How would we feel about it if the tunnels were for bikes? Seems like that would have some benefits: sheltered from the weather, no interaction with multi-ton vehicles driven by inattentive drivers, etc.

The small size of the The Boring Company's tunnels seems perfect for bicycles.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/worlds-longest-cycling-tu...

As a bicyclist, it might make sense, but not commonly. In rural or undeveloped areas, it's cheaper to just pave a bike path aboveground. In dense and developed areas, the sheer number of potential destinations means you'd need an unreasonable high number of points from which to emerge from the tunnel; better to just build protected bike lanes where bicyclists can transition to ordinary sidewalk-borne pedestrians by merely stepping off their bike. The only tunnel solution that makes sense would be a "highway" through a dense area with only few onramps/offramps, but that implies that you have a very high amount of urban density such that bike trips (which are usually under five miles) can't just be done using dedicated above-ground protected bike lanes. Or hell, an actual subway.

Maybe not bikes but small electric vehicles such as golf carts would be great. Most wouldn't want to go to work all sweaty.

It amazes me that a lot of these green cities haven't incorporated a small golf cart lanes as most people work within a range of a golf cart distance to travel.

The cost would be a lot cheaper than a car, no need for insurance premiums(if so, very little) , and less maintenance than . Also could likely double the lane traffic within the equivalent car lanes. The consumer would be more than willing to get on board using and buying golf carts just for the financial benefit of it.

Isn't this the selling point of Bird/Lime/Citibike etc... personal mobility? With e-mobility you don't arrive all sweaty.

Golf carts can provide rain and sun protection and can also allow for people to drive their kids to school and other activities as well.

Not saying that ebikes are bad but it would also be more appealing for the masses to embrace golf carts over bikes as a replacement for their vehicles.

But it's only good if you are going from one end of the tunnel to the other. You are cut off from all of the destinations in between. This is fine if you're talking about a tunnel that goes across a highway or something, but not great if you're bypassing all of downtown. I'd much rather see cars and trucks underground and bikes on the surface.

One could imagine a city where the streets are only for bikes/pedestrians/scooters/etc... and deliveries happen via underground tunnels where there is parking every other block and a freight elevator to bring the goods to the surface. A kind of futurist ideal that will never work because it would be horrendously expensive and the elevators would always be breaking down and as the city grew the system would be trapped at its current size and become increasingly overloaded over time.

Safety rules require exits every 300m, which is about 1 a block. That sounds about right for a bicycle expressway.

It is a much bigger ask to have an above ground station entrance on every block.

Separated bike lanes at street level or bust. Digging tunnels underground for bikes to get around is pants-on-head backwards- like we're trying to find the most expensive and circuitous solution to a problem we already know the answer to.

Actually, what it's closest to is Personal Rapid Transit (PRT), which is a transit idea that has generally always underwhelmed every place it's been introduced, starting from Morgantown in 1975.

It's kind of unimaginably worse... PRT has basically always assumed automation, with practical PRTs having very few implementation differences from AGT. But the Boring solution is manually operated, so it's going to have all the downsides of PRT (really more since the boarding time is worse) with the extra operating expense of paying an operator for each vehicle.

I wonder if it would be possible to fit a commercial AGT like Mitsubishi Crystal Mover into the Boring tunnels. They're wide enough I think but I don't know if the height clearance is sufficient. And of course AGTs are always constructed with a fire egress walkway which wouldn't fit, but Boring seems to have already accepted that significant safety limitation.

> But the Boring solution is manually operated

The intent is that it's supposed to be autonomous cars moving around, but it seems Elon vastly overestimated the speed with which autonomous cars can actually be delivered, so the manual operation is just a stopgap solution.

Then again, it's pretty telling that he's struggling to recreate the features of systems developed 50 years ago.

Wait, the LV underground Teslas have to be manually driven? An enclosed track like that is basically ideal for self driving, there is no reason they shouldn't be able to do it with their current tech.

"Six killed in self-driving car pileup under Las Vegas" would be such bad PR for all involved that even someone as tone deaf as Elon probably has some cold feet.

The current Teslas in Convention Center tunnel have human drivers. The original plan was to have automated pods but that would have cost money. It might be possible to drive Tesla automated, but it is probably not easy to disconnect the drivers seat.

