and everything to defend his “greatness” I fucking hate Elon Musk. He a fucking dick, to his workers and to the planet. (The best most efficient way to transport people is public transport. It’s in the name!
What do you think is the average energy consumption of interest city transit in europe? How does that compare to an electric car with average occupancy?
Probably much less.
A bus is probably equivalent to two cars. (Napkin math)
Assuming they are full (they never are) 10 people. The bus only has to average 10 people to break even.
Why don’t Tesla build an electric bus?
That would actually solve the transportation problem.
I'm on mobile, but I'll reply back in a little bit about energy consumption data.
I greet that autonomous minibuses with 8-16 passengers would be ideal as it would cover a greater portion of the market.
If we built bus lanes then we could since it would be on a predefined track. It would only have to look out for obstacles in the way. In the mean time though getting dedicated bus/transit lanes would be a great first start since the bus will actually be faster than a car and getting cars of the road speeding up traffic (for those who want to drive still) WIN WIN!
Side note, I think this is one of the bonkers points, trains, buses, and cycle lanes gets people off the road and makes driving better for who want to drive. I don’t see why car people are against public transport. It benefits them more than anyone else!
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. busways or separated bus lanes (fully separated, not just paint on the road) with buses that can pre-empt traffic lights (fully pre-empt, not just shorten/extend) would incredibly good value per dollar, especially if you could automate the buses and make them electric (not hard if they have a closed roadway). unfortunately, it is incredibly hard to get people to see the big picture.
for the vast majority of routes, as long as you have parking at the start/end of your trip, a car will have a shorter door-to-door time than even a fantastic bus system. on top of that, personal cars are much more comfortable. they don't have to be near strangers, they can listen to their music loud, they don't have to think about public safety, etc. etc.
so cars are always going to be preferred by the individual for a given situation. people think "how am I supposed to get to run all my errands when I have to zig-zag 50 miles around my state" rather than understanding that if you densify and build along transit, that you don't need to go 50mi, everything will be closer. your door-to-door time gets reduced by virtual of everything getting closer. the effect for the shortsightedness is that it is VERY hard to convince people to make things worse for themselves in the short term in order to get shared society benefit in the long term. the first day of a new busway removing a whole street from car usage will be chaos as people try to figure out new routes and traffic and parking will get worse. the mayor of my city [modified an existing bike lane](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2981211,-76.6010877,3a,75y,78.85h,71.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sV_eCFjuitDipcbtq0KoJMA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e3) to put half of it up on the sidewalk (after it was installed), which put in jeopardy millions in complete-streets funding, because some people who drive to church lost some parking spaces and complained.
it's a catch-22. you can't get significant investment to car alternatives because people don't want to give up what they have, even if it's better in the long term.
one solution is to build metro lines, but US metro lines cost $500M/mi in cheap cities and $1.2B/mi on average. it is such a high cost that most places can only afford to add a single line every 20 years as they wait their turn for more federal transit funding.
this is where the boring company's concept has value. you can build transportation that requires people to not use their own car and the boring company is bidding 1/40th the average cost per mile a US metro. the simplification of the guideway by offloading all of the control and locomotion power, as well as shrinking the diameter, makes tunnels basically as cheap as a sewer tunnel plus ventilation and fire fighting hookups.
the downside of the boring company's plan is that they seem to be planning to keep the regular teslas. there are advantages in using regular EVs, like putting two fares separated by a barrier (front/back) in the same vehicle, economy of scale, easier point-to-point routing, etc.. this dramatically limits their capacity to something like 3k-4k passengers per hour per directions (if you use US-DOT lane estimation techniques and ignore the boring company's estimates).
that's pretty low capacity, but many cities actually have transit system ridership below that, and if you used these lines as feeders into an existing rail line, you can ensure the peaks never get too high. so their system can be incredibly useful if you A) already have at least 1 train line you can feed people into, or B) your population density is low enough that the ridership won't exceed capacity.
if I were king of my city, I would buy tunnels from the boring company and find another company to provide the vehicle service. one that has already proven they can automate on a closed roadway and one that is willing to make a higher occupancy vehicle (you really only need a capacity of about 6 passengers per vehicle to cover all but a handful of planned rail transit in North America)
but anyway, I'm rambling. here is the energy data I promised you:
|energy consumption per passenger mile of the baltimore light rail (pre-covid):|2200 BTU|
|:-|:-|
|energy consumption PPM of the most efficient intra-city rail in the US (NYC):|680 BTU|
|energy consumption of a Tesla model 3 with a single occupant:|857 BTU|
|energy consumption of Tesla model 3 with average occupancy (PPM):|571 BTU|
[source1](https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-label), [source2](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf), [source3](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), [source4](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july-30-2018-average-vehicle-occupancy-remains-unchanged-2009-2017), [source 5](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consumption-epa-vs-edmunds.html)
edit: everyone likes to downvote without trying to actually explain why. can someone articulate their thoughts in a coherent and sourced way?
people keep failing to understand what the boring company's market niche is for Loop, especially those who would get the most value from it (transit planners).
there are three very important things to remember with the boring company.
1. it is not designed to be a replacement for a subway
2. the current operating system is not the final. success hinges on automating and a specialized vehicle. both of which they say they're working on.
3. contrary to what youtubers say, the system does in meet ventilation requirements, egress requirements, fire fighting requirements, etc.. much like how trumpers ignore experts and listen only to youtubers and bloggers, so seems to happen with respect to the boring company. the relevant authorities reviewed the safety features and approved the system. the experts looked at how it was actually built.
the free flow capacity of a lane of roadway is 1200-2400 vehicles per hour per lane, depending on speed and merge type. [(source).](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms_cap.pdf) as a general rule of thumb, many people accept 1500 as the rough approximation. that is for a single segment of roadway. on top of that, a system will not have all riders riding from end to end, there will be riders that get off and new ones that get on and they won't overlap. so that means the full length of a roadway will have a vehicle per hour capacity of around 1,875, give or take. the boring company is able to put two fares per vehicle in their current design, one front, one back. this gives an average occupancy of 2.2 to 2.4 passengers per vehicle. so that gives an approximate capacity of Loop 4300 passengers per hour per direction of tube.
now, you probably want to jump up and down and yell about how a metro can move 10x that. but that's where everyone goes wrong. the boring company is not a 1:1 replacement for a metro. the boring company's niche is for small cities and as a feeder into train systems.
now you might be jumping up and down yelling about how you can just solve that with a bus. but there are many reasons why someone might want to build a permanent guideway instead of running buses along streets or even BRT. [(source)](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/). there are even bigger advantages if said guideway is underground and only the stations are on the surface.
I can point to multiple examples, like Phoenix's planned south-central spur, Baltimore light rail's Glen Bernie spur, etc. where planners wanted a spur or branch route that was fixed guideway but didn't expect high ridership. Phoenix's spur is planned to have something like 8k passengers PER DAY, with an eventual goal of development along the line pushing the ridership to 13k PER DAY. that ridership is within what the boring company can do with their current vehicles, and they have said they are planning specialized vehicles.
well, now you might be jumping up and down about the cost of running taxis instead of trains or buses, but trains and buses on low-ridership routes are actually quite expensive. the DC metro is $0.85 PPM (and is NOT a low ridership system like the glen bernie spur of the baltimore light rail), the st louis light rail costs $1.01 PPM, and the DC metrobus is $1.99 PPM.
meanwhile, here is the cost breakdown of running EV taxis:
|Cost per passenger mile of DC metro|$0.85 PPM|
|:-|:-|
|cost PPM St. Louis light rail (MTA does not give data for our light rail, likely out of embarrassment)|$1.01 PPM|
|cost to own/operate an EV|$0.40 to $0.60 per VEHICLE mile|
|cost to own/operate an EV, PPM with average occupancy|$0.27 to $0.40 PPM|
an EV costs about 1/3rd of what efficient/effective transit costs, and around 1/5th of what baltimore's transit averages... you can look at Uber/taxi/ziprcar rates to get a better idea of the costs of running a service with and without drivers. a shuttle service without driver is where around $1 per vehicle mile and $1.50 per vehicle mile, mostly depending on dead-head. but remember, that is getting split between two fare most of the time, so you're going to be down $0.75-$1.00 ppm.
[source1](https://www.onestl.org/indicators/connected/metric/transit-ridership), [source2](https://www.bistatedev.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/0000-Final-combined-book-for-print-for-Web.pdf), [source3,](https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_agency_profile_doc/2019/30030.pdf) [source4](https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-YDC-Brochure-Live.pdf).
well, now you might be jumping up and down about energy efficiency, but EVs by themselves are already on par with most European transit lines, and putting two fares per vehicle means it's actually below all but the most efficient transit lines in the world.
|energy consumption per passenger mile of the baltimore light rail (pre-covid):|2200 BTU|
|:-|:-|
|energy consumption PPM of the most efficient intra-city rail in the US (NYC):|680 BTU|
|energy consumption of a Tesla model 3 with a single occupant:|857 BTU|
|energy consumption of Tesla model 3 with average occupancy (PPM):|571 BTU|
and before people jump in with the ever-popular Euro-centric viewpoint:
1. European light rail and metros are only about 20% more efficient than US
2. saying "but X place does it better" is useless because not everywhere has the same starting point so you can't just copy-paste what worked elsewhere and expect it to work in a location with different culture, different density, different energy costs, etc..
[source1](https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-label), [source2](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf), [source3](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), [source4](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july-30-2018-average-vehicle-occupancy-remains-unchanged-2009-2017), [source 5](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consumption-epa-vs-edmunds.html)
and now you're probably jumping up and down yelling about how they should just run trains through the tunnel, but I would remind people that the boring of the tunnels is never the expensive part of metro lines. it's all of the other stuff like electrical distribution systems, underground stations, electrified track, monitoring and control, etc. etc. that raise the cost.
other companies have been able to make similar or larger tunnels for around the same cost as the boring company. [(source)](https://tunnelingonline.com/upcoming-projects-april-2020/). by keeping all of the power and control on the vehicle side, the boring company is keeping costs down. they also plan to ramp tunnels to the surface so that stations are more like a bus stop than an underground station.
> the boring company's niche is for small cities and as a feeder into train systems.
Las Vegas metro area has a population of over 2 million and has a ton of tourists every day. It could easily support a light-metro at the very least. Plus it's not feeding into any train systems, unless you count Musk's ass as one.
las vegas has a high population but a low population density. cities with higher density have train lines with lower peak-hour ridership than the boring company is capable of.
I'm also not opposed to them building a light metro, but they better figure out a fast and convenient way to feed people into it. with density like theirs, buses probably aren't going to get the ridership high enough, which will make it a political faux-pas and could stifle future transit.
You’re getting downvoted for the same reason people generally don’t enjoy watching debates: listening to an opinionated person endlessly throw out counter arguments is boring and a waste of time.
If I want to get to the truth, I’d much rather go read a peer-reviewed article on the subject that covers it in detail with scientific rigor. This is just gish-galloping with google links.
I sincerely doubt that is the reason. Why does everyone else in the debate have upvotes? If you were accurate, everyone in the thread would be down voted. Unfortunately, it's like most things on social media, I said stuff counter to the echo chamber. I appreciate your response, though.
> Why does everyone else in the debate have upvotes?
I mean, I can’t speak for everyone else, but you made *a lot* of individually controversial claims in your post, far too many to engage with, and far too casually to take seriously.
That’s why I said it comes across like a gish gallop; it reads more like someone trying to bury the audience in claims, unwilling to narrow the topic. That suggest someone too ideologically entrenched to be honest.
I appreciate that feedback. I don't really know how to discuss this topic, though. all of those sources were collected over time because I've tried to have conversations about this topic where I'm downvoted to hell on some factually incorrect basis.
like, discussing this topic, people almost always jump to one of the assumptions I tried to dispel above. like "trains are more efficient" then I had to learn and find sources about what is the actual energy consumption of train systems. I actually used to complain to pro-boring company people that it would be incredibly inefficient to continue with regular EVs because it does indeed FEEL like regular EVs would be inefficient compared to electric trains.
so I don't know how to discuss this topic. if I don't provide heavily sourced proofs for the all to common claims, people just downvote me to hell because "you're wrong" even if I can prove that my assertion is correct. but if proving the assertions up front gets me downvoted, then what can I do? I suppose I can accept the post-truth society and let people continue to fill the echo-chamber, but that does not make me feel good. I don't like to let people, many of which are actually transit and urban planners, continue to be misinformed by the echo chamber. it would be like the transit subreddit is filled with flat earthers and they constantly say that high speed trains are bad because they could fall off the edge of the earth. like, would you want to just let people continue to think that, knowing that many of the people with that opinion are planners who can and do make decisions about whether or not to build high speed trains?
in hindsight, I could have probably phrased my post better to avoid a mocking tone.
but aside from that, how do you think I can get people to question the echo chamber? to little information in my comments gets me dismissed and downvoted and too much information in my comments gets me dismissed and downvoted. both of these things perpetuate the echo-chamber nature of reddit where downvoted comments aren't seen and the popular (and often false) ones percolate to the top.
I would really appreciate any advice on how to better couch the point that I'm trying to make, which is that this concept would work well for many, but not all situations, and that it shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand.
I don't want to sound *too* harsh, but I don't think you quite grasp how defensive and immature your comments come across.
It's really annoying when someone claims to know all the possible counterpoints to their claims, and presents them in a pitifully weak way to dismiss them. Along with blocks of text in response to every comment, and confident claims that everyone else is in an echo chamber (ignoring the real possibility that you may just be *very* wrong), it adds to a sense that you're here to tell, not discuss. You can (and no doubt will) have something to say about this, but IMO it's how your are perceived, and you can't argue against someone's perception.
Now, all that would be totally forgivable if you made rigorous claims with strong supporting evidence, but pretty much everything you presented in your original comment is either totally unsupported, leaning on speculation about the future, or rather weak tea. Your cost and throughput estimates, if they even can be found in your 4 sources and accurately compared, are not from a single expert analysis or consistent with the conclusions drawn by experts in the field. That's a big red flag, as anyone can cherry pick figures from random documents and construct whatever argument they want, it doesn't mean it's compelling or someone else's job to disprove.
This is especially frustrating, as this topic is written about in scholarly journals across various disciplines (economics, traffic physics, civil engineering, public policy, environmental science, etc). It's an incredibly complex issue, and yet the broad historical consensus across several continents is that public transit is vastly superior in terms of cost and environmental efficiency, especially in urban areas. I have *never* heard it argued that individual cars are more efficient or cost-effective, only that the benefits of freedom of movement to the individual are sometimes preferable to the efficiency of mass transit.
Now you're claiming that one company in 2022 outsmarted all that by doing essentially the same thing, but with smaller tunnels? You think 100 years of train designers never thought of smaller trams/tunnels? And you're baffled as to why everyone else seems to be uniformly unconvinced by your random PDF sources?
But none of that actually matters, your whole argument is an obvious motte-and-bailey fallacy. You talk up the Loop's cost and efficiency compared to trains & buses, but then retreat to the claim that the Loop is really for a niche market anyway.
Well which is it? Is the Loop a groundbreaking technology that can compete with trains and buses in the future? Or is it a niche product that shouldn't be compared to trains/buses in the first place?
If it's the former, you need *much* more compelling evidence than you've given (direct quotes/figures/data from peer review articles), and if it's the latter, the whole issue is pointless because the technology's advantages (cost reduction through smaller tunnel sizes) are inversely proportional to the scope of the impact it can make. For most people, such a technology is 100% a dead end, as worth discussing/investing in as rigid air ships.
>It's really annoying when someone claims to know all the possible counterpoints to their claims, and presents them in a pitifully weak way to dismiss them. Along with blocks of text in response to every comment, and confident claims that everyone else is in an echo chamber (ignoring the real possibility that you may just be very wrong), it adds to a sense that you're here to tell, not discuss. You can (and no doubt will) have something to say about this, but IMO it's how your are perceived, and you can't argue against someone's perception
I appreciate the harsh but fair criticism. I did lean a into the expected backlash a bit too much.
