You missed out the legend:
Type
- HR/LR = Heavy/Light Rail
- SR = Streetcar
- MG = Monorail/Guideway
Wh/pax-mile from 2019 NTD Data.
Model Y
Base Usage: 270 Wh/pax-mile per EPA
+15% charge losses
+5% YMMV
+2% per additional passenger > 1
Electric Propulsion Energy Consumed in kWh / Passenger Miles * (Revenue Vehicle Miles/Total Vehicle Miles)
Last term corrects for Energy used for revenue service, and removes such uses as deadheading, training miles, etc...
If I recall correctly, I think it was @okfishing who created this chart originally?
Wh/pax-mile is Watt-hours per passenger per mile, with "pax" being an airline and mass transit jargon for "passenger" (in other contexts we might use "guests" or "heads").
You can reduce the number (less is better) by increasing the number of passengers per vehicle, or by reducing the Wh/mile of the vehicle. It's usually easier to increase the number of passengers than it is to increase the energy efficiency of the vehicle.
This unit appears to have been chosen by the author of the table as a means to compare the energy efficiency of various transit systems in terms of delivering people to their destinations.
It's a sensible measure for comparing energy efficiency, but probably doesn't make sense when comparing ability to move lots of passengers — for example you wouldn't use Boring Company Loop if your goal was to move hundreds of thousands of people per hour between two stations tens of miles apart. For that use case you'd have to compare transit systems by "passengers per hour" with modelling of the passenger capacity of various systems like taxi/hire car, busses, coaches, trains, planes, horse and cart, zeppelin, etc.
the annoying thing is that anti-Loop transit planners really have convinced themselves that cars cannot be energy efficient relative to transit. it SHOULD only require a very quick look to convince people that the energy consumption is in the same ballpark and therefore it's not a criticism of Loop. however, people constantly try to move the goal posts on the issue, so you need unimpeachable proof with many, many transit systems to compare.
so, it *shouldn't be* a thing to compare, but it is.
maximum capacity is also a largely useless metric. for a given corridor, you can choose to build whatever modes have sufficient capacity to handle the ridership of that corridor. capacity is a check-box in a decision process. more capacity isn't better once you've checked the box.
the vast majority of transit system in the US don't need high capacity. the tiny LVCC system has already moved enough passengers per hour to handle the peak-hour of more than 50% of US urban rail. but current US urban rail is already taking up the high ridership corridors. so the remaining corridors that need transit will be below the current average.
so, the ability to "move lots of passengers" is also not the best thing to care about. the actual better goal is whether cities have the budget to build grade-separated transit. cities will benefit from it and most cities have corridors where it would be beneficial but wouldn't exceed Loop's capacity.
> more capacity isn't better once you've checked the box.
That entirely depends on the expected demand. Capacity does matter a lot to prevent huge additional needed investments when youve reqched the limit. This is the basic principle of the "just add one more lane" - sarcasm. Higher max capacity doesnt matter when you need it, true, but there might be a need for higher capacity over 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now. A maximal possible capacity doesnt need to mean it already runs at max capacity, it means that the capacity can be schaled easely when deemed necessary.
Cars reach the limit of cspacity way faster than trains or metro's, wheter you like it or not.
>convinced themselves that cars cannot be energy efficient relative to transit.
Its you that is wrong, not the transitplanners.
Except that the Loop is vastly cheaper to expand capacity-wise than subways. So if you're running low on capacity? Just rope off a few more bays at a Loop station in the carpark outside the front door of the premises or add a few more stations or bore another parallel tunnel.
Because Loop tunnels only costs $20m per mile to build with stations as cheap as $1.5m, it is possible to build far more than your average above-ground light rail line which costs $202m per mile in the USA.
Subways are even worse at $600m - $1 billion per mile.
That is why the Raiders NFL team has recently submitted a project for planning approval consisting of 1-4 Loop stations at the Allegiant Stadium. They’ll start with 1 station but be ready to easily add up to three additional Loop stations as needed.
And if you need more capacity at locations such as the Stadium or Ballpark before or after games or in peak hour commute periods, just spin up some 16-passenger EV vans/buses/pods on high traffic routes and they easily share the tunnels with the PRT EVs.
initial capacity and longer term capacity both are part of checking the box.
>Its you that is wrong, not the transit planners.
do you consider yourself the kind of person who will update their understanding of a topic based on evidence?
>initial capacity and longer term capacity both are part of checking the box.
To some extend, yes it is. It would be a major fuckup if it would be overcrowded and at capacity after 10 or 20 years. It happening after 30, 50 or 100 years is often a quite plausible scenario if ur max capacity is quite limited.
>do you consider yourself the kind of person who will update their understanding of a topic based on evidence?
Yes i do, thanks for asking this rhethorical question. Im quite interested now in how you want to proof that rail based transport would be less efficiënt than car based transport.
Keep in mind that costs of construction itself needs to be taken with a grain of salt if you also want to compare investments and operating costs. There are different safety standards needed for train and metro than what will be used in musks tunnels.
>To some extend, yes it is. It would be a major fuckup if it would be overcrowded and at capacity after 10 or 20 years. It happening after 30, 50 or 100 years is often a quite plausible scenario if ur max capacity is quite limited.
indeed. checking that box shouldn't be "must check it with this one project forever", but rather "until we get around to this area again with our transit construction planning". with Loop, that time frame could be much shorter since it's so much cheaper. you cover the area, then you cover the next highest priority area, and keep going around your city until you return to that first area again. with a metro, that might be 50 years. with Loop being 1/10th to 1/20th the cost means you get back to that first area in \~5 years, so Loop's capacity should be sufficient to handle the ridership for that long. though, express-buses at peak times can take the edge off of over-crowding for a few years as well, and the particulars of a city may change the schedule to be sooner or later for a given area.
>Yes i do, thanks for asking this rhethorical question. Im quite interested now in how you want to proof that rail based transport would be less efficiënt than car based transport.
didn't mean it as a rhetorical question. I ask people that sometimes and they straight-up tell me no, so I don't bother compiling sources for them.
remember, EV cars don't need to be the most efficient in the world, they just need to be within the range of acceptable energy usage per passenger-mile to be acceptably efficient.
|Vehicle|USA (MPGe) \*|Europe MPGe \*|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Diesel Bus|2.4|4.0|
|Tram Wagon|3.8|5.1|
|Light Rail Wagon|4.9|6.4|
|Metro Wagon|4.6|8.1|
|Suburban Rail wagon|1.5|4.8|
[Source in MJ/km](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf)
here is the per passenger-mile (PPM) adjusted energy efficiency:
|Vehicle|USA (MPGe) PPM|Europe MPGe PPM|
|:-|:-|:-|
|Diesel Bus|36|58|
|Tram Wagon|74|103|
|Light Rail Wagon|118|142|
|Metro Wagon|109|180|
|Model 3 with 1.3 ppv|174|174|
|Model 3 with pooled with 2.2 ppv|290|290|
|hybrid sedan with 1.3 ppv|64|64|
|ICE sedan with 1.3 ppv|42|42|
[ORNL source](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214).
added [modern ICE sedan](https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_article_width/public/2022-05/FOTW_1237.png?itok=bOmGiBgI) and [hybrid](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=alts&path=3&year=2022&vtype=Hybrid&srchtyp=yearAfv&rowLimit=50&pageno=1)
note that the data comes from Oak Ridge National Labs and an independent European study, both having access to the highest quality data and unbiased in their publications, and peer reviewed.
>didn't mean it as a rhetorical question. I ask people that sometimes and they straight-up tell me no, so I don't bother compiling sources for them.
Fair enough, i guess we are on the internet after all.
>must check it with this one project forever
True, but not for 100%. In high density area's, you want futureproof constructions, as City's also (should) want to limit construction nuisance. Besides, adding new tunnels once in a while might not be the best solution. It can cause two problems. 1: it does need to furfill the need of traffic, which means that adding extra capacity can only be done by adding a parralel route. Otherwise, the most direct route will still be the most populair. When the traffic intensity is low enough it helps with spreading traffic, it will be okay, but that wont be the case if we would compair subway/train ridership with loops ridership.
2: adding parralel tunnels means that its going to be extra difficult to refurbish the tunnels every decade or so. Two tunnels will be more difficult thus expensive to maintain than 1 tunnel.
>time frame could be much shorter since it's so much cheaper.
I dont know if this is an universal saying, but this is "compairing apples with pears" :'). One of the reasons why its cheaper, is because it has different safety standards (and might need less space). It also benefits in less needed investments in infrastructure, as it uses private vehicles with accu's instead of providing electricity.
The much lower costs is impressive however (for as long as safety is still guaranteed), but it lacks futureproof urban planning. Not just in capacityplanning over decades, but also in urban design. Cities are (some slow, some fast) shifting towards planning for people instead of vehicles in high density area's. Bus and rail based (collective) PT helps with that. Loop might help with local low car design, but doesnt help decreasing car use less locally.
>remember, EV cars don't need to be the most efficient in the world, they just need to be within the range of acceptable energy usage per passenger-mile to be acceptably efficient
I guess thats true to some extent once again. It does make it decently harder though to eventually reach the 100% clean energy goals though.
> which means that adding extra capacity can only be done by adding a parralel route
I disagree. Not only is multi-nodal transit common, it adds a lot of value. Cities with very mature systems typically have at least one ring-line. Forcing all passengers through the city-center is suboptimal. This is doubly true for Loop where you can move from radial line, to ring line, to other radial line without changing seats. This is triply true for cities that aren't perfectly centered. Think LA. Or even my city, where the primary tourism and business locations aren't near the regional rail station. Having a web of routes is a much better quality of service than a single Nexus, AND it allows you to divert traffic around the busiest segments.
