Unlike Subways Each Boring Tunnel Transit Will Be Non-Stop Express

Boring Tunnel is Elon Musk’ company that is working to revolutionize tunneling and public transportation. Boring Company has been building their system around the Las Vegas Convention Center and has approval to expand the system to the Vegas Strip, downtown and the airport. At the Vegas planning meeting, Boring Company engineers indicated that this would not be an 18 stop subway system. They will inexpensive tunneling to make multiple non-stop express tunnels between each hotel-casino and other destinations.

The non-stop services will make travel times from 15-20 minutes to 3 minutes for each trip. This will mean many elevators or escalators within each hotel to the section of the Boring Company station that takes people to other Casinos or locations.

This would mean the Boring Station level would have around two dozen gates like an airport terminal or platforms like a Japanese subway station. People would move along people movers to move the 20-30 meters to the next pair of platforms or gates.

Vegas planners and council is excited about adding Boring stations and service to the Art District, City Hall and other locations in Vegas.

First Three Stations Are Over 90% Complete

The road surfaces around the stations are 85% complete. There are test vehicles in the tunnels.

Full system calibration at 4400 vehicles per hour should have begun.

Hexagonal Tunnel Segments

SOURCES- Boring Company, A Boring Revolution
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

26 thoughts on “Unlike Subways Each Boring Tunnel Transit Will Be Non-Stop Express”

  1. I used to know a guy who had a plan for small cars that would drive to the house and back from a station, then hook together for the long part of the trip as a train, or part of a train, best of both worlds.

  2. Drexler maintained that nanotech could *make* rockets so light that SSTO personal size craft would be possible.

  3. Yes, I was focusing on the "non-stop express" aspect. Altho I now wonder if the "V" part is really 5 times airline speed, or is that counting the trip to the airport as an "airline" speed component? Say 500 mph (slow) flight speed would be hyperloop of 2,500 mph. scootin'

  4. Loop is a system designed for Networked self driving electric vehicles, letting them bypass congested streets. Tesla thinks it’s effectively there now and all it’s vehicles will be ready to act as robotaxis with a software update.

  5. VSE is a VacTrain system like proposed by Goddard many decades before. That’s also what Elon Musk’s HyperLoop is (with a few tweaks). The same tunnels TBC builds for Loop can also be repurposed for HyperLoop. HyperLoop with partial Vacuum and maglev would reach speeds of 600 mph+ between cities. It would connect to Loop systems within cities. Elon Musk’s system very much incorporates and extends these earlier ideas.

  6. It’s not feasible for an architecture that has trains stopping at every station no matter how fast they go. Only individual cars with small numbers of passengers that can go direct to destinations bypassing stations can achieve optimal travel times. No design with hundreds of passengers on trains can do this. If subways would also have to climb up onto streets and take passengers all the way to their destinations to be like Loop.

  7. No, they’re not. Actually they happen to be about the same size as the London Underground tunnels. TBC would build it’s tunnels for a conventional subway system at much lower cost if there was a demand. Loop though is MUCH more efficient in many ways than subways. Subways are much slower and stop at every station. Loop takes passengers direct to their destination. Loop vehicles are autonomous BEVs that can go up on surface streets and take passengers door to door.

  8. They need to move from McCarran Airport to the Hotel-Casinos and to the several Convention centers on the strip as well as to different attractions on the strip. Gambling isn’t the major attraction. There are free and paid shows and attractions all along the strip, different restaurants, lot’s of spectacle.

    Loop will also serve employees and local residents.

  9. Right. It won’t be much of an issue for LV Loop. If you look at the new public station layouts for the Caesar’s Loop it’s clear what other “stations” look like.
    Future “stations” will enter/exit to public streets that might allow entry by other vehicles. The system though is all about networked autonomous BEVs and it knows where every vehicle is exactly and everything each one sees. It will be easy to build barriers that only let permitted vehicles get access.

  10. You go to Vegas as a tourist i.e look around. Time spent gambling is, by necessity of budget, a small percentage of the daily quota.

