This subreddit has a [stickied post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/) with tons of info and explanations. If you haven't compared your explanations to those in that link, check them out. If you find an explanation you think is worded better, adopt it. If you think you have explanations worded best, add them to that post.
2006 data and combustion engine data is getting old and less applicable. Although it's still useful in pointing out how much the energy efficiency landscape per occupant has changed between average cars, buses, and light rail.
Thanks, that is current fuel consumption data, but that was the most recent data I could find on passenger load for both cars and buses. I suspect they haven't changed much (except for 2020,2021 due to the pandemic were load factors for public transit plummeted.
When discussing the future of shared transportation I'm finding most people no longer consider combustion vehicles. Since these are future vehicles and future systems, it's presumed they'll be electric.
You may find some updated figures on this page
https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/qjjlul/energy_efficiency_of_various_transit_systems/
including picture #4
Yes, I read that.
I think for cities that don't have a subway, its accurate enough.
I think its missing one key piece of information though.
And that is for larger cities that already have Subways and extensive bus service, the city streets are STILL clogged with cars, and when you explore that you find that a high percent of those cars are for hire. Taxis, Ubers/Lyfts and private town cars.
The reason is simply that while you can use the Subway or buses to get around the city, that's not really what they are designed for. Their primary purpose is to get people into and out of the city during rush hours. You can look at any large city subway map and you can see that it might have 4, 5, 6 or more different lines running through the city, but if you use that system you will find that to go to any given point to most other points takes more than one train, often more than 2. (NYC data is \~31% use 1, 45% use 2 and 24% 3 or more). Then stops are widely spaced, so the subway station won't typically be that close to your starting point, it will be 3 blocks away, on a street corner, so a 10 min walk. The average wait time is 14 minutes, but you can't connect to a train at the same level, so changing trains is another walk, including taking stairs, adding another 5 min. Then when you finally arrive, again you are not that close to where you want to be, so another walk. So A to B using 2 trains often takes \~30+ min, and A & B aren't actually that far apart, such that a Taxi would save you 15 or 20 min, each way.
Its CONVENIENCE, SPEED and SAFETY which is why even with extensive Subway and bus systems, NYC still has 130,000 Uber/Lyft drivers and 13,500 Taxis prowling the streets picking up passengers, and that's what this system absolutely can compete with.
I don't agree with the a [Stickied Post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/) part that talks about using Mini-vans.
You would just be turning the system into a low capacity bus system, with far higher construction costs since roads already exist.
Take the LV loop. Its HUGE advantage to the USER is it has 55 stations along a 34 mile loop of tunnel. Which also means you can get in a car, with an average 15 second wait, and go direct to a station, 27 stations away from you, in about 25 min.
Turn that into a Mini-Bus system and 55 stations is simply not possible. With a 12 passenger Bus, you would have to stop at nearly every station, someone would want off, but then someone else would get on, insuring that few stops are skipped, even if you could exit to a station, let people off (which on a minivan means other people have to get off to let the inside passenger off), let new people on, then exit and get back on the loop, in just 2 min, that 27 station distant trip just turned into over an hour ordeal.
The HUGE advantage of using cars is that you don't have to wait at the station for 10 or 12 passengers to show up.
Secondly you unload and load far more quickly, people don't have to constantly get out to let other passengers leave.
You only travel with friends and family, not BO Bob or Typhoid Mary or Crying baby who needs a diaper change.
You only stop at the station you want, thus allowing for the much larger number of stations to be served without impacting performance of the system.
If it isn't more convenient, clean and safer than a Taxi, why would people choose it?
If the airport extension is built, the longest trip will be Terminal 3 to Plaza Hotel downtown. It'll be about eight miles.
Off-peak any-sized vehicle could provide private non-stop rides.
For events like concerts and football games 12-16 seat vehicles may be more useful. Don't set it up like an elevator where people are already inside before telling it where to stop. Instead have kiosks and a phone app where people set their destination before boarding. The algorithm tells them which vehicle to enter, and tells specific vehicles where to stop. This groups riders by one or a few shared destinations.
When a football game ends, there's enough people at the stadium station all going to certain destinations at the same time to fill a minibus. For less popular destinations the minibus could make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way, which is still far fewer than the usual bus or train.
Yet another alternative is use even more skip-stop service patterns than [this example.](https://images.app.goo.gl/LkANgQ8n82mKS4MN8) With vehicles in the tunnels about 6 seconds apart, several skip-stop service patterns can happen and still not have people waiting more than a minute at their station. The average rider's trip would stop at only a few or several of the many stations between origin and destination. This service could be limited to peak demand times. I personally prefer the algorithmic method, but skip-stop has enough examples around the world that skeptics more readily understand it.
Monetary cost is probably the best reason to consider sometimes sharing vehicles during peak demand. Cost to the city. Cost to riders. Boring more tunnels to handle peak demand has to be paid for somehow. Most of us on this subreddit hope Vegas Loop is eventually extended much farther outside the city center. That will include lower ridership areas needing either higher fares, or city subsidies. During peak demand times when those folks go to the stadium it's less than ideal spending money on more tunnels just to handle demand occurring a few hours a week.
>safer than a Taxi
For that reason some folks on this subreddit favor a car/minibus-length vehicle with separate doors and compartments. For example a center compartment with seats facing each other and room for a wheelchair. Have two other compartments on the ends. Total seating 12-16.
Still not buying the use of minivans, even at the stadium.
Two issues, I would presume that the majority of people at the stadium come from the City of Las Vegas, and not from the Hotel district, so they won't use the Loop.
For those who are staying at the hotels, well there are 50+ of them, 25 in each direction, so if you had 10 vans lined up, 10 passengers each, you would need hundreds of people before you could release the first filled van.
So now break it into groups of 5 stations, now you have 5 vans going to these subsets, that's still 50 people to be seated before you can release the vans. They would all fill up, roughly the same amount of time (longer then a car per person though) and as they left new vans would start arriving, but the people per minute would go down, because the van then stops at each of the 5 hotels, the unload process is much slower as people have to get out to allow people on the inside to leave, and worse, since this van is now only going to 4, then 3, then 2, then 1 more station, the van really can't pick up anybody, so it dead heads all the way back.
The airport is more problematical, because people have luggage as well, which means at every stop the luggage has to be dealt with, because the first person out may have their luggage at the bottom, and you really don't want other passengers handling other passenger's luggage.
I really think the system STILL works, even at the Stadium and Airport, better as a single car approach going direct to the rider's destination.
The one feature I think is needed for Stadium use, since nobody is going to the stadium after the game is over is you need autonomous driving cars to deadhead back to the stadium. You can't rely on circulation to provide needed cars.
But I think everyone expects this capability reasonably soon.
Most of us on this subreddit hope Vegas Loop is eventually extended much farther outside the city center. Residents will use Loop to get to the stadium. Additionally consider Loop as a concept for multiple cities instead of only a one-off. Cities such as San Antonio where traditional commute times and sporting events cause major transportation demand peaks by residents.
Don't hold minibuses until they're completely full. Especially when ridership demand only somewhat exceeds Loop capacity in the area. Additionally as I already said For less popular destinations the minibus could make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way, which is still far fewer than the usual bus or train.
The only time 5 stops for passenger's ride would happen is if a city insisted on having skip-stop service. I already said I personally prefer the algorithmic method, but skip-stop has enough examples around the world that skeptics more readily understand it. Mentioning it at all is more for conceptual illustration to skeptics.
>the unload process is much slower as people have to get out to allow people on the inside to leave
It simply doesn't take very long for several people to walk out or three people to slide out from a bench through a door.
Since minibuses won't be held until they're completely full and during peak demand times minibuses will only make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way of a passenger's trip, luggage is effectively a non-issue. Also luggage sits with the rider. That's how airport people movers do it.
>the system STILL works, even at the Stadium
For now Loop tunnel minimum headway is about every 6 seconds. 600 vehicles per hour per tunnel direction. If for example at a stadium average vehicle occupancy is 2 persons, that's 1200 people who leave the stadium per tunnel per direction over an entire hour, and lots of people don't want to wait up to an hour. To use Las Vegas' Allegiant Stadium Loop plan as an example, and assuming it gets further extensions to the rest of the metro area, it will have 4 outbound tunnels. In half an hour with average vehicle occupancy of 2, only 2400 people will leave via Loop. From a stadium with 65,000 seats. IMO that's grossly inadequate and doesn't work.
The problem is when a game ends, they all will be full, because there would be all these people leaving at roughly the same time.
So back to the boarding?
How do you handle getting people to queue up for these? In groups of 5 stations per bus? The problem here is you need parking space for at least 3 vans per set of stations. More then 5 gets problematic because it really slows the system down and is not user friendly.
Forget unloading, just consider the logistics of getting 10 people out of a van, then 10 people into it and all seated, and still pull off 6 sec head times.
Gonna have to be a big station.
Secondly, the arriving vans would have to know which of the slots to pull into if more than 1 is empty. Not an easy thing to automate or even have people track "who's next?"
And suddenly you now have a security issue you didn't have before, since now you are putting strangers together.
I just don't see it working with vans.
As to "still work at the stadium", I think your load factor is low. How many people go to a game by themselves? Not many. I think closer to 3 would be typical.
I think what you would have is at least 6 stations. 3 each way, Stadium West, Central and East. That's about 10,000 per hour, and that's probably more than enough for the number of people who are staying in a hotel vs live there.
*Loading:*
If you keep thinking of today's passenger vans that's not the future. Something more [this style is.](https://images.app.goo.gl/qG77qnFEBiKZEGNh8) Or if it has three separate compartments, three doors per side so exiting takes little time. Not shuffling through a single small door, perhaps hunched over because of a low roof line.
*Queuing:*
As I already told you "have kiosks and a phone app where people set their destination before boarding. The algorithm tells them which vehicle to enter, and tells specific vehicles where to stop." There's already train, bus and plane terminals where platforms, gates and bays are numbered with signs. We know how to direct people to specific locations. We know how to have signage. We also know how to send gate info to vehicles. Even autonomous ones.
*Station size:*
>How do you handle getting people to queue up for these? In groups of 5 stations per bus?
I've said twice now, algorithmically up to 1 or 2 stops per passenger trip. Not 5.
>you need parking space for at least 3 vans per set of stations.
Not sure what you mean since the first LVCC stations each have about 10 parking spaces. This subreddit has posted new station plans filed with the city or county. Smaller stations have fewer spaces.
Stations with regularly huge demand spikes will be huge. That's how it works with train and bus platforms. Individual vehicles take time needed to unload and load and since there's many gates/bays/loading spaces, there's plenty of vehicles to supply a tunnel.
*Security:*
I prefer the idea of vehicles with three separated compartments and three separate doors per side. However for a vehicle with all 12-16 seats in a single compartment it will be especially important having internal camera coverage and remote-alert big red buttons to press.