Human drivers can't be cheap either, and they reduce the capacity of the vehicle by a whopping 25%. Or are the cars in self driving mode but still stuck with the driver alertness systems? That would be a terrible job, holding on the wheel of a self driving car in a tunnel all day long just to keep the self driving system from getting mad and stopping the car.

It's hard for me not to view the situation as intentional. Conversion of buses to guideway operation has been done by local shops in several cases around the world. If you look at the tunnel design it seems that the small side curbs may have been intended to support side guidewheels similar to what many AGTs use. It's hard to believe that introducing at least steering guidance would have been that big of a project, but when you look at the stations it seems pretty clear that there was zero consideration of any kind of existing guidance technology. Sure, some of this can be attributed to a very hand-wavey "we'll do it in software," but it's hard for me to believe that automation was every seriously planned when they didn't build out mechanical steering guidance and design the stations for it. That's well-established technology going just about to WWII and the early Boeing APM experiments, and with a track record of shops doing semi-custom conversions of existing vehicles.

Ultimately I think Boring/Tesla would introduce automation to the Las Vegas tunnels faster if they just bought a commercial moving-block system like Cityflo and adapted the vehicles. The fact that they don't seem to be pursuing this makes me think that the automation goal was never serious outside of its potential as a marketing tool for Tesla, which they are perhaps ironically also failing to deliver.

you know, once the tunnels are built, they can be re-purposed later.

Re-purposed for what? It's not like they're building them wide enough for anything but cars.

Those tunnels will turn into beatiful homeless shelters. Like catacombs from Demolition Man.

Then just build homeless shelters. Cheaper, less excavation, and less dystopia.

Subways in the US cost about $1B per mile. The Boring Company is spending about $10M per mile.

Subways have a capacity of about 50,000 people per hour. TBC's tunnels have a capacity of 4,000 people per hour.

So 8% of the capacity for 1% of the cost.

Even if the numbers are an order of magnitude out, it would still be attractive. 8% of the capacity for 10% of the cost would be fabulously useful in smaller cities like Vegas.

The cost for the subway could also be reduced the same way as the loop by the way. Here in Switzerland a km of train tunnel costs around 50-200M per km.

The 4,000 passenger number is afair only for the current section, the planned expansion will have a capacity of 2,000 passenger per hour.

The Las Vegas Loop makes sense as a vanity project.

Have they operated at anywhere close to 4000 per hour?

> Subways in the US cost about $1B per mile.

No they don't. The most expensive subway in the country costs $1B per mile. Typical costs are much cheaper (and could be even cheaper, but that's another story).

To get down to TBC's cost/passenger, they'd need to come down to $120M/mile.

Subways at $120M/mile would be pretty freaking awesome.

Subways can run in the Boring tunnels. They are smaller than what are normally used but same size as the London Underground tunnels.

This means that need to put down rails and control systems in the tunnels. I can't see that being $10M/mile.

The huge cost for subway systems are stations. What do the Boring stations cost? I bet the $10M/mile doesn't include the stations. Fairly simple stations for Las Vegas should be pretty cheap.

Isn't the question if 4,000 people an hour is sufficient? An electric scooter can possibly get 1/100th the cargo to a destination at 1/100th the price of a semi truck, but does that actually solve the problem?

And Las Vegas isn't paying a dime for it. The cost is carried by the boring company and all that Las Vegas does is give them permission to dig the tunnels

[citation needed]

I have the impression that the Boring Company could reduce costs of subway mile significantly if they tried

> So 8% of the capacity for 1% of the cost.

If this is the way that economies of (small-) scale work w.r.t. tunnels, then how 'bout we shoot coffin-like pods down pneumatic tubes for something close to free ?

but just think of the income that's going to be generated from films and games incorporating these tunnels into their stories!

actually, I'm not even kidding.

I’d be more interested in the cost per mile for the end user.

I was under the impression you had a driver take you through the existing tunnel, all those wages can’t be cost effective for users.

Any chance the tunnels could later be re-purposed as subway tunnels once people realize that this approach doesn't work?

Everything about LV is an affront to god and man. A city shouldn't be there, and it's having issues for that reason. That they want an overpriced loop that delivers little shouldn't come as a surprise.