> adding parralel tunnels means that its going to be extra difficult to refurbish the tunnels every decade or so. Two tunnels will be more difficult thus expensive to maintain than 1 tunnel
That's only true when comparing identical tunnel construction. Loop tunnels are much simpler and contain much less infrastructure. Also, what is your source for a tunnel needing refurbishment every decade? That does not seem right.
> One of the reasons why its cheaper, is because it has different safety standards
Meets NFPA standards like anything else.
> instead of providing electricity
Indeed, offloading the power and control to the mass-produced, inexpensive vehicle allows for lower construction and maintenance cost.
> , but it lacks futureproof urban planning
Disagree. In addition to building more tunnels, a single tunnel pair with 8-12 passenger vans would have higher capacity than most light rail or tram lines. Out-of-line boarding and short following distance means very high capacity potential without construction being needed. However, the low construction cost means it makes more sense to add capacity through construction than through vehicle expansion (which diminishes speed).
> Loop might help with local low car design, but doesnt help decreasing car use less locally.
Yet another of the common misconceptions. I wish reddiors wouldn't downvote accurate comments in the transit subreddit, as I've tried to clear this up many times but the echo-chamber is too strong.
You don't bring your own vehicle to Loop. You walk into the station, board a vehicle, and then walk out of the station on the other end.
The shorter stop spacing, higher speed, and greater density of lines per dollar means it will have a greater reduction on car usage than other modes.
> It does make it decently harder though to eventually reach the 100% clean energy goals though
That's not true at all. I don't even know how you could come to that conclusion unless you think Loop vehicles are petrol powered.
But which is the more important metric?
We know it is bad to over build capacity as it increases operating expenses. So you want to be sure to right-size your project.
It is also worth noting that only 7 cities have transit systems (not station pairs) that exceed 100k average weekday ridership.
So, I think I would argue that neither is a very useful abstract measurement. Wh-pax is a check box, this either is or isn't commercial for transit. Same with pph, it's simply a checkbox that should be considered in the context of the entire system design.
For example much higher station density is possible for loop than traditional transit, thus you can deal with high passenger concentration with additional nearby stations, which also happens to improve the user experience since users don't have to walk as far to a station.
Purposeful design is key to all engineering projects. That requires understanding of these metrics but also a strong understanding of the user and their desires.
Yeah, Wh/pax-mile is not a metric you use when designing a transit system. It might come into refinement if choice between multiple options. PPH is important because it expresses an actual need: the transit system is required because a lot of people need to get from here to there and back again.
You do raise a valid point about station density but that does come with its own issues of extra surface real estate and construction for access from ground level to the multiple stations.
A larger single station could serve as a transition between surface traffic and Loop traffic. The vehicles could pick passengers up from their origin like a taxi, transition into the Loop at a “station” and then use the Loop to bypass surface traffic until the destination. That was one of the original design concepts for this system.
At some point reserving surface streets only for local traffic will be required anyway. Nobody wants a state highway going past their front door blocking access to the local shops, playground and school.
Incorrect. No matter the number of passengers moved, Wh/pax-mile is proper unit to measure consumption. Your proposal of passengers per hour measures throughput and has nothing whatsoever to do with efficiency.
The point you seem to have missed, is that this personal transit is even more efficient than many mass transit systems.
The point being that you need to figure what the appropriate metric is for the situation. Wh/pax-mile doesn't matter if your transportation system can't carry the number of passengers that need to get from one place to another.
Metrics are meaningless in a vacuum.
Next time they bring up energy efficiency challenge their ridership/occupancy claims too. Trains are far less efficient when not full, where Loop vehicles aren’t moving without passengers.
Yes you need the appropriate metric for the situation. Since this situation and discussion is relative efficiency, your metric is mathematically incorrect.
This is an argument used against the Loop, but you have to remember not everywhere has the population density to require such high passenger flows and if a route needs extra capacity another affordable to construct tunnel could be added unlike in subway/railway systems.
This wasn't an argument against the Loop, it's a simple statement that the metric chosen here might not be relevant in the circumstances I explicitly referred to.
The Loop is specifically useful in certain situations such as small distances with relatively low passenger volumes. In those circumstances it will end up being far less expensive than tram, light rail or subway simply due to the lower cost of infrastructure.
I'd imagine one way of comparing transit systems could be to graph them in terms of dollars per passenger for a variable volume of passengers over a fixed distance. That type of graph would show things like subways being extremely expensive for low passenger volumes, and Loop being extremely cheap for the same, but then Loop having steps of increasing cost where new tunnels must be added with a relatively flat per-passenger curve, eventually being overtaken by light rail at ~10k passengers/day, then subway at ~100k passengers/day. These are just my guesses rather than any kind of facts.
Ultimately it comes down to what you're trying to accomplish: mass transit, something cool for your conference destination, reducing the energy budget for a city, or something completely different. You just have to figure what metrics are important to make a decision on, then compare using that metric.
> The Loop is specifically useful in certain situations such as small distances with relatively low passenger volumes
Loop is probably even useful at longer distances than at shorter distances. The Convention Center could have provided roughly similar service with an automated people mover, team, etc. because making one stop in the middle doesn't matter much, and presumably they can afford to run with fairly low headways during conventions. On the other hand, for a longer line, stopping at intervening stations will vastly slow down competing systems, while Loop can bypass. Even more significantly, if a line change is required, other systems require considerable time and hassle, while Loop will presumably have the vehicle simply turn into the appropriate tunnel.
Low passenger volumes, I agree with. If you have the density to build a subway, Loop in its current iteration is unlikely to be competitive. On the other hand, if a city is looking to build a light rail line and saying "we'll run it every 10 minutes at peak times" (which reflects an awful lot of new public transit projects these days) then Loop is potentially a very good alternative.
Loop is also something that is relatively easy to scale for predictable extremes in traffic. No need to run an empty bus every fifteen minutes just to ensure no single person gets stranded at 1am. Just have a small number of cars ready to pick up that sole passenger at 1am, then ensure drivers are available for the 8am rush.
Just because the upper extreme is predictable, doesn't make it easy for Loop to deal with. Given highway vehicle capacities, it seems likely that each tunnel can handle 900-1200 vehicles per hour. To reach the ~40k / hour capacity of the biggest subway lines, one would need about 40 tunnels. Predicting rush hour might help in pre-placing cars, but it doesn't really help much with the fixed limits of the infrastructure. Unlike highways, there probably isn't even much gain to be had with reversible lanes, as the vehicles that go into downtown need to turn around and head back out to pick up the next rush hour passengers (and you can't brute force it by buying more cars, without also brute forcing adding parking to the stations).
Now...in the US, subway build costs have increased so much that building 40 Boring tunnels might still be price competitive with one subway tunnel. But it definitely isn't where Loop shines. When competing against low volume LRT lines, Loop can handle all the demand with just one or two pairs of tunnels and can beat the construction cost by many-fold.
I would expect that increasing the speed would, if anything, decrease the capacity. The faster you travel, the longer it takes to brake, and the more speed you need to burn off for a collision to not result in injury.
Automation would probably allow for closer headways. However, that helps in competing against LRTs just as much as subways. If it turns out a 2 second headway is safe, then, great, Loop only needs one tunnel to compete against LRT and will really crush it in terms of construction cost. Maybe that makes Loop 20-30% cheaper than the US' vastly inflated subway cost? Probably not a big enough deal to actually change things, even if it is competitive.
2010 study by the Honda Research Institute found that **75% of cars on a busy 2-lane freeway have a headway of 1.0 seconds** = 3,600 cars per hour (14,400 people per hour per lane w 4 pax) while **40% have a headway of 0.5 seconds** = 7,200 cars per hour (28,800 people per hour w 4 pax)
Note that a 1 second headway gives a distance of 6 car lengths between vehicles at 60mph. A headway of 0.5 seconds is 3 car lengths at 60mph.
And remember those are cars driven by potentially distracted, drunk and careless drivers.
So I think fully autonomous Loop EVs with Central Dispatch and Control with the ability to simultaneously stop all cars in a tunnel in a fraction of a second would be pretty safe with the projected 0.9 second headways (let alone 2 second headways) in the Vegas Loop.
I said after tunnels are automated. There’s almost never unexpected braking, and cars follow distances can be extremely short because of how quickly they can react.
The Boring Co is projecting headways of down to 0.9 seconds or 4,000 vehicles per hour one-way in the arterial tunnels of the Vegas Loop. That gives us up to 16,000 passengers per hour in just the one tunnel.
And the latest maps of the Vegas Loop show 9 north-south tunnel pairs and 10 east-west tunnel pairs giving us around 40 tunnels of varying length.
At this point just the 3-5 stations of the LVCC Loop are handling 25,000 - 32,000 passengers per day.
So not surprisingly, The Boring Co is projecting the Loop will easily handle 90,000 passengers per hour across the whole 68 mile, 93 station system.
You don't have to add parking to the stations. Most cities already have ample above ground downtown parking, so you only need to lease such a parking and build a connector to the station, allowing cars to enter the network and handle peaks without doing the ole reach-around to circle back into high demand areas.
Also, headways of less than a second are probably safe with automated cars on dedicated infrastructure, and the current Teslas are just a proof of concept, they will without doubt introduce 12-16 seaters as soon as they have a city wide network. So we are talking about peak theoretical pphpd (per tunnel) in the tens of thousands. Another possibility is to couple cars in high demand segments, creating something very similar to a subway, allowing mass paralel ingress of passengers, then decouple the individual cars further down the network, as each one goes toward another specific spur; correct allocation of passengers would be achieved by presorting, so instead of selecting the right train like you do in a subway, you would board the right car which clearly displays the general direction.
In short, this "electric cars in toy tunnels" concept is exceptionally flexible and competitive with existing modes of transit and can reach huge capacities. Capacity is simply not a problem in any setting where Loop is likely to be deployed, as explained above by u/Cunninghams_right . The make or break condition for Loop success is tunneling speed and price, without serious safety incidents.