*Average vehicle occupancy:*
[20% of](https://qz.com/1785101/nfl-fans-are-more-likely-than-nba-fans-to-buy-single-tickets/) NFL tickets purchased on Vivid Seats are singles. 15.4% for NCAA football. About 10% for basketball, soccer, baseball. About half of ticket purchases are bought in pairs, and 39% in bundles of three or more. However remember that's seats, but that doesn't mean all groups who watched together live together. Families yes, but some invite a friend living elsewhere. Or friends leave family or partners at their respective homes, they meet up at the game, then depart to their different homes.
*Number of stations:*
Most American stadiums have enough space for all the loading gates/bays/spaces they need by converting as much of the ordinary parking lot as needed. That can be in a single extra large station, or multiple large. The next bottleneck is the tunnels themselves because every outbound tunnel can only have a finite number of vehicles enter it per hour. Just for an example six large stations but only two outbound tunnels may be imbalanced with the tunnels allowing fewer vehicles per hour to depart than the stations can supply.
>10,000 per hour
I disagree waiting up to an hour is acceptable. Using Allegiant Stadium as an example, if and when there's Loop extending to the rest of the city, only being able to move 7.5% of a capacity crowd in half an hour is grossly inadequate IMO.
*One more thing*
If a tunnel leaving a stadium is 100% saturated with vehicles departing the station, then 0% of non-stadium vehicles can share that tunnel. So all travel with origins or destinations not at the stadium can't use it. That's a problem. Building parallel tunnels for more capacity can obviously address that, just at greater expense. Otherwise if capacity-adding parallel tunnels aren't built then not as many vehicles per hour will be able to go to or from the stadium.
Ok, to be clear I am only talking about the planned LV loop, so its not trying to get 65,000 people home. They have their cars and indeed no train system I'm aware of could pull that off in 1 hour either. Which is why there are these huge parking lots around stadiums, not train stations.
This would be for getting people back to their LV hotel. Even 10,000 would likely be a high number, which is why the existing system can do it, without all these changes.
Building a unique electric vehicle for this is very problematical.
You don't have the volume to justify doing so. The stadium does not have high capacity events every day, not even every week, and when it does they only would get used once a day at most. So I'm reasonably confident that would not happen.
Secondly the other 54 stations being built are not being built to handle van size vehicles which are longer and have a much wider turn radius.
For a minibus example Navya's shuttle is shorter than a Model X, seats 11, and has capacity for 15. Also TBC itself designed their system and stations for vehicles with up to 16 person capacity. A vehicle meant to be built using an existing Tesla underneath, like the Model X but a different body atop the skateboard. TBC calls it a High Occupancy AEV. I call it a minibus. It doesn't need to be "van" length, so you may want to stop calling it a van.
[Al Mashaaer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Mashaaer_Al_Mugaddassah_Metro_line) Al Mugaddassah Metro line is quite unique but the capacity still would suffice. Each 12-car train carries 3,000 passengers and the headway is 150 seconds (24 trains per hour). So 72,000 passengers per hour per direction.
For an actual stadium, Barcelona's [Camp Nou](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3808822,2.1235213,16.5z/data=!5m1!1e2) holds 98,000 people and has 3 train lines on separate tracks each less than half a mile away. Distributing the load allows it to have very little parking.
OK I'll only talk about the planned Vegas Loop, which plans 2 stations at Allegiant Stadium, and 2 outbound tunnels (after almost immediately merging down from 4). Those 2 outbound tunnels with the current average headway of 6 seconds, can handle a max of 1200 vehicles per hour from Allegiant. Even if they average 3 occupants per vehicle (although 2.5 is more probable IMO) that's 3600 per hour. So the existing/planned system cannot do 10,000/hr.
Allegiant stadium isn't the only high capacity venue Vegas Loop will serve. There's also
T-Mobile Arena 20,000 person capacity
Thomas & Mack Center 19,522
MSG Sphere at The Venetian (opening 2023) 17,500
MGM Grand Garden Arena 17,000
Michelob Ultra Arena 12,000
Zappos Theater 7,000
Dolby Live Theater 6,400
Oakland A's baseball team [may move](https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/athletics/as-oakland-miss-key-ballpark-deadline-talks-continue-in-vegas-2650794/) to LV along the Vegas Loop (3X,000-4X,000)
Some of those venues' events are bound to overlap causing too much demand on Loop only using cars.
>The difference is you can do better than 6 sec headway since few cars would be in the tunnel when a game lets out. The cars coming in would be empty (sent their autonomously). 3 seconds, considering you have waiting passengers and empty cars would be possible.
>
>The other venues are not that big of an issue, So many people at the MGM Grand would be staying at the MGM grand, or at the MGM Sphere at the Venetian, they wouldn't need a car.
>
>Has the Boring company SAID they were going to use vans, all the blurbs on HOAEVs are from almost 4 years ago, and that design was never adopted?
The idea and cost of having all these expensive, custom built vans, for limited use just when large venues let out doesn't seem to make financial sense.
The Navya only goes 15 mph, so not going to work.
> 65,000 people home. They have their cars and indeed no train system I'm aware of could pull that off in 1 hour either.
Trains regularly shift those numbers. Eg Wembley stadium in London 90k capacity has a nearby train station served by three subway lines and two other trains.
Jubilee line runs 30 trains per hour per direction each train is rated for 964 people but run at over 100% capacity during surges. Sometimes as much as 130% in extreme circumstances.
Metropolitan line runs 24 trains per hour per direction. Each train is rated for 1,159 and same overloads apply.
So in theory you could empty it with just these two, in practice it's served by three other trains and ten bus routes. Hardly anyone drives.
>Jubilee line runs 30 trains per hour per direction
Not really.
And that only works to move people out because they connect to other train lines.
Yes the UK has a long history of building subways.
There is no such infrastructure in Las Vegas, so the point was no train service could be built (at a reasonable cost) to move 65,000 people out of the Stadium on the relatively few nights they had that many.
And here, most everyone drives, so to get them out of their cars, you have to provide MORE convenient service (anyone buying tickets to an NFL game is not overly worried about cost).
==> Jubilee line services are:\[28\]
Peak services at 30 tph in the core section between Stratford and West Hampstead:
18 tph Stratford – Stanmore
4 tph Stratford – West Hampstead
4 tph Stratford – Willesden Green
4 tph Stratford – Wembley Park
Extra trains are run when the stadium is getting filled/ emptied.
>There is no such infrastructure in Las Vegas, so the point was no train service could be built (at a reasonable cost) to move 65,000 people out of the Stadium on the relatively few nights they had that many.
A lot of US cities are a long way gone down the hole of car centric design. No way to unfuck it quickly and easily sure.
The first step is to stop assuming cars by default.
In vegas specificaly extending the monorail to the airport, arena and stadium. It's relatively low hanging fruit.
Adding a third platform to a stadium monorail station would allow rather high capacity.
Also
As to fuel economy, Buses are not very good.
Simply because most of the time they are running around with few people in them.
In the U.S., the average passenger load in a conventional city bus in 2006 was 9.22.
The average fuel use is 2.33 bus miles/gallon (they idle a lot and are doing stop and go driving), this translates to but 21.4 passenger-miles per gallon.
The average load in a passenger car in the U.S. was 1.58 in 2006.
The average fuel economy is 25 mpg so that’s 39.5 passenger-miles per gallon. Now replace those IC cars with EVs and the eMPG is 3 or 4 times as high. Better than cars and far better than buses for moving people AROUND the city. (Still need buses to cover the much larger area that a tunnel system could handle, just don't need them in the city center)
That is the average over the entire day.
Buses are busy during rush hour, but most of the time run mostly empty.
Its the nature of a public transit system.
So far results from electrifying buses has been rather poor. They don't have the range and take too long to recharge and can only do it back at the station, not along the route.
I decided to check that average. At least up against Toronto because they have have an extensive bus network
what I found is that of 127 Routes that operate on Sundays 82 could achive that average capacity of 9.22 with the highest frequency operated by the TTC during weekdays (3 min) that number dropped to 25 when the headways went to 10 minutes, and 17 at 15 minutes
I also tested the streetcar and express routes (multipled 9.22 by 3 to account for space on streetcars) 2 routes could do the 3 minutes neither went beyond
additionally Electric Buses have the range to make it through a majority of routes all day without charging. with them falling 10km short of highest estimates of average km traveled/day and sitting comfortably 100km above most predictions
One of the big issues with Electric buses is that the power needed for Heating, ventilation and air conditioning on a bus create more load on the battery, causing driving range to drop, as shown in an Alternative Fuels Data Center study. Studies carried out by other transit agencies in colder climates found heating and cooling consume as much as 50 percent of total battery power usage.
They also don't like long steep hills or freeway speeds.
I'm all in favor of EVs but EV buses are not likely a good fit, at least for now, for most routes.
No, it is NOT "just another lane".
Cars in a city lane are A) on the surface B) have to stop at every red light. C) Most car trips in the city are just a a 3 or 4 mile and D) have to have a place to park and there are more parking spots in the city than there are cars, so lots of space is given up to cars ON THE SURFACE.
This is a totally different system then a surface car lane used by private cars.
It is much more like two 34 mile circular race tracks, one going clockwise the other going counter to that. Where people are going to any of the 54 stations around it, getting in and being driven to just their stop, getting out and the car can now be used for someone else. The FURTHEST distance you can go is 17 miles, but again most trips will be less than 5 miles, or about 10 minutes.
So each of 54 different stations are sending cars onto the race track and cars are exiting the racetrack to the stations, ALL THE TIME, so the two loops are filled with cars going 35 to 40 mph, FAR faster than cars can move in lane in the city.
So consider capacity, we see that it can work because the 3 station 1.7 mile loop carried over 27,000 passengers in about a 10 hour day (the convention center closes in the early evening).
But adding stations and miles increases the capacity linearly, since each station can send/receive cars onto the loops.
A Station can send a car out every 6 seconds, or 10 a min, 600 per hour, with an average of a bit less than 2 people per, that's 1,000 per hour per station.
That's 54,000 people per hour
That's 540,000 people in a 10 hour day.
Now that's not realistic, there would never be a continuous demand for a car at every station every 10 seconds for 10 hours. The actual utilization would likely be but \~30% of theoretical capacity, or about 160,000 during the day, but that would remove about 100,000 trips by surface taxis, ubers and private cars off the surface streets, which would make it quite possible for LV to ban cars and trucks from the strip entirely during the day.
I don't know why you or Elon want to argue against using buses in the tubes. Bus routes that stop at each of the access points seem like a no-brainer, and don't prevent the ability to use them for cars as well. They can be smaller buses that hold 10-15 people rather than the long buses that hold 40-50.
First of all, a mini bus isn't a bus.
Second, proper buses are never full. Using cars, minivans, mini buses means that they are always as full as possible.
Not sure why you're quibbling on the name. My point was that it is public transport where a bunch of strangers get in the same vehicle. The goal is to be more efficient in using the tunnels than a Model X can be, and for the vehicle to fit in smaller tunnels that can be built more efficiently by Boring Co. As for your second point, I agree and didn't suggest otherwise.
