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Comment by testing22321 | Hacker News Reader

Have you ridden the existing Vegas tunnel?

Tens of thousands of riders when I was there and not a spec of dirt. Very far from perfect, but a long way from useless.

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There were tens of thousands of riders _when you were there?_ Or there were tens of thousands of riders over the lifetime of the system?

Most videos I've seen recently show a system that, while functional, typically only has a handful of vehicles running simultaneously, each with carrying capacity for one party of up to 3 people.

When I was there. During SEMA, the worlds biggest automotive show.

In 2023-03, they did passenger 1,000,000 [1].

In 2024-05, they did passenger 2,000,000 [2].

So 1,000,000 passengers in 14 months or ~420 days. That is a average throughput of ~2,400 passengers per day.

In comparison, the Tokyo Marunouchi line averages ~1,100,000 passengers per day [3]. That is ~420x the rate. Every single day, they do what the Las Vegas Loop does in a year.

The peak capacity that they claim without evidence is ~32,000 in a day [4]. The Maruonouchi line does in a day what the Las Vegas Loop at maximum capacity could theoretically do in a entire month.

[1] https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-vegas-loop-1-m...

[2] https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-2-million-passenger...

[3] https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/travel-by-tr...

[4] https://www.boringcompany.com/lvcc

You are 100% correct. It’s small fry right now.

You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers.

Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.

There's that, but attempting to run around regulations despite numerous violations just doesn't fly either.

And they will be punished for it, exactly as defined by the law.

A fine that isn't based on income isn't a fine, it's a cost of doing business at the expense of workers, the environment and society at large. 242k, that's peanuts for someone with Musk level wealth.

So you’re angry that fines are not based on income?

What are you doing to fix that?

I don’t think most people are arguing against the concept, or even implementation, of the system as developed. Obviously it’s both a publicity stunt and beta test as they learn how to build and operate a tunnel system like this. The concern is that much of the environmental harm that’s being done (according to the EPA) is repetitive, and that The Boring Company (TBC) actively pledged to hire an environmental inspector three years ago and is now being fined for having not done so. Given that, who knows how many violations that don’t leave a permanent mark are going unnoticed.

Do you think that they are going to ignore environmental laws for JUST this project, or do you think that is their modus operandi? I’d be happy to have a tunnel system installed near my home, even if there’s temporary disruption during the construction process. What I wouldn’t tolerate is active, and unmonitored (by TBC’s insistence on “self-monitoring”), pollution occurring near my home. Fines only cover so much, and un-polluting something after the fact costs far more than the fines that are being levied and, when it comes to pollutants that harm humans (like improper disposal of chemicals from digging, as they have been fined for), you can’t just “undo” the human harm with a fine.

What I think is that environmental review rules are so convoluted that almost any project you would investigate breaks plenty of them. I also don't trust the definition of "environmental" when it comes to environmental regulations. When you hear "environmental" you think dumping toxic chemicals, but in reality environmental reviews have components like a building casting a shadow on a playground for 1 hour a day. And on top of that I don't trust journalists for counts of number of violations. In this case they get to 800 by counting one real violation 700 times:

> The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.

> as they learn how to build and operate a tunnel system like this.

Yes, why do they even do that. Not that they are never any improvements, but this pretty much a solved problem. They have a stupid amount of NIH syndrome, but apply that to the physical world and that always results in fatalities.

I would rather live in a world where you do not get to cause hundreds of times more environmental violations than others just because you imagine your new horse and cart idea is way better than cars.

You can, in fact, not discharge your sewage and contaminated water into public spaces even if you are trying something new. What a concept.

At no point did I suggest anything like that.

Clearly they broke the law, and will be punished for it as the law demands. Good.

But it's not really a new idea. Vehicles transporting people through tunnels is something we already know how to do and we have many examples going back decades that are more efficient and higher volume.

This isn't some new early stage innovation that can grow into a great new thing, it's a shittier version of something we already have.

> Every single day, they do what the Las Vegas Loop does in a year.

Tokyo Marunouchi is a multi-branch line totaling 17 miles; the Las Vegas Loop is a (not yet complete) single tunnel just one-tenth that distance.

This is a strange comparison.

Yamanote line is a single line and does around 5 million every day.

Tens of thousands of riders in what time period? Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour, and compare that to any light rail or street car service in any city. There is no way the loop makes sense to build.

> Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour

…what is it?

Peak ridership is about 1300/hour. About how many people you can fit in two trams. Or 10 Disneyland people movers.