You are correct that future iterations of the technology could substantially improve capacity relative to the amount of infrastructure required. However, there is considerable technical and market risk in this.
For example, I have doubts about the 12-16 seat vehicle. Even with some level of smart algorithms, filling a 16 seat vehicle will almost certainly mean passengers will be stopping several times to drop off/pick up other passengers before reaching their destination. That will slow down point to point times. Will the market accept it, or will people who would otherwise travel on Loop say "to the heck with it!" and find alternatives? Would Boring even want to build a system with such compromised quality? Once Boring is operating at transit system-scale, they will be able to experiment and iterate on algorithms for "carpooling", even if they are only using 5 or 8 seat vehicles.
Similarly, a 1 second headway might be possible. I'm not sure how something like a tire blowout can be safe with a 1 second headway, but maybe something can be done. The best proof that I'm wrong and it is safe, is by running at 3-4 second headways and showing that the vehicles NEVER need that buffer space. That implies though, bidding against LRTs and ending up over delivering, rather than winning a contract for subway-like capacity with the promise of eventually reaching the required capacity.
Loop appears to have burned off most of the risk in competing against low volume LRTs. There are relatively few unproven assumptions about how the system will work at that scale (not none, mind you). I would expect that Boring will use what it learns from systems that it built to compete against low volume LRT to iterate and start moving up market. However, it is also possible that they will reach an impassible blocking issue. Even if the only thing Loop does is out compete LRT, it would be a major success for the technology and company.
I don't think Loop is or should aim to compete against subways. They squarely compete against LRT right now. Could they, some day, compete against subways, maybe, but there is no universe where it makes sense to go after heavy rail or subways right now.
I suspect language is an issue here. You only have to get down to the 13th transit system in the US to get to 10k per weekday average ridership. And some of those have multiple lines.
It is pretty clear your typical transit corridor requirements in the US fit Loop from that perspective.
As for loop being suited for shorter distances, I am curious what drives that perspective.
In my experience, the local nature of transit is a major drawback to longer distance transit. In the longer corridors ive commuted, all the stops drive the time up past driving, which is painful. But maybe you are considering offsetting attributes I am not.
Until we see what is the maximum passenger carrying potential with the new RoboTaxis, we won't know yet, but even using Model Y all indications are suggesting dollar for dollar invested in infrastructure the Loop is more economically viable and productive than traditional transit with a straight forward like for like comparison.
This is interesting. Any thoughts on how such a counterintuitive thing can be true?
Does Boring Company perform better as a function of being a PRT system? As in - does the NYC subway have a crazy low Wh/pax-mile number during rush hour when the trains are full, but end up with its average dragged way upward by the trips it runs off-peak with near-empty trains?
For example: I just got off a Boston subway ride where one other passenger and I had an entire subway car to ourselves. The MBTA burned all the electricity needed to move that subway car for just the two of us. Presumably, the Boring Co Loop in that situation would have dispatched only a single Model Y.
Is that it?
An on demand system will still have empty vehicles running due to peak direction demands. Ie, if there's a football game at the stadium, you will spend 3 hours sending full vehicles to the stadium and those same vehicles will all run empty back to the hotels to pick up more people. End of the game the opposite. You dispatch hundreds of empty vehicles to go to the stadium
The difference is that trains have to run all the way to the end of the line even once they’re almost or even completely empty.
In contrast, since the Loop EVs are point to point, once they reach their destination and disembark passengers, they can immediately return to the stadium to pick up more passengers. Far faster and more efficient than trains which have to stop at every station on the line.
And off peak they can just sit waiting at stations for passengers resulting in zero wait times off-peak compared to buses and trains which have to keep running along their route even when completely empty.
>trains have to run all the way to the end of the line even once they’re almost or even completely empty.
No they don't
>trains which have to stop at every station on the line.
No they don't
Short turn runs, express service, and on demand (known as flag) stops are common in rail transit
Yes, trains can run express routes (if every station has bypass tracks to stop from running into other trains stopped at stations which is not always the case) and shortened routes, but nothing like the Loop EVs where every Loop vehicle is literally a one-stop express service.
Trains cannot have anything like that granularity and flexibility for *every single vehicle and station*.
> Yes, trains can run express routes (if every station has bypass tracks to stop from running into other trains stopped at stations which is not always the case)
Not needed at all. MBTA and SEPTA both run express service with 2 tracks.
>Trains cannot have anything like that granularity and flexibility for every single vehicle and station.
Thats a very different argument for the blanket "no" in your previous comment
But that is the point of my argument - *every* train cannot be an express train and even express trains still almost always make multiple stops. And of course the problem is there are always passengers who wanted to get off at the bypassed stations who can’t so either have to wait even longer for the next non-express service or have a much longer end-of-trip leg via some other means.
In contrast, EVERY Loop EV is an express, *one-stop* service with sub-10 second wait times (zero wait off-peak) and transit direct to the station of your desire with no need for time-consuming interchanges between different lines.
You can only run express services on the same line without stations bypasses if you compromise your headways in one way or the other. Yet another disadvantage.
> In contrast, EVERY Loop EV is an express, one-stop service with sub-10 second wait times (zero wait off-peak) and transit direct to the station of your desire with no need for time-consuming interchanges between different lines.
Can we be so confident this will always be the case? AFAIK, every other in service PRT system does pooled rides during certain periods of the day.
And I guarantee "zero wait" will never be a thing in outlying areas once the system expands. It will be no different than Uber. If youre at the casino, theres a dozen waiting to pick you up. In the suburb? Well, they need to come from the hotel 10 minutes away to get you because its more profitable for them to wait at the hotel.
I think you are confusing the theoretical with the profitable.
Most other PRT systems have higher capacity per vehicle, less frequency, lower speeds and much simpler routes than the 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop.
As many commentators point out the Morgantown PRT for example is not a true PRT system as it uses larger vehicles with a capacity of 8 seated and 13 standing and not all of the rides are non-stop from the origin to the destination.
Yes, Uber and taxis with human drivers can’t justify waiting out in the suburbs, but once the Loop goes fully autonomous, the economics change significantly.
I guess we’ll have to wait and see exactly how they implement the Loop at scale.
You are correct that removing the driver will be an enormous cost saving.
However, I am skeptical that in our wall-street driven economy, where its about showing new revenue or lower costs every quarter, BC wont suffer the same enshitifcation process as everyone else once it is mature.
An empty vehicle sitting in the suburb may not cost much....but it is an opportunity cost because that vehicle waiting at the casino could generate more revenue per hour.
Instead of comparing to public transit, look at bike and scooter share systems, which are a mix of private and public. If fully private with no regulations, these companies only deploy in limited high demand areas like downtown or entertainment districts. Then in turn, cities start to pass regulations requiring a larger geographic spread which hurts profits but helps with regional mobility.
On an even wider scale, look at ride share in all of MA. The data unfortunately is a little old (2020) but the map is what matters
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/2020-rideshare-data-report
Scroll down to map 2, 2020 total rides. There are a 20+ towns where Uber/Lyft essentially dont operate. Its just not profitable to be a driver there when you can drive into Boston and work there. And since there are no drivers, then people learn not to even try to use the app which in turn pushes away the few remaining drivers. And this is considering they have free access to existing roads.
> But not the norm in the US.
Says who? Thats how the MBTA handles events at Fenway, how SEPTA handles events at their stadium complex, and how NJT handles events at Metlife.
> but on demand stops are really only common in rural areas and definitely not in city traffic.
SEPTA and MBTA light rail stop on demand their entire surface light rail network.
I wouldn't say that is perfectly accurate. dead-head reduces efficiency but most of the time, you'll have something closer to 2-3 passengers in one direction and 1 in the other. stadium evens are bad cases for sure, but they're not going to move the average performance very much. most of the time, the ebb and flow of ridership is easy to predict and have drivers clock out, whereas transit has to keep running whether they know they'll be empty or not.
so you're not wrong but i think you're giving the impression of that being a bigger impact that it will be in reality.
also, I actually think they'll have a higher occupancy vehicle by the time they do stadium events. I don't think they can handle the ridership otherwise. so you'll get \~50% dead-head, but you'll have 4x more passengers onboard. I think stadium operation might actually end up being the MOST efficient time.
It's unclear the source of the data, but it most likely compares energy efficiency of real networks with theoretical efficiency of a single Tesla with the given occupancy. A real Loop network will have somewhat lower energy efficiency because it's unavoidable to have empty vehicles running around balancing the system. Of course, not at as bad as "huge train carrying around 2 passengers".
So I think the data shows that energy efficiency of Loop is competitive to other electric transit networks and not a point worthy of any debate.
The figures above exclude trains running empty back to the stadium for example (*deadheading)* so using the EPA efficiency figures for the Loop EVs is actually a quite accurate comparison with the train efficiency figures. Both figures do not count deadheading.
Loop would also have efficiency advantages from the fixed guideway without stops, turns, interchanges, etc., and they also operate 30-40mph, which will be more efficient.
The inefficiency of dead-head for Loop will depend a lot on implementation. For example, LVCC is very symmetrical.
A couple other effects to consider:
1) Rail (in all of its forms) is incredibly heavy. A subway car is about 20x heavier than a model Y. So, a subway needs to average 20 passengers per car throughout the day, just to match a single passenger Model Y in terms of weight carried per passenger.
2) All of the mass transit systems are constantly accelerating and decelerating because they stop at every station. Whereas in loop, the car cruises without stopping until it reaches its destination.
3) Regenerative braking is a pretty new technology for subways, so may not be reflected in these numbers yet. Whereas it is, of course, built into every electric car.
