It made him money but did not fix traffic lol
That $75 million figure made my bullshit detector start to squawk, so I did the math. The web site says it has a capacity of 4,400 visitors per hour, and assuming $3.75 per ride (if nobody gets the daily pass for $5), it only has to operate at maximum capacity all hours of the day and night, 24/7, for 6 months to bring in that amount of revenue.
So if the profit margin is 50%, the Vegas Loop can make $75 million in a year of continuous operation at 100% capacity. Seems legit. /s
I’m sure they meant 75m gross, at best.
Which, even if that’s true, I’m still laughing at him because it hasn’t fixed the traffic.
The sad thing is, there’s already a light rail there between the convention center and hotels.
Also if note, If they would have built a nice path, you could have easily just had people walk.
For some reason Americans don’t think trains are sexy. Mostly though there’s a belief that they’re extremely expensive, difficult to maintain, worse to use than cars, and too inflexible. The first two are more true about highways than railroads and the hyperloop is the worst of both worlds and really just the manifestation of Elon and many Americans’ distaste for interacting with and as part of the public.
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
- San Francisco’s BART moves about 3-4 million people per month(~ 5,000 per hour)
- Boston’s MBTA moves on average 700,000 to 800,000 people per week (~4,1000 per hour)
- And then there’s the NYC Metro 2-6 million people per day.
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).
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.
For anyone interested, that’s the U4 line in Hamburg, Germany, at the “HafenCity Universität” station.
Cool, thank you!
This is a 3.5km tunnel with a speed of 55km/h. Thats 3.8 minutes of travel. No fucking way this thing could ever be profitable.
Isn’t this simply a private lane for whoever pays?
Thats the one in California, the one in Vegas has drivers and is between the convention center and a hotel.
IIRC their peak capacity estimates do things like assume loading/unloading times for a family of 4 with luggage to be under 30 seconds too.
We have a LRT here in toronto that has taken over a decade to build and MIGHT finally open in 2025. I am so sick and tired of transit projects being so slow.
So all box.sol really cares about is if it is profitable.
Not that it actually functions well.
I’ll be perfectly honest as a non-American who tries to not hear about Musk, I had no idea this was actually built.
I’d heard about it, but I didn’t think they’d be stupid enough to actually build it.
Some people are “idea” guys, other guys are wealthy. When these are separate people, great things can come of it. When they are both the same person, stupid shit comes of it.
I have yet to see any evidence that Musk is an idea guy.
I’m an idea guy. The ideas he funds are idiotic. My theory is he has a team of idea guys and he asks them what would be cool, then funds it.
I mean they built a tunnel. We’ve been building tunnels since before electricity was invented.
And as mentioned it’s no different to the tunnel of love at Disney, or a sky bridge between two hotels in Vegas.
Yeah, but they clearly didn’t build this one properly.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel-sludge
Sure bud, 75 million a year.
Let’s be super generous and say this thing operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. And let’s say we’re talking about turnover, not profit when saying it “makes” 75 million a year. And let’s say they do a 100 trips an hour all day long. That would mean a single trip would cost over $85. Yeah right, in your dreams buddy.
Knowing how musk operates, it’s 5 million in profit and 70 million paid by Vegas or some government handout as some sort of fucked up deal he managed to get
More likely is 100 million in losses, but 175 million paid by vegas
This sub seems like it’s got more disinformation and engagement bait than a lot of others. I agree with the concept but a post about a tweet retweeting someone’s blatantly false info is just dumb.
I assume it is revenue. That would be realistic but absolutely laughable, my local public transport company makes 240 million Euros in revenue every year. They also operate at a 140 million deficit but I doubt that tunnel is any different. Neither will it have transported 200 million people either.
One is a grift, the other one is actually meant to be a means of transportation
It’s a great American success because instead of being good at what it needs to do, it is good at making money for a rich person.
And only because of government support. Your tax dollars at work.
Also I haven’t really looked into this Vegas Loop thing until now, and the tweet was right, it only connects a convention center and a hotel LOL
Last I heard too the cars aren’t autonomous in the tunnel either. They’re driven by real people. The “hyperloop” idea was actually to try and kill the high speed rail project in Cali. Elon is a piece of shit and tried to tank our train, which has helped to extend the project further and increase scrutiny of it.
Yeah, that was one of the ways people realized ‘oh, Tesla FSD is complete bullshit.’
If you can’t even automate a car driving in an extremely simplified and controlled environment, like a set track with a 2 or 3 ‘stops’… your FSD is obviously crap.
The worst part about it is the hyper loop is an objectively cool idea, impractical but fucking sweet, that definitely didn’t originate from Elon. He only jumped on it to try and divert cash from highspeed rail and even then it just evolved into lol put cars in a tunnel I own.
Not a cool idea, it’s a retarded idea, unless we are saying making something super expensive and very impractical is cool, in which case, it’s cool I guess, like a Bugatti Veyron, just even stupider for it to exist while there are children starving in the world.
Good point I was wrong, I forgot it’s impossible to spend money on more than one thing at a a time.
You get the worst of both worlds, inefficiency of transportation capacity of a car with limitations of driving destinations of a rail.
And apparently even the self driving doesn’t even work there (you would think this would be an easy feature to add)
Of course Americans are in love with cars, but isn’t the best solution for Vegas an above ground streetcar? Relatively short distance, sufficient space (so no need to dig underground), high capacity.
I’ve been stunned that the Vegas strip doesn’t have some kind of real transit system for decades now.
They didn’t even let the new HSR line come to the Strip itself. It stops outside of the area and people have to taxi in. Why the casino owners weren’t fighting over who got the HSR stop in their casino I’ll never understand. Wouldn’t you want those trains to drop off thousands of possible marks right on your doorstep? No, instead they get dropped in the desert and have to wander to wherever in town.
So it’s just a worse tunnel then
Ha
it gets worse: the loading and unloading takes several minutes because all the cars have to back out into traffic, so congestion in the tunnel is common. the max speed is something like 15km/h because there are too many cars moving in the system. and the tunnel is too narrow for you to be able to open the door, meaning that in the event of a fire, everyone just dies.
EV batteries fire + narrow place seems like the worst ever combo
How the heck is this project even approved lol
murica, sensible regulations are socialism, please add 5 parking spaces for every 10 square feet of your store, thanks
Is it true that you actually have to add a parking space as a building owner in US? lol
If you have half an hour free, and want to spend it feeling a justified combination of nauseous horror and smug superiority, have I got a video for you!
A few years back I actually found the hyperloop pretty novel and cool. Like put your car on skates and it could zoooom very fast. Yes a train would be better but this idea seems like a cool project. Fast forward now, and you still have to drive and stuff, it’s lame af.
Hyperloop is soo fucking stupid if you think about it for like 5 minutes, but lots of people bought into the hype.
Nah it was always a silly idea. But like something silly and expensive and you’re kind of waiting to see how it would come out to be. But alas, it is a shell of the concept designs the public were exposed to
![[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}