Vegas Boring Loop Surpasses 4400 Passengers Per Hour Target in Testing

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The Boring Company Vegas Loop capacity testing exceeded 4400 passengers per hour on Tuesday.

The LVCVA said it would conduct capacity tests for the loop ahead of World of Concrete, the convention center’s first major trade show since the COVID-19 pandemic began. The almost $50 million loop connects the three different halls of the convention center via subterranean tunnels and Tesla vehicles that travel through them.

The loop is expected to be operational for World of Concrete, which runs from June 8-10

Facts about Elon Musk’s Vegas Loop:

* The Vegas loop is currently free, but when it expands to the entire Vegas strip then it will cost $5 to 10 per ride.
* he capacity goal is about 4,400 people an hour, but Vital Vegas they will get closer to 7,000 people an hour.
* Larger vehicles are being developed by Tesla. They will be able to hold 12 passengers.
* Construction of the Vegas Loop cost $52.5 million. Fun fact: New York City’s Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile. With a “b.”
* The Vegas convention center tunnels are .8 miles long, each direction.
* There are three stations, two above ground, one below.
* It’s about a 90 second ride between each station.
* The cars are Teslas.
* There are 62 cars.
* Most of the cars are Model 3, with some X and Y in the mix. The X is the one with the “gull wings,” above.
* At the moment, the vehicles are completely controlled by the drivers, although they can be quasi-autonomous.
* The cars can travel up to 40 m.p.h. in the straight sections of the tunnel, 30 m.p.h. in the turns.
* About 1,500 drivers applied for the Vegas Loop, only 60 made the cut.
* Most driver applicants failed the driving test, which culminates with having to drive the entire .8 mile tunnel backwards. There’s a five minute time limit. Drivers do this in case a vehicle ever stalls in one of the tunnels and they need to reverse their way out.
* Drivers are paid $17 an hour, plus tips.

Future plans are to have the first self driving Tesla’s used in the Boring Tunnels. This will be the easiest full self driving task. It will be through dedicated unidirectional tunnels.

SOURCES- Warren Redlich, Las Vegas Convention Center, Boring Company, Vital Vegas
Written By Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

37 thoughts on “Vegas Boring Loop Surpasses 4400 Passengers Per Hour Target in Testing”

  1. Assuming a path width of 4m, it works out to about 0.3 pax/ms corridor capacity. That's about 1/5 of what you would get with a bus and 1/6 of light rail. If Elon wants to reduce the the cost of boring, fine. But we already know the best thing to put in the tunnels, its called a subway.

  2. I agree. Musk is a great selector of engineering talent. He demands a lot of his engineering teams, from rockets to batteries to gigafactory design to foldable telecom satellites to tunnel drilling machines to reusable rockets to…

    But it is Musk who has assembled all of this talent and given them a vision of what he wants to accomplish while giving them room to constantly design, experiment, and improve.

  3. Why would you need to deny Americans personal cars in order to undermine their sense of identity?

    Cars give you freedom of mobility, which is hard to easily take away.

  4. These are not personal cars. You get in, get transported, get out at the other end, the car goes off to the next customer.

  6. anti-collision (front) software? If they are all just beads on a string with sensors for front spacing… almost I4iot-proof.

  9. mostly about the ruining of the tight tunnel space, its extended time before re-use and occupant dispersal, and the non-piled-ups awaiting somewhere to go – anywhere to go…
    if you have seen some of the simple fender-benders and their truly epic traffic disruptions in the Alps' tunnels – its amazing. Throw in a spin-out or a small fire or a bit of spilled chemical and you have dozens of responders who tend to clog and disrupt as much as the original few accidentees. Like a fire on a boat, tunnel accidents are many times more complicated than one would guess on first thought…

  10. agreed. interesting to see such a design for efficient ramp-on and enter-traffic at 100+ mph when controlled by AI – if it can be Boring-integrated. The varying widths and branches may not play nicely with straight-forward tunneling tool.

  11. Pileups happen, but you don't get trapped (providing you can get out of the crashed car) because you can just walk away.

  12. Yes. As mentioned in the article, there are 62 cars in the system and they are all Teslas. Tesla only makes electric cars.

  14. Subways also appear to be a lot more expensive. Like in excess of a few hundred million for about the same length.

  15. For a few reasons. Nevermind we tend to be more independent, have a culture where cars are ingrained in us- a lot of us just live out in suburbs or rural areas and we need independent transportation to get around or for utility purposes like hauling things around.