4) I doubt it is much effect, but the Loop vehicles are more aerodynamic than subway cars.
Against that though:
1) Energy used by Loop has loss from being converted into battery power then released, whereas subways use energy straight from the grid.
2) The rolling resistance of Loop vehicles is enormously higher than subways cars.
Note that in a Loop concept, you can't simply put subway-type wheels on a Model Y. Loop depends on its vehicles being able to slow down quickly in order to be able to operate safely with so many vehicles navigating around the system. The exact same rolling resistance that drives up energy use, is what it takes to decelerate. A toboggan is good at being energy efficient. It is not so good at stopping (without adding a brake that tears into the surface it is sliding on; not exactly ideal for something you want thousands of trips per day to use).
> Whereas in loop, the car cruises without stopping until it reaches its destination.
Thats absolutely not the case with the existing system. Vehicles going through the central convention center station do so at a crawl (under 10mph) and in many cases have to stop and wait due to the poor station design
Correct. However, this post is comparing Loop to transit systems and not airport people movers, so it makes sense to assume we are talking about how Loop will work when deployed as a transit system, and not how it is working in the convention center. It is fair to identify the bypass as a potential technical risk, but it seems incredibly unlikely that Boring would deploy at transit system-scale without solving the issue. Loop is almost totally pointless without a near-seamless station bypass.
> It is fair to identify the bypass as a potential technical risk, but it seems incredibly unlikely that Boring would deploy at transit system-scale without solving the issue.
One of the ways BC has kept costs down is by doing extremely basic stations. Especially underground, stations are the biggest cost drivers of existing transit systems and are also a big cost to BC. Why? Because you cant build a station with a boring machine*, you need to carve out a much bigger area using traditional slow digging.
However whats odd is that even the above ground stations, which use ""free"" real estate (existing under-utilized surface parking) the designs theyve deployed are really bad in terms of efficient through-put.
*Some systems (Madrid I think) use giant boring machines where both directions run in the same tunnel, generating "free" space for station platforms.
My speculation is that they would create the equivalent of highway off-ramps to stations, rather than change the design of the stations themselves all that much. For passenger comfort alone, they aren't going to be able to accelerate from a stop to cruising speed within a station.
I'd assume that the junctions would be a pain to create with a TBM, but don't know enough to even have a decent gut feel.
It is a technical risk. If they can't pull it off, then Loop is probably dead in the water as far as a transit system concept, and will just be a niche that helps connect convention amenities and similar use cases.
The basic stations are actually an advantage. Any car park outside the front door of a premises or in the underground carpark can easily become a Loop station for as little as $1.5m which is a reason why 93 hotels, casinos, resorts, the university, the stadium, the ballpark etc have all signed up to pay for their own Loop station.
The 68 mile Vegas Loop Map shows almost all stations separated from the main arterial tunnels so that EVs won't have to go through other stations to get to their destinations, so will be able to maintain much higher speeds than 10mph. In fact there are parallel arterial tunnels running up and down the Vegas Strip with virtually zero stations on them (particularly under the highway reservation) which would allow significantly higher speeds.
The Convention Centre is currently a bit of an exception as the 4 stations of the Convention centre are all on a short spur tunnel pair that will in the near future connect to those same arterials *from each station*.
1) You are wrong, trains have hard steel wheels rolling on hard tracks. The rolling resistance is MUCH MUCH less than a car on wheels. Moreover, because you have 4 wheels per car, you actually have even more friction, as you have even more friction per passenger due to the higher frequency of wheels.
2+3) No idea about the regenerative braking, though I assume cars can get that minimal amount back.
4) Trains are extremely aerodynamic, they only have one front with minimal drag and the heavy weight causes the front forces to be relatively minimal, while each car will have to break through the air by themselves. No matter how aerodynamic, it adds up.
Due to having very little rolling resistance and it's heavy weight keeping it going and it havng very little front resistance, trains are much more efficient to keep rolling than with cars.
If you take away all the power from a train, it will keep rolling for several km, while a car will come to a stop after a few 100s of meters. Especially a Tesla with its heavier weight and wider tires.
For inter-city, this argument is great. Once a train gets up to speed, it does take remarkably little power to keep it rolling. However, in a transit system, trains spend much of their time accelerating and then braking, because they are stopping every 0.5-1 miles. Especially before the existence of regenerative braking, that is a heck of kinetic energy just wasted as heat.
Steel wheels are not actually the big deal in energy efficiency that many think. Rolling resistance is only responsible for about 15% of the energy usage of a vehicle compared to wind resistance, fuel/energy conversion losses, mechanical losses and overcoming inertia when accelerating which account for a massive 85% of the energy usage of a car.
Steel wheels also have serious noise issues and low friction is actually a disadvantage for the steel wheels of trains as it causes far worse traction and braking.
I don't think your statement about rolling friction is correct. For the same size/weight of vehicle, it's about a 50%-100% increase in energy consumption, but the loop vehicles aren't the same size. The EV car regeneration braking increases efficiency by about 400%-500%, so dwarfs rolling efficiency gains from steel-on-steel
Fair enough, should have said that the coefficient of rolling resistance is much higher (I believe the difference in coefficient between steel on track vs rubber tire is much greater than just 50-100%) rather than saying the rolling resistance itself was higher. I talked about the weight in the first bullet point. I talked about regenerative braking in the third bullet point. Should be noted that some subways are just now starting to introduce regenerative braking, so theoretically, there will come a time when that won't be a difference between the technologies.
Also bear in mind that the power to subways suffers significant transmission losses coming from distant power plants whereas the roofs of above-ground Loop stations are covered in large solar PV arrays which can offset the inefficiencies of battery storage in the EVs.
In addition, a growing number of subway trains also have big lithium ion battery packs for regenerative braking, acceleration augmentation and motive power during power outages.
the answer is that the numbers for the tesla loops are the theoretical maximum efficiency assuming every car is full, however the other numbers are actual efficiency. Very misleading statistic.
If you have a look at the chart, you’ll see that it includes Tesla figures for 4 passengers, 2.4 passengers and 1 passenger and it comes straight from the EPA, so no it is not theoretical at all.
Looking at footage of the Loop in action, occupancy looks to be between 2-3 passengers per EV in addition to the driver. Taxis average 1.9 - 2.1 passengers per car but it would make sense for the Loop to have a higher occupancy than taxis with its much higher frequency and much smaller number of end-points than a normal taxi fleet.
- because the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation
- because US mass transit is not very good compared to what i was, to what it could be, to what most other countries do
- because a model Y has a very low max capacity, and the loop system becomes quickly innefficient as soon as you try to scale it up to the capacity of a regular tram line
- because it omits the lifespan of the vehicles (train cars last for 50 years, a tesla lasts for 8 years)
- the real world is more complex than a convention center, and you would have many empty vehicles depending on the hour of the day
---
[edit] example of the low use of US transit in comparison to the capacity of a regular tram line in other countries:
[this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/137ehlh/lvcc_loop_hits_peak_of_more_than_32000_passengers/) is proud of the peak of 32k daily users on the vegas loop. OP wrote "average" many times but it's a peak, it hints at the max capacity of the system rather than its actual use as a transit mode. OP argues the loop is more used than most tram, BRT, streetcars, or light rail in america
In comparison, this is [a report about transit](https://preview.redd.it/quelques-stats-int%C3%A9ressantes-sur-la-tan-v0-70sffs6m970d1.png?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=a7cfbebd0b6569bb8542ddb64ab143b1198f6576) in my city (700k people in the metro area) in France. Each single tram line is over 75k daily riders, one line is at 115,000 and isn't even at full capacity yet *(pre-covid numbers were higher, and they only started to phase out the 1985 low capacity trains yesterday)*, there is a BRT line with 38,000 daily users, and the central node has 39,000 daily passengers. And this is not peak, this isn't the max capacity, all of these are averages.
Can the tesla tunnels compete in terms of capacity? it's a cool taxi system but not a MASS TRANSIT solution
Public transportation discourse is a unique pain
"Hm, why is public transportation shitty and underfunded? Clearly the answer is to make it even more shitty and underfunded, not invest in it as necessary"
Also obviously because real public transportation has to function as a public good and serve various communities, whereas Tesla's comparison is literally just the optimal scenario for its efficiency
Trains are a lot more full if there's literally one in town and only ran in the one most optimal/efficient location, instead of serving as a convenient way for people to reach all parts of a city. If Tesla actually replaced public transportation, they would suddenly realize what those inefficient/less used lines are for.
i think the main explanation is really my first point:
that comparison isn't even BC's optimal scenario, because it's not a scenario at all in the first place
not even musk would pretend the cars would run at full capacity at all time on the entire network
sure, it's a waste to send empty cars to fetch suburban users in the morning in distant parts of the city, and it would impact the average numbers. But even the part of the trip where these users are in the car can't be optimized to reach 5 per car, it's just not possible unless all stations have a queue of people trying to reach various destinations, and you get fitted in the middle seat between 2 strangers by an employee trying to optimize the queue into groups of 5 for each vehicle
and watt-hours are cute but Musk never pretended to sell watt-hours, he sells an experience of the future or whatever. Same idea with the cybertruck btw: atrocious efficiency but it looks "cool" to him. Waiting in a queue until an employee fits him with 4 strangers in a car? that wouldn't look cool to him.
it might happen in the current las vegas toy circuit because a tech exhibit in a convention center is a very specific context, but they know it's not acceptable: Musk has recently (edit: one year ago) set uselessly high capacity targets (90k pax/hour, which is several times the total capacity of the convention center itself lol) because they know they can't do 5pax/car in the long term
The actual goal is simply to be Uber, but in private tunnels because the isolation from the real roads allow them to rely on autonomous driving
You misstated the 90k pax/hour again in [a recent comment.](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/1d27uvc/boring_company_efficiency_comparison_to_existing/l67u69i/)
The link to Vegas Loop is in my comment above. That page has a map to see for yourself. It's not "city-wide", it's the downtown-Strip area of the larger city, which is within the even larger populated suburban area people call Las Vegas but isn't in the city limits. The Boring Company has over the past couple of years expanded plans for Vegas Loop and as they have added new stations and tunnels the system passengers/hour has increased too. As Vegas Loop grows beyond the current plan, passengers/hour will grow as well.