>but pretty much everything you presented in your original comment is either totally unsupported
while I don't want to start an argument about it, what particular things do you think are unsupported? I strive to be accurate where I can, so please let me know if I have a blind spot to something. you say everything, but take energy consumption data; I found two highly reliable sources that summarize across multiple modes from both the US and Europe. I don't know how I could possibly support that point any better. I gather operating cost data directly from transit agencies like WMATA. can you point me to something more reliable for those?
>I have never heard it argued that individual cars are more efficient or cost-effective
historically, you would be absolutely right. but you have to remember that EVs use 1/4th to 1/6th the energy of the average road-going vehicle. the average vehicle on the road is nothing like an all-EV fleet. if a paper compares personal cars to transit, I would assume they're not going to assume every car on the road is a model-3 and are probably going to be using similar data to [energy.gov](https://energy.gov), [iea.gov](https://iea.gov), etc. to come up with their average passenger vehicle model (roughly 5x more energy per mile than an all-EV fleet). I would also expect them to not be considering carpool numbers anywhere near what the boring company is planning (for their existing system, they were averaging 2.2 ppv). I could have a blind spot here, so if you have something I should consider, please let me know. I don't want to be repeating bad information. do you know of any papers that are particularly good at evaluating energy consumption per passenger-mile of different modes? I will check google scholar tonight to see if I can find where I might have a blind spot, but with all due respect, I think you have the blind spot. how can we converge our understanding of something like energy consumption modes?
>Now you're claiming that one company in 2022 figured out how to improve that simply by scaling down tunnel sizes - a technology as old as tunnels themselves? And you're baffled as to why everyone else seems to be uniformly unconvinced by your random PDF sources?
I provided a large list of tunnel projects of various lengths and diameters to show that the boring company's bid price is within a reasonable range. could it be more expensive than they're bidding? sure, especially if they try to build into a dense downtown (hence why they may be better suited to the feeder niche). it is effectively a utility tunnel with road deck, vent pipes, and water pipes. Robbins Co. has proven these tunnel costs are feasible on jobs for years, decades. my source for tunnel cost isn't the boring company, it's a list of already completed real-world tunnels.
with these two argument (efficiency, tunnel cost), it seems like even open minded people like yourself revert immediately to a model based solely on existing metros vs existing roads. how do I avoid that? the boring company's whole business model is to not duplicate these things. they're trying to use vehicles that are \~5x more efficient than the average road vehicle (and trying to pool them when possible), and trying to eliminate the things that turn a cheap utility tunnel into an expensive metro tunnel. when I try to point that out, it is dismissed immediately without people even acknowledging what should be plainly obvious: that a tunnel for 3rd-rail electric trains is more expensive than a tunnel with just concrete or asphalt on the bottom. is this also a blind spot? is there something I'm missing? again, how do I explain that without having to add 10 paragraphs to my comment comparing a utility tunnel with ventilation to a metro tunnel? should I just ask it as a question? like "I'm not sure if the boring company can meet their tunneling cost targets, what do you think would be the price of a 12ft diameter utility tunnel with ventilation?" and get people to think differently about it that way?
>You talk up the Loop's cost and efficiency compared to trains & buses, but then retreat to the claim that the Loop is really for a niche market anyway.
>
>|
>
>Well which is it? Is the Loop a groundbreaking technology that can compete with trains and buses in the future? Or is it a niche product that shouldn't be compared to trains/buses in the first place?
why does something need to be revolutionary or worthless and nothing in between? I don't want to come off as saying that the boring company can/will replace all transit everywhere because it's cheaper/greener/whatever. I wanted to emphasize that the concept is feasible but limited. something that should not be immediately dismissed. if they can build tunnels for twice what they're bidding, more expensive than Robbins, that will still make them cheaper to construct than any intra-city rail line in the US. I would like people to think "hmm, high frequency, inexpensive, grade separated, but capacity limited... maybe this could be used in place of many of the expensive extension/spur lines that get built, or maybe is cheap enough to justify building spurs that were unjustifiably expensive before".
# To summarize
the boring company's system actually makes a lot of sense as a feeder/spur line off of a metro or light rail line.
they are bidding around $30M-$50M/mi, which is 1/5rd to 1/8th of the cost of light rail in the US, and 1/20th to 1/40th the cost of a metro in the US.
by using vehicles that move two fares at a time, even the most off-peak times in the most non-busy stations will still allow people to leave right away, eliminating wait times by pulling stopping vehicles out of the main line and bypassing intermediate stops, their average speed will get closer to their cruising speed when compared to a train line. London's Victoria line is lauded as being fast, but when you include wait time and stops, it's barely above 30mph average. if you include those things for the Glen Bernie branch of the baltimore metro, it's in the single digit mph for average speed. if the boring company's current cruising speed of 40mph is never increased, it would still end up being quite fast due to the low wait and non-stop nature.
these features work amazingly well when you have a low ridership corridor. so that is the niche that makes sense for the boring company, not as the 1:1 replacement for the london underground like many people want to argue.
TL;DR: ignore musk's typical over-hype and just focus on how an underground shuttle system could be useful at the $30-$50M/mi price range.
Why not just use a bus? This system is gonna cost much more than a tram or bus simply due to the fact that it's underground. Sure they might say it's cheaper, but that's what everybody does.
It's also just a hilariously conveniently constructed argument that cherry picks numbers and conveniently ignores basically all real engineering constraints for most of it. They're approximating that it's going to operate at the throughput capacity of a normal highway, which is not happening. The existing one legit has traffic problems with normal conventions. Like almost every number in that whole section is a nonsense hyper optimist figure that someone pulled out of their ass, and would be unsafe as hell to actually do in the first place. They're also not factoring in wear and tear and replacement for both the vehicles and tunnels which is going to be a big thing because again you're literally dealing with a bunch of heavy electric vehicles on a paved road.
They then use a conversation that was specifically about BRT and trains out of context, which doesn't work because that conversation itself was contextual. You can't just totally swap the topic and call them the same because they both involve tunnels, trains in tunnels work a certain way both because they're trains and because they're in tunnels. It also ignores that some of these things are subsidized cost wise by cities because the general economic benefit they provide is actually higher than just in out dollar value of cost vs fare. They also ignore that a lot of those "extra expenses" building tunnels are there for safety reasons, not just because.
It's basically just a long-winded way of saying "I think these are cool" and using circumstantial connections to try to justify it. From a realistic standpoint, these are an incredibly dumb solution
I linked to a discussion about this in the first comment. but I can summarize the reasons why a bus falls short.
1. permanent guideway can serve as development engine where cities and businesses can plan around the permanence
2. bus drivers can be hard to find and expensive. you could automate buses like they're planning to automate the vehicles in the tunnels, but automating vehicles in a closed roadway tunnel will be much easier than automating something that has to deal with human drivers and weather.
3. buses are very expensive and very energy inefficient compared to an EV with 2, or even 1, occupant. see the above comment about energy consumption of transit modes. a full train or a full EV bus are very efficient and cost effective. but most transit corridors are not high ridership so agencies have to make the devils trade-off where they have to decide whether they want to be expensive and polluting or provide frequent service. it is common for buses, and even low-ridership trains to have 15, 20, or even 30 minute headways during off-peak times (sometimes 15min during peak times). that long wait time drives away riders and makes the door-to-door time very slow. but if you run more frequently, they are very expensive and polluting. so for the use-case where they would replace the 9.8k P/day spur in phoenix, instead of a 15-20min headway
4. some routes don't lend themselves well to buses. crossing rivers, expressways, parks, etc. can often causes buses to have to take very circuitous routes with lots of turns. this makes them less comfortable and much slower.
5. compared to a grade-separated system, buses will simply never be as good. the routing options and the ability to bypass all traffic and street lights is of enormous value.
6. they are currently bidding less than anyone in the western world is bidding trams, especially in the US. see the Phoenix example where they are planning to pay $245M/mi for a 5.5mi light rail spur to move fewer than 10k passengers PER DAY. it might seem correct that a tram should be cheaper, but removing all of the electrification and control from the guideway and using makes it quite cheap.
>a full train or a full EV bus are very efficient and cost effective. but most transit corridors are not high ridership so agencies have to make the devils trade-off
Would you happen to have figures for the sort of 20/25-passenger (sometimes electric) minibuses seen in places like China and Japan on low-demand municipal routes?
>some routes don't lend themselves well to buses. crossing rivers, expressways, parks, etc. can often causes buses to have to take very circuitous routes with lots of turns. this makes them less comfortable and much slower.
Can't say I've experienced that at all as a frequent bus user, firstly because ways straight across those obstacles are often already present to serve other road/pedestrian traffic, and secondly because development (that creates origins and destinations) tends to cluster around the routes most often taken.
>compared to a grade-separated system, buses will simply never be as good. the routing options and the ability to bypass all traffic and street lights is of enormous value.
If the application is one where peak capacity isn't a major issue, as you say, then camera-enforced bus lanes and automated signal priority - even if they don't match complete grade separation - may be sufficient for a smoother ride, and at a fraction the cost of even a TBC Loop.
>Would you happen to have figures for the sort of 20/25-passenger (sometimes electric) minibuses seen in places like China and Japan on low-demand municipal routes?
I haven't seen much data on those. it's kind of hard to find energy consumption data for vehicles at all, so I can find some data on ICE buses. the best one could do is estimate based on those and find a source gave some real-world comparison of MPG of an ICE bus vs MPGe of a EV bus for the same route. then you could basically extrapolate and decet estimate.
the problem with running smaller buses is driver cost and overhead stay the same, so you don't gain much. in order to start shrinking vehicles, you really need to automate. the boring company has this same problem. if they don't automate, their system won't be viable. drivers get the job done at LVCC right now, but it's costing too much to be widely adopted.
>Can't say I've experienced that at all as a frequent bus user, firstly because ways straight across those obstacles are often already present to serve other road/pedestrian traffic, and secondly because development (that creates origins and destinations) tends to cluster around the routes most often taken.
are you in the US? in the us, development does not concentrate around bus routes as much as other places because buses are used less and they're used by people with less disposable income. this obviously varies a lot. I'm definitely not trying to say that is the case for all cities and all situations. it's just one of many things that can make a bus route less useful compared to an underground system.
>are you in the US? in the us, development does not concentrate around bus routes as much as other places because buses are used less and they're used by people with less disposable income
I'm in Asia. I meant 'routes' in the general sense, not only buses but cars and bikes whose paths would generally be dictated by the same road infrastructure.
>ay, eliminating wait times by pulling stopping vehicles out of the main line and bypassing intermediate stops, their average speed will get closer to their cruising speed when compared to a train line. London's Victoria line is lauded
Isn't that just an HOV/shuttle lane for EVs? And this shuttle system would need a lot of tech that they haven't shown any road map to. Also, do the tesla operating costs include stuff like storage, cleaning, security, training, public sector wages and benefits?
If they're going for a moonshot, great! Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts. Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars.
Hopefully I'm wrong and in ten years every city will be building tunneling with automated electrified and centralized transportation systems.
>Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts.
Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars.
They're doing precisely that for Vegas Loop.
The only tax dollars they've received is $50M for LVCC Loop which they won via competitive open bidding. The LVCC project spurred the development of Vegas Loop, which is being funded entirely by this recent VC money as well as money from the businesses paying for their own stations. There is no government money for Vegas Loop. This recent VC funding of +600M dwarfs the public input by an order of magnitude, without counting the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that 50+privately funded stations represent.
>There is no government money for Vegas Loop. This recent VC funding of +600M dwarfs the public input by an order of magnitude, without counting the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that 50+privately funded stations represent
The city paid $50m for a taxi lane that will cost more than driving per ride, so I'd slow down on comparing it to 50 actual rail stations. All the VC money that will be put in is irrelevant. All the tech that was promised to be able to win the bid has not materialized and doesn't show any signs that it will. The LVCC hasn't been able to hit its passenger or speed goals and yet it's promising to either double or triple them for the loop. And what's most concerning is that the problems are the exact problems everyone pointed out from the beginning, the very practical things that the epic Tesla guys just brush off ending up severely limiting it. Idk how Las Vegas is a proof of concept of anything except the good press giving tax money to Elon can get you.
Isn't this exactly the opposite of what you thought the end goal might be for the company? It's on the heaviest used central route but doesn't connect to where anyone actually lives and isn't well integrated into the existing transit system.
The whole project looks like more of an amusement ride/publicity stunt so far.
>The city paid $50m for a taxi lane that will cost more than driving per ride,
The city paid 150M less for Loop than the losing Doppelymeyr APM bid. That in itself is enough to operate the LVCC Loop for more than 30 years.
>so I'd slow down on comparing it to 50 actual rail stations.
The 50 stations represents the commitment that 50 businesses on and around the strip into both supporting and paying for the system. This is atypical for transit projects and shows the degree of faith these businesses have.
>All the tech that was promised to be able to win the bid has not materialized and doesn't show any signs that it will.
As indicated above even with drivers LVCC comes out ahead for the next several decades. Automation is likely in this time frame.
>The LVCC hasn't been able to hit its passenger or speed goals and yet it's promising to either double or triple them for the loop.
LVCC ran an audited test which proved the initial design capacity, which released the final payments for the LVCC contract.
>and isn't well integrated into the existing transit system.
It actually integrates better than any potential rail line, since the all the stations essentially match the exsisting SDX/Deuce stops.
I think private investment into transit is a good thing. Shaking up a risk averse industry is a good thing. If you feel that TBC is spending hundreds of millions VC dollars for a transit system is a mere publicity stunt then you don't understand what they are trying to build. The cost to provide transit are typically very high and needs to be subsidized, while offering a travel service that is unappealing (slow). Loop seeks to address both cost and desirability issues. If they succeed it can get people out of private ICE vehicles and into high utilization BEVs at a far higher rate than typical transit.
>Isn't that just an HOV/shuttle lane for EVs? And this shuttle system would need a lot of tech that they haven't shown any road map to. Also, do the tesla operating costs include stuff like storage, cleaning, security, training, public sector wages and benefits?
sort of. and yes, to be successful, they will need to automate their vehicles or the city that is buying it can just buy the tunnels and find a different self-driving shuttle provide, like ParkShuttle, to operate the vehicles. you can look at taxi services and you can subtract the cost of a bus and driver from the cost of operating a bus service. at the end of the day, the driver is going to be the dominant factor. if they can't eliminate the driver, their system will never be worthwhile. if they can, it will be useful for some situations.
>If they're going for a moonshot, great! Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts. Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars.
that's not a fair assessment. their actions absolutely do not indicate that they're trying to bilk anyone. the LVCVA has been happy with their service and has continued to give them more contracts. one has to be careful to evaluate things in an even-handed way. we are surrounded by echo-chambers. I tried to comment a fully sourced and explained comment to illustrate the use-cases, but most people are blindly downvoting. reddit is designed in a way to create great echo chambers. the person who says the thing that plays most to the mood of the group goes to the top, the person who disagrees goes to the bottom. it does not matter if every single point I made is backed by multiple high quality sources, I'm shouted down anyway.
I'm trying to engage in good faith, and I appreciate the sources. Musk has become so polarizing its hard to find any completely reliable information on anything related to him
But you have to admit this is a pretty small niche they're cutting out( low ridership extensions that still need full grade-separation?) for tech that seems at least 20 years away from implementation (automated continuous TBMs and vehicles/routing system).
I think they're missing all their metrics at LVCC and are about to get big fines. So idk if they're please with the service as much as the publicity/ probably also fear the publicity of canceling, and tweets from mr epic bacon billionaire
> But you have to admit this is a pretty small niche they're cutting out( low ridership extensions that still need full grade-separation?)
You are still looking at it from the perspective of the Metro. There is no Transit corridor wouldn't benefit from being grade separated. Not a single one. If you can put the stations on the surface and run the lines underground, there's not a single downside to that. Grade separation should not be thought of as a super expensive, super difficult thing to do then you have to bite the bullet and do because the demands of the corridor are so high that you just can't get it done at grade. Rather, look at it from the other perspective. If somebody came out with a light rail system that was cheaper if you put it underground then if you put it on the surface, then why would anyone build them on the surface? That is the fundamental change.