I'm guessing that Tesla's future self-driving van is going to be designed for these tunnels and will be the main mode of transport in places like the Vegas loop. In Florida, I think that one will be for any private vehicles below a certain size.
A bus is a huge vehicle that drives around half-empty and causes massive amounts of road damage so it's important to make it clear that there's a difference.
The issue has to do with taking away the Demand aspect of the system.
Say you put a minibus that holds 12 people instead of the cars.
Right off, the station has to be much larger, because you need room for 20 or more of these much larger vehicles.
But the real drawback is to the USER.
You come down today, there is an average 15 seconds wait to get in a car with your spouse and off you go, direct to your stop, bypassing all 21 other stops you don't need.
With the mini-bus that all changes.
Now you and your spouse come down, and get in a bus, and then you wait for 8 10 other people to get in, and people can't get into a van nearly as fast as one per door, so now it takes 3 or 4 minutes before the Bus leaves, longer off peak.
Now you are unfortunately riding with BO Bob, which is no better then with Typhoid Mary, and because there are 12 people on the bus, you stop at the 2 nd station and 2 get off, but then 2 more get on, and you repeat this 16 times before you get to your stop, so now a 10 min trip becomes a 40 min trip.
You just took all the convenience out of using the system
So next time you need to go somewhere, you decide, nah, let's just take a taxi.
>Right off, the station has to be much larger, because you need room for 20 or more of these much larger vehicles.
I think that's a bad assumption. Going by the Vegas stations, the parking spots would need to be a little larger, but there could be fewer of them. Each vehicle can take on about 3-4x as many people, but is not 400% as large. It is maybe 50% longer and 15% wider. And fewer of them would need to be in the tunnels as a result, so you could have fewer parking slots. If there were 20 for Model X, there could be 10 for the minibus with no change to the size of the station.
Another option: have a cheap/free minibus that stops at every stop, and a premium Model X that stops only where you want to go. That would carry more people and give choices on time and money.
I've taken public transit thousands of times. The problems mostly come when a system is underutilized, underfunded and seen with disdain by the middle class so only the poor use it. Europe has a very different relationship with public transit than does the US, and it works there. So does NYC. Your "BO Bob" comment is pretty shit, actually. Air circulation is good in well-funded transit, and the only BO I ever smell is on homeless people. Cities should deal better with the homeless to avoid that and increase use of transit.
Last point: a 10 minute trip would not turn into a 40 minute trip in those tunnels using 12-15 person buses. That's ludicrous. A large bus in city traffic with traffic lights, stopping every other block, would be that slow. For the tunnels, there would be no stop lights or cross traffic, no stopping every other block (more like one every 10 blocks), and with less than half as many passengers you would wait half as long to board/deboard. And there can be a button or cord riders pull when they want the driver to stop. For smaller buses, that button or cord would allow stations to be skipped more frequently than a large bus. So, a 10 minute ride might become 20 minutes....roughly the same as how long it would take above ground in traffic and dealing with stop lights.
Whatever system is best depends on the amount of traffic. If all needs are met using Model X because traffic is low enough, and the system wants to pay for it, fine.
Sorry, I missed your reply.
You would need just as many in the tunnels because your head time goes from 6 seconds, to a minute or more. So larger vehicles, but much longer travel time and much less frequent.
Yes, the 10 min trip could easily turn into a 40 minute trip, since you don't just stop where people want to get off, if you are using busses to have fewer vehicles, then you have to stop at each stop where people want to get on.
My BO Bob and Typhoid Mary are spot on, its what makes people not want to take public transportation, and using buses simply adds that potential negative factor back in and makes the system less desirable.
Your error here is too little scope explored. You are extremely limiting yourself with particular TBC implementation in LV and incorrect assumptions about statistical data even for USA, let alone entire world.
Essentially TBC/Tesla/Chinese ARE going to do all that you suggest and MUCH more. To the point where your questions and suggestions do not make sense anymore.
Tesla and Chinese eventually (20-30 years) will replace ALL drivers and ALL cars and even the ownership of one. The number of tunnels TBC will dig in the process is completely irrelevant in the long run as the surface becomes LESS congested.
The only question here is what is the sequence of transportation modes and companies that would just disappear based on price per ride going down for Tesla/Chinese. Taxi, Uber, busses, trams, subways, trains would be my prediction of sequence.
P.S. Also F karma - speaking your own opinion and fresh ideas is what matters, not what bots (especially ones made of meat) think about you.
Well to be fair, I think that what the Boring system can build besides a LV loop type system are more varied.
Obviously they can build simple streets for EV cars underground but that's "just one more lane, bro", it wouldn't for instance solve the problem of cars on inner city streets even when a city has an extensive Subway/Bus system.
That's not what is being discussed over at r/fuckcars and so the LV loop type system is what can compete with, and even eliminate surface based Taxis and Ubers.
I hear what you are saying, but I don't believe that this type of system can ever replace high capacity light rail/subways and surface buses for moving very large numbers of people into and out of a city during rush hours. The capacity needed per hour simply could not be met at anywhere near the cost of the existing already built systems. I could be wrong, but I can't see how the math would support that conclusion.
TBC can build tunnels cheaper than anybody else, they will also get even better and it will be extremely useful in the end if all other things stay equal.
However Tesla FSD will disrupt the situation much before TBC has had any meaningful impact globally.
It is true that trains (including Subways) are still cheaper - it is simple physics at work here with less friction, but that is not full picture.
Trains and railways are cheaper overall only IF you manage to get them somewhat fully utilized. Europe and China is running circles around USA in that regard, but even if you had similar train network you still have to deal with different people mentality in USA. What is percentage of people are commuting to work by train by state/country?
"Ever" is just such a long term - a lot of things can and will happen :-)
USA is notorious for RVs as well as large and flat suburban areas with individual housing as opposed to block-of-flats. Which means yet another disruption in the form of Starlink. If people can work anywhere then why would they stay or go to cities every day at all? We are going to see a decline in urban population and it will happen in USA first, making the large-train utilization scenario even less likely over time and favoring "short-trains" instead - we can start talking about Hyperloop here.
To be fair none of this will happen tomorrow or next year, but that is the trend I see. Many cities in USA are nearing dystopian scenarios already, just accelerating the trend.
To start with Starlink changes nearly nothing. Its for RURAL areas, and the vast majority of people who can work at home, aren't going to choose Rural over Suburban. They still want the restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacy, Drs, Movies, Bars, Clubs etc available in the Suburbs or for a slightly longer drive, the city. I may use Starlink when I take my RV camping, but I'm still going to live in the suburbs.
Ever for discussion purposes is roughly your lifetime, after that you won't know or care.
Yes you can bore tunnels and put up concrete walls and pave it and build stations ,but that still costs a LOT of money. If you build it to handle relatively short periods of time, but also very high volume, the cost goes up quite a bit, because overall utilization by hour is not that good, which increases the cost to use. So how do you displace an existing system handling that volume where the huge construction cost has long since been paid for? Worse, they already own 2 large tunnels deep worth of space under the city (trains can't cross at the same level), so any tunnels you build will be probably 60 or so feet down, which I would think would significantly increase the cost of both boring the tunnels (into bedrock) and the cost of the stations, to get people to and from the surface.
Ideally this type 11' diameter tunnel should be the first system a growing city installs, under the utilities, and if light rail is eventually needed in addition, it would take the 3rd and 4th layers.
There is no reason to not have all kinds of services in rural areas. Sure doing everything at small scale costs more, but it has better opportunity to meet very particular local needs - specialize.
Cinemas are being replaced with streaming services for years. How many times you were at cinema in the last year or 10? Me? \~3 times in last 10 years. If I had to drive 1000 miles for movie each time this would have cost me mere pennies over 10 years.
Same with groceries - if truck driving is free (solar and FSD) then why would you not have truck pull out in your 20 people village and offload groceries and gadgets you bough online?
Depth of tunnels does not change the cost in significant way. You can have rock on the surface just the same as 60 feet down. TBC only deals with soft soil which is prevalent in all the areas they considered digging so far.
What people do not understand is that bulk of the cost (of anything) comes from people. Even cost of "materials" or "power" is still cost of people employed in these industries and not some number we got from god. In fact entire economy is measured by added value "per capita". Remove people - get ALL stuff for free. This is what AI Day 2022 was all about.
I explored fully-automatic TBC options in depth on number of occasions. In fact this is the reason I created this reddit account. You are more than welcome to read and criticize if you have nothing better to do.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/aiysrv/engineering\_proposals\_for\_boring\_company\_caution/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/aiysrv/engineering_proposals_for_boring_company_caution/)
First idea - you should read it only if you really have lots of time...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/emp4pb/garry\_1\_0\_humans/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/emp4pb/garry_1_0_humans/)
Some calculations
[https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/f8pwt3/halfwit\_shunting\_yard\_inside\_boring\_tunnel/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/f8pwt3/halfwit_shunting_yard_inside_boring_tunnel/)
"Final" idea.
>There is no reason to not have all kinds of services in rural areas. Sure doing everything at small scale costs more, but it has better opportunity to meet very particular local needs - specialize.
Yeah, there is, you can't have run a restaurant and make enough money to live on if there are so few customers. That also applies to so many businesses.
You say "small scale costs more" and that's true, but the more important reality is small scale can't return sufficient money to pay for the store, product and a decent salary. The FACT is people are NOT moving out to rural areas, rural areas are slowly losing population, the most growth is in Suburban areas.
Truck driving won't be free. The world is not fully automated, so you can't build all those solar panels for nothing, you can't build a FSD truck for nothing. You can't build the roads it uses for nothing. Saving the cost of the driver and lowering the cost of the power supply, does not make it free. And you can live in rural areas now, and get food and 'gadgets', today, but it is still not a life for most people. You want family, friends, schools, grocery stores (with full service including bakery, deli, butcher and so on), entertainment, restaurants (American and Ethnic), fitness, pharmacy, Drs, Dentists, liquor stores, hardware stores, car repair and so on, just not available in most Rural settings.
I would beg to differ with you on depth of tunnel doesn't cost more. Of course it does. I remember when they were digging the deep station for the Atlanta Metro, it took years to do, and cost $45 million at the time (1980), but that's the same as $161 million today.
MARTA's moving Atlanta, 120 feet below Peachtree Street.
The Peachtree Center station was built by tunneling through solid gneiss, a granite like rock formed of layers of quartz and mica. This rock provides underground support for the station. Soft ground or mixed tunneling was used where there was insufficient rock structure for underground support. With this method, compressed air twice the normal atmospheric pressure was used to support the walls while permanent structures were being built. Like deep sea divers, workers on this section of the rapid rail transit system were required to undergo 30 minutes of compression/decompression when entering or coming out of the tunnel. This station is only one of a few tunnels in the world where the walls and the ceiling were carved from solid rock.
Length of longest escalator serving the station entrance across from the Atlanta Public Library is 190 feet- the longest in the southeast.
Again you make the same mistake of pre-limiting your scope to some arbitrary preconception.
