
The Boring Company’s Las Vegas tunnel is nearly 50% done - Sami_Lehtinen
https://www.teslarati.com/the-boring-companys-las-vegas-tunnel-is-nearly-50-done/
======
mc3
ELI5... why is digging a tunnel tech news? Does Elon dig them faster or more
cheaply or something? Otherwise do I submit this to HN?
[https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling](https://www.sydneymetro.info/tunnelling).

I think tunnels are the future though for cities. But I'd prefer trains to be
running in them, or roads that only allow electric public transport.

Edit. In 1988 they started work on the Channel Tunnel UK to France:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_Tunnel)
\- I am still in awe that they did this! I like the vision, bean counters be
damned. If he made a tunnel like that it'd be news.

~~~
dv_dt
I think this follows Elons pattern of being able to find areas where the
fundamental technology has advanced and is available, but the integration and
step up to a new level hasn't been invested in yet. I think the Boring company
basically made more efficient custom built tunneling equipment.

~~~
threeseed
Actually Musk leased an existing Canadian boring machine:

[http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-
mac...](http://superexcavators.com/news/super-excavators-consult-machine)

There is no evidence of any improvements or innovations.

~~~
SECProto
And the Tesla Roadster was just a modified Lotus Elise.

Buying an of-the-shelf product and reverse engineering it, before building
ones' own, is a very valuable step.

~~~
mbesto
And Tesla's Gigfactory is a JV with Panasonic and partially funded by
taxpayers.

I'd say the largest value add about Elon Musk is his ability to create a
reality distortion field to convince large swathes of people to follow his
dream.

I'm actually not being critical of Musk here. Jobs did this and you can see
how transformative certain technologies have been as a result.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Can’t we call it passion and vision instead of “reality distortion field”?

~~~
JohnJamesRambo
Can we have passion and vison that doesn't need reality distorted and instead
follows truth and the laws of physics and logic in our universe?

------
technofiend
Stated opening date isn't until 2021, so they're doing the first 90% of the
project which is drilling then the second 90% which is finishing the
infrastructure, installing stations, etc. It's interesting to see but not
exactly a milestone just yet.

------
mdszy
So they're halfway through digging the tunnel, not halfway through doing all
the other things to make the tunnel actually as useful as musk is claiming.

This all just seems like subways from first principles but probably worse.

~~~
neltnerb
Though if they really dug that much tunnel under a city in such a short time,
maybe there's an actual innovation in a better way to make subway tunnels?

I think putting cars in these tunnels is silly and that subways are obviously
the best answer personally, but I'm also watching two new light rail lines
being put in next to my house. It does not seem quick (though they're
elevated). It'd be lovely if those tracks were somehow underground faster and
cheaper than above ground.

I'm happy enough it's finally happening, but if it could be done economically
in a way that reclaimed the land the rail lines are on to make a park or more
housing? And without trains driving by my windows on both sides? Maybe the
boring machine itself is somehow better than what we dig tunnels now.

~~~
danso
If there were an actual innovation in tunneling, I feel like they’d be able to
give actual specific metrics to rebut critics who argue that it’s apples to
oranges. But AFAIK the bottleneck in tunneling is not a mechanical engineering
one.

~~~
cordite
What is the bottleneck

~~~
duckymcduckface
Geotech is a bitch. Soils aren't homogenous and vary a lot in both composition
and characteristics. There are multiple types of TBMs that are designed to
operate under very specific conditions, for example a soft rock/soil TBM
excavates through different mechanisms than a hard rock TBM. One of the big
problems in any excavation is you have no idea what's actually down there
until you start working in it. The underlying material can differ a lot over
very short distances. You can very easily be minding your own business driving
the TBM and run into a transition that will straight up mess you up. Combine
that with all the previous mentioned stuff and you get a lot of cost overruns
and time overruns. But yea, subsurface is a bitch.

~~~
jtolmar
Great answer, but I also want to add:

Even if you had ideal conditions or an amazing new TBM that goes through any
material, you're still dealing with a machine that scrapes at rocks for miles
on end. The parts that do the digging need constant replacement, underground,
on the inconvenient side of the boring machine, and even if you did the actual
digging faster that'd mean repairing it even more often.

------
martamoreno2
Is this for real? They are basically getting orgasms just because someone
drills a tunnel, which is indeed revolutionary for public transportation...
And it transports a whopping 4500 people per hour, will you think of that!
That is almost as much as a normal, 100 year old subway train can do in a few
minutes.

~~~
ilitirit
I don't know a lot about the background of this project or the region. Why has
it taken this long for a tunnel to be built in LV? Was/is it not considered
necessary?

