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Transportation United States

Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop Might Only Carry a Fraction of the Passengers It Promised (techcrunch.com) 119

The Boring Company's Las Vegas Convention Center loop "will not be able to move anywhere near the number of people LVCC wants, and that TBC agreed to," reports TechCrunch. The LVCC wanted transit that could move up to 4,400 people every hour between exhibition halls and parking lots on the Los Vegas Strip. According to planning files reviewed by TechCrunch, "the system might only be able to transport 1,200 people an hour -- around a quarter of its promised capacity." From the report: Fire regulations peg the occupant capacity in the load and unload zones of one of the Loop's three stations at just 800 passengers an hour. If the other stations have similar limitations, the system might only be able to transport 1,200 people an hour -- around a quarter of its promised capacity. If TBC misses its performance target by such a margin, Musk's company will not receive more than $13 million of its construction budget -- and will face millions more in penalty charges once the system becomes operational.

So what is stopping TBC from transporting as many people as both it and the LVCC wants? There are national fire safety rules for underground transit systems that specify alarms, sprinklers, emergency exits and a maximum occupant load, to avoid overcrowding in the event of a fire. Building plans submitted by The Boring Company include a fire code analysis for one of the Loop's above-ground stations. The above screenshot from the plans notes that the area where passengers get into and out of the Tesla cars has a peak occupancy load of 100 people every 7.5 minutes, equivalent to 800 passengers an hour. Even if the other stations had higher limits, this would limit the system's hourly capacity to about 1,200 people.

The plans do not show any turnstiles or barriers to limit entry. Even without the safety restrictions, the Loop may struggle to hit its capacity goals. Each of the 10 bays at the Loop's stations must handle hundreds of passengers an hour, corresponding to perhaps 100 or more arrivals and departures, depending on how many people each car is carrying. That leaves little time to load and unload people and luggage, let alone make the 0.8-mile journey and occasionally recharge.

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Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop Might Only Carry a Fraction of the Passengers It Promised

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  • People gamble in the home-office anyway.

  • and i would visit Las Vegas on occasion back in the 1970's it was a big but pretty cool place to visit, well several decades later here it is 2020 and just last year i had the time & money to visit Las Vegas again and i hated it, it was even more crowded and busier than it was in the 1970's i did not even stay overnight and left for Palm Springs Ca, for the rest of my vacation, Vegas is not the same city anymore, i wont go back ever, maybe Laughlin or the other cities might be more fun for casino fun,
    • just last year i had the time & money to visit Las Vegas again and i hated it, it was even more crowded and busier than it was in the 1970's

      The system is supposed to be able to move 4,400 people per hour. Even if they are able to do it, who the fuck wants to be anywhere that busy and crowed?

      • It's specifically designed for conventions, which are by their very nature busy. The point of the system is to move people around the convention center without forcing them to move through the convention center (which would make said convention center even busier).

      • Elon Musk never over promises and under delivers. If he says 4,000, it'll be 4,000.

        For instance, in 2015 when he said that they'd have fully-autonomous vehicles that could drive across the country without a human driver by the end of 2017. Well, they do have cruise control, so that's close enough!

        Or in 2016 when he said they'd make half a million vehicles in 2018. He did almost half as much as he said he would, so close enough!

        2018 when he laid off 9% of the workers, "I also want to emphasize that we are

        • Because nobody would have been crazy enough to have bought all the Tesla shares at $420 each. Each of which are now worth $1760 (4 x $440 due to 4:1 split)

    • Tell us more Grandpa! Ooh, do the one about how you hate the circus! No, no, the one about airports!

      At least try to make it relevant to trains or something like that. Or maybe a cave, the one you hid your stuff from the revenue agents from.

  • Remember this system is meant to transport people from one part of a convention center to the other. It's not like an airport train carrying lots of people with luggage.

    These should be able to load/unload in around a minute, especially with not that many people per car.

    Also I thought there would be multiple standby cars so no need to pause for recharging.

    Whatever happens Vegas badly needs something like this as cars suck for driving around the primary area, and the monorail they have has extremely inconven

    • by Anonymous Coward
      you obviously haven't been to many business conventions. It is common practise for a large percentage of attendee's to have their luggage with them on the first and last day.
      • You obviously haven't been to many business conventions. It is common practise for a large percentage of attendee's to have their luggage with them on the first and last day.

        At CES??? I've been to several CES and you only see a handful of people carting bags around first and last day. There just is no room for them, and CES is way too massive to be pulling bags around all day.

        Maybe it's a little more common in the morning/evening (I've been to help set up a booth a few times) but then you don't have a lar

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      When you grow up, SuperKendall, you may actually attend a convention of this kind of size. Then you will realize that people care stuff around with them.

      Commenting on stuff like this just shows how ignorant, and arrogant, people are. Both qualities SuperKendall loves to display.