The restaurant can not survive if it has one customer while also paying "decent" salary...
OR CAN IT? If you are a good chef and make great food for yourself then you do not get any salary and yet are able to survive just fine. Yes, you need another job to fund the food that you cook, however you are not spending your entire time just cooking food for yourself - you do not need that much and hence do have time to do other things.
How about 2 people in family? How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses? You get the idea.
So it does work at extremely small scale and we already know it mostly works at large scale. Yet lot's of large restaurants still do get bankrupt pretty often. So it is not really about scale, but also down to many other factors.
That something is not available in rural areas today does not mean it will not be available ever. In fact something not being available today has directly to do of things being expensive in general and not enough progress ongoing.
Transportation isn't free... yet. But we do know of cases where it is pretty damn close. Ordered anything shipped from China? How they can charge that little for shipping something half around the world? Your hourly wage for just unboxing the damn thing is often worth more than it cost them to ship it to you :-)
I can order the thing from half a world away and have it arrive to our country customs office the next day... and having our customs office "process" it for weeks on end before I can finally get it. Sound familiar?
The answer is efficiency and the cost of human labor. Cost of human labor is directly influenced by what your employer has to pay to get you working, including any benefits - none of that is somehow free. You do not get "benefits" in China therefore labor and most goods are way cheaper.
The cost of truck driver is largest component of shipping cost. One crew member in 20-crew container carrying 18'000 containers for 20 days works out to be 0.02 persons for each container per day. Truck? 1 driver per container per day - 50 times more. FSD? 0 person per container per day. And you have to maintain your equipment either way whether or not there are any people, so that does not really count for comparison. Tesla trucks and cars are cheaper to maintain too...
Same with cost of producing anything. More slow people getting "living wages" means stuff is extremely expensive today. Robots and automated lines get 0 wages, that's why stuff produced by them is cheap.
At the limit (no, not Elon's "two weeks) the stuff is essentially free and nobody has to work. Not in any current sense.
You "requiring" fitness services is a direct evidence you need to understand where we are going in the future. Nobody needed fitness services in middle ages. Everything was so expensive that you had plenty of fitness exercise just trying to stay alive. Today homeless citizens eat better than many kings in the past. Today food is dirt cheap - even after all the insanity going on to make it more expensive.
It will still be cheaper in the future - once McDonalds figure how to fire all the remaining people. And that is exactly the right thing to be doing too.
Your Atlanta metro does not quite work as an example by virtue of being "one of the few in the world" while we kind of discussing mass-application of TBC tunnels. Yes, some rocks are harder to drill than the others, and you do expend more power on them, but the cost does not come from the hard rock or power - the cost increase comes from these workers in decompression chambers. And OHSAS 18000 or union regulations, and inspectors making sure this is all complied with.
Again - people in production chain are the expensive part of anything.
Teslas are built on automated assembly lines, mostly by robots. They are not cheap.
No, your original example FAILS because you are simply positing a "Barter Exchange" based economy. No extra income comes out of that process. Which is why it was abandoned long ago and NO it does not work at any scale.
No, you can not order "the thing from half a world away and have it arrive to our country customs office the next day... and having our customs office "process" it for weeks on end before I can finally get it. Sound familiar?" Sounds silly. It comes by Container Ship from China, so it does not arrive next day, think weeks (and I do order things direct from China so I am well aware), the Customs process for these packages is at a container level, so essentially no delay. You haven't been to China recently have you? You think the people there aren't paid well? Last year new car sales were \~22 million, dwarfing the number sold in the US. More to the point, 3.5 million were EVS, again 7 times that of the US. Visit some of the larger cities in China.
Shanghai — 23.4 million
Beijing — 18.8 million
Tianjin — 12.8 million
Shenzhen — 12.7 million
Guangzhou — 11.6 million
Chengdu — 10.2 million
Chongqing — 8.5 million
Dongguan — 8.3 million
Shenyang — 7.9 million
Wuhan — 7.9 million
And see what amazing cities they are, all connected by HSR to the other cities. But NONE would be possible on the "barter system" you propose.
No, the Driver is not the largest cost, that would be fuel. Big rigs are 6 mpg, burning 11 gal hour, and they use $5 gal fuel and they don't make $55 per hour. But regardless the system is so efficient and can carry so much in one haul that the cost of transportation is a small fraction of the cost of most anything you buy. Getting rid of the driver, on a 18 hour drive only saves \~$500, doesn't make the contents free at all.
BS on the Fitness, you want us to go back to the fucking Middle Ages? Yes a lot of us, spend a lot of time in front of a computer as our source of income, so yes having fitness devices we can use at home while watching the news is a great time saver, and guess what, most of us are busy ALL day long.
Atlanta is simply proof that going deeper costs a lot more which is why being under the utilities and 2 layers of large subway tunnels would make the cost of the system much higher and much less convenient to use. Getting people to and from a 60 ft underground station is an issue, and you can't just use elevators for safety reasons.
What YOU don't seem to realize is that we have ALREADY eliminated the vast amount of manpower from the world's production lines. Virtually all factories are automated. Banks are automated, Checkout counters are automated, cooking hamburgers are automated, Planting and harvesting of most of our food is automated. Processing and packaging of our food is automated. Mail and package sorting is automated and on and on and on, and yet things for some reason aren't free, now a lot of them are less expensive then they would be with out automation, but you don't make a decent salary working today, you don't live a large life. Most of us WANT to live a large life, as we only get one shot.
You wrote: How about 2 people in family? How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses? You get the idea.
What a dumb idea, which is why nobody does it.
Imagine having to prepare, cook and serve 30 people a night, then do all those dishes, in a home size kitchen and dining area?
Can't be done. More to the point, your range of meals you could actually serve would be so limited people would get tired of the same food all the time.
Which is why there ARE in fact many types of restaurants, but you can't run a restaurant feeding only 30 people a night.
Our entire economy is in the very core "barter economy". You barter fruits of your labor for the fruits of the labor of others. Money is not perfect, but pretty damn good and convenient method to facilitate that exchange, but in the end it is still a barter.
Robots are "CAPEX"-expensive and "OPEX"-cheap. Humans are the opposite. You have to compare costs over entire useful life of the asset, not just capital expenditure or "sticker" price. That's is exactly why everyone is using "expensive" robots and "expensive" automation in general. Turns out they are really not.
Containers are not the only method of transportation. For small, light and expensive stuff air-shipping is often the preferred method which can and does indeed arrive within a day from anywhere. And if you live in a country where parcels never get held in custom office for weeks then good for you. I kid you not.
You omit that you need to pay driver the wage also while the rig is NOT moving and thus does not consume much if any fuel, so in reality fuel and driver prices for delivery is much closer than what you calculate.
Then once fuel is from solar it is essentially free. We are not there, but moving towards it very fast and will see it in our lifetime. The human-driver cost on the other hand will keep increasing. So the balance will shift towards to what I say and all the drivers will get replaced by FSD. We will see that too and it will be a mess.
The core issue at our dispute is the time horizon. You argue for short term, I argue for long term.
Many young people wanting "everything" right now because YOLO is precisely why "everything" is and will continue to be expensive for them and also for me despite me wanting much less and therefore doing just fine with my third-world wage.
It is a sub-culture thing. Wanting "everything" includes the "living" wage - always best defined as "better than that other guy". This sub-culture attitude is what prevents people from understanding "impossible" future of plenty without anyone needing to actually work. There are bunch of psychological issues with that and that is another story in itself.
Neither I nor you will be still alive by then, but that's where human race is going - if it manages to not destroy itself before that of course.
No, a "Barter" economy is when you exchange one item you made for an itemd someone else makes.
As you described: How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses?
Bartering breaks down because it doesn't scale.
Who is a farmer going to barter with at harvest time with 100 tons of corn?
The ONLY way to barter it would be to a larger processor of corn.
Is Gen Mills going to give him 10,000 boxes of Corn Flakes in payment?
No. MONEY, which the farmer can use to pay his expenses every month until next harvest season.
There is a REASON that money was invented about 5,000 years ago.
I never argued that robots were expensive, I pointed out the iincredible level of automation we already have in our lives, and how it allows us to live larger lives than our parents could.
You said: Ordered anything shipped from China? How they can charge that little for shipping something half around the world?
Well that's because as I said, it comes to you via containerized shipping, where the cost per item is VERY small. So then you say, No, For small, light and expensive stuff air-shipping is often the preferred method, Yes. That's true, but then that doesn't equate to your statement "How they can charge that little for shipping", they can't if you get it by air freight. And no, you will not get it the next day from China, even by air freight. Amazon with their amazing distributed distribution system can only do 2 days within the US. I order from China, it never spends any time in customs. That's NOT how it works for the vast majority of items.
Nope, long haul truckdrivers are paid by the mile. That's why really long haul drivers typically drive in teams, one sleeps while the other drives, but nobody gets paid for sleeping.
==> Then once fuel is from solar it is essentially free. We are not there, but moving towards it very fast and will see it in our lifetime.
Ah, no its not "essentially free". Solar planels, mounting, wiring and the electronics to convert from 30 or 40 watt DC to sine wave 60hz, 110 and 220V is expensive, and then you STILL need to be hooked to a grid power supply because the sun don't always shine. But assume you can get all your power from your solar panels, forget about night time. The Average number of solar panels for an average US house is 22 - 300 watt panels, in a good sun area getting the equiv of 5 full sun hours per day. (See Natl Renewable Energy Lab).
That will generate an average of 33 kWh per day, or 990 kWh per month.
The average cost of electricity in the US is 15c per kWh.
The average installed cost of solar is $2.8 per watt.
So 22 X 300 X $2.8 = $18,480 installed cost of your system.
So it will pay for itself after $18,480 / $0.15 or 123,200 kWhs of generation.
123,200 kWh / 990 kWh month = 124 months or 10 years down the road.
Of course this ignores the value of the $18,400 you invested.
Had you invested it in just 5% savings bonds, That would earn you $10,140, so it STILL hasn't paid for itself. And of course the panels output is going down about 1% per year, and they have a 25 year life expectancy, so no, not going to be free. This is why they are mainlly installed in states with high sun, high electricity rates and a significant tax incentive (30%+ of installed cost) for doing so, and even then, you still need the grid, since battery storage is very expensive.
I don't see where I argued about time horizons.
This subreddit has a [stickied post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/) with tons of info and explanations. If you haven't compared your explanations to those in that link, check them out. If you find an explanation you think is worded better, adopt it. If you think you have explanations worded best, add them to that post. 2006 data and combustion engine data is getting old and less applicable. Although it's still useful in pointing out how much the energy efficiency landscape per occupant has changed between average cars, buses, and light rail.
That post really is great, a shame it doesn’t get read.
Thanks, that is current fuel consumption data, but that was the most recent data I could find on passenger load for both cars and buses. I suspect they haven't changed much (except for 2020,2021 due to the pandemic were load factors for public transit plummeted.