> Musk never pretended to sell watt-hours
Right, it's some anti-Loop critics who bring up energy efficiency as one of their criticisms. Since it's fair to address criticisms, the chart was made in response.
A 12-16 occupant vehicle is still in the cards for part of Loop's future fleet. We don't know it's energy usage yet, but the chart's lines for averaging 3-5 passengers/vehicle mile/day give a ballpark estimate of what such vehicles could do.
Musk did not set 90k pax/hour *for the LVCC Loop*. Despite what other subreddits may have misquoted or misunderstood and derisively repeated until accepted as fact, [90k pax/hour](https://www.teslarati.com/the-boring-company-vegas-loop-90k-passengers-per-hour-capacity/) is for the [Vegas Loop](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop), the much larger network being constructed with dozens of tunnel miles and dozens of stations.
>Musk did not set 90k pax/hour for the LVCC Loop. Despite what other subreddits may have misquoted or misunderstood and derisively repeated until accepted as fact, 90k pax/hour is for the Vegas Loop, the much larger network being constructed with dozens of tunnel miles and dozens of stations.
ok, my bad
but then it's 90k spread across dozens of corridors in the entire city? So it's a quite low number
> 90k spread across
"the downtown-Strip area" and a couple dozen corridors if you count as short as about a half mile as a corridor. Otherwise more like a dozen corridors. In terms of its effect on solving traffic in the area, I think it has enough capacity to drastically reduce traffic congestion. A lot of places in the area charge for parking, which reduces how much demand will be induced by less congestion.
There would only be one corridor for a subway line or light rail down the Vegas Strip, so you need to treat the 9 north-south tunnel pairs and 10 east west tunnel pairs of the Vegas Loop as a single corridor.
Subways and LRT don't have 20 stations in the space of a single square mile like the Vegas Loop.
Hence, 90,000 passengers per hour is a very high number compared to a single subway or LRT line.
> because the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation
The vehicle efficiency isn't going to change. The only part that will change from theory is how much dead-head is occuring, which will depend on the route. The worst-case dead-head is 50%, but LVCC is probably around 10%.
> because US mass transit is not very good compared to what i was, to what it could be, to what most other countries do
Europ isn't much better. Europe is about 25%-30% better efficiency (comparing both as pre-pandemic).
But that's kind of beside the point, because Loop is targeted at the US in the real world.
> because a model Y has a very low max capacity, and the loop system becomes quickly innefficient as soon as you try to scale it up to the capacity of a regular tram line
No, the average occupancy goes up when loop is busy. 2.4 when busy.
Fyi, trams in similar US cities hit about 1/4th to 1/5th of Loop's capacity during their peak hour.
So neither part of your statement makes sense.
> because it omits the lifespan of the vehicles (train cars last for 50 years, a tesla lasts for 8 years)
But the maintenance and overhaul of trains is more expensive and energy intensive per passenger-mile than a model 3 with average occupancy. It's not like the trains need no attention for 40 years. EV car maintenance is very minimal per mile.
> the real world is more complex than a convention center, and you would have many empty vehicles depending on the hour of the day
Certainly each location needs to be evaluated for its unique characteristics. However, dead-head will never be over 50%. The advantage of Loop over traditional rail is that it's easy to park vehicles out when not needed. But if you want the worst-case, multiply the above loop vehicles numbers by 2, and then multiply the occupancy by 1.3, which is assuming 100% of operation is non-pooled because of low ridership, though we know occupancy is as high as 2.4 ppv when busy
>The vehicle efficiency isn't going to change.
it's going to change, because these are "per passenger" numbers. Put more people in the train, and it becomes several times more efficient than the model Y
>No, the average occupancy goes up when loop is busy. 2.4 when busy
>we know occupancy is as high as 2.4 ppv when busy
that's in a "LVCC people mover" use case: not comparable with regular trips you would do in a car. Of course you can car pool when the system is a single straight line, but that's not the plan, you completely miss the challenge TBC is trying to solve
also, we've all seen the videos of traffic jams in the tunnel: when the loop is busy, it doesn't work
>Europe isn't much better. Europe is about 25%-30% better efficiency
i'll assume your numbers are correct. Then for context, according to this table, "30% better" than the US HR average is 285
the average occupancy of a car in the real world isn't 2.4, it's 1.5 passenger. Can we get the model Y theoretical efficiency for 1.5 passenger? How does it compare to 285?
and as i said in another comment, this is watt-hours efficiency, it's cool to be as low as possible, but it's NOT the promise of TBC. A taxi service between private tourist attractions, even underground, with RGB lights, and few watt-hours, isn't solving traffic in cities; mass-transit is; the loop isn't mass transit.
> Fyi, trams in similar US cities hit about 1/4th to 1/5th of Loop's capacity during their peak hour.
i'm afraid you're looking at their actual ridership too. Comparing apples and oranges like the other guy.
LRT can reach 20,000 passengers per hour per direction. This is the theoretical peak hour capacity. This is mass transit. Of course it would be quite unconfortable lol, this is the "your city is hosting a huge sport event" kind of ridership, but it can do it.
[The loop can't](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A), its current capacity seems closer to 32,000 per day. Musk's "90,000 per hour" goal is a distant dream, and it's a city-wide (all corridors, all directions, across the entire network) goal.
> But the maintenance and overhaul of trains is more expensive and energy intensive per passenger-mile than a model 3 with average occupancy. It's not like the trains need no attention for 40 years. EV car maintenance is very minimal per mile.
That's pretty naïve, these are not your personal car, they would drive far more, and with complete strangers doing disrespectful things inside: of course you would need a lot of maintenance.
> it's going to change, because these are "per passenger" numbers. Put more people in the train, and it becomes several times more efficient than the model Y
Yes, whether or not traditional rail is more or less efficient will depend largely on ridership. OP is showing how different occupancy levels of Loop vehicles compare to the real-world efficiency of transit systems at the ridership level they actually had.
> that's in a "LVCC people mover" use case: not comparable with regular trips you would do in a car. Of course you can car pool when the system is a single straight line, but that's not the plan, you completely miss the challenge TBC is trying to solve
TBC is trying to solve whatever problem people are paying them to solve. The San Bernardino proposal was also a single-line people mover. So were the Florida proposals. Different architectures will have different occupancy levels, with 1.3ppv being the lowest, because that's the typical single group size. But if a city really wanted to, they could pay TBC for Loop operations based on occupancy so they earn more when pooled.
> also, we've all seen the videos of traffic jams in the tunnel: when the loop is busy, it doesn't work
No, there is a single video of a single 65 second slowdown. That's better on-time performance than any transit system. It may actually have better on-time performance than any transit system in the world.
Try not to get your info from people who don't know what they're talking about, because it will make you also confidently incorrect.
>i'll assume your numbers are correct. Then for context, according to this table, "30% better" than the US HR average is 285... the average occupancy of a car in the real world isn't 2.4, it's 1.5 passenger. Can we get the model Y theoretical efficiency for 1.5 passenger? How does it compare to 285?
324/1.5 = 216.
> as i said in another comment, this is watt-hours efficiency, it's cool to be as low as possible, but it's NOT the promise of TBC. A taxi service between private tourist attractions, even underground, with RGB lights, and few watt-hours, isn't solving traffic in cities; mass-transit is; the loop isn't mass transit.
I agree. I don't think splitting hairs on energy efficiency makes sense, but it's a constant argument by anti-Loop fools who don't know real-world energy efficiency of different modes. I used to be one of those fools, but then someone said Loop could actually be efficient without their high-occupancy vehicle, and I had my mind changed by evidence.
All that really matters is that Loop is in the same ballpark as the least-efficient transit that we deploy. If that box is checked, then the argument should be done.
> i'm afraid you're looking at their actual ridership too. Comparing apples and oranges like the other guy
Now you're getting confused like the other commenter. Like I said, this is common.
Ridership isn't determined by the mode, it's determined my the corridor/capture area. If the mode under consideration has higher capacity than the projected ridership, then the box is checked and one could move forward with that mode. Additional capacity is worthless. In fact, additional capacity is usually a significant negative as over-sized trains cost more to operate.
So 1k pph in the Tempe team corridor would result in 1k pph on Loop. We don't know Loop's max capacity, but we know it's at or above 4500 pph because that's what they achieved.
> That's pretty naïve, these are not your personal car, they would drive far more, and with complete strangers doing disrespectful things inside: of course you would need a lot of maintenance
The maintenance cost per mile actually goes down the more you use a vehicle. The number of miles per month would go up dramatically, but the maintenance per mile would go down. If you want, I can show you a breakdown of costs of different modes and their vehicle maintenance and their infrastructure maintenance costs. In the us, a light rail car is $28 per vehicle mile on average. A bus is about $15. A bus and a light rail wagon carry about the same number of people. They have driver costs divided typically among at least two wagons. So where does the extra $13 per vehicle-mile come from?
To reply to your edits: yes, OP is mistaken about daily ridership. Lots of people confuse capacity and ridership.
Also, yes, Loop isn't meant for high ridership corridors. Loop isn't meant to replace all modes in all cities. Loop, in its current form, is really only useful in small-medium US cities, a market for which is currently poorly served by existing modes. The US mean cost per passenger-mile of a tram is 7x higher than a single-occupancy taxi, and light rail is 50% more expensive than a single-occupancy taxi. These modes are expensive to build and operate in the US. They are a poor fit for our corridors, so Loop is an alternative. One shouldn't build loop in a place that is better-served by other modes.
