“I tried a prototype outside of its optimal use case and it was half baked.” Surprise surprise!
(asking a bit naively, it's the first time I hear about it)
Vegas has never had meaningful public transit investment, and a real subway would cost billions and take decades of political will that simply doesn’t exist here. The Loop fits the actual use case: moving convention attendees between LVCC halls and eventually casino properties, quickly, in a city where distances are deceptive and walking in 115° heat is brutal.
For that narrow purpose, point-to-point, climate-controlled, short-hop movement in a dense tourist corridor, it works reasonably well. The comparison to a subway is a bit of a category error; no subway was ever on the table. The real question is whether it beats surface-level shuttles and moving walkways, which it probably does.
The critique is fair though: it’s not scalable the way a subway is (throughput is limited by number of cars), and it’s privately owned infrastructure serving commercial interests rather than a public transit network.
AVs in tunnels allow for a wide range of density from 2-seater to high density bus/train-car like vehicles that can convoy through tunnels but still do point-to-point and on-demand.
The main challenge is convincing the train-obsessed that 3d travel is better than 1d travel.
How many exit tunnels will need to exist for the final above-ground stage of the trip to be quick and not increase the total length of the route significantly?
If there are exit tunnels all over the place, how long would it take to build all of them? If there aren't, how do you avoid massive jams as the multiple lanes merge to the single exit tunnel lane?
How do all the exit tunnels connect to the surface streets in the many areas where there's no room for another lane to be built anywhere?
They could terminate to converted underground parking garages (cities already have quite a few) and with AVs the need for personal parking would be greatly reduced. People would have plenty of time to get in and out without blocking the tunnel.
It's actually insane that most trains stations block the track, how quickly would you fire the dev that insisted on holding a perf critical mutex while waiting on user input?
Building the tunnels does need to be automated but that's exactly what Boring company is doing.
Ultimately human driving will be banned within cities. It's just far too dangerous. It's almost as deadly as smoking especially in cities and the risk asymmetry is extreme: pedestrians and those around the car are in far more danger than the driver.
As for the idea of a convoy of magic cars, it’s a nice idea but I don’t think it holds up to actual math. Specifically, area used. There are plenty of variants of this graphic, and here’s a tongue in cheek one:
The fundamental issue is that individual low-capacity vehicles are large and use lane space inefficiently. Sure, perfect self driving might improve the situation, maybe by a factor of two or, extremely optimistically, a little more. But a factor of two isn’t really good enough.
Consider the 405 freeway in Los Angeles through the Sepulveda pass. It carries over 300k passengers per day (I’m not sure whether this counts Sepulveda Blvd as well, but, either way, we’re talking about 12+ traffic lanes), and traffic sucks. Maybe really advanced self driving could double capacity. Sticking a freeway lane in a narrow tunnel does nothing to speed it up or increase capacity.
In contrast, Wikipedia’s estimate of light rail capacity is about 8x as high for a rail track as compared to a lane of traffic. A single pair of light rail tracks could perform comparably to the entire Sepulveda Pass mess of roads. If actual intelligent, retroactive planning happened, there would be four tracks for one express and one local each way, New York style, and the whole assembly would be quieter, cheaper, far faster (at least during rush hour), and use massively less energy. But self-driving Teslas would not get most of those gains.
(E-bikes and the kind of culture that would get a hundred thousand or so people to ride them over the pass on their commute would also do the trick, but good luck with that. Although… the pass isn’t that long, and maybe Dutch-style levels of dedication to cycling might actually make it work. Los Angeles with real bike infrastructure would be quite a sight!)
2. Aren't AVs suppose to greatly alleviate the traffic problem on existing roads since AVs can/will coordinate efficiently. I'm actually surprised that the loop doesn't operate autonomously and requires drivers
3. Wouldn't flying cars be the ultimate 3D model, as oppose to digging limited tunnels.
2) Yes I'm surprised also. Any theories on why? Too much of an edge case for tesla's focus?
3) I think yes but very few building have heliports, far more have parking garages that could double as tunnel ingress/egress. I think both will be used but tunnels support higher density and have less dependence on weather.
Cars can fail, you have to leave enough room to allow cars behind to stop in time to avoid a (cascade) crash.
(yeah, taking 140 km/h, quite high for a car especially in tunnels like this, but anything slower would be slower than our slow trains and would be quite disappointing)
I suppose you do that by making the system as convenient and efficient (cost effective both for the operator and the users, energy efficient, good capacity, good speed, not more wasteful hardware wise, good longevity in the long run) as, or more than a properly setup train system?
Another commenter has a good point though, in a place that's not willing to invest in good public transport, there's a void to fill I suppose.