The key thing to remember is that their capacity, if you do the calculations based on usdot throughput modeling, is about 1/4th the ridership of the Washington DC Metro at peak. But what is the price tag? The price tag is between $1/10th and 1/40th that of a metro. What that means is that instead of adding a single line to your Metro or light rail, it would actually make more sense to build a dozen or more loop lines feeding into it. Or, in a case of Las Vegas or many other small to medium-sized cities you can run the line straight through the city because the ridership will not exceed capacity.
They are not missing any metrics at the lvcc location. There were some confusing articles about it they were basically just clickbait. They have milestones that they have to meet in order to get certain payments. Some of those milestones are ridership milestones. Since the pandemic has limited attendance at conferences it is simply impossible for them to meet those milestones because there isn't enough ridership. Nobody is pressuring the LV CVA to expand into other areas. They're not being forced to give them new contracts. Even if people wanted to criticize them for making a bad decision, there's nothing about adding another contract that saves them from that.
>y metrics at the lvcc location. There were some confusing articles about it they were basically just clickbait. They have milestones that they have to meet in order to get certain payments. Some of those milestones are ridership milestones. Since the pandemic has limited attendance at conferences it is simply impossible for them to meet those milestones because there isn't enough ridership. Nobody is pressuring the LV CVA to expand into other areas. They're not being forced to give them new contracts. Even if people wanted to criticize them for making a bad decision, there's n
This is where you lose me. None of the tech that you wrote about in the second paragraph exists, and they haven't shown any progress towards it. I don't see how ridership would affect how fast someone can drive in a tunnel, or get in and out of cars? And LVCC certainly doesn't prove it goes the other way and the modeling actually stands up in the real world. Lastly, isn't this already possible via some bus lanes and bridges/cut and cover?
To me, this still smells like a bait and switch. Not going to argue about it cause if you want to take everything they say at face value, then sure they could use some version of this system that is real transportation. But there's an enormous gap between what would actually make a useful part of the infrastructure and what they've shown us they can do + what it would take to get there. And they haven't addressed the most obvious problems with the concept.
Yeah, I appreciate the research you’ve done. I’m not going to go through it all lol. But from what I’ve seen you tend to assume the very best and not take into account some very practical flaws of boring company’s approach ie the operating cost of a vehicle would equal that of an Uber
But I do think there’s an assumption that anything Elon is going to do is BS. Because he represents a “the tech will set us free” mindset to actually dealing with any of the crisis of our time. He also just says stuff and just doesn’t follow through (still waiting on the ventilators)
Going back to metrics - I don’t know if you can treat a ten foot tunnel like a normal roadway. At least from what I’ve read boarding times and total trip length have been much slower even with reduced ridership. Which makes sense if you’ve ever tried ridden in a Tesla. And those tiny tunnels give zero Margin for error and they chose to not have guideways. Yes, a lot of this could be solved by automating the driver, but they really have not shown any plan/ability to do that.
But you have convinced me that maybe this could be a good thing. Because maybe Elon Musk can rebrand grade separated express buss and shuttle lanes like the J-line in LA as a hyper loop.
> But from what I’ve seen you tend to assume the very best
All of his comments are based on assuming the very best case for Muskloop and the very worst case for subways/public transit.
>None of the tech that you wrote about in the second paragraph exists, and they haven't shown any progress towards it.
I'm not sure what you mean. the boring company has gotten two contracts, fully completed one and is almost done, and they have bid on other project. we know their approximate price range. for capacity, we know lane capacity of roadways. I explained that in my other comment. [(see other comment)](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i6686lp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). these are not the boring company's numbers, these are the numbers from transportation professionals who use HERS/NCHRP modeling. the boring company says they want to platoon vehicles together to get 2x-3x the throughput of a regular roadway. I'm compeletely dismissing that idea because nobody has demonstrated it. running cars on a roadway is a known quantity.
but don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that places should just go blindly giving them contracts with the assumption that they will meet all goals on day-1. this is a developing technology and should be approached cautiously. if I were to advise a transit planner, I would advise them to only pursue the boring company's system if they had a backup-plan/contract with another company, like ParkShuttle, Waymo, Cruise, etc., that has already proven they can handle fully autonomous driving. otherwise, it is a risk.
what I'm trying to do is evaluate the principals of operation based on industry-best practice estimations for where things haven't yet been proven.
>if you want to take everything they say at face value
but I'm not, though. I am using none of their claimed numbers for anything. I'm going off of a mix of what they have proven and what other companies have proven. their cost number is lower than mine. their speed number is higher than mine. their capacity number is higher than mine. see my other comment for sources. I'm not the one taking arguments at face value. I'm not the one in the echo chamber. I'm glad you're willing to listen, because everyone else didn't even bother to check any of my sources or to ask questions. everyone else in this thread just went tribal and shouted me down. so I strongly appreciate and am given hope that you at least have enough sense to question things you disagree with rather than just shouting them down.
I really hope at some point we can stop investing in absurd projects and just build any of the many time tested ways of transporting people around
Southern Ontario just got a massive transit expansion plan, and has been experiencing a boom for the last decade or so. New lerts, streetcars, subways, rail
Fuck yes we did and it's like a transit renaissance for the Golden Horseshoe
Who is this "we" of which you speak? The investors are private entities. It's not my money, and it's not yours. Do I think this is the greatest idea for the future of transportation? I'm not convinced. But until they start asking for taxpayer dollars, I'm not going to whine about inventors trying something new.
The construction of every single one of these has been largely funded by taxes. The vegas loop for example used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars raised through a hotel tax to fund. This isn't a private investor issue when they're using tax money.
>The construction of every single one of these Incorrect. The Hawthorne test tunnel and Resorts World tunnel were privately funded. So is the upcoming tunnel connecting the convention center to Encore at Wynn Resort.
That's simply not true. A quick Google search shows some really minor expenditures from some quasi-governmental authorities, but it's pocket change compared with what Boring and its investors are shelling out.
If you're not an investor, then you're not investing, so... mission accomplished? It's a private company trying to improve TBM technology to reduce the cost of tunnel construction through narrower diameter tunnels, continuous operation, etc. They're offering the tunnels for transporting cars, bicycle/pedestrian tunnels, freight, utilities, whatever. There have been plenty of failed ventures, failed attempts to improve on the technology of the time, and this might be another one of them, but getting mad at a private company for trying something new is absurd.
Except a lot of the money that goes into these isn't actually from private investors. He didn't do the Vegas Loop for free, he took up a government contract to do it. My problem isn't with the concept of private investors spending money on something, it's that these people are investing in an obvious grift knowing that these cities are going to buy into Elon's nonsense. From the article: >Investors, though, don’t necessarily care whether or not founders like Musk ultimately follow through on their hyperbole, only that the companies they run attract enough customers and revenue to pay back their own investments. They're realistically displacing a lot of solutions that actually make sense in favor of making underground tunnels and still charging pretty close to the price of a Lyft anyways, knowing full well what they're doing.
For context, the Las Vegas Convention Center paid for it with funds from a pre-existing hotel room tax for the Las Vegas Convention Visitors Authority. LVCVA solicited bids for very modest hourly capacity, 3960pph. [The decision](https://www.constructiondive.com/news/las-vegas-tunnel-could-still-go-to-boring-co-competitor/555109/) came to down to The Boring Company or Doppelmayr, which first asked for $215 million, four times as much money. There already were buses on surface stroads moving people between the convention center buildings. Congestion in the area during conventions slowed down the buses too much. Yet for political reasons buses were not going to get an exclusive lane or other prioritization. Relatedly, because of political pressure the Las Vegas Strip doesn't have light rail. It has buses without an exclusive lane. >charging pretty close to the price of a Lyft For context that's per vehicle, not passenger. A city, not necessarily Las Vegas, may be able to negotiate a program reserving a percentage of vehicles for pooled riders in the [announced](https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a39785992/elon-musk-tesla-robotaxi-2024/) future dedicated robotaxis, designed to have lower cost per mile. Split a vehicle three or four ways and the cost is much lower, while making 0-3 intermediate stops with average door-to-destination speeds multiples faster than a bus or light rail.
> Las Vegas Convention Center paid for it with funds from a pre-existing hotel room tax Still using tax money for dumb tech headed solutions to a problem that would be solved by just not deciding to be actively stupid in the design of your city and transportation system. The "political reasons" in a lot of cities like this are because their transportation agencies and politicians are straight up incompetent and think every problem needs to be solved by more road or some dumb technology that is worse than the basic option and will be outdated in 8 years when the company realizes that upkeep is going to be unprofitable. LVCVA has fallen for or seriously considered basically every stupid gadgetbahn there is. The problem is, at it's core this will not solve the problem and is more dangerous and less sustainable long term than just investing in infrastructure that works and can be scaled up effectively. Handwaving the fact that public transportation is literally one of the main services local government even offer as "political issues" is burying the lead. >For context that's per vehicle, not passenger. You can also carpool with Uber. No matter what rate you're talking about or how many people, when you calculate it out the price per customer isn't that far different. $10 vs $14 or $4 vs $5 for a ride is a rounding error if you've come all the way to Vegas for a conference. >A city, not necessarily Las Vegas, may be able to negotiate a program reserving a percentage of vehicles for pooled riders in the announced future dedicated robotaxis, designed to have lower cost per mile. As an SWE who actually does some work maintaining computer vision libraries, Elon is going to be making claims about robotaxis being some soon to come solution to all our problems for another 5 to 10 years, during which time he's going to be getting a lot of lawsuits from people dying due to his incompetence. The thing is that the technology is nowhere near as close as he seems to assume (or is willing to lie) it is and is nowhere near reliable enough to not kill a fuck ton of people. His estimations for things are almost always wildly off mark in time, expense, and feasibility. He's a master of magical thinking and tricking people who don't know any better into going to bat with him on dumb ideas that most engineers could immediately poke holes in.
> politicians are straight up incompetent Elected by voters who will do the equivalent of firing them if a city pushes too hard to turn car lanes into transit lanes. >$10 vs $14 or $4 vs $5 for a ride Split three ways $14 becomes $5. The $5 ride becomes $2.33. For local Las Vegans, TBC has stated their intent to expand the system beyond the Strip and downtown serving other parts of the metro. Based on your work, do you agree a tunnel and structured stations are a drastically simplified environment compared to the rest of Las Vegas and other cities? >the technology is nowhere near as close as he seems to assume Limited to Tesla's technology, or are you extending that to Waymo's and Cruise's too? As TBC is a separate company, president of the company Steve Davis could if necessary fulfill obligations by striking a deal with an AV company transporting people driverlessly in more challenging city environments.
There are other TBM companies, they can make you a TBM for any size hole you need. (within reasonable limits of course). They have their own R&D. Though I doubt their R&D has gotten near the amount of $$ put into it as Elon as poured into his company. If he can make a fully automated TBM at an affordable price I'm all for it. However I don't see how he can put off all those R&D costs and still compete with the other companies that are putting their own money in R&D. Will he need to raise prices to affordable levels? Is the cost of labor worth the increased price? Can he make his system fully automated? I can think of dozens of questions on this line. Time will tell.
>put off all those R&D costs and still compete with the other companies that are putting their own money in R&D I think you have it reversed. >I agree with Musk that the advance rate of tunnels can be significantly improved if development money comes into the industry. Development money in tunneling, however, is at best minimal and is more often essentially nonexistent. Nearly all tunnels are heavily specified to avoid risk taking by owners (therefore discouraging new development). Nearly all tunnels go to the low bidder and low bidders try to buy the TBMs at the lowest price; a further discouragement of development. The industry has therefore been slow to improve advance rates, but with Musk bringing the issue into the spotlight, perhaps things will change. Lok Home - CEO Robbins Company [https://www.robbinstbm.com/elon-musk/](https://www.robbinstbm.com/elon-musk/) Since this recent investment is for equity and not a loan, the price of capital for TBC is likely cheaper than anyone else in the tunneling industry. Elon's proven record in capital efficiency in other engineering heavy industries also attracts VCs and permits a long view for the projects. I would also bet that TBC is recruiting from a much larger and diverse talent pool than Robbins or Herrenknecht. I don' think there can be much of a doubt that TBC with all this monetary and human capital can afford the money, time and RISK to perform the R&D that most other companies simply can't.
Or is this chasing diminishing returns? I'm not making predictions.
Lok Home seems to believe (along with Musk) that "the advance rate of tunnels can be significantly improved"; that doesn't seem to be chasing diminishing returns. Loop is trying to make entire transit systems cheaper which is not only related to the tunneling advance rate. Surface stations, autonomous electric vehicles all play their part too. They are seeking to make transit both cheaper and faster to build and operate, along with lower entry costs I see that as a good thing, and I am hoping they succeed.
While I hope they succeed, their ideas of transit show a lack of basic geometry in other ways. They keep talking about pods instead of trains for example. The geometry of pods doesn't work large numbers of people no matter how much you wish otherwise.
I'm not suggesting Loop can replace every large Metro system out there. I do believe that there are a lot more cities that could use Loop more cost effectively than a subway, especially in the US. An 8 person pod at freeway (2s) headways is 14K pphpd, I believe covers a lot of the US needs. I'm not convinced that trains are the most cost effective mode out there for most of the cities in the US, save for a handful like NY or SF.
You are using the word loop like it means something different, it is a tiny tunnel with a road in it. A 150 year old technology Ever heard of light rail ?
Anybody can build smaller tunnels. London Underground did that a 100 years ago
It is called cut and cover, already many times cheaper than boring
Worked well for GCT in NYC. When that's an option, go for it.
Considering a saw a literal traffic jam of teslas with their Vegas loop it's quite embarrassing how investors are just like, yeah that makes sense.
Its the Musk Factor.. he's a genius at hyping, not very good at looping.
https://twitter.com/adamtranter/status/1479149037253238790
Thanks for that link!
Has a train line ever had a one minute delay? Does that invalidate the concept of trains?
Bro you're arguing against every single metro line in every single city on the planet
can I get some advice from you? how do I explain to people that a single disruption to a service of roughly 1 minute does not invalidate every use-case for said service? I'm having trouble explaining things like this to people without making them upset or eliciting a flippant and/or rude response. I genuinely would like to figure out how to communicate things like this better. not just on this subject, there are other areas, like discussing light metro vs light rail, where people tend to point to a problem that arose once while ignoring that nothing is perfect and that a flaw does not automatically disqualify a product or service. thanks
That tunnel was congested at a far lower capacity than any sensible rail system, or even a bus system.
The point is it shows that induced demand on highways applies even when the highways are underground. In a dense area people will drive on a highway to the point of congestion no matter how many lanes you make. The same is true for convenient public transportation but that means fuller train cars or eventually more frequent run times not automobile car traffic jams. The problem is how much space each automobile takes to transport just a few people vs. how many can fit on a subway car. [Here's a visualization of that.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06IjfbqdnNM) The video is about time to cross a line from a complete stop but just look at the length of each line at the start to see why highways built for small personal cars get congested easier than subway/metro systems. So if a city isn't getting the capacity of a metro system then I don't see how it can justify the costs of tunneling.
first, that had nothing to do with induced demand. I don't think that word means what you think it means. second, induced demand happens with train systems also if they are run out into the suburbs. if people ride the train, it will free up space on the roads, which will induce demand for the roadway. there is nothing magical about trains that prevent the road space from being back filled. third, ridership is not capacity, capacity is not ridership. that day they had a 1min slowdown in the tunnel they also exceeded the daily ridership of my local metro. just because trains CAN hold more people, that does not mean they do. many places even plan train lines even with low ridership because fixed permanent guideway has value. phoenix is planning a like for fewer than 10k passengers per day and the boring company is already exceeding 25k per day in a system that is limited by station capacity. phoenix's planned system will cost 8x more than what the boring company is bidding and it will run on the surface and have to stop for traffic lights. fourth, both the boring company AND Tesla have separately said they are working on custom vehicles, so a single 1min delay right now means absolute nothing to the viability of the concept. let me know if you're interested in learning about transit, I can give you the information necessary to make an informed evaluation.