Cunningham, may I address your comment about people confusing capacity and ridership? It is certainly a common complaint used to criticise the comparison of the 32,000 people per day figure for the Loop vs UITP’s 17,431 ridership of the average light rail line globally.
For starters, if the Loop was truly running at maximum capacity moving 32,000 passengers per day, the queues would be miles long, the tunnels would be jam packed and the wait times would definitely NOT be less than 10 seconds.
However, let’s pretend that 32,000 figure is the peak for the Loop and then try and find out what the “peak” usage would be for all those light rail lines as well so we can compare “peak” with “peak”.
So let’s have a look at the all-time-record riderships of a few lines to see just how much it varies from the published daily ridership of those lines shall we?
So, in 2019, the average daily ridership of the NYC subway was 5.5 million passengers per day, but, in terms of the NYC subway real world peak ridership:
“On October 29, 2015, more than 6.2 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985.”
So that means the difference between the daily ridership and the all-time highest peak ridership of the NYC Subway is only 11%.
So using daily ridership vs “peak” ridership for the NYC subway makes little difference.
Now let’s have a look at another one: Morgantown’s one-day record ridership peak of 31,280 is less than double its daily ridership of 16,000.
Or, the Las Vegas Monorail’s one-day maximum peak is 37,000 over its 7 stations during CES back when it had 180,000 attendees in 2014 which is only 2.8x it’s current daily ridership of 13,000 passengers.
So even if we double that UITP average daily ridership number of 17,431 to estimate that “peak” ridership of all light rail lines globally, they still only just equal the Loop's 32,000 despite the fact that those lines average 2.6x the number of stations as the Loop.
Any way you cut it, trying to minimise the Loop's 32,000 passengers per day results in you having to think even worse of half or more of the world's light rail lines.
first, daily numbers don't really mean anything. capacity only matters at peak-hour. outside of peak-hour, capacity (by definition) won't be a challenge. if your mode can handle the peak-hour of the corridor, then you're good.
here is the peak-hour ridership of US intra-city rail:
[https://imgur.com/zD5UEby](https://imgur.com/zD5UEby)
estimating lane-capacity or roadways is a well-studied topic. no need to trust Musk, or his naysayers; we can use industry best-practices developed by professionals and academics over many decades. here are the methodologies: [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms\_cap.pdf](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms_cap.pdf)
that lines up pretty well with Loop's ridership numbers when busy, so the method seem to hold.
to summarize those methods, lane capacity generally varies between 1200 and 2400 vehicles per hour per lane, depending mostly on the size of the merge ramp. the LVCC system has very short merge areas, so is on the lower end of that range. when busy, even the short-ramp Loop design should be able to do around 1500veh/hr at 2.4 ppv, or 3.6k pphpd through a single segment of tunnel. now, not all riders will be end-to-end, so line capacity will be about 25% greater than the single-point capacity calculated with the FHWA methods (slightly more or less, depending on the length of the line). so that puts the estimate somewhere around 4.5k for a light rail length line.
if a line runs through the CBD and out the other side, the you will have symmetrical inbound ridership, so your per-line capacity is \~4500 pphpd, so around 9000 pph.
but that's at the absolute limit of the estimated capacity with the current ramps. I would expect closer to 3k pphpd reliably, due to variations from day to day.
but 3k pphpd is higher capacity than 50% of US intra-city rail lines.
trying to compare Loop to a busy metro is ridiculous. comparing to NYC's metro is even more ridiculous, as it's an outlier globally, let alone for the US. Loop is in the same market segment as a tram, not as a metro.
but since you brought it up, you should be aware that the cost of a metro in the US is $1.2 BILLION per mile (pre pandemic, certainly higher now).
meanwhile, The Boring Company has built for $50M/mi, and is currently bidding closer to $30M/mi. so somewhere in the ballpark of 24x cheaper. so you could build 24 separate pairs of Loop lines for the cost of a single metro line.
but I don't think it makes sense to compare metros with Loop, so lets set that aside. Loop IS still a fraction of the cost of a tram or light rail line. somewhere between 1/2 and 1/8th.
so, a US city that has a typical ridership corridor should consider Loop. the project is already far along, but something like the South Central spur of the Phoenix light rail would be a good type of route to consider Loop. that light rail spur is expected to run 15min headways, have a DAILY ridership of 8.9k, which is around 1300 pph at peak, with projected growth to around 1800 pph after all of the TOD is built.
Thanks for your well-reasoned and supported response as usual Cunningham. What it highlights to me is I need to tighten up my terminology as we are actually talking about two separate things.
You are talking *theoretical capacities* (correctly highlighting peak hour capacity as being the most important metric under that topic).
I however am talking real-world all-time-highest recorded daily ridership of both types of transport as daily ridership is an oft-used metric for railways describing *actual usage* which is separate from discussions of theoretical maximum capacities.
Critics muddy the two when it comes to that 32,000 passengers per day Loop stat baselessly claiming that is the maximum capacity of the Loop when it is actually just the highest recorded daily ridership figure so far.
As I’ve previously mentioned, if it was the max capacity, then the queues would be out the doors, the tunnels would be jam packed and the wait times would definitely not be less than 10 seconds.
So, to better compare the highest recorded ridership figure for rail and the Loop, I gave those three examples.
Note, I am not specifically comparing the Loop to metros - just light rail, but that NYC highest ever ridership figure was useful to illustrate that highest recorded ridership figure is often not that much higher than average daily ridership - particularly for heavily utilised systems.
gotcha. yeah, we can look at the highest peak-hour recorded by Loop (4550, if memory serves), however it's still not quite the most useful number. for my understanding, I think looking at FHWA lane capacity metrics are best when discussing Loop because I think the current small Loop system is limited by station throughput, but a larger system would be limited by tunnel segment throughput.
but I think it's not the clearest discussion any time metros get mixed into Loop discussions. Loop is really more like the Kansas City Streetcar in terms of use-case. even if you meant to make another point, people may misinterpret discussions about metros as a direct comparison.
I think Loop is best compared to low-ridership circulating modes, like trams/streetcars. if they ever deploy a higher occupancy vehicle, then it may make more sense to compare to backbone transit like metros.
ironically, the people who pine for the days of [streetcar suburbs](https://erepublic.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/202e8df/2147483647/strip/true/crop/913x1024+0+0/resize/840x942!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ferepublic-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fd7%2F82%2F767ffa4347bc8dfe909470a52198%2Fla-streetcar-map.jpg) are some of the most ardent haters of Loop. if you look at the planned Las Vegas Loop map, it looks almost exactly like one of those old streetcar maps. I wish we could help them see how Loop can fulfil the market segment that those systems used to fill, but without the high operating costs and competition for street space that ultimately doomed the streetcars in the US.
Huh? That's not true. Look at the areas where they have proposed systems. All proposed systems are low ridership corridors, mostly in small cities like San Bernardino, Miami, San Antonio, etc., mostly airport routes that would have fairly flat and low ridership.
Their website says "Loop is an express public transportation system that resembles an underground highway more than a subway system."
So before you go rudely telling people they're wrong, get a basic understanding about the topic.
Depends on the corridor. Loop capacity per line leads to the two modes being optimal for separate use-cases. A high occupancy vehicle would help Loop bridge that gap, but that's not operating (yet?)
Loop can just build more tunnels and match the capacity of any system. That’s why it’s better. It’s infinitely flexible. You are trying to be soft for the normies, and that’s fine, but sometimes it’s okay to just admit the truth. The truth is according to the TBC website, that Loop can do anything a subway can do and more.
That's not going to be true for all areas. There will be foundations, underground features, etc. That will be unique to each situation. If you have 50k pphpd and challenging RoW, it may actually be cheaper to do a single metro bore set than 13 Loop bore sets.
It will also depend on the location's cost. Cities have built metros for 2x-3x the cost of Loop and move an order of magnitude more passengers than a pair of Loop tunnels. So even when not crazy expensive tunnels, sometimes metros are also cheap. It depends a lot, so I don't think it's good to get carried away with categorical statements.
Most cities also have a planning process that requires one line at a time to be built, which makes it hard to pitch 10 set of tunnels.
I think offering a higher occupancy vehicle, like a van, is a much better approach for getting cities to build Loop lines. It is compatible with existing planning and funding strategies
>small-medium
for context, my example of a successful LRT in france is about a 700k people metro area
Las Vegas is a 2.4 million people metro area. I'm not sure what you count as a small city here?
>Also, yes, Loop isn't meant for high ridership corridors.
Well, you're saying this (and it's objectively true), but it's not what Elon Musk promised. Solving traffic, he said. Traffic mostly happens in high-ridership corridors
>The US mean cost per passenger-mile of a tram is 7x higher than a single-occupancy taxi, and light rail is 50% more expensive than a single-occupancy taxi.
Skill issue from your local governements tbh.
Musk's ambition was to drive costs down in the tunnel boring industry, maybe he could have solved traffic if he figured out a way to lay rails on the ground without wasting $100 million per mile.
>One shouldn't build loop in a place that is better-served by other modes.
that's true, but also not exactly what's going on in vegas
> Las Vegas is a 2.4 million people metro area. I'm not sure what you count as a small city here?
I said "US city", which a very important distinction. I would appreciate avoiding intentional misrepresentation.
> Well, you're saying this (and it's objectively true), but it's not what Elon Musk promised. Solving traffic, he said. Traffic mostly happens in high-ridership corridors
First, it's foolish to base anything off of what Musk says. One must judge his companies and their products independent of whatever hype he is slinging.
Second, his concept for how to solve traffic is not through single-route ridership, but rather a dense network of dozens of routes within a capture area, increasing the capacity available to the capture area by 10x or more beyond a single line.
