Elon is grafting as per usual, it’s government funded:
TBC doesn’t generate revenue from charging passengers (the rides are free)… Only LVCVA provided a substantive reply, and none addressed the question of capacity, nor the outstanding questions about children or passengers with mobility issues.
For instance, during a large trade show like CES, the LVCC will pay TBC $30,000 for every day it operates and manages the system
At a frankly embarrassing capacity too:
If the Loop can demonstrate moving 2,200 passengers an hour, TBC will get $4.4 million
According to the Boring Company, the LVCC loop has a “demonstrated peak capacity” of 4,500 passengers per hour but only 32,000 passengers per day. I don’t know the reason for the discrepancy - I assume there are operational limitations or it doesn’t run 24h/day or something. But to my mind we have to use the 32k figure, which yields a paltry 1,333 passengers per hour.
Now technically a direct comparison would be to a single subway line, not the entire system. BUT we also need to compare it with the maximum capacity, not the actual ridership, which blows the doors off the stupid tunnel. I’ve seen numbers for BART as high as 48,000 passengers per direction per hour.
Anyone who cursorily looks at public transport logistics realizes that time deficiencies almost never lie on the actual motorization method. Electric, diesel, rail, rubber, car, bus, train, etc. All of those factor’s influence pale in comparison to embarking and disembarking times.
It doesn’t matter if you can make the trip in 15 minutes or an hour, if you always have to wait 40 minutes to disembark, then that trip is always capped at 40 at the least time it can take. The Vegas tube terminals are absurdly small. Thus people have to wait a long time to board a car, which isn’t the most efficient thing to get on or off. And they have to wait a lot in line before getting to a park spot to disembark. Then it’s the fact that each has to be driven by a person who need regular food and bathroom breaks and general rest. And there’s a driver per every 3 or 4 passengers. Inefficiencies begin to build up.
So, under one metric, from departure to arrival, yes the tube itself could carry 4k people an hour. But as a transport system as a whole it is awful at capacity and collapses as soon as so many people actually try to use it. This is a system that experienced a traffic jam inside the tube in their inauguration day, because that’s just what cars do when so many are at close proximity.
Spitballing here, but given the low per vehicle capacity and the inherent de/acceleration required at each stop, Vegas may be better served with a moving walkway for those 2.2 miles of total network length.
And it’d be far more accessible for people with reduced mobility or wheelchair users too
Honestly it’s just kinda cringe that las Vegas doesn’t have a train system. Sure it’s wider than tall but they could do the Japanese style two tier train pricing (low cost every stop, crammed in, and higher cost express that’s less frequent and has assigned seating).
Las Vegas has a monorail but it only connects a handful of casinos on the strip. There had been proposals to connect it to Downtown Vegas and the airport, but I don’t think that there is any money set aside to make it happen.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare entire train networks to this. Peak ridership at similarly sized station to this would be more accurate (and I’m sure they’d still dwarf it). I think the Loop is just 2 (possibly 3) stations, right?
![[image] Sometimes it feels like folks in US would build anything but efficient transit 🤦](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/9fee6912-22f8-44a0-b34c-75dd59e25f54.png){kind=link}
Elon is grafting as per usual, it’s government funded:
At a frankly embarrassing capacity too:
According to the Boring Company, the LVCC loop has a “demonstrated peak capacity” of 4,500 passengers per hour but only 32,000 passengers per day. I don’t know the reason for the discrepancy - I assume there are operational limitations or it doesn’t run 24h/day or something. But to my mind we have to use the 32k figure, which yields a paltry 1,333 passengers per hour.
Now technically a direct comparison would be to a single subway line, not the entire system. BUT we also need to compare it with the maximum capacity, not the actual ridership, which blows the doors off the stupid tunnel. I’ve seen numbers for BART as high as 48,000 passengers per direction per hour.
Anyone who cursorily looks at public transport logistics realizes that time deficiencies almost never lie on the actual motorization method. Electric, diesel, rail, rubber, car, bus, train, etc. All of those factor’s influence pale in comparison to embarking and disembarking times.
It doesn’t matter if you can make the trip in 15 minutes or an hour, if you always have to wait 40 minutes to disembark, then that trip is always capped at 40 at the least time it can take. The Vegas tube terminals are absurdly small. Thus people have to wait a long time to board a car, which isn’t the most efficient thing to get on or off. And they have to wait a lot in line before getting to a park spot to disembark. Then it’s the fact that each has to be driven by a person who need regular food and bathroom breaks and general rest. And there’s a driver per every 3 or 4 passengers. Inefficiencies begin to build up.
So, under one metric, from departure to arrival, yes the tube itself could carry 4k people an hour. But as a transport system as a whole it is awful at capacity and collapses as soon as so many people actually try to use it. This is a system that experienced a traffic jam inside the tube in their inauguration day, because that’s just what cars do when so many are at close proximity.
Spitballing here, but given the low per vehicle capacity and the inherent de/acceleration required at each stop, Vegas may be better served with a moving walkway for those 2.2 miles of total network length.
And it’d be far more accessible for people with reduced mobility or wheelchair users too
Honestly it’s just kinda cringe that las Vegas doesn’t have a train system. Sure it’s wider than tall but they could do the Japanese style two tier train pricing (low cost every stop, crammed in, and higher cost express that’s less frequent and has assigned seating).
Las Vegas has a monorail but it only connects a handful of casinos on the strip. There had been proposals to connect it to Downtown Vegas and the airport, but I don’t think that there is any money set aside to make it happen.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare entire train networks to this. Peak ridership at similarly sized station to this would be more accurate (and I’m sure they’d still dwarf it). I think the Loop is just 2 (possibly 3) stations, right?
Edit: https://programming.dev/comment/13898995