      • Then you will realize that people care stuff around with them.

        I have been to about four or five CES shows, and maybe 50 other trade shows...

        Maybe someday you'll go to a convention and pay attention to what other people are doing? Everyone is "carrying" at most a bag of printed materials or two, not carting around multiple suitcases. Frankly, there simply is not ROOM to carry around much else with so many people in each hall.

        For those of you who have not been to any conventions, like dflick here, you can p

    • If people don't have luggage and you only have 3 stations on a fixed route then use light rail or a bus not a car. Cars are optimized for small numbers of people going to many locations.
      • If people don't have luggage and you only have 3 stations on a fixed route then use light rail or a bus not a car

        A) Have you even seen Vegas, just where are you putting that light rail? You would have to take away a ton of convention space to install one above-ground.

        B) I have used buses at CES and the SUCK. Have you ever driven anywhere near the convention center in Vegas when CES is in full swing? I have, both in a bus and in my own car - nightmare. Anywhere less than two miles away you are going to b

  • by laird ( 2705 ) <lairdp@@@gmail...com> on Friday October 16, 2020 @06:35PM (#60616694) Journal

    First, if each station in the loop has a capacity of 800 people departing per hour, and there are three stations, isn't the total capacity 2,400 people per hour?

    Second, the fire safety laws limit the number of people queued up, not how fast the queues move. They're leaving 7.5 minutes for people to get out of the car, and another set of people load in, which seems quite conservative. And if people unload and load faster than the 7.5 minutes, then of course the throughput could go up. And 7.5 minutes seems like a very slow estimate of the time it takes 4-5 people to get out of a car, and another 4-5 people get into the car, even with some luggage.

    • Traffic modelling is not that simple.

      • by DesertNomad ( 885798 ) on Friday October 16, 2020 @07:19PM (#60616836)

        Um, what he said. +1.

        Humans are as bad as cattle when it comes to herding them on and off conveyances. Think escalators. The physical space required to queue up awaiting boarding passengers while still getting the passengers off is no small feat. Doors on vehicles open only so wide, and people take time to move in and out.

        I spent the last couple years working on the design of the LAX Automated People Mover, and at capacity is about 10k passengers per hour. There's four cars per train, two doors per car, and (I think) SRO is like 50 people per car. Each stop is about 40 sec dwell time, and the overall end to end travel time for the 5-station, 2.25 mi (~4 km) route is 10 minutes. It's two-lane separated direction so trains can pass without interaction. In a given direction, trains run every 120 sec or so. https://www.lawa.org/-/media/l... [lawa.org]

        It's one thing to move bodies along a route - the vertical movement in and out of a station is a huge deal as well.

        • by Rei ( 128717 )

          There's four cars per train, two doors per car, and (I think) SRO is like 50 people per car. Each stop is about 40 sec dwell time,

          Meanwhile, this Techcrunch article is declaring 6 minutes per 5-7 person car to be loaded and unloaded as impossible.

          • Perhaps the tech crunch ppl should once go to London or Paris and ride in a mass transit metro.
            Those "fire laws" seem not to make much sense either, when I'm in Paris at Gare du Nord, I easily see 1000 ppl at the same time in front of my eyes.

            Can't be so hard to have a "fire safe" train station if we have such amounts of ppl in europe all over the places.

            • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

              Did the "tech crunch ppl" say it was hard? Did anyone say it was hard? Where is a discussion of "hard"-ness anywhere in the article?

              It appears what you are saying is that Europeans understand fire safety and Americans do not. Do you think that their advantage is that they have no fire regulations to hold them back?

              • The comments indicated that "tech crunch" came to the conclusion that "1000 ppl per hour" is impossible due to fire regulations.
                I pointed out that in Paris/London a single train holds more than 1000 ppl ...

                No idea about what you want to nitpick ...

          • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

            Again with the lies. The article doesn't say anything is "impossible", it says that "Fire regulations peg the occupant capacity in the load and unload zones of one of the Loop’s three stations at just 800 passengers an hour." It's about fire regulations, not loading speeds, and it concerns what is needed IN CASE OF FIRE.

            Ordinary people can understand this, it takes an extraordinary one to continue lie about it.

            Also, in your eagerness to jump in on what you perceive as criticism of the article, you'v

            • by laird ( 2705 )

              And you left out the even more basic mistake, which is that they think that if one station can load 800 passengers per hour, then 3 stations have a capacity of 1,200, which makes no sense at all. 3x800 = 2,400.

              Yes, the author of the article interprets the fire safety regulations to mean that, but when they quote the regulations, the regulations only restrict the number of people allowed in the area, not the throughput, so the author got it wrong. The regulation is that you can't have more than 100 people in

        • Humans are as bad as cattle when it comes to herding them on and off conveyances.