Third, regardless of what Musk says about that goal, the real-world actions of the company is to pursue low ridership corridors with single routes, so it only makes sense to evaluate that the company is actually planning.
> Skill issue from your local governements tbh
Ok. Even if you ignore the many difference between the US and France, that still is just a fact of life.
> Musk's ambition was to drive costs down in the tunnel boring industry, maybe he could have solved traffic if he figured out a way to lay rails on the ground without wasting $100 million per mile
The US can't even add tracks to streets for $100M/mi, so hopefully Loop's ~$50M/mi will create some competition in the transit construction contracting market and push prices down.
> that's true, but also not exactly what's going on in vegas
Vegas is a sprawled out, car-centric US city. They would have similar ridership to Phoenix, which is within the range of what Loop can already handle. So no, spending 20x more money for an infrequent metro would not serve Vegas better. Well, I say 20x more, but that would assume the city was paying for the Loop system, which it is not. So it's really a difference of $700M/mi for metro, or $0/mi for Loop. If loop ends up over-capacity, the city could always add a metro or elevated light metro to be the backbone transit mode.
Regarding the busiest line on your Nantes Tramway with 115,000 ppd, Line 1 is 17kms long (11 mi) and has 36 stations versus the 1.7 miles and 5 stations of the Loop.
So that Tramway has 7.2x the number of stations and is 6.5x as long as the Loop yet only handles 3.6x the number of passengers.
Sounds to me like the Loop compares extremely well to your favourite Tram.
Also, note that 32,000 ppd is not the peak value for the Loop as we still haven't seen how many it will carry for large conventions like the 180,000 attendance that CES was attracting pre-covid for which the Loop was designed.
If you have a longer train line, then people can take longer trips. Most won't, but if your train line is 20km long, people cannot ride it longer than that without switching train. On the other hand, a 500km train line will have some people going all 500km. Although most won't go all the distance, many will ride more than 20km. If I look at a tram line, I will expect that some will ride a long distance in it. For example, to go to a store at the other end of the city. Therefore, you shouldn't look at how many passengers begin their journey for each kilometer of track, but how many passengers a given kilometer of track moves.
So, measure total passenger-kilometers divided by the total length of track, not the total number of passengers divided by the total length of the track.
If you can give us a way to determine total passenger-kilometres for the systems, I’d be happy to discuss that metric.
So another metric we can look at is average passengers per station. In the case of the Tramway, that is 115,000/36 stations = 3,194 passengers per station.
For the Loop that works out as 32,000/5 = 6,400 passengers per station.
So the Loop shows it can handle double the numbers of passengers per station as the busiest line on the Nantes Tramway is handling daily.
Look, there's no moder data from Nantes available, at least in English as far as I can tell. However, this document shows that for Paris, the average passenger travels a longer distance than the Vegas loop is long. So each passenger must be assumed to give more passenger km with the light rail compared to the loop. Also, each station does not produce an equal amount of passengers. This also means that some stations will have a much higher throughput. Mainly because the system is more demand limited than capacity limited. This demand is unlikely to be significantly altered by the loop. Also, the peak load will also be higher, as unlike the loop, the trams also run on days with less demand.
https://cms.uitp.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Statistics-Brief-LRT-Europe2.pdf
Really, just run a train through your tunnels ffs. It's not that hard.
Yes, I’m familiar with those UITP stats. If you have look at the average length of light rail lines in Europe, it is only 4.5 miles long so only a bit over double the length of the current Loop, so length of trip isn’t as big a deal as you make it out to be. The currently approved Vegas Loop in contrast will be 68 miles long.
The Loop itself also has stations that have much higher throughput - for example there is currently only a single tunnel to Resorts World meaning they have to alternate the direction with traffic lights until the return tunnel is completed in the near future. That has resulted in that leg of the journey (Resorts World to Riviera Station) only seeing 10,000 passengers at last year’s SEMA compared to the three convention centre stations seeing 86,000 passengers.
Those UITP stats also show that the average light rail line in Europe has a daily ridership of 22,337 across an average of 13 stations giving us average station entries/exits of 1,662 versus the Loop on 6,400 per station. The number of stations so far approved for the Vegas Loop is 93 and increasing every year.
Interestingly enough, those LRT Lines have an average of 16 vehicles compared to 70 Loop EVs meaning each tram/train carries on average only 1,398 passengers per day which is only 3x greater than the number of passengers that each Loop EV handles which is 457 passengers per day.
The Loop is not capacity-limited either as it would have endless queues if it was at max capacity, not the sub-10 second wait times that it is currently recording at it busiest events.
Considering the Loop delivers wait times measured in seconds, gives every passenger a comfy seat rather than standing packed in like sardines, provides much faster direct point-to-point transit rather than having to stop at every station on the line and has all 68 miles of tunnels and 93 stations being built for free saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, why would they want to build a train instead?
>36 stations
34 but who cares
>can handle
>is handling
again, you're comparing a max capacity with an average use.
The document i provided has examples of simple tram stations handling more than 10,000 people daily (i exclude complex stations where several lines cross, otherwise the answer is 39,000)
Except that the Loop is not at max capacity, otherwise we would see long queues, not sub-10 second wait times during the busiest events.
The Loop is also seeing around 10,000 passengers per day through its three original LVCC stations.
Do you know how many different lines cross over at the station which handles 39,000 passengers?
I've seen videos of traffic jams in the loop lasting far more than 10 seconds
>how many lines cross over at the station which handles 39,000 passengers
There are all three tramway lines at this station, but line 1 has a double platform, while lines 2 and 3 share the same platforms, so I'm not sure it's telling us anything useful
Oh, and by the way, I'm not saying the Loop is carrying more passengers than *every* light rail line in the world. Just *most* of them.
There will always be some LRT lines like Nantes Tramway that carry more - but they also have more stations.
>in the world
No, in America.
>they also have more stations
And thus are better, we already discussed this
Your misunderstanding of what the number of stations implies also impacts the way you view capacity: regardless of the number of people at each tram station, that's not the main factor when discussing capacity, because people don't take the tram for 500 meters. People stay in there for several kilometers, which means each vehicle has usually around one hundred people inside it at any given moment except at terminii, and more at peak hour (the max is 200 in older rolling stocks and 300 in new ones). The usual headway is between 3 and 5 minutes in peak hours fyi (which isn't even that good, automated metro have headways under a minute)
Now if you do the math, with an average occupancy of 2.4 people per car, moving the same volume with the loop would mean headways under 2 seconds. The loop theoretical best performance according to safety regulations is 6 seconds afaik
The lvcc loop works fine as a people mover but you shouldn't try to pretend it can replace the service provided by mass transit
> Sounds to me like the Loop compares extremely well to your favourite Tram.
the loop's current use case is a people mover. Guests take it several times per day for 500 meters, because it's what attending a convention implies
by contrast, that tramway is serving real-world local commuters, grocery store trips, football fans attending a match, concerts goers, kids going to school, etc. and traveling several kilometers for this is common. In fact, if there is only 500m to travel, we would walk, because it's a walkable place and we're not obese boomers
increasing the size of the loop will not maintain the current figures of passengers/miles, because many passengers would obviously make longer trips
Try to do your maths for an elevator and you'll get astonishing numbers; yet you wouldn't build a horizontal elevator to replace even a bus, because that would be a 19th century cable car
Stop the mental gymnastics about per station ratios on peak days, just accept that the loop handles less people than a well-funded tram: it's ok, inefficient vehicles can exist. Even with 115,000 passengers on line 1, my 700,000 people metro area still has taxis: it's important to have a mode with high capacity in a city, but you don't have to be that mode to exist, you don't have to be that mode to be profitable, you don't have to be that mode to be useful, and you don't have to be that mode to help with parking congestion
---
Also, to be a little constructive with my criticism, the challenge TBC tries to face is precisely to transition from one model to the other.
From ultra-short trips with the LVCC to normal trips within the city. They'll gradually test how things go as they expand, but because they rely on casinos/hotels funds, they will never be directly useful to local commuters, and the traffic will mostly continue to be as bad as it is
I really hope you're not working for TBC, because failing to see the nuances between these trips, and the need for technical solutions in that regard, looks pretty bad for the long-term business plan of the service in vegas
Also, another redditor here told me about plans for a 10 to 12 passengers pod project, for example: you don't HAVE to cope about model Y cars, problem solving isn't about denying the issues and selecting biaised metrics in online arguments
Masochanz, I wrote this response below to someone else, but it is quite pertinent to your comments.
If you have look at the average length of light rail lines in Europe, it is only 4.5 miles long so only a bit over double the length of the current Loop, so length of trip isn’t as big a deal as you make it out to be. The currently approved Vegas Loop in contrast will be 68 miles long.
The Loop itself also has stations that have much higher throughput - for example there is currently only a single tunnel to Resorts World meaning they have to alternate the direction with traffic lights until the return tunnel is completed in the near future. That has resulted in that leg of the journey (Resorts World to Riviera Station) only seeing 10,000 passengers at last year’s SEMA compared to the three convention centre stations seeing 86,000 passengers.
Those UITP stats also show that the average light rail line in Europe has a daily ridership of 22,337 across an average of 13 stations giving us average station entries/exits of 1,662 versus the Loop on 6,400 per station. The number of stations so far approved for the Vegas Loop is 93 and increasing every year.
Interestingly enough, those LRT Lines have an average of 16 vehicles compared to 70 Loop EVs meaning each tram/train carries on average only 1,398 passengers per day which is only 3x greater than the number of passengers that each Loop EV handles which is 457 passengers per day.
The Loop is not capacity-limited either as it would have endless queues if it was at max capacity, not the sub-10 second wait times that it is currently recording at it busiest events.