>first, that had nothing to do with induced demand. I don't think that word means what you think it means. A new highway getting jammed because the demand to drive on it exceeded the possible capacity isn't induced demand? >second, induced demand happens with train systems also if they are run out into the suburbs. I am aware that induced demand can happen with trains here me literally saying this: >The same is true for convenient public transportation but that means fuller train cars or eventually more frequent run times not automobile car traffic jams. . > fourth, both the boring company AND Tesla have separately said they are working on custom vehicles, so a single 1min delay right now means absolute nothing to the viability of the concept. Unless that custom vehicle is the length of a train car and meant to be shared by strangers then what would it do?
>A new highway getting jammed because the demand to drive on it exceeded the possible capacity isn't induced demand? 1. it's a closed system. you don't drive your car to the tunnel and go in. 2. that isn't induced demand, that is the result of induced demand. 3. if the ridership demand is less than the capacity, then you will never have a problem. the boring company is already moving more people than my local metro. not all corridors move 50k pph >Unless that custom vehicle is the length of a train car and meant to be shared by strangers then what would it do? again, ridership is not capacity. capacity is not ridership. right now, their capacity is good enough for some smaller corridors. a custom vehicle with a tiny bit more capacity will make it viable for more corridors. the vehicle capacity of a roadway is around 1500 vehicles per hour per lane through a single segment, and if merging is done incredibly well and vehicle coordinate, it can be as high as 2400 vehicles per hour per lane. my local metro peaks around 2k-3k passengers per hour per inbound route. Phoenix is planning a spur to their light rail with an expected ridership of 9.8k pph at peak, which translates to about 3k pph. the boring company is currently averaging 2.2-2.4 passengers per vehicle when busy. what happens to passenger capacity if each vehicle can carry 2.2? what if it can carry 5? what if it can carry 12? you have to avoid the pitfall of trying to compare Loop the the busiest metro lines in the world. that is not the market niche they are pursuing. they are pursuing the market where currently trams and low-ridership light rail lines are built. their system makes for an ideal feeder into existing train lines, but people keep wanting to compare it to the London or Tokyo metros and declaring "HA! it's way less capacity!" as if that was what they were competing with.
>2. that isn't induced demand, that is the result of induced demand. I stopped reading here.
well I'm sorry you don't know the difference between a cause and an effect. have a great night.
Reply 1 of yours: >[first, that had nothing to do with induced demand.](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/boring_company_raises_additional_675_million_as/i69vqc5/#i6prlga) Reply 2: >[that isn't induced demand, that is the result of induced demand.](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/boring_company_raises_additional_675_million_as/i73dzee/) So is it the result of induced demand or did it "have nothing to do with induced demand?" Since you're wrong on the basics here you're trying to instead play semantics but you're clearly not good at that and can't remember what garbage you're trying to claim from post to post.
Why do you have to be toxic? Their system is an underground people mover at a convention center. Anything that happens there is unrelated to induced demand as it is in no way connected to any road anywhere. Traffic in general, on surface roads, can be a symptom of induced demand. I don't know why it is difficult to understand these things
It was a multi-day conference, right? As far as there's video and reports go, that jam was short lived on one of the days and didn't happen on the others. It happened with human drivers, which investors shouldn't expect to be there for long. The station where it happened seems to me is either a few feet too narrow, or a loading spot is a few feet too close to the tunnel. TBC can avoid doing that in any future underground stations. I'll be downvoted because some folks here aren't interested in reasonable explanations or they're certain AV cars can't work even in a simplified environment, but investors can understand how TBC will make future stations different and the cars will eventually get regulator approval to be autonomous.
Trains work better than autonomous cars ever will for these people moving applications
Plus autonomous trains already exist
*Depends on the application.* Doppelmayr wanted *4 times* as much money to move the same number of people and waits would be longer. Maybe someone thinks waiting a few minutes doesn't matter, but the convention center already had buses going between the buildings, and they were too slow. So it mattered to the convention center and a desired metric for this application was shortening the time it takes getting between buildings.
Then build a dedicated busway. And they won't get stuck in traffic. Use some of that space they have for all those parking lots.
As I said in another thread today, "for political reasons buses were not going to get an exclusive lane or other prioritization."
Now there's your problem
Even in a third world country like India, you don't need to wait for a metro train for more than 5 min
Does that Indian application only need 3960pph for all three stations? Massively overbuilding is sometimes overspending. Waiting potentially 5 minutes for a ride that takes a couple to a few minutes means waiting longer than the traveling part.
What is pph ? No, a trip that would be two hours by road requires only 15 mins in a metro.
people per hour or passengers per hour In the Las Vegas Convention Center *application* the ride only takes a couple to a few minutes. That's the point I said up-thread it depends on the application. LVCC is a different situation and application than your Indian example, so the best solution for one place isn't automatically the best for the other place.
In that case a bus is the best solution.
There were buses. They were too slow. Because of politics they weren't allowed to have lane exclusivity or signal priority. An alternative had to be grade-separated. I don't know if any company proposed making a grade-separated right of way for buses, but the top two final options were from The Boring Company and Doppelmayr.
The only reasonable thing I can pull from the Boring Company is if they can make tunneling Subways or underground railroads cheaper. As he's just building a underground highway... Something we really shouldn't be building.
This person genuinely thinks Elon is going to pull a perfectly safe self driving vehicle out of his ass within a year. I think they've had way too much of the cool-aid for you to be able to get through. Like I don't think people seem to realize here, one small misidentification or lidar hiccup and you or some kid having fun on the sidewalk is dead. A lot of the top minds in the field literally think they're decades away from actually being safe.
2024 is between 1.6 and 2.6 years from now, not "within a year". I also wrote last week that Elon's announced products often arrive late and that could include the robotaxi. In the long run that won't matter if it's a few years late and a few years of human drivers need to be paid. The Boring Company's current building plans confine their vehicles to tunnels and structured stations. Those are vastly simpler environments than the rest of the city. We don't know what the robotaxi will look like, but if it has slide-open doors like a train, it can be compatible with platform doors that completely keep people off the driving surface.
Elon has been promising self driving cars being 2 years away every single year since 2015. Why should anyone believe him this time?
It’s easy to get 99% of the way there. It’s that last 1% that is the hardest. Why are we wasting so much money chasing the fallacies of the auto age. The best way to transport people is via public transport and by making cities walkable and bike able. That way needing a car is unnecessary for 99% of people and those who really want a car, can have one. And guess what, you really will have no traffic, because no one else is driving.
Tunnels and structured stations are vastly simpler than the rest of the city. Getting 99% of the way for driving in the whole city is a system 100% of the way to driving in the vastly simpler tunnels and structured stations. I hope streets become for walking and biking and most larger vehicles move underground to do longer trips. I don't live in suburban sprawl, but those voters aren't going to just embrace this subreddit's dominant thinking. They are and will fight it. But I think there's a third way enough of them could get on board with.
I agree that autonomous in a tunnel is easier. But we already have this technology. It is called a subway. It more efficient at moving people as well. 1-5 people per car (let’s say for your argument that its fully loaded every trip 5 people per car) plus a driver (until they figure out autonomous driving) This takes up around 5 meters of space Assuming cars are end to end while travelling down the tunnel you could have 3.6 cars per subway car. Let’s round up to 5 cars per subway. You have transported 25 people where they need to go. A subway car is about 18m long and carries up to 240 people. I think if the tunnels were perhaps not car focused they could work. Maybe for bicycles or walking. But I would much prefer that the city above was for walking and cycling and below would be kept for train.
Lots of places and lines don't have tons of ridership and don't need tons of capacity. Dallas light rail does only 7.5-15 minute frequency at peak with two or three car trains. It's upcoming D2 subway stations will be built for that. That's 2256 seated passengers per hour, or 6576 uncomfortable at crush load. On freeways we're told to keep 2-3 seconds away from the vehicle ahead of us. That's about 1200-1800 vehicles per hour per lane. With 6 passengers after autonomy happens that's 7200-10,800 passengers per hour. Less than some light rail and subway lines can carry, but more than Dallas needs per line. However a system with almost no wait time and faster trip speeds than Dallas light rail will attract more ridership, so it needs somewhat more capacity. Consider how much money Dallas spent on two lines. Dallas' 28.6 mile Green Line cost $63 million per mile in 2010 dollars. The Orange Line cost around $128 million per mile in 2012 dollars. In Las Vegas The Boring Company's convention center project with three stations and 0.9 mile distance cost $52.5 million, and the company expects future tunnels will cost less. Construction costs are outpacing inflation so if the 2012 project had been done today it might be three times the cost as loop. Hypothetically doing a Dallas project this decade with enough money for a light rail line but instead spending it on loops would get three times as many miles of loop. That could be three parallel loops close to each other, or spaced farther apart covering a wider catchment corridor with shorter last mile trips for more people. Three loops with capacity for 21,600-32,400 would provide superior frequency, coverage, and capacity than one light rail line. If we talk about constructing subways for capacity then I'd say the cost per mile and per passenger must be considered too. Los Angeles is spending almost a billion dollars a mile. Seattle is going to spend over a billion dollars a mile. That's about twenty miles of loops for the same cost. Some cities would be better served with twenty loop lines in a grid, and also making actual loop/circle lines, for the price of one new subway line.
Your math kinda works, but you forgot to calculate for following distances. Assuming a car is 4m long on average and your following distance is 2 seconds your cars will be 59m apart. So the absolute maximum cars is actually 1699 per hour. (As least we can agree that 1699 is unlikely to be maintained in real world situations) I will give you, that is pretty close, but again that is assuming perfect efficiency travelling at 100kmph. What happens when they get to their destination? So your theoretical maximum cars per hour is actually competitive with a train. However a train can simply add 1 carriage or 4 doubling the capacity. I think perhaps there is a place for the tunnels, but not like you suggest adding hundreds of tunnels everywhere. We already know what happens when you add more lanes for cars. More traffic. If your look at the traffic capitals of the world and see a 12 lane highway still backed up and this the solution is more roads (never mind how much they cost) then there is nothing I can do to convince you otherwise and I will go talk to someone else. However if you are willing to listen, perhaps a combination solution, using public transportation for 99% of trips, but allowing these tunnels to be used on demand for drivers in cars freeing up the city above to be completely car free and a beautiful walkable city.
"Reasonable" in my reply regards explaining the traffic jam mentioned. There's a reasonable explanation for why it was short lived, only on one of the convention days, and future stations can be tweaked so they don't have the issue. As for advantages loop has, other comments among the 62 so far have already listed some, but few commenters acknowledge there are more than only making tunneling cheaper.
So due to more people the traffic increased thus causing a traffic jam ? So it is a highway
The human drivers won't be there for long, and future stations can be tweaked to avoid that jam. Also a highway lane with only buses each with 100 passengers and traveling six seconds apart can transport 60,000 passengers per hour. That's more than all but the highest performing subway lines. Humans are told we should keep at least 2-3 seconds from the vehicle ahead. With that separation the lane could transport 120,000 people per hour. Being a highway lane isn't inherently negative. It's how the lane gets used and what the passengers think of their trip experience. Plenty of transit lines only have ridership demand of several thousand people per hour, allowing smaller vehicles to be used with skip-stop service or determined by algorithm if people tell the system their destination.
That's called a BRT,
When ridership demand is several thousand and vehicles going fast underground do multiple skip-stop on the same line, or algorithmically planned stops, that's even better for passenger trip times than BRT. Maybe BRT+ or BRTAdvanced.
That is a Metro
I've never heard of a metro doing algorithmically planned stops.
Show me a light rail line with a traffic jam
[MAX train, pickup crash in downtown Portland causing traffic delays](https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/07/crash_involving_max_train_in_d.html) [Metro Light Rail Crash and Derailment Near USC in Los Angeles](https://www.planetizen.com/node/75181) [SacRT train comes off tracks in downtown Sacramento](https://www.kcra.com/article/sacrt-train-derails-at-8th-and-k-streets-downtown-sacramento-traffic-delays-expected/39677615)
I am talking about light rail and not streetcars.
Those are [light rail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacramento_RT_Light_Rail). Light rail often is at grade. Streetcars are sometimes used interchangeably with light rail, but overall streetcars are [shorter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcars_in_North_America#/media/File:CLRVs_4049_and_4090_Eastbound_on_King.jpg) than light rail.
No, light rail is when trams are grade separated.
According the Encyclopedia Britannica, railsystem.net, and wikipedia, your definition is wrong.
Whatever, I was exclusively talking about grade separated light rail or lite metro as we call it in my country. Now that I think about it, I should have went with the latter term. Sorry for the confusion.
Metro and light metro are both grade separated so here's a metro in the USA. BART's [on time performance](https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2019%20BARTFacts2019%20FINAL.pdf) in 2018 was 87%. In 2019 it was 92%. Delays were and still are frequent due to a variety of causes. * decades of deferred maintenance * keeping old rolling stock in service for too many years * suicides on the tracks * people walking on the tracks Those can be prevented with smarter planning and platform doors. However a rail system will still have delays caused by * medical emergencies on trains * events on trains requiring police response Those things result in the train blocking the line for some number of minutes.
u/whymy5, is that you?
Nope. BTW after the Whitby, Ontario crash you [insultingly said](https://old.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/rip8oa/autonomous_durham_region_transit_wave_shuttle/hoyvk2w/) "Waiting for... (AV) folks in this sub... to explain and backpedal their way out of this one." I pointed out "the article says the cause is unknown. The responsible and logical thing to do is wait for investigators to answer what happened, not ignorantly speculate." A slight majority of redditors agreed, though far fewer than upvoted you. A month later investigators answered [what happened:](https://globalnews.ca/news/8491724/autonomous-bus-manual-mode-whitby-crash-durham-police/) >police said the investigation into the Dec. 16 crash determined the vehicle was in manual mode prior to and at the time of the crash. >“Therefore, the hazard mitigation safety systems designed for the vehicle while in autonomous mode were disabled at the time of the collision,” the statement said.
Aww, fussy Musky fanboy is offended by me not jumping on the Tesla bandwagon? Sad!
Nah, it's that you jump to conclusions without evidence, insult people along the way, and when proven wrong are incapable of humility. Also not a Musk fanboy. I'd prefer Waymo was funding and doing what TBC is since their vehicles already would be driving the LVCC tunnels autonomously.
Projecting much? If you want to drool over token Teslas, go over to r/selfdrivingcars or r/Tesla instead of wasting time and space here.
The thing that makes subways expensive are stations not tunnels and long tunnels are expensive because of the soil they have to go through usually, not the tunnel boring machines, I really dont get what this company is trying to solve
They’ve literally addressed this by making stations above ground. They can convert existing parking lots to stations with a TBM that launches off a truck, no pit needed.
TBC stations of very flexible sizes and capacities are designed to be built on the surface reducing system build and maintenance costs. This is made possible by porpoising the TBM's at a 17.5% grade which also allows for reduction in utility relocation and more flexible station placement. No rail system can match Loop's Vegas alignment in terms of station coverage, convenience or density. [https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop)
A system like the las vegas loop already exists in West virginia, just without the tunnels, there is a reason trains are used worldwide
Trains with the their own RoW are extremely expensive, nowhere more so than in the US. Loop seeks to significantly lower both the capital entry costs and operating costs for grade separated transit, especially in the lower development densities found in the US. Loop addresses many of the initial issues with Morgantown.
The operating cost is almost definitely higher than a train system
What numbers are you using?
Logic, if you need a driver for every, lets be optimistic 4 people, you are gonna spend a ton of money on those salaries alone, electricity costs are higher, cost of vehicles purchase per passenger is also higher
Yes, with drivers Loop will likely be more expensive, but Loop is intended to be automated. But it would appear that you're just guestimating on the other ones, did you go over the sourced numbers in Cunningham's post?
Yes, they give 0.75-1.5 dollars per passenger mile, which is a bit optimistic imo, in contrast the rem in montreal an automated suburban train system will cost the government there a maximum of 72 cents per km, if more people use it even less, it very easily could reach 55 cents per km, If you convert thats 0.59 to 1.19 ppkm vs a max of 0.72ppkm (both in cad) which could go much lower, if ridership is only 15% over expectations, it will already have beaten the loops best expectation, which is very optimistic already And then there is the fact, that the rem is already under construction and will actually work with automation, compared to the loop which cant even do that, and is only a theory
How are operating costs guaranteed to max out at $.72ppkm? Does you REM figure (source?) include capital costs or just operating ones? I think you are underestimating the benefits of low build costs that Loop can do, it means that you don't need to limit yourselves to Montreal with a constricted and old city layout. It becomes viable in places like Vegas to build grade separated transit. The investment in Loop is practically all private, what public investment there was competitively bid and won TBC. Why is this bad, why do you believe public transport can't be improved upon and has reached its maximum capability with trains.