  16. ah. someone hasn't seen a 5+ car pileup on an open highway with nothing around but exit… doesn't work…

  18. It's not about Mush, it's about the use of the tunnels that his diggers have excavated (unless he actually owns the tunnels and not the city?!).

    Why go to the trouble of digging new tunnels and not just go the full hog and dig proper tunnels for standard sized subway trains?

    It seems like this project is the opposite of efficiency to be pursuing the movement of individual vehicles rather than train cars that can handle many more people at once.

    Unless Vegas simply doesn't get the footfall to justify that kind of investment that New York and London had?

  19. I'm inclined to think it a bit idiotic myself.

    Is it at least limited to fully electric cars to keep fumes out of the tunnels?

  20. Seems a stretch considering they are much narrower than the average underground/subway train tunnel seen in the likes of London or New York.

    From what I've seen of them so far a standard sized car can barely fit on them at all.

  21. I think specialty is a bit of a reach, or putting those improvements at Musk's feet for that matter when a ton of engineers are doing most of the heavy lifting.

  22. But even if Thunderfoot is proved factually wrong, he still has a point. It's not about facts so much, criticizing this project points to some truth of the social reality in USA. Why do americans need personal cars in order to sustain their sense of identity?

  23. This is 0.8 mile? = 1.3 km?

    As soon as there is a queue it would be faster to park all the cars and walk down the tunnels.

    I think I've been in train stations that had ~1 km long walks from one platform to another.

  24. In the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), the big shows often have 200,000 participants, coming in and out during the day. The loop will help move people around, delivering and taking people to three different entrances and exits.

    The loop will not do away with other forms of transportation into the LVCC, it will merely add more transit capacity. Why would anyone object to that? More ways to get in and out is a good thing.

    Highly interesting are the new designs for boring company tunnels in more dense cities. To me, the Vegas loop is a starting point, a test bed. Just as Musk started Tesla with Roadsters, and just as he started Space X with Falcon 1, Musk's engineers will keep improving the designs of passenger loading/unloading platforms as well as external vehicle entry points. It will be slow going, but steady improvements over time is Musk's specialty.

  30. Why not self driving cars and mag rail? Does Musk need to do everything for you? Get off your couch and bust a hump!

  31. Hate to be that guy, but I predict a mini-disaster in a tube with many trapped for hours in the next 1 – 2 years. The number of future Boring tunnels plummets, resistance and untenable safety measures reduce and eliminate future convenience. Ah. human frailty and error that prevents us from having Nice Things.

  32. ho-hum. The dream of renting a car at the airport and taking your family and luggage down the boring tunnel, AI-whisked at 150mph with dozens of other families to pop up on the strip or major destination and simply 'drive' the remaining miles was but a pipe dream…

  33. The cost per mile is a bit of fudge since you need to compare the value and availability of and access to land/ subsurface in other major cities — many other boring projects have hit huge money, red tape, and NIMBY roadblocks.
    Seems like the cheap tunnel and the variety of vehicles that go through seem to be the overwhelming drive to this project when it should have been people management – such as peak time flow, access to stations, minimize waiting times, compartmentalize people and stuff (people value being in groups of 1-6 way more than as a traditional -transit gaggle) (and luggage?)

  34. geez. i see very little 'transformational' people-moving 'advances' going on… what happens during the first 2 hours and last 2 hours of conventions/ strip meal-times/ sports events? – same people grid lock – now the line-ups go up the escalator and out the entrances, many, many 10s of minutes of waiting … what's the point of creating an AI focussed 'optimization' scheme if you still have the same subway-like, train-like bottleneck-in and a bottleneck-out 'times' a few stations. The real advance is to have many stations around a node and have them all feed into the main line and use the benefit of small and nimble vehicles to mesh the input/output which wouldn't be possible with trains – like those Youtube intersections that don't need streetlights cause all intersection-input vehicles know where every other vehicle is and adjust 'crossing' trajectory accordingly – like a super efficient roundabout..

  35. doesn't seem an exciting option for those who otherwise just want to pop off the strip and go elsewhere quickly… limited express stations at end points seems too easy… fully AI with easily adaptable 'merge in' lanes to maximize ins/offs was minimally expected.

  36. seems a lot less of a 'get-off/ get-on efficient assembly line' operation than I would have guessed – even rental car drop-off seems more streamlined… potential unrealized….

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