          Just have a large sign saying "This Way to the Egress" [wikipedia.org].

    • station capacity I would think would be calculated as the sum of those arriving and departing, therefore half the capacity is the theoretical limit, i.e. 1200.
      • by Rei ( 128717 )

        Except that the area that only allows for 100 people per 7,5 minutes (800 people per hour) only serves the right-hand side of the vehicles, as can clearly be seen from the diagram. The left-hand side comes from the 200-person queue area.

        This whole "some guy looked at some fire code filings and decided that the system won't meet capacity" notion is farcical on its face. What is the notion, that nobody in Boring Company noticed? Or that they noticed but decided to do nothing about it because they didn't wa

        • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

          And again you are wrong, intentionally. The load/unload area serves the entire vehicle, not just one side. Which side you get into or out the car is irrelevant.
          No matter where you step when entering or leaving a car, you're in the load/unload zone.

          "This whole "some guy looked at some fire code filings and decided that the system won't meet capacity" notion is farcical on its face. "

          Careful, you only post that because it involves criticism of an Elon Musk operation. You want to talk "farcical on its face"

    • > First, if each station in the loop has a capacity of 800 people departing per hour, and there are three stations, isn't the total capacity 2,400 people per hour?

      It's my understanding that the limit is for the underground station, people getting off the train and the people getting on.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The Boring Company document in TFA says that the load limit is 100 people per 7.5 minutes, meaning that is their realistic estimate of the time it will take for arriving passengers to exit the vehicles and unload their luggage, then for the cars to move around the platform to the loading points and the new passengers to load their luggage and enter the cars.

      Keep in mind that these are just ordinary Tesla cars, not like walk-on underground trains. Not all passengers will be able bodied too, they have to cate

    • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      No, because a person must both enter AND leave, meaning you need 2400 events per hour to support 1200 people per hour.

      Also, don't be like REI and SuperKendall and view this as how fast you can get into and out of a car. It's about occupancy standards for the size of the platforms, not whether you have luggage.

      A tunnel has a limit to how frequently a car can enter or leave it. You want to exploit that as much as possible but fire codes say there is not enough load and unload area. That's the issue, not whe

      • by laird ( 2705 )

        Time to unload and load, times number of vehicles and passengers per vehicle, is what determines throughput capacity.

        Number of people in the building at one time is what's limited for fire safety.

        The two aren't directly related. If you doubled the size of the building, to allow twice as many people to line up, that wouldn't improve throughput at all.

      • by laird ( 2705 )

        The document in the article doesn't talk about separate unloading and loading "events" it talks about the rate of vehicles leaving, meaning that they unload, the new passengers load in, and the vehicle departs.

        If it were "events" then they'd be estimating that it would take 7.5 minutes for people to get out, another 7.5 minutes for the new passengers to get in, meaning 15 minute cycle types, which isn't what what it says.

      • How people behave in an emergency is at issue here, not whether you need 7.5 minutes on your best day.

        Horse Shit. This fire regulation uses is tied to how people behave at peak capacity on your best day, not in an emergency, because that is the data you have when you're planning, before any emergency has happened.

        The smart people already walked around with clipboards to compare how capacity in an emergency varies compared to normal, and they took that into consideration when making the rules.

  • I have an idea. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by versiondub ( 694793 ) on Friday October 16, 2020 @06:45PM (#60616730)
    They should build bigger cars that hold more people. The additional weight will certainly require some innovation; how about instead of rubber tires the cars are on metal tracks? Does anyone have a name they'd like to suggest? "Underground Mega-Car on Rails" has a nice ring but I'm sure there's a more catchy word that we can use.
    • The underground railroad, perhaps?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It appears that the whole thing is just a prototype for the next project, which somehow they have got someone else to pay for.

    • The issue is that The Boring Company was built around one purpose: Musk's hatred of public transit. He envisions a world where every single person is conveyed around in a form of private or semi-private vehicle where they don't have to interact with strangers.

      We already have that, they're called cars, and they suck in urban areas. Musk's idea is essentially the same as widening freeways, only this time putting them underground so they're less impactful. The problem is that this will not work for the same re

  • what about building the monorail to airport 1st!

    • what about building the monorail to airport 1st!

      Oh sure, the monorail gimmick [youtube.com].

    • by hawk ( 1151 )

      The monorail has recently filed its second bankruptcy.

      It isn't about moving people around, but keeping conventioneers in a handful of designated hotels.

      Proposals for it to go to the airport come up all the time, but it's the cab companies that block it.

      hawk, Las Vegas local

  • So another one of those revolutionary projects didn't live up to its promises. Who would have thought that this could happen, after the HyperLoop, the rocket Teslas and the passenger rockets.
    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      So.... if one were to write a headline....