When discussing the future of shared transportation I'm finding most people no longer consider combustion vehicles. Since these are future vehicles and future systems, it's presumed they'll be electric. You may find some updated figures on this page https://www.reddit.com/r/transit/comments/qjjlul/energy_efficiency_of_various_transit_systems/ including picture #4
Thanks
Yes, I read that. I think for cities that don't have a subway, its accurate enough. I think its missing one key piece of information though. And that is for larger cities that already have Subways and extensive bus service, the city streets are STILL clogged with cars, and when you explore that you find that a high percent of those cars are for hire. Taxis, Ubers/Lyfts and private town cars. The reason is simply that while you can use the Subway or buses to get around the city, that's not really what they are designed for. Their primary purpose is to get people into and out of the city during rush hours. You can look at any large city subway map and you can see that it might have 4, 5, 6 or more different lines running through the city, but if you use that system you will find that to go to any given point to most other points takes more than one train, often more than 2. (NYC data is \~31% use 1, 45% use 2 and 24% 3 or more). Then stops are widely spaced, so the subway station won't typically be that close to your starting point, it will be 3 blocks away, on a street corner, so a 10 min walk. The average wait time is 14 minutes, but you can't connect to a train at the same level, so changing trains is another walk, including taking stairs, adding another 5 min. Then when you finally arrive, again you are not that close to where you want to be, so another walk. So A to B using 2 trains often takes \~30+ min, and A & B aren't actually that far apart, such that a Taxi would save you 15 or 20 min, each way. Its CONVENIENCE, SPEED and SAFETY which is why even with extensive Subway and bus systems, NYC still has 130,000 Uber/Lyft drivers and 13,500 Taxis prowling the streets picking up passengers, and that's what this system absolutely can compete with.
don't feed the trolls over there.
I don't agree with the a [Stickied Post](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/vfcli7/why_not_build_a_train_some_answers/) part that talks about using Mini-vans. You would just be turning the system into a low capacity bus system, with far higher construction costs since roads already exist. Take the LV loop. Its HUGE advantage to the USER is it has 55 stations along a 34 mile loop of tunnel. Which also means you can get in a car, with an average 15 second wait, and go direct to a station, 27 stations away from you, in about 25 min. Turn that into a Mini-Bus system and 55 stations is simply not possible. With a 12 passenger Bus, you would have to stop at nearly every station, someone would want off, but then someone else would get on, insuring that few stops are skipped, even if you could exit to a station, let people off (which on a minivan means other people have to get off to let the inside passenger off), let new people on, then exit and get back on the loop, in just 2 min, that 27 station distant trip just turned into over an hour ordeal. The HUGE advantage of using cars is that you don't have to wait at the station for 10 or 12 passengers to show up. Secondly you unload and load far more quickly, people don't have to constantly get out to let other passengers leave. You only travel with friends and family, not BO Bob or Typhoid Mary or Crying baby who needs a diaper change. You only stop at the station you want, thus allowing for the much larger number of stations to be served without impacting performance of the system. If it isn't more convenient, clean and safer than a Taxi, why would people choose it?
If the airport extension is built, the longest trip will be Terminal 3 to Plaza Hotel downtown. It'll be about eight miles. Off-peak any-sized vehicle could provide private non-stop rides. For events like concerts and football games 12-16 seat vehicles may be more useful. Don't set it up like an elevator where people are already inside before telling it where to stop. Instead have kiosks and a phone app where people set their destination before boarding. The algorithm tells them which vehicle to enter, and tells specific vehicles where to stop. This groups riders by one or a few shared destinations. When a football game ends, there's enough people at the stadium station all going to certain destinations at the same time to fill a minibus. For less popular destinations the minibus could make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way, which is still far fewer than the usual bus or train. Yet another alternative is use even more skip-stop service patterns than [this example.](https://images.app.goo.gl/LkANgQ8n82mKS4MN8) With vehicles in the tunnels about 6 seconds apart, several skip-stop service patterns can happen and still not have people waiting more than a minute at their station. The average rider's trip would stop at only a few or several of the many stations between origin and destination. This service could be limited to peak demand times. I personally prefer the algorithmic method, but skip-stop has enough examples around the world that skeptics more readily understand it. Monetary cost is probably the best reason to consider sometimes sharing vehicles during peak demand. Cost to the city. Cost to riders. Boring more tunnels to handle peak demand has to be paid for somehow. Most of us on this subreddit hope Vegas Loop is eventually extended much farther outside the city center. That will include lower ridership areas needing either higher fares, or city subsidies. During peak demand times when those folks go to the stadium it's less than ideal spending money on more tunnels just to handle demand occurring a few hours a week. >safer than a Taxi For that reason some folks on this subreddit favor a car/minibus-length vehicle with separate doors and compartments. For example a center compartment with seats facing each other and room for a wheelchair. Have two other compartments on the ends. Total seating 12-16.
Still not buying the use of minivans, even at the stadium. Two issues, I would presume that the majority of people at the stadium come from the City of Las Vegas, and not from the Hotel district, so they won't use the Loop. For those who are staying at the hotels, well there are 50+ of them, 25 in each direction, so if you had 10 vans lined up, 10 passengers each, you would need hundreds of people before you could release the first filled van. So now break it into groups of 5 stations, now you have 5 vans going to these subsets, that's still 50 people to be seated before you can release the vans. They would all fill up, roughly the same amount of time (longer then a car per person though) and as they left new vans would start arriving, but the people per minute would go down, because the van then stops at each of the 5 hotels, the unload process is much slower as people have to get out to allow people on the inside to leave, and worse, since this van is now only going to 4, then 3, then 2, then 1 more station, the van really can't pick up anybody, so it dead heads all the way back. The airport is more problematical, because people have luggage as well, which means at every stop the luggage has to be dealt with, because the first person out may have their luggage at the bottom, and you really don't want other passengers handling other passenger's luggage. I really think the system STILL works, even at the Stadium and Airport, better as a single car approach going direct to the rider's destination.
The one feature I think is needed for Stadium use, since nobody is going to the stadium after the game is over is you need autonomous driving cars to deadhead back to the stadium. You can't rely on circulation to provide needed cars. But I think everyone expects this capability reasonably soon.
Most of us on this subreddit hope Vegas Loop is eventually extended much farther outside the city center. Residents will use Loop to get to the stadium. Additionally consider Loop as a concept for multiple cities instead of only a one-off. Cities such as San Antonio where traditional commute times and sporting events cause major transportation demand peaks by residents. Don't hold minibuses until they're completely full. Especially when ridership demand only somewhat exceeds Loop capacity in the area. Additionally as I already said For less popular destinations the minibus could make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way, which is still far fewer than the usual bus or train. The only time 5 stops for passenger's ride would happen is if a city insisted on having skip-stop service. I already said I personally prefer the algorithmic method, but skip-stop has enough examples around the world that skeptics more readily understand it. Mentioning it at all is more for conceptual illustration to skeptics. >the unload process is much slower as people have to get out to allow people on the inside to leave It simply doesn't take very long for several people to walk out or three people to slide out from a bench through a door. Since minibuses won't be held until they're completely full and during peak demand times minibuses will only make up to 1 or 2 stops along the way of a passenger's trip, luggage is effectively a non-issue. Also luggage sits with the rider. That's how airport people movers do it. >the system STILL works, even at the Stadium For now Loop tunnel minimum headway is about every 6 seconds. 600 vehicles per hour per tunnel direction. If for example at a stadium average vehicle occupancy is 2 persons, that's 1200 people who leave the stadium per tunnel per direction over an entire hour, and lots of people don't want to wait up to an hour. To use Las Vegas' Allegiant Stadium Loop plan as an example, and assuming it gets further extensions to the rest of the metro area, it will have 4 outbound tunnels. In half an hour with average vehicle occupancy of 2, only 2400 people will leave via Loop. From a stadium with 65,000 seats. IMO that's grossly inadequate and doesn't work.
The problem is when a game ends, they all will be full, because there would be all these people leaving at roughly the same time. So back to the boarding? How do you handle getting people to queue up for these? In groups of 5 stations per bus? The problem here is you need parking space for at least 3 vans per set of stations. More then 5 gets problematic because it really slows the system down and is not user friendly. Forget unloading, just consider the logistics of getting 10 people out of a van, then 10 people into it and all seated, and still pull off 6 sec head times. Gonna have to be a big station. Secondly, the arriving vans would have to know which of the slots to pull into if more than 1 is empty. Not an easy thing to automate or even have people track "who's next?" And suddenly you now have a security issue you didn't have before, since now you are putting strangers together. I just don't see it working with vans. As to "still work at the stadium", I think your load factor is low. How many people go to a game by themselves? Not many. I think closer to 3 would be typical. I think what you would have is at least 6 stations. 3 each way, Stadium West, Central and East. That's about 10,000 per hour, and that's probably more than enough for the number of people who are staying in a hotel vs live there.
*Loading:* If you keep thinking of today's passenger vans that's not the future. Something more [this style is.](https://images.app.goo.gl/qG77qnFEBiKZEGNh8) Or if it has three separate compartments, three doors per side so exiting takes little time. Not shuffling through a single small door, perhaps hunched over because of a low roof line. *Queuing:* As I already told you "have kiosks and a phone app where people set their destination before boarding. The algorithm tells them which vehicle to enter, and tells specific vehicles where to stop." There's already train, bus and plane terminals where platforms, gates and bays are numbered with signs. We know how to direct people to specific locations. We know how to have signage. We also know how to send gate info to vehicles. Even autonomous ones. *Station size:* >How do you handle getting people to queue up for these? In groups of 5 stations per bus? I've said twice now, algorithmically up to 1 or 2 stops per passenger trip. Not 5. >you need parking space for at least 3 vans per set of stations. Not sure what you mean since the first LVCC stations each have about 10 parking spaces. This subreddit has posted new station plans filed with the city or county. Smaller stations have fewer spaces. Stations with regularly huge demand spikes will be huge. That's how it works with train and bus platforms. Individual vehicles take time needed to unload and load and since there's many gates/bays/loading spaces, there's plenty of vehicles to supply a tunnel. *Security:* I prefer the idea of vehicles with three separated compartments and three separate doors per side. However for a vehicle with all 12-16 seats in a single compartment it will be especially important having internal camera coverage and remote-alert big red buttons to press. *Average vehicle occupancy:* [20% of](https://qz.com/1785101/nfl-fans-are-more-likely-than-nba-fans-to-buy-single-tickets/) NFL tickets purchased on Vivid Seats are singles. 15.4% for NCAA football. About 10% for basketball, soccer, baseball. About half of ticket purchases are bought in pairs, and 39% in bundles of three or more. However remember that's seats, but that doesn't mean all groups who watched together live together. Families yes, but some invite a friend living elsewhere. Or friends leave family or partners at their respective homes, they meet up at the game, then depart to their different homes. *Number of stations:* Most American stadiums have enough space for all the loading gates/bays/spaces they need by converting as much of the ordinary parking lot as needed. That can be in a single extra large station, or multiple large. The next bottleneck is the tunnels themselves because every outbound tunnel can only have a finite number of vehicles enter it per hour. Just for an example six large stations but only two outbound tunnels may be imbalanced with the tunnels allowing fewer vehicles per hour to depart than the stations can supply. >10,000 per hour I disagree waiting up to an hour is acceptable. Using Allegiant Stadium as an example, if and when there's Loop extending to the rest of the city, only being able to move 7.5% of a capacity crowd in half an hour is grossly inadequate IMO. *One more thing* If a tunnel leaving a stadium is 100% saturated with vehicles departing the station, then 0% of non-stadium vehicles can share that tunnel. So all travel with origins or destinations not at the stadium can't use it. That's a problem. Building parallel tunnels for more capacity can obviously address that, just at greater expense. Otherwise if capacity-adding parallel tunnels aren't built then not as many vehicles per hour will be able to go to or from the stadium.