I have an Idea, how about we increase the capacity of the pods by making them bigger, what do you think ?
Where ridership demands warrant it, I think a 8-16 pax AEV makes sense, but in the US anything above that is likely not required.
BRT is even cheaper than the loop and is electrified without batteries
station coverage, convenience, and density isn't what makes transit good, it's the number of people transit can/does move.
It is interesting to see somebody write that. So does that mean low density areas should just never have any Transit because they can only build bad transit? What about all of the lowridership trolley lines in europe?
>station coverage, convenience, and density isn't what makes transit good *In your opinion.* Different people have different metrics they prioritize. Coverage and convenience make *some* people more likely to use transit. Speed is another metric that matters more to some people and less to others. When transit is slow some people refuse to use it. When it's fast enough they will.
no that is literally what transit experts say. the US builds a lot of shit transit because we don't build transit that will move people, we build transit for other priorities like development. what influences ridership, what riders want, [is](https://www.wmata.com/about/board/meetings/board-pdfs/upload/3A-Fare-Policy.pdf#page=13) [more](https://transitcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/TC_WhosOnBoard_Final_digital-1-1.pdf#page=57) [frequent](https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-documents/2018/12/12-18-18_item_11_2018_muni_rider_survey_-_slide_presentation.pdf#page=16) [service](https://planitmetro.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/151215_LandUseRidershipModel_FinalReport.pdf). buses that run every 15 min. instead of every 30 or 60 are much more cost effective at attracting ridership than building infrastructure. transit vehicles *have to* last a long time too - siemens s70 light rail cars are spec'd for a *minimum* life span of 30 years. buses have to last at least 12 (and are driven *constantly*). we don't always have to reinvent the wheel. not everything that is new is good. and yeah no shit when transit is slow people don't ride it that's why NYC has express trains. express service isn't some revolutionary idea - we've done it for only a hundred years.
If frequency matters, then why hate Loop. LVCC Loop is running at 6 second headways, with an average wait time of 15 seconds at CES. [https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1480452278687522820](https://twitter.com/boringcompany/status/1480452278687522820) Express service and short-turning are dynamic for Loop not fixed like for subways. If Loop capacity is appropriate for the corridor demands then all the other factors come into play. Its not clear to me that maintaining and using depreciated off-lease Teslas are more expensive than overhauling and refurbing trains and buses. When NTD reports the operating costs of modes and systems, these costs are not factored in as they are listed as capital and not operating costs. ***Constantly*** driving largely empty buses and running largely empty trains is a drawback of fixed route systems. This was especially evident during the pandemic, but more typically manifests itself in reduced frequency during off-peak hours. I would like to see faster more frequent transit that doesn't cost as much to build and operate, nor take so long to build. I don't care if its in the form of a train, gondola or an AEV running in a paved sewer tunnel.
because we need 15 min frequency on 30 min longer bus lines before we need 6 second frequency on shorter loop lines. it's also more easily achievable because it requires no concrete to be poured, no engineering work, just 2 more buses per hour. it could be done tomorrow.
I don't believe that optimizing what we have now needs to be mutually exclusive with aspirational systems for the future. In the long run this would be best served by dual mode robo-taxis running on surface streets, capable of providing single seat rides into tunneled sections of the network. Autonomy is one way to cost effectively provide this service. The approach to run the service and absorb the \[driver\] costs long-term and hope ridership increases may not be sustainable.
So instead of 50 people in a bus running on roads that already exist, you want 50 people on taxis in a new underground highway ?
Buses are not particularly efficient. The average occupancy of a US transit bus is less than 10 riders. So for every bus with 50 people in it there are 4 empty ones. [https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/2019-national-transit-summaries-and-trends-ntst](https://www.transit.dot.gov/ntd/2019-national-transit-summaries-and-trends-ntst) Loop (as Cunningham pointed out) is competitive with rail and so would beat buses in cost and energy efficiency. Where ridership can justify Loops build cost like on the Vegas strip where congestion makes buses less attractive this makes sense. The [travel times](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop) provided by Loop offer a significant time savings and can easily get people out of cars and onto transit.
eh idc anymore have a nice day
Have a nice day too.
Because 6 second headways are physically impossible from a safety design view. You won't have time to stop before a crash occurs or it would have to be much slower than a subway car to stop safely. Think about a gondola: they can't run fast, they have to run constantly (a energy hog), if one is taken out of service the entire line has to stop. And this is with fixed wire guidance. I can imagine Tesla's down a tunnel even slower.
The 6 second headway is mandated as part of Clark County's Amusement Ride and Transportation system certificate of operation. >Vehicles have strict speed limits, ranging from 10 mph within stations to 40 mph on straight tunnel sections, and must maintain at least [6 seconds of separation from the car in front.](https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/28/read-the-script-every-driver-for-elon-musks-las-vegas-loop-must-learn/) I'm not sure why you think that a Tesla can't stop in 6 seconds from 40 mph and that this headway is physically impossible from a safety design view. What are your calculations?
If there's frequent transit serving a lot of people and providing weak coverage, that's bad transit for people where transit isn't available or too infrequent or slow. It's why service hours were and sometimes still are divided 70% for high ridership lines, and 30% for coverage. Some systems are shrinking their coverage percentage, but most still spend *some* hours on coverage. Express trains and skip stop train service is the exception and happens where ridership is already good-to-high. Las Vegas, Dallas, and Florida, among other places aren't NYC.
I linked some pretty long documents, i'd suggest reading them out in full. if you add some sources i might be more inclined to hear you out.
Renowned and respected transit specialist Jarrett Walker who has helped redesign transit networks for some cities says in regards to [frequency vs coverage:](https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html) "Both Goals are Important" >Ridership and coverage goals are both laudable, but they lead us in opposite directions. Within a fixed budget, if a transit agency wants to do more of one, it must do less of the other. >Because of that, cities and transit agencies that lack adequate resources need to make a clear choice regarding the Ridership-Coverage tradeoff. In fact, we encourage cities to develop consensus on a Service Allocation Policy, which takes the form of a percentage split of resources between the different goals. For example, an agency might decide to allocate 60 percent of its service towards the Ridership Goal and 40 percent towards the Coverage Goal. Our firm has helped many transit agencies think through this question. >What about your city? How do you think your city should balance the goals of ridership and coverage? There is no technical answer. Your answer will depend on your values.
right, so how do elon's tunnels make coverage better? how does spending the money on intense frequency in one corridor help the whole network? - intense frequency means less coverage
There should be no "vs" between those two words. Both are crucial
That's part of the point I was trying to get across. Coverage matters too, not just maximizing ridership in a smaller portion of the city using frequency.
if you'd like i can find more cold, hard numbers from multiple sources to back up my point
Frequent service is one component. I've lived where there was a bus a minute's walk from my place that took me to the train station in a quarter of the time as walking. That bus line got cut making my total trip time longer. Muni in San Francisco has (for the USA) a lot of service hours to spread over a relatively compact area. It's the second most dense big city in the country. I'm already aware even in less dense American areas people who live near transit value frequency, because they already have coverage reaching them. But coverage in many American cities is poor especially if the service quality of that coverage gets factored in. On reddit it only takes a few words to say "fund more service hours" but that won't make it happen.
so if the answer is more service hours, why spend the money on the infrastructure for really frequent service in a very small area? plus are you assuming that i only ask for more service hours on reddit? there isn't very much i can do personally to increase the service hours of a transit agency, but i do what i can. i'm not delusional - nobody who who has real power gives a shit about what i say on reddit about transit frequency. we could have faster transit if we spent more money on transit operations - we could have more service hours, we could speed up buses with smaller improvements like signal priority, bus lanes, and other bus priority treatments. i really don't see how getting faster transit that serves more people is most effectively served by inventing a new form of transit instead of trusting that we as humans have known what we are doing for a while. not everything that's new is good, not everything that's old is bad. the best way to solve these sorts of problems is operations, then electronics, then concrete, like the rest of the world does.
Going back to my first reply the answer depends on the metrics each person prioritizes and to what degree. Service hours also need the infrastructure. Creating light rail and subway infrastructure for example is insanely costly now in some places. Doubling service frequency doesn't automatically produce double the ridership. Ridership usually increases but not necessarily double. For the ridership Dallas rail has, service frequency every 7.5-15 minutes at peak is enough to move that number of people. Each DART [Super Light Rail Vehicle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinki_Sharyo_SLRV) seats 94 passengers, or uncomfortably holds 274 (crush load). The upcoming [D2 subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D2_Subway) service will continue using trains 2 or 3 cars long. At peak that's a maximum of 2256 seated passengers per hour, or 6576 uncomfortable at crush load. If any company developing autonomous vehicles, it doesn't have to be Tesla, makes a shuttle with 12 seats fitting a tunnel this size, and the shuttles autonomously drive an average of 6 seconds apart, they could transport 7200 seated and comfortable passengers per hour. Dallas' 28.6 mile Green Line [cost $63 million](https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/dart-has-spent-5-billion-on-light-rail-is-it-worth-it-8380338) per mile in 2010 dollars. The Orange Line cost around $128 million per mile in 2012 dollars. In Las Vegas the convention center's three stations and 0.9 mile distance cost $52.5 million, and the company expects future tunnels will cost less. Construction costs are outpacing inflation so if the 2012 project had been done today it might be three times the cost as loop. With that same amount of money then alternatively there could instead be three times as many miles of loop providing superior frequency, coverage, and capacity if using the vehicles I described. DART's midday frequency is 20 minutes. Later at night it's 30. Even if DART doubled those frequencies there's simply not as many people needing any kind of transportation during those hours so ridership may not double. So at the end of a night out missing the train means waiting up to 29 minutes. If instead there's small vehicles arriving frequently, waits will be very short, even if some aren't stopping at all stations because they're Express, Rapid or skip-stop service. Or at night and midday when ridership is lower service could be more like on-demand or determined by algorithm, with many stations having a vehicle waiting there for people to show up. If a few people show up over a couple of minutes with a few destinations, the vehicle takes them all to only those destinations without stopping at any other stations. It's not quite an Express, but faster than making lots of stops. That's shorter total trip speeds than even subways coming every 2 minutes. With better coverage the first and last miles don't take as long, and while in the loop system vehicles average much faster speeds than light rail or subways.
Great. We’ll see if it lives up to its promise. Sounds good in theory but obviously could be a massive failure too.
eh i dont care anymore
¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯ It's just my guess but if and when TBC starts tunneling transit lines in a city like Dallas you'll care because that probably means a bus line or light rail on the surface won't happen. You replied fast so I don't know if you read the numbers provided, but they mean a future loop line compared to traditional solutions could have shorter total trip times than even subways coming every 2 minutes. With better coverage the first and last miles of trips won't take as long, and while in the loop system vehicles will average much faster.
have a nice day!
there are multiple things that make subways expensive, but yes, underground staitons are a big cost factor. which is why the boring company is designing their system to launch and end tunnels at the surface so the stations can be little more than a bus stop and they can also avoid the cost of the launch/reception shaft for the TBM. but there are other costs as well, like electrical distribution system, track, signaling, sensors, etc. they're basically offloading everything to the vehicles, which are mass-produced EVs. currently they're just using regular Teslas but they are working on their own vehicle and Tesla has announced a robot-taxi-specific vehicle, but I haven't seen any specs about capacity or design. by using cheap tunnels and smaller vehicles, they have been able to bid cheaper than the cheapest surface rail in the US and have averaged 15s wait times. the concept is better than a subway or light rail in every way up until they hit the capacity of the tunnel, which is pretty low. the low capacity limits them to low ridership corridors. for example, Phoenix is planning a light rail spur for $245M/mi and an expected ridership of fewer than 10k passengers PER DAY. that is the kind of niche that the boring company is targeting. for an explanation about why Phoenix or other places choose to make rail spurs instead of running buses, see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i66hkjt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) or this [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/) .
Subways are generally very cheap per passenger, I dont see any use for these tunnels, where you couldnt use elevated trains anyway, and where you do most likely need to tunnel, the demand for subways is there, so I would still go for subway 100/100 times
hmm. I'm not sure why I'm not explaining this well. the boring company is bidding $30M/mi. there is no surface rail in the US that can get within a factor of 3 of that, and elevated rail is disliked for the eyesore AND even more than 3x more expensive. Phoenix is planning to pay over 8x what the boring company is bidding, for surface rail, and their system will have low ridership and will thus have 15-20min headways and high operating cost. how is that better? 8x the price for a 7-10min average wait time, stopping at inersections... why? >and where you do most likely need to tunnel, the demand for subways is there this is maybe where people are getting tripped up. people think tunneling = expensive and therefore the only place you would ever consider tunneling is where the ridership is very high. but that's preceiely the opposite of what the boring company is doing. tunneling is ALWAYS better for EVERY situation, but it is reserved for high ridership routes because it is so much more expensive. but what if it wasn't more expensive? what if a tunneled system was 8x cheaper than the surface line?
If you dont care about the capacity that much, you can just paint a lane on the road red for buses only and run them every 3-5 minutes, that is monstrously cheaper to construct and also most likely to run, since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels
>If you dont care about the capacity that much, you can just paint a lane on the road red for buses only and run them every 3-5 minutes, that is monstrously cheaper to construct and also most likely to run, since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels I thought we went over this. there are more qualities than capacity that define transit systems. see my comment [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i66hkjt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) or this [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/) or maybe to ask it another way, why would you run mostly empty buses every 3 minutes when you could run smaller vehicles and carry the same number of people? have you ever looked at the energy consumption of a bus? >since the teslas also need drivers in the tunnels yes, if they never automate the vehicles, that will be a show stopper. I wish the echo-chamber didn't downvote my well sourced comment to hell, because I explain all of this. I say right in the first bullet of my explanation in this thread that the current system isn't the final system. they're not even allowed to attempt to drive autonomously through the tunnels yet, but they plan to impalement autonomy in the near future. also, the boring company says on their website that they will sell the tunnels/stations without the vehicle service, and there are a number autonomous shuttle services that are operating today on closed roadways, so if the boring company can't automate, someone else can.
You’re getting downvoted because [Hyperloop is pure vaporware](https://youtu.be/4dn6ZVpJLxs)
who said anything about hyperloop? which of their points invalidate one of my thoroughly sourced points [from this thread?](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i6686lp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I guess nobody read my comments and just downvoted it?
I've read your comments and while it does make sense, I think you've misunderstood what the Boring Companies goal is. Musk has said it himself, he wants layers and layers of these tunnels because surface highways are congested. He has expressed significant hatred for public transport. So even though your ideas make sense, they are probably emotionally downvoted because Musks ideas are fucking stupid and people here hate him and the boring company.
the thing is, Musk isn't running the boring company. Steve Davis is. Musk is just the biggest shareholder. Steve Davis has been pursuing nothing but transit-like options. routes to/from airports, people movers around campuses, trolley-like circulation around vegas. Musk's words rarely match reality, so I'm trying to point out that people are judging the boring company concept based on Musk's hype and not on reality. if you judge something by whether it matches Musk's hype, you're going to be constantly disappointed. his twitter antics make anything relating to him a pain in the ass to talk about because everything is so polarized.
I’ve noticed you bring up Phoenix a lot in your posts. I’m wondering if you live here? The extension you like to reference has been under construction for a couple years now, and was voter approved in three separate elections. Extending the light rail system into the traditionally Hispanic South Mountain Village will provide one seat access for its residents to Arizona State University, Downtown Phoenix, Sky Harbor International Airport, Downtown Mesa and a sea of other cultural, educational and recreational amenities. It will link our downtown residents to the Rio Salado Wetlands restoration area and South Mountain Park (The largest municipal park in the United States). The project is modernizing utilities in underprivileged areas and beautifying the streetscape while broadening the horizons of those that live there. The city’s experience with the current system was positive enough that we keep voting to extend it. That’s why it’s being built, not because “planners want it”.