      "Ahead-Of-Schedule Project Not Finished, But Some Guy At TechCrunch Misinterprets Fire Code Plans And Decides That Company Plans To Not Get Paid For No Apparent Reason; Declared 'Revolutionary Project That Didn't Live Up To Its Promise' Before It's Even Open
      "

      after the HyperLoop

      After what was explicitly called an open-source whitepaper, and which Musk explicitly stated he had no plans to actually buid?

      the rocket Teslas

      The add-on package for a model that's not

      • Some Guy At TechCrunch Misinterprets Fire Code Plans

        Yes, fire codes, one of those pesky details of reality that make building metros expensive.

        After what was explicitly called an open-source whitepaper, and which Musk explicitly stated he had no plans to actually buid?

        He made the newscast tour explaining to the world how it was just a couple of years away. We had articles here on /. suggesting that new railway projects had better be scrapped and replaced by hyperloops. All of this while the project was

  • ... for example in Thunderf00t's debunking video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
    • by Rei ( 128717 )

      Yes, because when I want engineering analysis, I always turn to a microbiologist (/facepalm)

      Just [youtube.com] a [youtube.com] random sampling [youtube.com] of [youtube.com] some [youtube.com] of his massive mistakes. Long one here [youtube.com].

    • This wasn't about hyperloop you idiot. It was the station not passing fire safety code. Nothing to do with the tunnel.

  • Toronto has a 40,000 passenger per hour flow [daxack.ca] during rush hour on one of its lines. The main limitation is how closely they can run the trains together without risking safety. I guess the difference between the Yonge Line and the Las Vegas Loop is 100 passengers per train versus 1,500 passengers per train, and 7.5 minutes between trains versus 2.5 minutes between trains? Why is the Loop so low-capacity and running so infrequently?
    • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Friday October 16, 2020 @08:49PM (#60617082) Homepage

      Why does this sound ridiculously small?

      Because it is ridiculously small. It's a tiny contract for a tiny prototype line serving only three stations. Its success thusfar recently gained them approval to build a vastly larger network, however, serving the Vegas strip, airport, and downtown. Success in that will gain them contracts to cover even more of Vegas and help them land contracts in other cities. Repeat.

      Again we see this weird thing where people seem to expect companies to just be birthed at mass-scale. Where does this notion come from? I really don't get this mindset. Maybe it's because many people in this site work in software and are used to really short development cycles or something?

      • by AC-x ( 735297 )

        Again we see this weird thing where people seem to expect companies to just be birthed at mass-scale

        Or is it because mass transit is hundreds of years old and well understood, and so anyone with any common sense can see that replacing metro trains that can hold 500-1000 people and run every few minutes with individual passenger cars is a complete non-starter?

        Even using small bore tunnels is an ancient idea [wp.com].

      • by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        "Again we see this weird thing where people seem to expect companies to just be birthed at mass-scale."

        No one suffers that delusion more than Elon Musk.

        "Where does this notion come from?"

        Elon Musk

        "Maybe it's because many people in this site work in software and are used to really short development cycles or something?"

        Ask Elon Musk

  • What a shock, Elon takes another tax payer organisation to the cleaners with over hyper looped promises ...
    • This has nothin to do with the tunnel and 100% on the station design not complying with fire regulations.

  • Elon can call up his buddy Trump and get him to repeal the national fire standards. After all, they are just burdensome regulations that saddle companies with needless restrictions that prevent American Innovation, such as inventing means of immolating thousands of passengers simultaneously inside a giant tunnel. That's true innovation, right there.

  • Finding out at this point that there are fire code restrictions that will limit the amount of traffic to be far below what was promised seems to me to be pretty darned sloppy.
  • The article makes a stupid mistake, and then runs with it. The 100 people / 7.5 minutes quantity is the maximum accumulation of people in the station, not the number of people that are allowed to pass through the station. If you can load people in the cars and send them off at the same rate that people enter the station, there is zero accumulation

    This mistake was pointed out in the first comment on the story.

    My back-of-the-napkin (and not-a-mass-transit-engineer) calculation says that they should be able

  • so glad we have these "jeniuses" running around to show us all how it's done... badly.

  • Right now they're specifying the load based on 7.5 minutes between transports. Transit systems routinely operate with far less time between vehicles, down to 2 minutes or less. The capacity of this loop can be increased substantially by running vehicles more frequently, though it will require a larger fleet of them. Eventually you hit diminishing returns because you can't get people on and off the platforms quickly enough.
  • If the other stations have similar limitations, the system might only be able to transport 1,200 people an hour -- around a quarter of its promised capacity.

    So, simply apply the lessons Musk learned from inventing the Internet (he invented that didn't he, a few years before he invented packet switching?), and divide the stream into smaller packets which can be routed more efficiently. Divide with an axe, or a high-speed freezer and a log chipper ; reassembly with ... needle and thread? Superglue?

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