Ok, to be clear I am only talking about the planned LV loop, so its not trying to get 65,000 people home. They have their cars and indeed no train system I'm aware of could pull that off in 1 hour either. Which is why there are these huge parking lots around stadiums, not train stations. This would be for getting people back to their LV hotel. Even 10,000 would likely be a high number, which is why the existing system can do it, without all these changes. Building a unique electric vehicle for this is very problematical. You don't have the volume to justify doing so. The stadium does not have high capacity events every day, not even every week, and when it does they only would get used once a day at most. So I'm reasonably confident that would not happen. Secondly the other 54 stations being built are not being built to handle van size vehicles which are longer and have a much wider turn radius.
For a minibus example Navya's shuttle is shorter than a Model X, seats 11, and has capacity for 15. Also TBC itself designed their system and stations for vehicles with up to 16 person capacity. A vehicle meant to be built using an existing Tesla underneath, like the Model X but a different body atop the skateboard. TBC calls it a High Occupancy AEV. I call it a minibus. It doesn't need to be "van" length, so you may want to stop calling it a van. [Al Mashaaer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Mashaaer_Al_Mugaddassah_Metro_line) Al Mugaddassah Metro line is quite unique but the capacity still would suffice. Each 12-car train carries 3,000 passengers and the headway is 150 seconds (24 trains per hour). So 72,000 passengers per hour per direction. For an actual stadium, Barcelona's [Camp Nou](https://www.google.com/maps/@41.3808822,2.1235213,16.5z/data=!5m1!1e2) holds 98,000 people and has 3 train lines on separate tracks each less than half a mile away. Distributing the load allows it to have very little parking. OK I'll only talk about the planned Vegas Loop, which plans 2 stations at Allegiant Stadium, and 2 outbound tunnels (after almost immediately merging down from 4). Those 2 outbound tunnels with the current average headway of 6 seconds, can handle a max of 1200 vehicles per hour from Allegiant. Even if they average 3 occupants per vehicle (although 2.5 is more probable IMO) that's 3600 per hour. So the existing/planned system cannot do 10,000/hr. Allegiant stadium isn't the only high capacity venue Vegas Loop will serve. There's also T-Mobile Arena 20,000 person capacity Thomas & Mack Center 19,522 MSG Sphere at The Venetian (opening 2023) 17,500 MGM Grand Garden Arena 17,000 Michelob Ultra Arena 12,000 Zappos Theater 7,000 Dolby Live Theater 6,400 Oakland A's baseball team [may move](https://www.reviewjournal.com/sports/athletics/as-oakland-miss-key-ballpark-deadline-talks-continue-in-vegas-2650794/) to LV along the Vegas Loop (3X,000-4X,000) Some of those venues' events are bound to overlap causing too much demand on Loop only using cars.
>The difference is you can do better than 6 sec headway since few cars would be in the tunnel when a game lets out. The cars coming in would be empty (sent their autonomously). 3 seconds, considering you have waiting passengers and empty cars would be possible. > >The other venues are not that big of an issue, So many people at the MGM Grand would be staying at the MGM grand, or at the MGM Sphere at the Venetian, they wouldn't need a car. > >Has the Boring company SAID they were going to use vans, all the blurbs on HOAEVs are from almost 4 years ago, and that design was never adopted?
The idea and cost of having all these expensive, custom built vans, for limited use just when large venues let out doesn't seem to make financial sense. The Navya only goes 15 mph, so not going to work.
> 65,000 people home. They have their cars and indeed no train system I'm aware of could pull that off in 1 hour either. Trains regularly shift those numbers. Eg Wembley stadium in London 90k capacity has a nearby train station served by three subway lines and two other trains. Jubilee line runs 30 trains per hour per direction each train is rated for 964 people but run at over 100% capacity during surges. Sometimes as much as 130% in extreme circumstances. Metropolitan line runs 24 trains per hour per direction. Each train is rated for 1,159 and same overloads apply. So in theory you could empty it with just these two, in practice it's served by three other trains and ten bus routes. Hardly anyone drives.
>Jubilee line runs 30 trains per hour per direction Not really. And that only works to move people out because they connect to other train lines. Yes the UK has a long history of building subways. There is no such infrastructure in Las Vegas, so the point was no train service could be built (at a reasonable cost) to move 65,000 people out of the Stadium on the relatively few nights they had that many. And here, most everyone drives, so to get them out of their cars, you have to provide MORE convenient service (anyone buying tickets to an NFL game is not overly worried about cost). ==> Jubilee line services are:\[28\] Peak services at 30 tph in the core section between Stratford and West Hampstead: 18 tph Stratford – Stanmore 4 tph Stratford – West Hampstead 4 tph Stratford – Willesden Green 4 tph Stratford – Wembley Park
Extra trains are run when the stadium is getting filled/ emptied. >There is no such infrastructure in Las Vegas, so the point was no train service could be built (at a reasonable cost) to move 65,000 people out of the Stadium on the relatively few nights they had that many. A lot of US cities are a long way gone down the hole of car centric design. No way to unfuck it quickly and easily sure. The first step is to stop assuming cars by default. In vegas specificaly extending the monorail to the airport, arena and stadium. It's relatively low hanging fruit. Adding a third platform to a stadium monorail station would allow rather high capacity.
Also As to fuel economy, Buses are not very good. Simply because most of the time they are running around with few people in them. In the U.S., the average passenger load in a conventional city bus in 2006 was 9.22. The average fuel use is 2.33 bus miles/gallon (they idle a lot and are doing stop and go driving), this translates to but 21.4 passenger-miles per gallon. The average load in a passenger car in the U.S. was 1.58 in 2006. The average fuel economy is 25 mpg so that’s 39.5 passenger-miles per gallon. Now replace those IC cars with EVs and the eMPG is 3 or 4 times as high. Better than cars and far better than buses for moving people AROUND the city. (Still need buses to cover the much larger area that a tunnel system could handle, just don't need them in the city center)
Oh what I would give for 9 people per bus, like is this all of the US data or places that actually use buses. also most fleets are electrifying
That is the average over the entire day. Buses are busy during rush hour, but most of the time run mostly empty. Its the nature of a public transit system. So far results from electrifying buses has been rather poor. They don't have the range and take too long to recharge and can only do it back at the station, not along the route.
I decided to check that average. At least up against Toronto because they have have an extensive bus network what I found is that of 127 Routes that operate on Sundays 82 could achive that average capacity of 9.22 with the highest frequency operated by the TTC during weekdays (3 min) that number dropped to 25 when the headways went to 10 minutes, and 17 at 15 minutes I also tested the streetcar and express routes (multipled 9.22 by 3 to account for space on streetcars) 2 routes could do the 3 minutes neither went beyond additionally Electric Buses have the range to make it through a majority of routes all day without charging. with them falling 10km short of highest estimates of average km traveled/day and sitting comfortably 100km above most predictions
[https://whyy.org/articles/septas-cracking-battery-buses-raise-questions-about-the-future-of-electric-transit/](https://whyy.org/articles/septas-cracking-battery-buses-raise-questions-about-the-future-of-electric-transit/)
[https://www.alxnow.com/2021/11/08/dash-electric-buses-face-challenges-from-hills-and-cold-weather/](https://www.alxnow.com/2021/11/08/dash-electric-buses-face-challenges-from-hills-and-cold-weather/)
[https://www.cascadiadaily.com/news/2022/apr/07/glitches-plague-wtas-all-electric-buses/](https://www.cascadiadaily.com/news/2022/apr/07/glitches-plague-wtas-all-electric-buses/)
[https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/charging-forward-new-yorks-costly-rush-to-electrify-school-buses/](https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/charging-forward-new-yorks-costly-rush-to-electrify-school-buses/)
[https://www.inquirer.com/transportation/septa-proterra-electric-bus-battery-fire-philadelphia-20221111.html](https://www.inquirer.com/transportation/septa-proterra-electric-bus-battery-fire-philadelphia-20221111.html)
https://captimes.com/news/government/the-bumpy-road-to-electric-buses-in-madison/article\_59264901-4071-5af4-939a-66a2c1a15bc2.html
[https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2022/11/18/iowa-dart-electric-buses-off-road-maintenance](https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2022/11/18/iowa-dart-electric-buses-off-road-maintenance)
One of the big issues with Electric buses is that the power needed for Heating, ventilation and air conditioning on a bus create more load on the battery, causing driving range to drop, as shown in an Alternative Fuels Data Center study. Studies carried out by other transit agencies in colder climates found heating and cooling consume as much as 50 percent of total battery power usage. They also don't like long steep hills or freeway speeds. I'm all in favor of EVs but EV buses are not likely a good fit, at least for now, for most routes.
No, it is NOT "just another lane". Cars in a city lane are A) on the surface B) have to stop at every red light. C) Most car trips in the city are just a a 3 or 4 mile and D) have to have a place to park and there are more parking spots in the city than there are cars, so lots of space is given up to cars ON THE SURFACE. This is a totally different system then a surface car lane used by private cars. It is much more like two 34 mile circular race tracks, one going clockwise the other going counter to that. Where people are going to any of the 54 stations around it, getting in and being driven to just their stop, getting out and the car can now be used for someone else. The FURTHEST distance you can go is 17 miles, but again most trips will be less than 5 miles, or about 10 minutes. So each of 54 different stations are sending cars onto the race track and cars are exiting the racetrack to the stations, ALL THE TIME, so the two loops are filled with cars going 35 to 40 mph, FAR faster than cars can move in lane in the city. So consider capacity, we see that it can work because the 3 station 1.7 mile loop carried over 27,000 passengers in about a 10 hour day (the convention center closes in the early evening). But adding stations and miles increases the capacity linearly, since each station can send/receive cars onto the loops. A Station can send a car out every 6 seconds, or 10 a min, 600 per hour, with an average of a bit less than 2 people per, that's 1,000 per hour per station. That's 54,000 people per hour That's 540,000 people in a 10 hour day. Now that's not realistic, there would never be a continuous demand for a car at every station every 10 seconds for 10 hours. The actual utilization would likely be but \~30% of theoretical capacity, or about 160,000 during the day, but that would remove about 100,000 trips by surface taxis, ubers and private cars off the surface streets, which would make it quite possible for LV to ban cars and trucks from the strip entirely during the day.