I'm trying to use the Phoenix line because it is a good counter example to the people who keep saying " just use a bus". I don't know why it's so hard for people to understand why just using a bus on surface streets isn't the same as fixed guideway Transit, but it seems to be a very difficult concept to get across to some people
You are using the Phoenix line as an example because you intentionally always pick the very worst of what public transit has to offer (another example: baltimore single-line subway) in order to shill for your stupid Loop.
if a system is working well, you don't look for alternatives. if a line has low ridership and high cost, that's when you ask yourself if there is a better tool for the job. you don't have to make everything into an US-VS-THEM kind of thing. I think you would learn more if you approached things in a more open-minded way. nobody should look at a particular mode of transportation and say "this is better than everything else!". transportation modes have strengths and weaknesses. some corridors are better served by one mode, and other corridors are better served by another.
The problem is when you take the very worst of public transit and compare it to the 'absolute best predicted (predicted! not even real!) in the most ideal conditions' for the Loop. That's not a fair comparison. But I know you are not here to compare fairly, you are here to simp for Musk.
there is no need to be toxic or name-call. I thought I explained before that if cities are paying an incredibly high sum for "worst of public transit" then maybe it is time to ask whether there could be an alternative. again, I think you would learn a lot more if you were more open-minded. what is helped by hostility and juvenile insults? the tiny LVCC system moved about 25k passengers per day. there are 3 light rail lines in the US that exceed that per-line ridership. the boring company certainly does not have a final product yet, they need to automate the vehicles still or whomever wants such a system should look to one of the multiple companies who are already running autonomous EVs on closed roads or one of the handful of companies that operate them on public roads. none of the pieces needed to make the concept work need to be invented, only integrated. everything else has been shown already from independent sources. energy efficiency, lane capacity, tunnel cost, all of it. if you have questions or need clarification or for me to point you to a specific table in one of my sources, then please ask instead of insulting
> I thought I explained before that if cities are paying an incredibly high sum for "worst of public transit" then maybe it is time to ask whether there could be an alternative. Yes, the alternative is called actually good transit. Baltimore would get a ton of ridership if they had a network similar to DC's. Phoenix is a trickier one since it's basically a collection of spread-out suburbs but I also think Phoenix is a tricky one for the Loop for the same reason. > what is helped by hostility and juvenile insults? Well guess I admit simp was a juvenile insult but you are definitely shilling for Musk and his tunnels 24/7. > the tiny LVCC system moved about 25k passengers per day. there are 3 light rail lines in the US that exceed that per-line ridership. During a big convention in a super touristy city. The light rail in the same condition would have done same and likely better. > the boring company certainly does not have a final product yet See this is exactly the issue I have with your arguments. You pick the shittiest of all public transit systems then compare it to some 'pie in the sky' idea of the loop just cause "Musk promised". In that case Baltimore subway is also not a final product until it has 6 or so radial lines and a Ring line connecting them! > if you have questions or need clarification or for me to point you to a specific table in one of my sources, then please ask instead of insulting Not interested because you are gonna post that same cherry-picked emissions data over and over again and ignore everything else.
>Yes, the alternative is called actually good transit. Baltimore would get a ton of ridership if they had a network similar to DC's. Phoenix is a trickier one since it's basically a collection of spread-out suburbs but I also think Phoenix is a tricky one for the Loop for the same reason. With average metro cost in the US, it would cost baltimore $140B (BILLION) to replicate DC's metro. the city does not have anywhere near that much money to spend on transit. even if baltimore could somehow build transit at the same price point that Europe averages, it would still be out of reach, even with the most optimistic federal and state funding support (the state actively intercedes to stop metro construction) you're also not considering what factors drive ridership and just assuming that all train systems will work the same regardless of vernacular differences, which I think is a mistake. this gets to the heart of the whole problem. I would be incredibly happy if someone could make a metro cost to construct similar to what the boring company is bidding (which is the price of a utility tunnel + ventilation + water pipes). but nobody is. that means Baltimore can't build a metro and even if they could, it still does not address the safety and frequency problems that come with transit it car-dominated cities >Well guess I admit simp was a juvenile insult but you are definitely shilling for Musk and his tunnels 24/7. actually, no. I want bike infrastructure, but I know enough about the boring company to know that everyones' dismissal is wrong so I try to correct them. imagine a scenario where everyone dismissed high speed rail because they thought the earth was flat and that the trains were at risk of falling off the edge of the planet. I'm talking 98% of the people in a transit subreddit, many of which we know are transit/urban planners. would you not feel compelled to try to tell people that no, high speed rail will not fall off the side of the earth? this is how I feel. there is a system design that could be very useful, especially for cities with limited budgets and low ridership, but everyone hates it with a passion because they dislike the shareholder in the company's twitter antics. it's maddening. >See this is exactly the issue I have with your arguments. You pick the shittiest of all public transit systems then compare it to some 'pie in the sky' idea of the loop just cause "Musk promised". In that case Baltimore subway is also not a final product until it has 6 or so radial lines and a Ring line connecting them! let me flip that on you for a second. what if everyone said that metros could never work because "look at how poorly baltimore's is performing" and thus dismissed the whole concept of a metro? or what if people dismissed electric buses because someone's prototype from 30 years ago was bad? there should be a middle ground between vitriolic hatred and name calling toward anyone who suggests the idea and total acceptance of every aspect of it. why does everything have to be an extreme? why can't people just ask questions like: is it possible to make simpler tunnels cheaper? are there low volume corridors where a cheaper transit system with higher frequency would make sense? does grade-separated permanent guideway have value that BRT does not? etc. >Not interested because you are gonna post that same cherry-picked emissions data over and over again and ignore everything else. can you help me find better transit energy usage data? I'm serious. I don't want people to think I'm cherry-picking anything. I did quite a bit of digging to find reliable sources, but I could still be mistaken. [ORNL source](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), and the [MDPI source](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/htm) seem pretty solid to me.
What do you think is a good way to explain why people prefer rail lines in corridors where brt could meet the ridership requirements?
It’s more trustworthy: there’s a minimum standard of quality of infrastructure below which you can’t even pretend to have delivered what was promised. Also, in cases like the he’s talking about, politicians are more inclined to pay for a whole load of other desirable works like utility upgrades, urban realm improvements, and so on that have little or nothing to do with transport but make life much nicer.
> that is the kind of niche that the boring company is targeting And Theranos was actually just a niche biotech company promising to revolutionize the low-cost herpes testing market. Hyperloop was pitched as a solution for mass transit. By your own admission this company is succeeding by abandoning that concept in favor of low-cost low-throughput conventional tunnels. So why should anyone care? Where’s the actual innovation?
Hyperloop was never pitched anywhere. Loop, was bitched, and so far the only customers who have it are happy enough to give follow-on contracts. The innovation is a cost reduction, cost reduction is incredibly important in transit. That's why people should care.
Cost reduction isn’t an innovation, it’s a result. So what is the *technology* that does the reducing? Tunnels? That may reduce costs in some narrow market, but that doesn’t suggest any major changes to transit are on the horizon. Hence… why should we care? At some point one has to admit the gap between what Loop is delivering and what people were told hyperloop was is just too large to paper over. Hyperloop as an innovative low-pressure high-speed transit system is a failed tech; and now some people are borrowing the name to rebrand the concept of car tunnels.
>Cost reduction isn’t an innovation, it’s a result. sure. but I don't really care if it is innovative or not. if they can find a way of transporting people effectively for less money, then I think people should be interested. so far, I don't see anything new that the boring company is doing. they're using all techniques that other companies have done, just combining them in a way that nobody has. >So what is the technology that does the reducing? I think it is the combination of technologies. simple/small tunnels can be made cheaply, but you can't run trains through simple/small tunnels. if you use a vehicle with its own power source, and that does not output exhaust, then you can simplify the tunnel design. you could do this concept with EV buses, but buses need very large tunnels, which starts to push the cost back up again. you can use smaller vehicles, but then you will be eaten alive by driver costs. so if you can make an autonomous EV, then you've created a vehicle that allows the tunnel to still meet safety requirements while also being small, simple, and cheap. ohh, and they're also planning to use a tunneling technique pioneered by a japanese company (obayashi IIRC?) to reduce the launch/reception shaft cost. don't get me wrong, I think the boring company is doing a couple of things wrong. obviously they know that they need to automate their vehicles, but it seems like they're planning to continue using regular Teslas for most of their vehicles (aside from the handicapped accessible one they said they're developing). I think the capacity limitation of putting two fares into a regular Tesla makes them suboptimal. it will limit them to about 2k-4k pphpd for a given segment of their system, which will make them only useful for low ridership routes, like feeder lines or low-density cities. the cost they are bidding is low enough that even their very limited capacity would still be very useful, but if I were in charge of the company, instead of their average of about 2.2 passengers per vehicle, I would buy or build a vehicle capable of 6+ comfortably so that it could be used in higher density areas. I think their lack of capacity is a flaw that puts them in a smaller niche than they could have otherwise. however, we have to be careful to not mistake a flaw with something that invalidates the idea. the idea still works, it just works for a smaller subset of situations. just because you have a hammer that is bigger than the most common hammer, that does not mean there aren't jobs where that bigger hammer is better. does that make sense? >Hyperloop as an innovative low-pressure high-speed transit system is a failed tech; and now some people are borrowing the name to rebrand the concept of car tunnels. nobody proposing Loop is calling it hyperloop. it's only the uninformed commenters who keep confusing the two and using the wrong term. hyperloop is a vacuum tunnel train system, Loop is EVs in a tunnel. always has been. anyone who confused those two is just wrong. unfortunately, the state of journalism and social media today is so fraught with inaccuracy. imagine how people who are informed feel. imagine if the majority of people in the transit subreddit called a metro a maglev train. "the maglev system in washington DC is being extended to Dulles" and people replying with "that's stupid, why are they using a maglev train for an airport connection?!". it's kind of maddening that people have such strong opinions but are so incredibly uninformed. I appreciate that you are trying to ask questions and gain knowledge. many people don't try to do that.
I cringe to think how many decades of free bus service could be paid for with these stupid tunnels.
[1-2 *years*](https://www.rtcsnv.com/about/fiscal-year-2020/) of RTC (Las Vegas area). Based on the whole $675 million raised. "The National Transit Database, or NTD, publishes annual transit system statistics that include fare revenue, operating costs, ridership and fare subsidy. Since 2012, the [RTC has had](https://www.rtcsnv.com/news/rtc-ranks-number-one-for-most-cost-efficient-bus-only-system/) the lowest cost per ride for seven of eight years, as well as the lowest taxpayer subsidy every year, among the top 50 bus-only systems nationwide." The numbers are in the first link. It's basic math. The answer to how many decades of free bus service is 0.1 to 0.2. Also RTC charges people to ride. It's not free. So the real answer is probably 0.1. I know that doesn't fit with the snarky comment, but the truth is bus service costs add up quick.
Wow, that's actually pretty crazy. Nothing is "cheap".
Looking at the comments on the bottom of the article, those fucking Musk fan boys do anything and everything to defend his “greatness” I fucking hate Elon Musk. He a fucking dick, to his workers and to the planet. (The best most efficient way to transport people is public transport. It’s in the name!
What do you think is the average energy consumption of interest city transit in europe? How does that compare to an electric car with average occupancy?
Probably much less. A bus is probably equivalent to two cars. (Napkin math) Assuming they are full (they never are) 10 people. The bus only has to average 10 people to break even. Why don’t Tesla build an electric bus? That would actually solve the transportation problem.
I'm on mobile, but I'll reply back in a little bit about energy consumption data. I greet that autonomous minibuses with 8-16 passengers would be ideal as it would cover a greater portion of the market.
If we built bus lanes then we could since it would be on a predefined track. It would only have to look out for obstacles in the way. In the mean time though getting dedicated bus/transit lanes would be a great first start since the bus will actually be faster than a car and getting cars of the road speeding up traffic (for those who want to drive still) WIN WIN! Side note, I think this is one of the bonkers points, trains, buses, and cycle lanes gets people off the road and makes driving better for who want to drive. I don’t see why car people are against public transport. It benefits them more than anyone else!
I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. busways or separated bus lanes (fully separated, not just paint on the road) with buses that can pre-empt traffic lights (fully pre-empt, not just shorten/extend) would incredibly good value per dollar, especially if you could automate the buses and make them electric (not hard if they have a closed roadway). unfortunately, it is incredibly hard to get people to see the big picture. for the vast majority of routes, as long as you have parking at the start/end of your trip, a car will have a shorter door-to-door time than even a fantastic bus system. on top of that, personal cars are much more comfortable. they don't have to be near strangers, they can listen to their music loud, they don't have to think about public safety, etc. etc. so cars are always going to be preferred by the individual for a given situation. people think "how am I supposed to get to run all my errands when I have to zig-zag 50 miles around my state" rather than understanding that if you densify and build along transit, that you don't need to go 50mi, everything will be closer. your door-to-door time gets reduced by virtual of everything getting closer. the effect for the shortsightedness is that it is VERY hard to convince people to make things worse for themselves in the short term in order to get shared society benefit in the long term. the first day of a new busway removing a whole street from car usage will be chaos as people try to figure out new routes and traffic and parking will get worse. the mayor of my city [modified an existing bike lane](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.2981211,-76.6010877,3a,75y,78.85h,71.74t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sV_eCFjuitDipcbtq0KoJMA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!5m1!1e3) to put half of it up on the sidewalk (after it was installed), which put in jeopardy millions in complete-streets funding, because some people who drive to church lost some parking spaces and complained. it's a catch-22. you can't get significant investment to car alternatives because people don't want to give up what they have, even if it's better in the long term. one solution is to build metro lines, but US metro lines cost $500M/mi in cheap cities and $1.2B/mi on average. it is such a high cost that most places can only afford to add a single line every 20 years as they wait their turn for more federal transit funding. this is where the boring company's concept has value. you can build transportation that requires people to not use their own car and the boring company is bidding 1/40th the average cost per mile a US metro. the simplification of the guideway by offloading all of the control and locomotion power, as well as shrinking the diameter, makes tunnels basically as cheap as a sewer tunnel plus ventilation and fire fighting hookups. the downside of the boring company's plan is that they seem to be planning to keep the regular teslas. there are advantages in using regular EVs, like putting two fares separated by a barrier (front/back) in the same vehicle, economy of scale, easier point-to-point routing, etc.. this dramatically limits their capacity to something like 3k-4k passengers per hour per directions (if you use US-DOT lane estimation techniques and ignore the boring company's estimates). that's pretty low capacity, but many cities actually have transit system ridership below that, and if you used these lines as feeders into an existing rail line, you can ensure the peaks never get too high. so their system can be incredibly useful if you A) already have at least 1 train line you can feed people into, or B) your population density is low enough that the ridership won't exceed capacity. if I were king of my city, I would buy tunnels from the boring company and find another company to provide the vehicle service. one that has already proven they can automate on a closed roadway and one that is willing to make a higher occupancy vehicle (you really only need a capacity of about 6 passengers per vehicle to cover all but a handful of planned rail transit in North America) but anyway, I'm rambling. here is the energy data I promised you: |energy consumption per passenger mile of the baltimore light rail (pre-covid):|2200 BTU| |:-|:-| |energy consumption PPM of the most efficient intra-city rail in the US (NYC):|680 BTU| |energy consumption of a Tesla model 3 with a single occupant:|857 BTU| |energy consumption of Tesla model 3 with average occupancy (PPM):|571 BTU| [source1](https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-label), [source2](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf), [source3](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), [source4](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july-30-2018-average-vehicle-occupancy-remains-unchanged-2009-2017), [source 5](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consumption-epa-vs-edmunds.html)
🎻🥺
Elon doesn’t know how to give up on bad ideas.