~~~
Traster
It's pretty much misleading to describe this as a Los Vegas tunnel to be
honest. What they're actually doing is building a small shuttle system to get
from one side of a convention centre to the other. The total length of the
tunnel will be 1 mile. So in terms of what this project does, it's best
compared to the sorts of bus systems, monorails, and light rail systems that
airports use to transport people from one terminal to another. There's a
reason these small funky transit systems are only used on small scales.

It's not comparable to real mass transit systems used on the scale of a city
and the length of the tunnel means that the public really can't view the cost
of this as comparable to the cost of a real Subway system tunnel or road
tunnel.

The relevance of the project for TBC is that they're going to learn from it,
but for the rest of us it's really not going to be that interesting.

------
WhitneyLand
The Strip, McCarran airport, and downtown are not within one or two miles of
each other. They are further apart than that so there must be something else
to it.

The Strip itself could use the whole length of the tunnel, so whatever this is
connecting to is going to be more limited then it might sound from the
article.

~~~
mzkply
It's just from one end of the LVCC to the other.

~~~
jandrese
That sounds silly until you've walked from one end of the LVCC to the other.

~~~
ghaff
The expansion of the LVCC made me vaguely curious about what types of shows
use it given that all the IT shows I'm familiar with use the Venetian/Sands
or, if they're a bit smaller, The Mandalay Bay. I haven't been there since
Comdex days. It looks as if it's things like Kitchen and Bath Builders, World
of Concrete, etc. So maybe things that are more oriented towards a mega show
floor and less to speaking rooms.

~~~
nrp
CES is the key one. It occupies all of LVCC and Sands, with spillover and
unofficial meeting rooms taking up basically all of the strip. It's not clear
what CES is going to do with another full hall though. The show is already
kind of a mish-mash of industries.

~~~
ghaff
I forgot about CES because I've never been to that one.

It still sort of amazes me that CES hasn't collapsed under its own weight.
Comdex did. CeBIT finally did. I thought it was finally going to happen about
a decade ago when Microsoft pulled out; that's the usual "emperor has no
clothes" moment. But it kept on going.

------
abduhl
The article is confusing. It says that they are supposed to deliver two
tunnels - are both going on at the same time?

It also says that they’re 6 football fields in: 1800 ft. This is only 35% of
the stated mile length for the tunnel. Under what metric is this tunnel or
project 50% complete?

~~~
jessriedel
This article from 10 days ago says "About 1,900 feet of the 4,300-foot-long
tunnel has been dug in the seven weeks since the project’s kickoff".

[https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/boring-
co...](https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/conventions/boring-co-s-1st-las-
vegas-convention-center-tunnel-nears-halfway-point-1929443/)

So I think the Teslarati article just rounded 4,300 feet up to "a mile"
(=5,280 feet). 1900/4300 = 44%.

~~~
rainyMammoth
Also good to note that Teslarati is an "Elon Musk fan boy" blog. Anything that
you read there is usually lacking critical sense. They probably rounded 44% to
50%

------
altacc
Isn't this just describing building a small but fancy subway system? Honest
question: what's the novel "wow" factor that I'm missing?

~~~
mdszy
The "wow" factor is that Musk's name is associated with it. Nothing more.

~~~
3fe9a03ccd14ca5
Isn’t the Tesla just an electric car?

Musk as a company leader means a lot. I’m sure a lot of other people had the
idea for a “Tesla” before there was Tesla. Or the idea of self-landing
rockets.

~~~
CydeWeys
There's a big difference between an ICE car and a BEV.

There's no difference between a tunnel and a tunnel.

~~~
maxharris
When you build the tunnel for a tenth the cost, that's a pretty big
difference. The same budget lets you build ten times more infrastructure,
which is quite badly needed! I live in Los Angeles and things are so bad here
that often you simply can't see friends that live only a few miles away.

~~~
yongjik
But what if it's also tenth the capacity? According to the article this
accommodates 4,400 people/hr. BART ridership is 411k/day, and (to pick a
random example) Gangnam subway station in Seoul averages at 230k/day. And
that's actual usage, not max capacity.

~~~
maxharris
That's only a valid comparison if you take massive infrastructure projects
head-on. There is no law of physics stating that these tunnels can't be used
for other situations and purposes.

Several things come to mind:

1\. There are lots of places with lower density than city centers, but higher
density than suburbs that would benefit massively from underground
transportation.

2\. Smaller tunnels running everywhere will be very useful for package
delivery! John McCarthy (the man that gave us LISP) explains it in detail
here:
[http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/future/delivery.html](http://jmc.stanford.edu/commentary/future/delivery.html)

3\. Let's not discount the strong likelihood of further cost reductions. The
Boring Company has made huge strides already, with further cost and speed
gains to be had from a TBM they are designing and building from scratch:
[https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-
tunnelin...](https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-line-storm-tunneling-
machine-active/)

~~~
reitzensteinm
Do you have any citation for the "huge strides" TBC has made already? The only
concrete numbers I've seen have been apples to oranges, either not normalizing
for cross section area, or comparing just the cost of TBC digging to complete
projects.