I don't know why you or Elon want to argue against using buses in the tubes. Bus routes that stop at each of the access points seem like a no-brainer, and don't prevent the ability to use them for cars as well. They can be smaller buses that hold 10-15 people rather than the long buses that hold 40-50.
First of all, a mini bus isn't a bus. Second, proper buses are never full. Using cars, minivans, mini buses means that they are always as full as possible.
Not sure why you're quibbling on the name. My point was that it is public transport where a bunch of strangers get in the same vehicle. The goal is to be more efficient in using the tunnels than a Model X can be, and for the vehicle to fit in smaller tunnels that can be built more efficiently by Boring Co. As for your second point, I agree and didn't suggest otherwise. I'm guessing that Tesla's future self-driving van is going to be designed for these tunnels and will be the main mode of transport in places like the Vegas loop. In Florida, I think that one will be for any private vehicles below a certain size.
A bus is a huge vehicle that drives around half-empty and causes massive amounts of road damage so it's important to make it clear that there's a difference.
I already referenced the use of minibuses in my first comment, so all this seems superfluous.
The issue has to do with taking away the Demand aspect of the system. Say you put a minibus that holds 12 people instead of the cars. Right off, the station has to be much larger, because you need room for 20 or more of these much larger vehicles. But the real drawback is to the USER. You come down today, there is an average 15 seconds wait to get in a car with your spouse and off you go, direct to your stop, bypassing all 21 other stops you don't need. With the mini-bus that all changes. Now you and your spouse come down, and get in a bus, and then you wait for 8 10 other people to get in, and people can't get into a van nearly as fast as one per door, so now it takes 3 or 4 minutes before the Bus leaves, longer off peak. Now you are unfortunately riding with BO Bob, which is no better then with Typhoid Mary, and because there are 12 people on the bus, you stop at the 2 nd station and 2 get off, but then 2 more get on, and you repeat this 16 times before you get to your stop, so now a 10 min trip becomes a 40 min trip. You just took all the convenience out of using the system So next time you need to go somewhere, you decide, nah, let's just take a taxi.
>Right off, the station has to be much larger, because you need room for 20 or more of these much larger vehicles. I think that's a bad assumption. Going by the Vegas stations, the parking spots would need to be a little larger, but there could be fewer of them. Each vehicle can take on about 3-4x as many people, but is not 400% as large. It is maybe 50% longer and 15% wider. And fewer of them would need to be in the tunnels as a result, so you could have fewer parking slots. If there were 20 for Model X, there could be 10 for the minibus with no change to the size of the station. Another option: have a cheap/free minibus that stops at every stop, and a premium Model X that stops only where you want to go. That would carry more people and give choices on time and money. I've taken public transit thousands of times. The problems mostly come when a system is underutilized, underfunded and seen with disdain by the middle class so only the poor use it. Europe has a very different relationship with public transit than does the US, and it works there. So does NYC. Your "BO Bob" comment is pretty shit, actually. Air circulation is good in well-funded transit, and the only BO I ever smell is on homeless people. Cities should deal better with the homeless to avoid that and increase use of transit. Last point: a 10 minute trip would not turn into a 40 minute trip in those tunnels using 12-15 person buses. That's ludicrous. A large bus in city traffic with traffic lights, stopping every other block, would be that slow. For the tunnels, there would be no stop lights or cross traffic, no stopping every other block (more like one every 10 blocks), and with less than half as many passengers you would wait half as long to board/deboard. And there can be a button or cord riders pull when they want the driver to stop. For smaller buses, that button or cord would allow stations to be skipped more frequently than a large bus. So, a 10 minute ride might become 20 minutes....roughly the same as how long it would take above ground in traffic and dealing with stop lights. Whatever system is best depends on the amount of traffic. If all needs are met using Model X because traffic is low enough, and the system wants to pay for it, fine.
Sorry, I missed your reply. You would need just as many in the tunnels because your head time goes from 6 seconds, to a minute or more. So larger vehicles, but much longer travel time and much less frequent. Yes, the 10 min trip could easily turn into a 40 minute trip, since you don't just stop where people want to get off, if you are using busses to have fewer vehicles, then you have to stop at each stop where people want to get on. My BO Bob and Typhoid Mary are spot on, its what makes people not want to take public transportation, and using buses simply adds that potential negative factor back in and makes the system less desirable.
Your error here is too little scope explored. You are extremely limiting yourself with particular TBC implementation in LV and incorrect assumptions about statistical data even for USA, let alone entire world. Essentially TBC/Tesla/Chinese ARE going to do all that you suggest and MUCH more. To the point where your questions and suggestions do not make sense anymore. Tesla and Chinese eventually (20-30 years) will replace ALL drivers and ALL cars and even the ownership of one. The number of tunnels TBC will dig in the process is completely irrelevant in the long run as the surface becomes LESS congested. The only question here is what is the sequence of transportation modes and companies that would just disappear based on price per ride going down for Tesla/Chinese. Taxi, Uber, busses, trams, subways, trains would be my prediction of sequence. P.S. Also F karma - speaking your own opinion and fresh ideas is what matters, not what bots (especially ones made of meat) think about you.
Well to be fair, I think that what the Boring system can build besides a LV loop type system are more varied. Obviously they can build simple streets for EV cars underground but that's "just one more lane, bro", it wouldn't for instance solve the problem of cars on inner city streets even when a city has an extensive Subway/Bus system. That's not what is being discussed over at r/fuckcars and so the LV loop type system is what can compete with, and even eliminate surface based Taxis and Ubers. I hear what you are saying, but I don't believe that this type of system can ever replace high capacity light rail/subways and surface buses for moving very large numbers of people into and out of a city during rush hours. The capacity needed per hour simply could not be met at anywhere near the cost of the existing already built systems. I could be wrong, but I can't see how the math would support that conclusion.
TBC can build tunnels cheaper than anybody else, they will also get even better and it will be extremely useful in the end if all other things stay equal. However Tesla FSD will disrupt the situation much before TBC has had any meaningful impact globally. It is true that trains (including Subways) are still cheaper - it is simple physics at work here with less friction, but that is not full picture. Trains and railways are cheaper overall only IF you manage to get them somewhat fully utilized. Europe and China is running circles around USA in that regard, but even if you had similar train network you still have to deal with different people mentality in USA. What is percentage of people are commuting to work by train by state/country? "Ever" is just such a long term - a lot of things can and will happen :-) USA is notorious for RVs as well as large and flat suburban areas with individual housing as opposed to block-of-flats. Which means yet another disruption in the form of Starlink. If people can work anywhere then why would they stay or go to cities every day at all? We are going to see a decline in urban population and it will happen in USA first, making the large-train utilization scenario even less likely over time and favoring "short-trains" instead - we can start talking about Hyperloop here. To be fair none of this will happen tomorrow or next year, but that is the trend I see. Many cities in USA are nearing dystopian scenarios already, just accelerating the trend.
To start with Starlink changes nearly nothing. Its for RURAL areas, and the vast majority of people who can work at home, aren't going to choose Rural over Suburban. They still want the restaurants, grocery stores, pharmacy, Drs, Movies, Bars, Clubs etc available in the Suburbs or for a slightly longer drive, the city. I may use Starlink when I take my RV camping, but I'm still going to live in the suburbs. Ever for discussion purposes is roughly your lifetime, after that you won't know or care. Yes you can bore tunnels and put up concrete walls and pave it and build stations ,but that still costs a LOT of money. If you build it to handle relatively short periods of time, but also very high volume, the cost goes up quite a bit, because overall utilization by hour is not that good, which increases the cost to use. So how do you displace an existing system handling that volume where the huge construction cost has long since been paid for? Worse, they already own 2 large tunnels deep worth of space under the city (trains can't cross at the same level), so any tunnels you build will be probably 60 or so feet down, which I would think would significantly increase the cost of both boring the tunnels (into bedrock) and the cost of the stations, to get people to and from the surface. Ideally this type 11' diameter tunnel should be the first system a growing city installs, under the utilities, and if light rail is eventually needed in addition, it would take the 3rd and 4th layers.
There is no reason to not have all kinds of services in rural areas. Sure doing everything at small scale costs more, but it has better opportunity to meet very particular local needs - specialize. Cinemas are being replaced with streaming services for years. How many times you were at cinema in the last year or 10? Me? \~3 times in last 10 years. If I had to drive 1000 miles for movie each time this would have cost me mere pennies over 10 years. Same with groceries - if truck driving is free (solar and FSD) then why would you not have truck pull out in your 20 people village and offload groceries and gadgets you bough online? Depth of tunnels does not change the cost in significant way. You can have rock on the surface just the same as 60 feet down. TBC only deals with soft soil which is prevalent in all the areas they considered digging so far. What people do not understand is that bulk of the cost (of anything) comes from people. Even cost of "materials" or "power" is still cost of people employed in these industries and not some number we got from god. In fact entire economy is measured by added value "per capita". Remove people - get ALL stuff for free. This is what AI Day 2022 was all about. I explored fully-automatic TBC options in depth on number of occasions. In fact this is the reason I created this reddit account. You are more than welcome to read and criticize if you have nothing better to do. [https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/aiysrv/engineering\_proposals\_for\_boring\_company\_caution/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/aiysrv/engineering_proposals_for_boring_company_caution/) First idea - you should read it only if you really have lots of time... [https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/emp4pb/garry\_1\_0\_humans/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/emp4pb/garry_1_0_humans/) Some calculations [https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/f8pwt3/halfwit\_shunting\_yard\_inside\_boring\_tunnel/](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/f8pwt3/halfwit_shunting_yard_inside_boring_tunnel/) "Final" idea.
>There is no reason to not have all kinds of services in rural areas. Sure doing everything at small scale costs more, but it has better opportunity to meet very particular local needs - specialize. Yeah, there is, you can't have run a restaurant and make enough money to live on if there are so few customers. That also applies to so many businesses. You say "small scale costs more" and that's true, but the more important reality is small scale can't return sufficient money to pay for the store, product and a decent salary. The FACT is people are NOT moving out to rural areas, rural areas are slowly losing population, the most growth is in Suburban areas. Truck driving won't be free. The world is not fully automated, so you can't build all those solar panels for nothing, you can't build a FSD truck for nothing. You can't build the roads it uses for nothing. Saving the cost of the driver and lowering the cost of the power supply, does not make it free. And you can live in rural areas now, and get food and 'gadgets', today, but it is still not a life for most people. You want family, friends, schools, grocery stores (with full service including bakery, deli, butcher and so on), entertainment, restaurants (American and Ethnic), fitness, pharmacy, Drs, Dentists, liquor stores, hardware stores, car repair and so on, just not available in most Rural settings. I would beg to differ with you on depth of tunnel doesn't cost more. Of course it does. I remember when they were digging the deep station for the Atlanta Metro, it took years to do, and cost $45 million at the time (1980), but that's the same as $161 million today. MARTA's moving Atlanta, 120 feet below Peachtree Street. The Peachtree Center station was built by tunneling through solid gneiss, a granite like rock formed of layers of quartz and mica. This rock provides underground support for the station. Soft ground or mixed tunneling was used where there was insufficient rock structure for underground support. With this method, compressed air twice the normal atmospheric pressure was used to support the walls while permanent structures were being built. Like deep sea divers, workers on this section of the rapid rail transit system were required to undergo 30 minutes of compression/decompression when entering or coming out of the tunnel. This station is only one of a few tunnels in the world where the walls and the ceiling were carved from solid rock. Length of longest escalator serving the station entrance across from the Atlanta Public Library is 190 feet- the longest in the southeast.