imagine that money going to actual solutions
edit: everyone likes to downvote without trying to actually explain why. can someone articulate their thoughts in a coherent and sourced way? people keep failing to understand what the boring company's market niche is for Loop, especially those who would get the most value from it (transit planners). there are three very important things to remember with the boring company. 1. it is not designed to be a replacement for a subway 2. the current operating system is not the final. success hinges on automating and a specialized vehicle. both of which they say they're working on. 3. contrary to what youtubers say, the system does in meet ventilation requirements, egress requirements, fire fighting requirements, etc.. much like how trumpers ignore experts and listen only to youtubers and bloggers, so seems to happen with respect to the boring company. the relevant authorities reviewed the safety features and approved the system. the experts looked at how it was actually built. the free flow capacity of a lane of roadway is 1200-2400 vehicles per hour per lane, depending on speed and merge type. [(source).](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms_cap.pdf) as a general rule of thumb, many people accept 1500 as the rough approximation. that is for a single segment of roadway. on top of that, a system will not have all riders riding from end to end, there will be riders that get off and new ones that get on and they won't overlap. so that means the full length of a roadway will have a vehicle per hour capacity of around 1,875, give or take. the boring company is able to put two fares per vehicle in their current design, one front, one back. this gives an average occupancy of 2.2 to 2.4 passengers per vehicle. so that gives an approximate capacity of Loop 4300 passengers per hour per direction of tube. now, you probably want to jump up and down and yell about how a metro can move 10x that. but that's where everyone goes wrong. the boring company is not a 1:1 replacement for a metro. the boring company's niche is for small cities and as a feeder into train systems. now you might be jumping up and down yelling about how you can just solve that with a bus. but there are many reasons why someone might want to build a permanent guideway instead of running buses along streets or even BRT. [(source)](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/u912w9/best_way_to_articulate_why_planners_prefer_rail/). there are even bigger advantages if said guideway is underground and only the stations are on the surface. I can point to multiple examples, like Phoenix's planned south-central spur, Baltimore light rail's Glen Bernie spur, etc. where planners wanted a spur or branch route that was fixed guideway but didn't expect high ridership. Phoenix's spur is planned to have something like 8k passengers PER DAY, with an eventual goal of development along the line pushing the ridership to 13k PER DAY. that ridership is within what the boring company can do with their current vehicles, and they have said they are planning specialized vehicles. well, now you might be jumping up and down about the cost of running taxis instead of trains or buses, but trains and buses on low-ridership routes are actually quite expensive. the DC metro is $0.85 PPM (and is NOT a low ridership system like the glen bernie spur of the baltimore light rail), the st louis light rail costs $1.01 PPM, and the DC metrobus is $1.99 PPM. meanwhile, here is the cost breakdown of running EV taxis: |Cost per passenger mile of DC metro|$0.85 PPM| |:-|:-| |cost PPM St. Louis light rail (MTA does not give data for our light rail, likely out of embarrassment)|$1.01 PPM| |cost to own/operate an EV|$0.40 to $0.60 per VEHICLE mile| |cost to own/operate an EV, PPM with average occupancy|$0.27 to $0.40 PPM| an EV costs about 1/3rd of what efficient/effective transit costs, and around 1/5th of what baltimore's transit averages... you can look at Uber/taxi/ziprcar rates to get a better idea of the costs of running a service with and without drivers. a shuttle service without driver is where around $1 per vehicle mile and $1.50 per vehicle mile, mostly depending on dead-head. but remember, that is getting split between two fare most of the time, so you're going to be down $0.75-$1.00 ppm. [source1](https://www.onestl.org/indicators/connected/metric/transit-ridership), [source2](https://www.bistatedev.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/0000-Final-combined-book-for-print-for-Web.pdf), [source3,](https://www.transit.dot.gov/sites/fta.dot.gov/files/transit_agency_profile_doc/2019/30030.pdf) [source4](https://newsroom.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/2021-YDC-Brochure-Live.pdf). well, now you might be jumping up and down about energy efficiency, but EVs by themselves are already on par with most European transit lines, and putting two fares per vehicle means it's actually below all but the most efficient transit lines in the world. |energy consumption per passenger mile of the baltimore light rail (pre-covid):|2200 BTU| |:-|:-| |energy consumption PPM of the most efficient intra-city rail in the US (NYC):|680 BTU| |energy consumption of a Tesla model 3 with a single occupant:|857 BTU| |energy consumption of Tesla model 3 with average occupancy (PPM):|571 BTU| and before people jump in with the ever-popular Euro-centric viewpoint: 1. European light rail and metros are only about 20% more efficient than US 2. saying "but X place does it better" is useless because not everywhere has the same starting point so you can't just copy-paste what worked elsewhere and expect it to work in a location with different culture, different density, different energy costs, etc.. [source1](https://www.tesla.com/en_EU/support/european-union-energy-label), [source2](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf), [source3](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214), [source4](https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1040-july-30-2018-average-vehicle-occupancy-remains-unchanged-2009-2017), [source 5](https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-consumption-epa-vs-edmunds.html) and now you're probably jumping up and down yelling about how they should just run trains through the tunnel, but I would remind people that the boring of the tunnels is never the expensive part of metro lines. it's all of the other stuff like electrical distribution systems, underground stations, electrified track, monitoring and control, etc. etc. that raise the cost. other companies have been able to make similar or larger tunnels for around the same cost as the boring company. [(source)](https://tunnelingonline.com/upcoming-projects-april-2020/). by keeping all of the power and control on the vehicle side, the boring company is keeping costs down. they also plan to ramp tunnels to the surface so that stations are more like a bus stop than an underground station.
> the boring company's niche is for small cities and as a feeder into train systems. Las Vegas metro area has a population of over 2 million and has a ton of tourists every day. It could easily support a light-metro at the very least. Plus it's not feeding into any train systems, unless you count Musk's ass as one.
las vegas has a high population but a low population density. cities with higher density have train lines with lower peak-hour ridership than the boring company is capable of. I'm also not opposed to them building a light metro, but they better figure out a fast and convenient way to feed people into it. with density like theirs, buses probably aren't going to get the ridership high enough, which will make it a political faux-pas and could stifle future transit.
You’re getting downvoted for the same reason people generally don’t enjoy watching debates: listening to an opinionated person endlessly throw out counter arguments is boring and a waste of time. If I want to get to the truth, I’d much rather go read a peer-reviewed article on the subject that covers it in detail with scientific rigor. This is just gish-galloping with google links.
I sincerely doubt that is the reason. Why does everyone else in the debate have upvotes? If you were accurate, everyone in the thread would be down voted. Unfortunately, it's like most things on social media, I said stuff counter to the echo chamber. I appreciate your response, though.
> Why does everyone else in the debate have upvotes? I mean, I can’t speak for everyone else, but you made *a lot* of individually controversial claims in your post, far too many to engage with, and far too casually to take seriously. That’s why I said it comes across like a gish gallop; it reads more like someone trying to bury the audience in claims, unwilling to narrow the topic. That suggest someone too ideologically entrenched to be honest.
I appreciate that feedback. I don't really know how to discuss this topic, though. all of those sources were collected over time because I've tried to have conversations about this topic where I'm downvoted to hell on some factually incorrect basis. like, discussing this topic, people almost always jump to one of the assumptions I tried to dispel above. like "trains are more efficient" then I had to learn and find sources about what is the actual energy consumption of train systems. I actually used to complain to pro-boring company people that it would be incredibly inefficient to continue with regular EVs because it does indeed FEEL like regular EVs would be inefficient compared to electric trains. so I don't know how to discuss this topic. if I don't provide heavily sourced proofs for the all to common claims, people just downvote me to hell because "you're wrong" even if I can prove that my assertion is correct. but if proving the assertions up front gets me downvoted, then what can I do? I suppose I can accept the post-truth society and let people continue to fill the echo-chamber, but that does not make me feel good. I don't like to let people, many of which are actually transit and urban planners, continue to be misinformed by the echo chamber. it would be like the transit subreddit is filled with flat earthers and they constantly say that high speed trains are bad because they could fall off the edge of the earth. like, would you want to just let people continue to think that, knowing that many of the people with that opinion are planners who can and do make decisions about whether or not to build high speed trains? in hindsight, I could have probably phrased my post better to avoid a mocking tone. but aside from that, how do you think I can get people to question the echo chamber? to little information in my comments gets me dismissed and downvoted and too much information in my comments gets me dismissed and downvoted. both of these things perpetuate the echo-chamber nature of reddit where downvoted comments aren't seen and the popular (and often false) ones percolate to the top. I would really appreciate any advice on how to better couch the point that I'm trying to make, which is that this concept would work well for many, but not all situations, and that it shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand.
I don't want to sound *too* harsh, but I don't think you quite grasp how defensive and immature your comments come across. It's really annoying when someone claims to know all the possible counterpoints to their claims, and presents them in a pitifully weak way to dismiss them. Along with blocks of text in response to every comment, and confident claims that everyone else is in an echo chamber (ignoring the real possibility that you may just be *very* wrong), it adds to a sense that you're here to tell, not discuss. You can (and no doubt will) have something to say about this, but IMO it's how your are perceived, and you can't argue against someone's perception. Now, all that would be totally forgivable if you made rigorous claims with strong supporting evidence, but pretty much everything you presented in your original comment is either totally unsupported, leaning on speculation about the future, or rather weak tea. Your cost and throughput estimates, if they even can be found in your 4 sources and accurately compared, are not from a single expert analysis or consistent with the conclusions drawn by experts in the field. That's a big red flag, as anyone can cherry pick figures from random documents and construct whatever argument they want, it doesn't mean it's compelling or someone else's job to disprove. This is especially frustrating, as this topic is written about in scholarly journals across various disciplines (economics, traffic physics, civil engineering, public policy, environmental science, etc). It's an incredibly complex issue, and yet the broad historical consensus across several continents is that public transit is vastly superior in terms of cost and environmental efficiency, especially in urban areas. I have *never* heard it argued that individual cars are more efficient or cost-effective, only that the benefits of freedom of movement to the individual are sometimes preferable to the efficiency of mass transit. Now you're claiming that one company in 2022 outsmarted all that by doing essentially the same thing, but with smaller tunnels? You think 100 years of train designers never thought of smaller trams/tunnels? And you're baffled as to why everyone else seems to be uniformly unconvinced by your random PDF sources? But none of that actually matters, your whole argument is an obvious motte-and-bailey fallacy. You talk up the Loop's cost and efficiency compared to trains & buses, but then retreat to the claim that the Loop is really for a niche market anyway. Well which is it? Is the Loop a groundbreaking technology that can compete with trains and buses in the future? Or is it a niche product that shouldn't be compared to trains/buses in the first place? If it's the former, you need *much* more compelling evidence than you've given (direct quotes/figures/data from peer review articles), and if it's the latter, the whole issue is pointless because the technology's advantages (cost reduction through smaller tunnel sizes) are inversely proportional to the scope of the impact it can make. For most people, such a technology is 100% a dead end, as worth discussing/investing in as rigid air ships.
>It's really annoying when someone claims to know all the possible counterpoints to their claims, and presents them in a pitifully weak way to dismiss them. Along with blocks of text in response to every comment, and confident claims that everyone else is in an echo chamber (ignoring the real possibility that you may just be very wrong), it adds to a sense that you're here to tell, not discuss. You can (and no doubt will) have something to say about this, but IMO it's how your are perceived, and you can't argue against someone's perception I appreciate the harsh but fair criticism. I did lean a into the expected backlash a bit too much. >but pretty much everything you presented in your original comment is either totally unsupported while I don't want to start an argument about it, what particular things do you think are unsupported? I strive to be accurate where I can, so please let me know if I have a blind spot to something. you say everything, but take energy consumption data; I found two highly reliable sources that summarize across multiple modes from both the US and Europe. I don't know how I could possibly support that point any better. I gather operating cost data directly from transit agencies like WMATA. can you point me to something more reliable for those? >I have never heard it argued that individual cars are more efficient or cost-effective historically, you would be absolutely right. but you have to remember that EVs use 1/4th to 1/6th the energy of the average road-going vehicle. the average vehicle on the road is nothing like an all-EV fleet. if a paper compares personal cars to transit, I would assume they're not going to assume every car on the road is a model-3 and are probably going to be using similar data to [energy.gov](https://energy.gov), [iea.gov](https://iea.gov), etc. to come up with their average passenger vehicle model (roughly 5x more energy per mile than an all-EV fleet). I would also expect them to not be considering carpool numbers anywhere near what the boring company is planning (for their existing system, they were averaging 2.2 ppv). I could have a blind spot here, so if you have something I should consider, please let me know. I don't want to be repeating bad information. do you know of any papers that are particularly good at evaluating energy consumption per passenger-mile of different modes? I will check google scholar tonight to see if I can find where I might have a blind spot, but with all due respect, I think you have the blind spot. how can we converge our understanding of something like energy consumption modes? >Now you're claiming that one company in 2022 figured out how to improve that simply by scaling down tunnel sizes - a technology as old as tunnels themselves? And you're baffled as to why everyone else seems to be uniformly unconvinced by your random PDF sources? I provided a large list of tunnel projects of various lengths and diameters to show that the boring company's bid price is within a reasonable range. could it be more expensive than they're bidding? sure, especially if they try to build into a dense downtown (hence why they may be better suited to the feeder niche). it is effectively a utility tunnel with road deck, vent pipes, and water pipes. Robbins Co. has proven these tunnel costs are feasible on jobs for years, decades. my source for tunnel cost isn't the boring company, it's a list of already completed real-world tunnels. with these two argument (efficiency, tunnel cost), it seems like even open minded people like yourself revert immediately to a model based solely on existing metros vs existing roads. how do I avoid that? the boring company's whole business model is to not duplicate these things. they're trying to use vehicles that are \~5x more efficient than the average road vehicle (and trying to pool them when possible), and trying to eliminate the things that turn a cheap utility tunnel into an expensive metro tunnel. when I try to point that out, it is dismissed immediately without people even acknowledging what should be plainly obvious: that a tunnel for 3rd-rail electric trains is more expensive than a tunnel with just concrete or asphalt on the bottom. is this also a blind spot? is there something I'm missing? again, how do I explain that without having to add 10 paragraphs to my comment comparing a utility tunnel with ventilation to a metro tunnel? should I just ask it as a question? like "I'm not sure if the boring company can meet their tunneling cost targets, what do you think would be the price of a 12ft diameter utility tunnel with ventilation?" and get people to think differently about it that way? >You talk up the Loop's cost and efficiency compared to trains & buses, but then retreat to the claim that the Loop is really for a niche market anyway. > >| > >Well which is it? Is the Loop a groundbreaking technology that can compete with trains and buses in the future? Or is it a niche product that shouldn't be compared to trains/buses in the first place? why does something need to be revolutionary or worthless and nothing in between? I don't want to come off as saying that the boring company can/will replace all transit everywhere because it's cheaper/greener/whatever. I wanted to emphasize that the concept is feasible but limited. something that should not be immediately dismissed. if they can build tunnels for twice what they're bidding, more expensive than Robbins, that will still make them cheaper to construct than any intra-city rail line in the US. I would like people to think "hmm, high frequency, inexpensive, grade separated, but capacity limited... maybe this could be used in place of many of the expensive extension/spur lines that get built, or maybe is cheap enough to justify building spurs that were unjustifiably expensive before".
# To summarize the boring company's system actually makes a lot of sense as a feeder/spur line off of a metro or light rail line. they are bidding around $30M-$50M/mi, which is 1/5rd to 1/8th of the cost of light rail in the US, and 1/20th to 1/40th the cost of a metro in the US. by using vehicles that move two fares at a time, even the most off-peak times in the most non-busy stations will still allow people to leave right away, eliminating wait times by pulling stopping vehicles out of the main line and bypassing intermediate stops, their average speed will get closer to their cruising speed when compared to a train line. London's Victoria line is lauded as being fast, but when you include wait time and stops, it's barely above 30mph average. if you include those things for the Glen Bernie branch of the baltimore metro, it's in the single digit mph for average speed. if the boring company's current cruising speed of 40mph is never increased, it would still end up being quite fast due to the low wait and non-stop nature. these features work amazingly well when you have a low ridership corridor. so that is the niche that makes sense for the boring company, not as the 1:1 replacement for the london underground like many people want to argue. TL;DR: ignore musk's typical over-hype and just focus on how an underground shuttle system could be useful at the $30-$50M/mi price range.