  11. Many other people have already concluded that PRT (personal rapid transit) systems, need to be hanging pods on steel rails in the air (although all such systems will need some tunnels to access that downtown area, so the boring company is doing some good).

    Maybe Brian could do an interview with Dan Verhoeve of http://www.openprtspecs.blogspot.com on the positives and negatives of the Boring Company's approach?

    https://openprtspecs.blogspot.com/2008/11/pods-just-gotta-hang.html

    There are two big blockers of PRT systems: 1. If you have only a small network taking you to few places it is failry worthless, so you need govt backing to go large. 2. You need the abilities of a self driving car that can drive on highways in all weather conditions (we are not there yet a reasonable price).

  12. Okay, I keep focusing on the tunnels, which I like, but can someone explain the other part of this use case?

    Why do people need to move between a lot of casinos at high speed?

    I always thought of casinos as one stop shops. Are the slot machines just better in one casino and the blackjack better in another, and people enjoy cycling back and forth? There's actually a lot of traffic between these things?

  13. About twenty years ago I thought about door to door travel on an high speed underground network. If you do the math you will see it can't move anywhere as many people as trains.

  14. I have taken the subway when I lived in NYC. I remember that the "D" train used to travel 80 mph. Went from the Bronx to Manhattan in half hour on the express. Smooth ride.

    New tunnels, new trains, no reason why 200 mph couldn't be feasible.

  15. At $20M per mile for two directional tunnel, how many tunnels could you build for the price of a subway? Depending on the city, most subways cost 10 – 30x this amount per mile. That's a lot of tunnels. Maybe you can scale them for the actual demand, and put them closer to where people want to go. It might be game changing for mass transit.

  16. Childish design
    I want a train that ill take from my hotel lobby to Mars.
    No understanding of what mass mobility is.

  17. I don’t think your description of Loop stations is correct. The Loop system is direct because it has an express bypass at every entry/exit point. Subways stop at every station. Loop won’t really even have stations at all at most on/off points. The Autonomous vehicles will just go up/down ramps (easily constructed because Prufrock series TBMs can “porpoise”, creating their own entry/exist ramps). It’s much more like an underground expressway for Networked autonomous BEVs.

    The stations depicted are all from the phase one project at the LCCC which met their design needs but isn’t that similar to the rest of the system – which does NOT have anything like the same passenger volume requirements.

  18. To cut transit time so much is great. Time is precious. The idea is to use small tunnels almost non stop so you can send a lot of people when you get it right. Cheap underground transport would decrease pollution and congestion,… good for the economy.

  19. The tunnel diameter shouldn't be a big problem. They're big enough that you could move a lot of people per car if you used a modified and stretched vehicle chassis. Most subways don't operate near their max capacity levels because the experience is low-quality and slow. Hopefully they will have more efficient dispatching and "platooning" where appropriate.

    If they succeed in lowering the costs the way Elon Musk wants, you could build multiple layers of tunnels to meet any level of throughput.

  20. Boring tunnels aren't mass transit. They're underground toll roads.

    In Vegas, the toll roads will only operate with dedicated fleet cars. In other projects, it may be a mix of private vehicles and fleet cars, or predominantly fleet vehicles.

    If someone decides the boring tunnel toll roads should serve mass transit, they can design and operate busses that fit in the tunnels, and pay for access like anyone else.

  21. "His final venture, the high-speed train system, which he called VSE (for
    velocity, silence, efficiency), was started during his last six months.
    The basic idea of VSE is to build a train network like a telephone
    network, with all trips non-stop, the stations widely distributed, and
    the switching system transparent to the users. Unlike other high-speed
    train systems, VSE is designed to outperform commercial airlines-in
    velocity by a factor of 5, in silence by a factor of 100, in efficiency
    by a factor of 10. Like other O’Neill inventions, it will have to wait a
    long time before the world discovers how sensible it is."
    Freeman J. Dyson
    Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, New Jersey
    from Physics Today, February 1993

  22. Boring tunnels are too small for mass transit needs. If you need to move millions of people daily you need large tunnels and long trains. Many of the major cities in the world have mass transit projects going on or planned. The boring company should be trying to get a chunk of this business.

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