Bicycle Austin forum

MichaelBluejay

Webmaster

From: Austin, TX

Registered: 2008-05-26

Posts: 1,455

Website

Elon Musk's first tunnels in Las Vegas

(1) The tunnels were constructed by Elon Musk's "The Boring Company" (nice pun)

(2) The tunnels shuttle convention-goers around in Tesla electric cars.

(3) The cars will initially be driven by humans but are expected to go autonomous at some point.  They might also introduce some larger-capacity vehicles.

(4) There are two tunnels (one for each direction), about 0.8 miles long each.

(5) The convention center says that walking would take up to 25 minutes, which sounds about right, considering pedestrian gridlock.  (The Boring Company, self-servingly puts the walk time at 45 minutes, which isn't believable).

(6) The big news about this is that a tunnel for cars can be substantially smaller than one for subway cars, and as a result, the cost of the project was a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to put in a subway.  The total cost for both tunnels and 3 stations (2 surface, 1 subsurface) was reportedly only $52.5M, compared to $453M for the same length of subway.

(7) Future plans are to build a loop that connects the airport, the entire Las Vegas strip, and downtown, with trip fare being far less than taxis.

(8) Testing showed that the system can move over 4400 passengers per hour.  That's far short of 30,000 for a subway.  At first I thought that maybe that's okay because higher capacity would be overkill if there wasn't that much demand, but the largest conventions have 100,000 attendees, so it could be that waits for the shuttle could be considerable, possibly longer than just walking.