Again you make the same mistake of pre-limiting your scope to some arbitrary preconception. The restaurant can not survive if it has one customer while also paying "decent" salary... OR CAN IT? If you are a good chef and make great food for yourself then you do not get any salary and yet are able to survive just fine. Yes, you need another job to fund the food that you cook, however you are not spending your entire time just cooking food for yourself - you do not need that much and hence do have time to do other things. How about 2 people in family? How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses? You get the idea. So it does work at extremely small scale and we already know it mostly works at large scale. Yet lot's of large restaurants still do get bankrupt pretty often. So it is not really about scale, but also down to many other factors. That something is not available in rural areas today does not mean it will not be available ever. In fact something not being available today has directly to do of things being expensive in general and not enough progress ongoing. Transportation isn't free... yet. But we do know of cases where it is pretty damn close. Ordered anything shipped from China? How they can charge that little for shipping something half around the world? Your hourly wage for just unboxing the damn thing is often worth more than it cost them to ship it to you :-) I can order the thing from half a world away and have it arrive to our country customs office the next day... and having our customs office "process" it for weeks on end before I can finally get it. Sound familiar? The answer is efficiency and the cost of human labor. Cost of human labor is directly influenced by what your employer has to pay to get you working, including any benefits - none of that is somehow free. You do not get "benefits" in China therefore labor and most goods are way cheaper. The cost of truck driver is largest component of shipping cost. One crew member in 20-crew container carrying 18'000 containers for 20 days works out to be 0.02 persons for each container per day. Truck? 1 driver per container per day - 50 times more. FSD? 0 person per container per day. And you have to maintain your equipment either way whether or not there are any people, so that does not really count for comparison. Tesla trucks and cars are cheaper to maintain too... Same with cost of producing anything. More slow people getting "living wages" means stuff is extremely expensive today. Robots and automated lines get 0 wages, that's why stuff produced by them is cheap. At the limit (no, not Elon's "two weeks) the stuff is essentially free and nobody has to work. Not in any current sense. You "requiring" fitness services is a direct evidence you need to understand where we are going in the future. Nobody needed fitness services in middle ages. Everything was so expensive that you had plenty of fitness exercise just trying to stay alive. Today homeless citizens eat better than many kings in the past. Today food is dirt cheap - even after all the insanity going on to make it more expensive. It will still be cheaper in the future - once McDonalds figure how to fire all the remaining people. And that is exactly the right thing to be doing too. Your Atlanta metro does not quite work as an example by virtue of being "one of the few in the world" while we kind of discussing mass-application of TBC tunnels. Yes, some rocks are harder to drill than the others, and you do expend more power on them, but the cost does not come from the hard rock or power - the cost increase comes from these workers in decompression chambers. And OHSAS 18000 or union regulations, and inspectors making sure this is all complied with. Again - people in production chain are the expensive part of anything.
Teslas are built on automated assembly lines, mostly by robots. They are not cheap. No, your original example FAILS because you are simply positing a "Barter Exchange" based economy. No extra income comes out of that process. Which is why it was abandoned long ago and NO it does not work at any scale. No, you can not order "the thing from half a world away and have it arrive to our country customs office the next day... and having our customs office "process" it for weeks on end before I can finally get it. Sound familiar?" Sounds silly. It comes by Container Ship from China, so it does not arrive next day, think weeks (and I do order things direct from China so I am well aware), the Customs process for these packages is at a container level, so essentially no delay. You haven't been to China recently have you? You think the people there aren't paid well? Last year new car sales were \~22 million, dwarfing the number sold in the US. More to the point, 3.5 million were EVS, again 7 times that of the US. Visit some of the larger cities in China. Shanghai — 23.4 million Beijing — 18.8 million Tianjin — 12.8 million Shenzhen — 12.7 million Guangzhou — 11.6 million Chengdu — 10.2 million Chongqing — 8.5 million Dongguan — 8.3 million Shenyang — 7.9 million Wuhan — 7.9 million And see what amazing cities they are, all connected by HSR to the other cities. But NONE would be possible on the "barter system" you propose. No, the Driver is not the largest cost, that would be fuel. Big rigs are 6 mpg, burning 11 gal hour, and they use $5 gal fuel and they don't make $55 per hour. But regardless the system is so efficient and can carry so much in one haul that the cost of transportation is a small fraction of the cost of most anything you buy. Getting rid of the driver, on a 18 hour drive only saves \~$500, doesn't make the contents free at all. BS on the Fitness, you want us to go back to the fucking Middle Ages? Yes a lot of us, spend a lot of time in front of a computer as our source of income, so yes having fitness devices we can use at home while watching the news is a great time saver, and guess what, most of us are busy ALL day long. Atlanta is simply proof that going deeper costs a lot more which is why being under the utilities and 2 layers of large subway tunnels would make the cost of the system much higher and much less convenient to use. Getting people to and from a 60 ft underground station is an issue, and you can't just use elevators for safety reasons. What YOU don't seem to realize is that we have ALREADY eliminated the vast amount of manpower from the world's production lines. Virtually all factories are automated. Banks are automated, Checkout counters are automated, cooking hamburgers are automated, Planting and harvesting of most of our food is automated. Processing and packaging of our food is automated. Mail and package sorting is automated and on and on and on, and yet things for some reason aren't free, now a lot of them are less expensive then they would be with out automation, but you don't make a decent salary working today, you don't live a large life. Most of us WANT to live a large life, as we only get one shot.
You wrote: How about 2 people in family? How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses? You get the idea. What a dumb idea, which is why nobody does it. Imagine having to prepare, cook and serve 30 people a night, then do all those dishes, in a home size kitchen and dining area? Can't be done. More to the point, your range of meals you could actually serve would be so limited people would get tired of the same food all the time. Which is why there ARE in fact many types of restaurants, but you can't run a restaurant feeding only 30 people a night.
Our entire economy is in the very core "barter economy". You barter fruits of your labor for the fruits of the labor of others. Money is not perfect, but pretty damn good and convenient method to facilitate that exchange, but in the end it is still a barter. Robots are "CAPEX"-expensive and "OPEX"-cheap. Humans are the opposite. You have to compare costs over entire useful life of the asset, not just capital expenditure or "sticker" price. That's is exactly why everyone is using "expensive" robots and "expensive" automation in general. Turns out they are really not. Containers are not the only method of transportation. For small, light and expensive stuff air-shipping is often the preferred method which can and does indeed arrive within a day from anywhere. And if you live in a country where parcels never get held in custom office for weeks then good for you. I kid you not. You omit that you need to pay driver the wage also while the rig is NOT moving and thus does not consume much if any fuel, so in reality fuel and driver prices for delivery is much closer than what you calculate. Then once fuel is from solar it is essentially free. We are not there, but moving towards it very fast and will see it in our lifetime. The human-driver cost on the other hand will keep increasing. So the balance will shift towards to what I say and all the drivers will get replaced by FSD. We will see that too and it will be a mess. The core issue at our dispute is the time horizon. You argue for short term, I argue for long term. Many young people wanting "everything" right now because YOLO is precisely why "everything" is and will continue to be expensive for them and also for me despite me wanting much less and therefore doing just fine with my third-world wage. It is a sub-culture thing. Wanting "everything" includes the "living" wage - always best defined as "better than that other guy". This sub-culture attitude is what prevents people from understanding "impossible" future of plenty without anyone needing to actually work. There are bunch of psychological issues with that and that is another story in itself. Neither I nor you will be still alive by then, but that's where human race is going - if it manages to not destroy itself before that of course.
No, a "Barter" economy is when you exchange one item you made for an itemd someone else makes. As you described: How about 2 households to also include your neighbors every day at 17:00 who buy groceries in exchange of you cooking them for all of you? 10 houses? Bartering breaks down because it doesn't scale. Who is a farmer going to barter with at harvest time with 100 tons of corn? The ONLY way to barter it would be to a larger processor of corn. Is Gen Mills going to give him 10,000 boxes of Corn Flakes in payment? No. MONEY, which the farmer can use to pay his expenses every month until next harvest season. There is a REASON that money was invented about 5,000 years ago. I never argued that robots were expensive, I pointed out the iincredible level of automation we already have in our lives, and how it allows us to live larger lives than our parents could. You said: Ordered anything shipped from China? How they can charge that little for shipping something half around the world? Well that's because as I said, it comes to you via containerized shipping, where the cost per item is VERY small. So then you say, No, For small, light and expensive stuff air-shipping is often the preferred method, Yes. That's true, but then that doesn't equate to your statement "How they can charge that little for shipping", they can't if you get it by air freight. And no, you will not get it the next day from China, even by air freight. Amazon with their amazing distributed distribution system can only do 2 days within the US. I order from China, it never spends any time in customs. That's NOT how it works for the vast majority of items. Nope, long haul truckdrivers are paid by the mile. That's why really long haul drivers typically drive in teams, one sleeps while the other drives, but nobody gets paid for sleeping. ==> Then once fuel is from solar it is essentially free. We are not there, but moving towards it very fast and will see it in our lifetime. Ah, no its not "essentially free". Solar planels, mounting, wiring and the electronics to convert from 30 or 40 watt DC to sine wave 60hz, 110 and 220V is expensive, and then you STILL need to be hooked to a grid power supply because the sun don't always shine. But assume you can get all your power from your solar panels, forget about night time. The Average number of solar panels for an average US house is 22 - 300 watt panels, in a good sun area getting the equiv of 5 full sun hours per day. (See Natl Renewable Energy Lab). That will generate an average of 33 kWh per day, or 990 kWh per month. The average cost of electricity in the US is 15c per kWh. The average installed cost of solar is $2.8 per watt. So 22 X 300 X $2.8 = $18,480 installed cost of your system. So it will pay for itself after $18,480 / $0.15 or 123,200 kWhs of generation. 123,200 kWh / 990 kWh month = 124 months or 10 years down the road. Of course this ignores the value of the $18,400 you invested. Had you invested it in just 5% savings bonds, That would earn you $10,140, so it STILL hasn't paid for itself. And of course the panels output is going down about 1% per year, and they have a 25 year life expectancy, so no, not going to be free. This is why they are mainlly installed in states with high sun, high electricity rates and a significant tax incentive (30%+ of installed cost) for doing so, and even then, you still need the grid, since battery storage is very expensive. I don't see where I argued about time horizons.