------
TaylorGood
I recently learned about the amount of homeless living in tunnels under the
Las Vegas strip (1). I would imagine the depth for Boring Co is significant in
comparison to these runoff tunnels right beneath the surface, but still popped
into my mind..

1)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRrxFX1wfFg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRrxFX1wfFg)

------
kenneth
The Boring Company's FAQ is actually pretty helpful in understanding why their
approach is innovative.

In short: Small autonomous vehicles instead of big subway cars means you can
change the model from one of big stations with big heavy trains that must
speed up and slow down constantly to let people in and out, to one with
smaller pods that go directly from a specific origin to a destination, travels
mostly entirely at their top speed, never have to slow down for stops or other
vehicles, etc.

Also, the tunnels for this can be smaller and therefore exponentially cheaper
to dig.

[https://www.boringcompany.com/faq](https://www.boringcompany.com/faq)

~~~
Traster
Sorry, maybe I'm missing something, but everything we know about urban
planning is that large high capacity vehicles doing fixed routes are way more
efficient than individual point to point travel. Cars aren't as efficient as
busses, busses aren't as efficient as trains. Or to put it another way - using
your logic everyone should just be flying in private jets.

------
bane
I wish Musk could provide a clearer vision for why this is important (cheap
subways for any city that wants one!). Instead we get weird tiny bumpy tunnels
and car elevators.

------
lucas_membrane
The article says that two one-mile lengths will be constructed and that now
they have completed more than 6 football fields (say 600 meters). That is not
quite 20% of two miles, so the math may be more leading edge than the shovel.
The article also says that the equipment has been underground "for months," so
it doesn't get me thinking that tunnels are ready to conquer widespread
problems on a large scale soon.

------
WilliamEdward
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dn6ZVpJLxs)

Here is an analysis of why Musk's tunnels are ridiculous. I used to believe in
them too, so you can trust that this completely changed my opinion. Facts are
more important than magic, people.

------
hnburnsy
Here is great Vegas blog that broke the news on the tunnel in Vegas.

[https://vitalvegas.com/elon-musks-tunnel-project-is-
underway...](https://vitalvegas.com/elon-musks-tunnel-project-is-underway-at-
las-vegas-convention-center/)

------
mzkply
Perhaps the timing makes sense, similar to high-rises and how they have their
concrete structure complete a very long time before anyone can actually move
in.

------
rainyMammoth
This is a textbook study case for the Dunning Kruger effect

------
sambroner
I don't know much about tunneling speeds, but this seems much faster than Big
Bertha in Seattle although for a much smaller volume (the tunnel is narrower)
and (I'm assuming) less complex location.

Big Bertha - 3.5 years, ~1.75 miles, 1.5 m/yr

Boring - .15 years, .35 miles, 2.33 m/yr

~~~
CydeWeys
Your units are confusing me. Meters per year? Surely they're faster than that?

~~~
Jernik
They used miles and years right before that, so I'm not sure how it is
confusing that m/yr is miles/year

~~~
OnlineGladiator
It's confusing because the way the units are represented is inconsistent.

~~~
Dylan16807
You find the 'yr' confusing?

~~~
OnlineGladiator
No, they interchanged miles with m, and in a weird unintuitive way at that. m
isn't even standard for miles, it's standard for meters, and just before that
miles was written instead of shortened - it's not just confusing it's also
terribly presented. At least yr is intuitive, nothing about m is easily
understood even given the context (which is why so many other people are
complaining about it).

~~~
Dylan16807
Okay, though that sounds like you're actually objecting for a different reason
than inconsistency.

But I will note that "m" is used in the common distance-over-time unit of mph.

------
Rebelgecko
If the tunnel was 0% done on November 15, and is 50% done today, why isn't the
tunnel opening before 2021? If this is actually their rate of progress, the
tunnel should be ready by March.

------
pro-duct
This sounds comically obvious, but WOW that was fast. Really impressed that
they are delivering on some of their promises, given Musk's history of over-
optimism. Sincerely wishing them the best of luck, because if they can pull
this off, there will be other cities making deals with them (please San
Francisco I'm begging you)

~~~
jeltz
They just used an off-the-shelf machine from another company. Modern tunnel
boring machines are this fast.