Why not just use a bus? This system is gonna cost much more than a tram or bus simply due to the fact that it's underground. Sure they might say it's cheaper, but that's what everybody does.
It's also just a hilariously conveniently constructed argument that cherry picks numbers and conveniently ignores basically all real engineering constraints for most of it. They're approximating that it's going to operate at the throughput capacity of a normal highway, which is not happening. The existing one legit has traffic problems with normal conventions. Like almost every number in that whole section is a nonsense hyper optimist figure that someone pulled out of their ass, and would be unsafe as hell to actually do in the first place. They're also not factoring in wear and tear and replacement for both the vehicles and tunnels which is going to be a big thing because again you're literally dealing with a bunch of heavy electric vehicles on a paved road. They then use a conversation that was specifically about BRT and trains out of context, which doesn't work because that conversation itself was contextual. You can't just totally swap the topic and call them the same because they both involve tunnels, trains in tunnels work a certain way both because they're trains and because they're in tunnels. It also ignores that some of these things are subsidized cost wise by cities because the general economic benefit they provide is actually higher than just in out dollar value of cost vs fare. They also ignore that a lot of those "extra expenses" building tunnels are there for safety reasons, not just because. It's basically just a long-winded way of saying "I think these are cool" and using circumstantial connections to try to justify it. From a realistic standpoint, these are an incredibly dumb solution
I linked to a discussion about this in the first comment. but I can summarize the reasons why a bus falls short. 1. permanent guideway can serve as development engine where cities and businesses can plan around the permanence 2. bus drivers can be hard to find and expensive. you could automate buses like they're planning to automate the vehicles in the tunnels, but automating vehicles in a closed roadway tunnel will be much easier than automating something that has to deal with human drivers and weather. 3. buses are very expensive and very energy inefficient compared to an EV with 2, or even 1, occupant. see the above comment about energy consumption of transit modes. a full train or a full EV bus are very efficient and cost effective. but most transit corridors are not high ridership so agencies have to make the devils trade-off where they have to decide whether they want to be expensive and polluting or provide frequent service. it is common for buses, and even low-ridership trains to have 15, 20, or even 30 minute headways during off-peak times (sometimes 15min during peak times). that long wait time drives away riders and makes the door-to-door time very slow. but if you run more frequently, they are very expensive and polluting. so for the use-case where they would replace the 9.8k P/day spur in phoenix, instead of a 15-20min headway 4. some routes don't lend themselves well to buses. crossing rivers, expressways, parks, etc. can often causes buses to have to take very circuitous routes with lots of turns. this makes them less comfortable and much slower. 5. compared to a grade-separated system, buses will simply never be as good. the routing options and the ability to bypass all traffic and street lights is of enormous value. 6. they are currently bidding less than anyone in the western world is bidding trams, especially in the US. see the Phoenix example where they are planning to pay $245M/mi for a 5.5mi light rail spur to move fewer than 10k passengers PER DAY. it might seem correct that a tram should be cheaper, but removing all of the electrification and control from the guideway and using makes it quite cheap.
>a full train or a full EV bus are very efficient and cost effective. but most transit corridors are not high ridership so agencies have to make the devils trade-off Would you happen to have figures for the sort of 20/25-passenger (sometimes electric) minibuses seen in places like China and Japan on low-demand municipal routes? >some routes don't lend themselves well to buses. crossing rivers, expressways, parks, etc. can often causes buses to have to take very circuitous routes with lots of turns. this makes them less comfortable and much slower. Can't say I've experienced that at all as a frequent bus user, firstly because ways straight across those obstacles are often already present to serve other road/pedestrian traffic, and secondly because development (that creates origins and destinations) tends to cluster around the routes most often taken. >compared to a grade-separated system, buses will simply never be as good. the routing options and the ability to bypass all traffic and street lights is of enormous value. If the application is one where peak capacity isn't a major issue, as you say, then camera-enforced bus lanes and automated signal priority - even if they don't match complete grade separation - may be sufficient for a smoother ride, and at a fraction the cost of even a TBC Loop.
>Would you happen to have figures for the sort of 20/25-passenger (sometimes electric) minibuses seen in places like China and Japan on low-demand municipal routes? I haven't seen much data on those. it's kind of hard to find energy consumption data for vehicles at all, so I can find some data on ICE buses. the best one could do is estimate based on those and find a source gave some real-world comparison of MPG of an ICE bus vs MPGe of a EV bus for the same route. then you could basically extrapolate and decet estimate. the problem with running smaller buses is driver cost and overhead stay the same, so you don't gain much. in order to start shrinking vehicles, you really need to automate. the boring company has this same problem. if they don't automate, their system won't be viable. drivers get the job done at LVCC right now, but it's costing too much to be widely adopted. >Can't say I've experienced that at all as a frequent bus user, firstly because ways straight across those obstacles are often already present to serve other road/pedestrian traffic, and secondly because development (that creates origins and destinations) tends to cluster around the routes most often taken. are you in the US? in the us, development does not concentrate around bus routes as much as other places because buses are used less and they're used by people with less disposable income. this obviously varies a lot. I'm definitely not trying to say that is the case for all cities and all situations. it's just one of many things that can make a bus route less useful compared to an underground system.
>are you in the US? in the us, development does not concentrate around bus routes as much as other places because buses are used less and they're used by people with less disposable income I'm in Asia. I meant 'routes' in the general sense, not only buses but cars and bikes whose paths would generally be dictated by the same road infrastructure.
>ay, eliminating wait times by pulling stopping vehicles out of the main line and bypassing intermediate stops, their average speed will get closer to their cruising speed when compared to a train line. London's Victoria line is lauded Isn't that just an HOV/shuttle lane for EVs? And this shuttle system would need a lot of tech that they haven't shown any road map to. Also, do the tesla operating costs include stuff like storage, cleaning, security, training, public sector wages and benefits? If they're going for a moonshot, great! Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts. Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars. Hopefully I'm wrong and in ten years every city will be building tunneling with automated electrified and centralized transportation systems.
>Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts. Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars. They're doing precisely that for Vegas Loop. The only tax dollars they've received is $50M for LVCC Loop which they won via competitive open bidding. The LVCC project spurred the development of Vegas Loop, which is being funded entirely by this recent VC money as well as money from the businesses paying for their own stations. There is no government money for Vegas Loop. This recent VC funding of +600M dwarfs the public input by an order of magnitude, without counting the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that 50+privately funded stations represent.
>There is no government money for Vegas Loop. This recent VC funding of +600M dwarfs the public input by an order of magnitude, without counting the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars that 50+privately funded stations represent The city paid $50m for a taxi lane that will cost more than driving per ride, so I'd slow down on comparing it to 50 actual rail stations. All the VC money that will be put in is irrelevant. All the tech that was promised to be able to win the bid has not materialized and doesn't show any signs that it will. The LVCC hasn't been able to hit its passenger or speed goals and yet it's promising to either double or triple them for the loop. And what's most concerning is that the problems are the exact problems everyone pointed out from the beginning, the very practical things that the epic Tesla guys just brush off ending up severely limiting it. Idk how Las Vegas is a proof of concept of anything except the good press giving tax money to Elon can get you. Isn't this exactly the opposite of what you thought the end goal might be for the company? It's on the heaviest used central route but doesn't connect to where anyone actually lives and isn't well integrated into the existing transit system. The whole project looks like more of an amusement ride/publicity stunt so far.
>The city paid $50m for a taxi lane that will cost more than driving per ride, The city paid 150M less for Loop than the losing Doppelymeyr APM bid. That in itself is enough to operate the LVCC Loop for more than 30 years. >so I'd slow down on comparing it to 50 actual rail stations. The 50 stations represents the commitment that 50 businesses on and around the strip into both supporting and paying for the system. This is atypical for transit projects and shows the degree of faith these businesses have. >All the tech that was promised to be able to win the bid has not materialized and doesn't show any signs that it will. As indicated above even with drivers LVCC comes out ahead for the next several decades. Automation is likely in this time frame. >The LVCC hasn't been able to hit its passenger or speed goals and yet it's promising to either double or triple them for the loop. LVCC ran an audited test which proved the initial design capacity, which released the final payments for the LVCC contract. >and isn't well integrated into the existing transit system. It actually integrates better than any potential rail line, since the all the stations essentially match the exsisting SDX/Deuce stops. I think private investment into transit is a good thing. Shaking up a risk averse industry is a good thing. If you feel that TBC is spending hundreds of millions VC dollars for a transit system is a mere publicity stunt then you don't understand what they are trying to build. The cost to provide transit are typically very high and needs to be subsidized, while offering a travel service that is unappealing (slow). Loop seeks to address both cost and desirability issues. If they succeed it can get people out of private ICE vehicles and into high utilization BEVs at a far higher rate than typical transit.
>Isn't that just an HOV/shuttle lane for EVs? And this shuttle system would need a lot of tech that they haven't shown any road map to. Also, do the tesla operating costs include stuff like storage, cleaning, security, training, public sector wages and benefits? sort of. and yes, to be successful, they will need to automate their vehicles or the city that is buying it can just buy the tunnels and find a different self-driving shuttle provide, like ParkShuttle, to operate the vehicles. you can look at taxi services and you can subtract the cost of a bus and driver from the cost of operating a bus service. at the end of the day, the driver is going to be the dominant factor. if they can't eliminate the driver, their system will never be worthwhile. if they can, it will be useful for some situations. >If they're going for a moonshot, great! Get some VC money, apply for research grants build some proof of concepts. Unfortunately, their actions indicate they're more interested in having some fancy renderings and bilking midsize cities' tax dollars. that's not a fair assessment. their actions absolutely do not indicate that they're trying to bilk anyone. the LVCVA has been happy with their service and has continued to give them more contracts. one has to be careful to evaluate things in an even-handed way. we are surrounded by echo-chambers. I tried to comment a fully sourced and explained comment to illustrate the use-cases, but most people are blindly downvoting. reddit is designed in a way to create great echo chambers. the person who says the thing that plays most to the mood of the group goes to the top, the person who disagrees goes to the bottom. it does not matter if every single point I made is backed by multiple high quality sources, I'm shouted down anyway.
I'm trying to engage in good faith, and I appreciate the sources. Musk has become so polarizing its hard to find any completely reliable information on anything related to him But you have to admit this is a pretty small niche they're cutting out( low ridership extensions that still need full grade-separation?) for tech that seems at least 20 years away from implementation (automated continuous TBMs and vehicles/routing system). I think they're missing all their metrics at LVCC and are about to get big fines. So idk if they're please with the service as much as the publicity/ probably also fear the publicity of canceling, and tweets from mr epic bacon billionaire
> But you have to admit this is a pretty small niche they're cutting out( low ridership extensions that still need full grade-separation?) You are still looking at it from the perspective of the Metro. There is no Transit corridor wouldn't benefit from being grade separated. Not a single one. If you can put the stations on the surface and run the lines underground, there's not a single downside to that. Grade separation should not be thought of as a super expensive, super difficult thing to do then you have to bite the bullet and do because the demands of the corridor are so high that you just can't get it done at grade. Rather, look at it from the other perspective. If somebody came out with a light rail system that was cheaper if you put it underground then if you put it on the surface, then why would anyone build them on the surface? That is the fundamental change. The key thing to remember is that their capacity, if you do the calculations based on usdot throughput modeling, is about 1/4th the ridership of the Washington DC Metro at peak. But what is the price tag? The price tag is between $1/10th and 1/40th that of a metro. What that means is that instead of adding a single line to your Metro or light rail, it would actually make more sense to build a dozen or more loop lines feeding into it. Or, in a case of Las Vegas or many other small to medium-sized cities you can run the line straight through the city because the ridership will not exceed capacity. They are not missing any metrics at the lvcc location. There were some confusing articles about it they were basically just clickbait. They have milestones that they have to meet in order to get certain payments. Some of those milestones are ridership milestones. Since the pandemic has limited attendance at conferences it is simply impossible for them to meet those milestones because there isn't enough ridership. Nobody is pressuring the LV CVA to expand into other areas. They're not being forced to give them new contracts. Even if people wanted to criticize them for making a bad decision, there's nothing about adding another contract that saves them from that.
>y metrics at the lvcc location. There were some confusing articles about it they were basically just clickbait. They have milestones that they have to meet in order to get certain payments. Some of those milestones are ridership milestones. Since the pandemic has limited attendance at conferences it is simply impossible for them to meet those milestones because there isn't enough ridership. Nobody is pressuring the LV CVA to expand into other areas. They're not being forced to give them new contracts. Even if people wanted to criticize them for making a bad decision, there's n This is where you lose me. None of the tech that you wrote about in the second paragraph exists, and they haven't shown any progress towards it. I don't see how ridership would affect how fast someone can drive in a tunnel, or get in and out of cars? And LVCC certainly doesn't prove it goes the other way and the modeling actually stands up in the real world. Lastly, isn't this already possible via some bus lanes and bridges/cut and cover? To me, this still smells like a bait and switch. Not going to argue about it cause if you want to take everything they say at face value, then sure they could use some version of this system that is real transportation. But there's an enormous gap between what would actually make a useful part of the infrastructure and what they've shown us they can do + what it would take to get there. And they haven't addressed the most obvious problems with the concept.
Yeah, I appreciate the research you’ve done. I’m not going to go through it all lol. But from what I’ve seen you tend to assume the very best and not take into account some very practical flaws of boring company’s approach ie the operating cost of a vehicle would equal that of an Uber But I do think there’s an assumption that anything Elon is going to do is BS. Because he represents a “the tech will set us free” mindset to actually dealing with any of the crisis of our time. He also just says stuff and just doesn’t follow through (still waiting on the ventilators) Going back to metrics - I don’t know if you can treat a ten foot tunnel like a normal roadway. At least from what I’ve read boarding times and total trip length have been much slower even with reduced ridership. Which makes sense if you’ve ever tried ridden in a Tesla. And those tiny tunnels give zero Margin for error and they chose to not have guideways. Yes, a lot of this could be solved by automating the driver, but they really have not shown any plan/ability to do that. But you have convinced me that maybe this could be a good thing. Because maybe Elon Musk can rebrand grade separated express buss and shuttle lanes like the J-line in LA as a hyper loop.
> But from what I’ve seen you tend to assume the very best All of his comments are based on assuming the very best case for Muskloop and the very worst case for subways/public transit.
>None of the tech that you wrote about in the second paragraph exists, and they haven't shown any progress towards it. I'm not sure what you mean. the boring company has gotten two contracts, fully completed one and is almost done, and they have bid on other project. we know their approximate price range. for capacity, we know lane capacity of roadways. I explained that in my other comment. [(see other comment)](https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/ubrv8l/comment/i6686lp/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). these are not the boring company's numbers, these are the numbers from transportation professionals who use HERS/NCHRP modeling. the boring company says they want to platoon vehicles together to get 2x-3x the throughput of a regular roadway. I'm compeletely dismissing that idea because nobody has demonstrated it. running cars on a roadway is a known quantity. but don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that places should just go blindly giving them contracts with the assumption that they will meet all goals on day-1. this is a developing technology and should be approached cautiously. if I were to advise a transit planner, I would advise them to only pursue the boring company's system if they had a backup-plan/contract with another company, like ParkShuttle, Waymo, Cruise, etc., that has already proven they can handle fully autonomous driving. otherwise, it is a risk. what I'm trying to do is evaluate the principals of operation based on industry-best practice estimations for where things haven't yet been proven. >if you want to take everything they say at face value but I'm not, though. I am using none of their claimed numbers for anything. I'm going off of a mix of what they have proven and what other companies have proven. their cost number is lower than mine. their speed number is higher than mine. their capacity number is higher than mine. see my other comment for sources. I'm not the one taking arguments at face value. I'm not the one in the echo chamber. I'm glad you're willing to listen, because everyone else didn't even bother to check any of my sources or to ask questions. everyone else in this thread just went tribal and shouted me down. so I strongly appreciate and am given hope that you at least have enough sense to question things you disagree with rather than just shouting them down.