That seems high for what it is. Is that hypothetical peak or actually measured capacity?

That is the peak spontaneous ridership per hour. So about 22 people per minute. Probably measured during a convention or something. Most of the time it's probably half of that.

So essentially they made a ride comparable to Space Mountain that takes about 2200 passengers per hour.

> Please, look up how many people it is capable of moving per hour, and compare that to any light rail or street car service in any city.

I have a hard time understanding this criticism. Why not do both?

It seems to me like underground highways make sense as an alternative to above ground highways in urban areas, not that they're an alternative to rail. There's lots of cities with excellent public transport that also make use of underground car travel (Melbourne for e.g.). If a company can figure out how to (safely) make underground highways more quickly and more affordably, it seems like that means we may need to do above-ground roads less frequently -- why would that not be a good thing?

Further, obviously Musk has a PR angle in facilitating tesla traffic here as the test bed in early days, but I don't see any reason that this couldn't be repurposed to rail use at scale.

In urban areas, they're usually an alternative. If you're going past the city, you could build a ground level highway around the city for a lot cheaper. If you're going into the city, it makes more economic sense to leave your car at the periphery of the city and take a rail system in because of the difference in throughput per $ spent building it (as well as the space occupied by parking for people who need to leave their cars in the city). Plus the people leaving the highway will get onto surface streets, and back up the highway.

Being able to make underground tunnels cheaper and faster is cool. Using them for cars is mostly a boondoggle with clearly superior alternatives.

I think that's reasonable. I suppose I also think it idealist that cities will actually act that way in practice in the short term. I'm specifically thinking of examples like the Corniche highway in Alexandria or Marine drive in Mumbai which shows cities are willing to give up gorgeous public space throughout incredibly dense areas to support car traffic. But there's also examples like Boston's "big dig" which shows cities are willing to spend extra to move those auto pathways underground. At least in the short term it seems that 1) cities aren't giving up entirely on cars, but 2) are willing to pay more to have them underground.

I suspect in practice the actual approach is going to be a mix of all of the above. So my reasoning is primarily that if all cities won't give up cars anyway, it seems objectively better to make it easier to at least move more of them underground. I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.

> I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.

It's Friday night so I lack the motivation to go on a stats-finding expedition, but anecdotally this seems like a circular issue to me. Public transportation sucks, so no one wants to fund it and we invest money into car infrastructure. Traffic gets worse, but public transportation is still bad because we haven't improved it, so we dump more money into car infrastructure, and etc.

I do hear you about the practical realities, though. Most people will drive if they can, because it is more convenient (so long as we can keep building more roads, even at exorbitant prices).

I think there would be far less support if people could see what they're actually spending on car infrastructure. At least in the US, it's currently so fractured it's hard to get an idea. Registration fees, gas taxes, federal taxes that get pumped into highway maintenance, etc. There's no clear "we spend $X on car infrastructure, and we could have really good public transportation for $Y".

The LVCC Loop has demonstrated a peak capacity of ~4,400–4,500 passengers per hour in testing.

How did you arrive at tens of thousands of riders?

I was at the world’s biggest automotive show. It was packed.

I didn't realize they could fit tens of thousands of people in the waiting areas. Those stations must really be something to behold.

So then saying “ Tens of thousands of riders” is a lie since they weren’t actually using the tunnels to ride in at the time.

I didn’t say anything like at the same time.

In my week in Vegas for SEMA from 8am to well after dark it was always jam packed. That’s tens of thousands of riders.

What was it like when you rode it?

I’m not in LA so I haven’t ridden it but that’s a moot point to the discussion.

Having tens of thousands of drivers over an unspecified time period rather than simultaneously isn’t really a flex imho.

I didn’t intend it to be a flex.

I was stating what I saw when I rode it.

>Tens of thousands of riders

You saw tens of thousands of riders?

That anecdote just doesn't jibe with the throughput numbers -- that's why it seems like a flex, it's grossly inflated.

Now before we go into pedantry and you talk about how 'riders' meant 'all willing participants who are sitting in line' , fine -- i've been to SEMA and I understand those crowds , but those aren't riders. It's a misreporting of the situation, and frankly it seems intentional.

I did.

I was in and around multiple stations for a week, from early till late, and never saw a single one anything other than packed. Lineups up the turned off escalators topside were extremely common. Many tens of thousands of people were riding.

FWIW I was at the event that caused the worlds biggest event centre (the Vegas convention centre) to expand, because it wasn’t big enough to host the event.

Millions and millions of people in and around the convention centre, all serviced by the loop.

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