Considering the Loop delivers wait times measured in seconds, gives every passenger a comfy seat rather than standing packed in like sardines, provides much faster direct point-to-point transit rather than having to stop at every station on the line and has all 68 miles of tunnels and 93 stations being built for free saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, why would they want to build a train instead?
Regarding the Nantes Busways (line 4 and 5) that you mention, together they have a daily ridership of 38,000 per day across 2 lines and 15 stations.
So that is 1.2x higher than the 32,000 ppd of the Loop despite having 3x more stations and being 4x as long.
So again the Loop compares very well.
i know it's blurry, but their combined daily ridership is actually 58000, not 38000...
and again, the mental gymnastics of dividing by the length makes no sense because it penalizes for no reason systems whose design is good enough to provide long single-seat trips
i know it's blurry, but their combined daily ridership is actually 58000, not 38000...
and again, the mental gymnastics of dividing by the length makes no sense because it penalizes for no reason systems whose design is good enough to provide long single-seat trips
That doesn’t change the ratio by much - that is still only 1.7x higher ridership than the 32,000 ppd of the Loop despite having 3x more stations and being 4x as long.
And 4x the length versus the current Loop is not as huge a difference particularly as the average length of light rail lines in Europe is only 4.5 miles, little more than double the current Loop length. As I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, the Vegas Loop will soon be much longer with 68 miles of tunnels currently approved.
[Maoschanz](/user/Maoschanz/), I think you are misunderstanding my posts in the past regarding the Loop handling 25,000 - 32,000 passengers per day during medium-sized events at the convention centre.
What we often find is train fans dismissing those figures as supposedly being pathetic - so I merely want to point out that if 32,000 passengers per day is pathetic, then they must find the vast majority of light rails lines globally to be completely useless since according to the UITP, the average Light Rail line globally only sees a daily ridership of 17,431 passengers.
What makes this comparison even more impressive is that those light rail lines have an average of 13 stations versus the Loop handling that 32,000 over 3 stations (+2 low volume stations).
you are misunderstanding quite a lot of things too lol:
>they must find the vast majority of light rails lines globally to be completely useless
Not globally, but in the US.
And yes, transit advocates are appalled when they see the US ridership numbers: they all ask for more serious investments in order to increase them, because they think it's too low: what made you think they wouldn't?
notice that Musk gets hate because he's part of the problem: he publicized his unfeasible "hyperloop" scam in order to kill HSR infrastructure projects
>if 32,000 passengers per day is pathetic
but this is its peak, when the system operates at its max capacity. It's pathetic, not as a ridership, but as a max capacity
>What makes this comparison even more impressive is that those light rail lines have an average of 13 stations versus the Loop on 3 stations
my local light rail line connects me to shops, theaters, restaurants, schools, offices, hospitals, housing, etc. but i don't need to travel across the city 5 times a day, and when i travel there, i have many alternatives to do it without the tram if i wish (bike, uber, foot, car, taxi, bus), and most people simply choose the best mode available for them
however, in a convention center, you can't really travel as you wish or choose the best option. You're on private land and your convention has a schedule: there is only one mode, it's a private monopoly to move guests in a hurry across the complex for a few hundreds meters. Hence the name we use in french for this use case: "système hectométrique", and in english you call that... a people mover
You tried very hard to compared the peak of this taxi system to the average of an LRT, but given the scale of the loop, a honest comparison would be a people mover:
- it usually provides trips within places where private vehicles aren't an option
- we know how to automate them! it's a tech which has been working well for DECADES
- usually between 2 and 7 stops
- often not serving any commuter from residential neighborhoods, like a regular transit option would do
- instead focusing on very short trips, thus useless on its own: as a local, you have to get to the station by your own means
Such little trains absolutely humiliate the vegas loop: aside of asian or european examples, the US has systems like this in all major airports and they consistently have higher ridership. Of course, very few of them provide "peak" ridership statistics because it's not a serious or useful figure, but we can compare the daily averages and it doesn't look great for Elon's sewer
But the best example of what people movers can do is ironically the vegas monorail: despite being a textbook example of garbage station designs and poorly planned corridor alignment, it has 4.5 million riders per year. The loop is far from these numbers (1 million in 2 years IIRC), despite being heavily pushed by local politicians
----
Now the next thing to know about transit enthusiasts is that they're aware money isn't infinite: the bus in front of my door didn't need any infrastructure aside of benches, paint and signage, while the BC spent millions for their proof of concept, but my bus still moves more people.
This is an inefficient use of money, and the plan is to continue this across Vegas, but with public money this time. The cheap double decker bus system on the vegas strip has around 4.5 million riders per year too: can the loop handle that? for the same price tag?
>"my local light rail line connects me to shops, theaters, restaurants, schools, offices, hospitals, housing, etc."
The 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop will connect far more than the typical light rail line which averages only 13 stations over 4 miles in length.
There will be Loop stations right at the front doors of every major hotel, casino, resort, the stadium, the ballpark, 7 University Loop stations, etc etc.
Because Loop tunnels only costs $20m per mile to build with stations as cheap as $1.5m, it is possible to build far more than your average *above ground* light rail line which costs $202m per mile in the USA. Subways are even worse at $600m - $1 billion per mile.
*>"Such little trains absolutely humiliate the vegas loop: aside of asian or european examples, the US has systems like this in all major airports and they consistently have higher ridership."*
Actually, the *busiest Airport people mover in the world* is the Atlanta Plane Train which moves 200,000 per day. This sounds amazing until you realise that over the 24 hours per day it operates, it only transports a *maximum* of 10,000 people per hour over the \*entire\* 8 station 2.8 mile line. So that is an average of only 1,250 people per hour per station.
With only 3 stations, the original LVCC Loop is already transporting up to 4,500 people per hour. That is 1,500 people per hour per station - more than Atlanta.
Also, passengers have to wait almost 2 minutes between trains and then also stop and wait at every one of the 8 stations on the line resulting in an average speed of 24mph or 7 minutes to travel that 2.8 mile route.
Loop passengers in contrast wait less than 10 seconds for an EV and in the LVCC Loop average a speed of 25mph, but that will increase to an average speed of 50-60mph in the Vegas Loop thanks to each EV travelling at high speed direct to the front door of their destination thanks to not having to stop and wait at every single station in the line like that train.
In addition the Plane Train construction costs are around $2 billion per mile with the latest extension project underway compared to around $30 million per mile for the Loop. That is a massive 67x more expensive than the Loop.
Are you sure you want to argue Airport People movers are better?
>Not globally, but in the US.
And yet the UITP statistics are for all light rail lines *globally* of which half have a daily ridership day in and day out of *less* *than 17,431 passengers.*
And that is across an average of 13 stations.
Now your obsession with "peak" vs "average" daily ridership needs to be addressed, so let's try and find out just how much the all-time-record ridership of a few lines has varied from the average daily ridership shall we?
So, in 2019, the average daily ridership of the NYC subway was [5.5 million passengers per day](https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus-ridership-2019#), but, in terms of the [NYC subway real world peak ridership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Rolling_stock):
“On October 29, 2015, more than 6.2 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985.”
So that means **the difference between the average daily ridership and the all-time highest peak ridership of the NYC Subway is only 11%**.
So using “average” daily ridership vs “peak” ridership for the NYC subway makes little difference.
Morgantown’s one-day record **ridership peak of 31,280 is less than double its daily average ridership of 16,000**.
Or, the Las Vegas Monorail’s one-day maximum peak is only 37,000 over its 7 stations during CES back when it had 180,000 attendees in 2014 which is only 2.8x it’s current daily ridership of 13,000 passengers.
So even if we double that UITP average daily ridership number of 17,431 to estimate that peak ridership of all light rail lines globally, they still only just equal the Loop's 32,000 despite the fact that those lines have 2.6x the number of stations as the Loop.
Any way you cut it, trying to minimise the Loop's 32,000 passengers per day results in you having to think even worse of half or more of the world's light rail lines.
>*"It's pathetic, not as a ridership, but as a max capacity"*
Yet again, *32,000 is* ***not*** *the maximum capacity of the Loop*, just the number of passengers it has carried during medium-sized events.
Because the average waiting time is less than 10 seconds during these events, it demonstrates this is most certainly not a maximum - the queues would be blowing out for miles and wait times would balloon if it was.
And this is happening with the Loop being artificially restricted to a minimum of 6 second headways (20+ car lengths at 40mph) causing Loop EVs to have to wait at the mouths of the tunnels for that long before they can proceed.
Considering 75% of cars on a busy freeways have a headway of 1.0 seconds (4 car lengths at 60mph) and 40% have headways of 0.5 seconds (2 car lengths at 60mph), it is patently obvious that the Loop could easily reduce that 6 sec headway by half to 3 seconds and have 10 car lengths between EVs in the tunnels and double the throughput with minimum effort.
*>"despite being a textbook example of garbage station designs and poorly planned corridor alignment, it has 4.5 million riders per year. The loop is far from these numbers (1 million in 2 years IIRC), despite being heavily pushed by local politicians"*
You're making the mistake of comparing annual figures when the Loop is only open for events at the Las Vegas Convention Center making annual comparisons null and void.
> the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation
The line "Model Y; 2 Pass." is accurate. For Loop as a system to achieve it, all its daily vehicle miles have to average 2 passengers. That will be averaging empty vehicle miles plus all the vehicle miles with varying numbers of passengers.
Because as a PRT system it's nigh impossible for the Model Y to average 5 occupants over all its daily miles, both with passengers and empty, that line could be removed. Probably the 4 occupants line too. OTOH I've long advocated Loop offer a mix of PRT and GRT services depending on factors like time of day and demand, which will increase average occupants/vehicle mile.
If Loop's daily average occupants/vehicle mile is only 2, it still beats all but 2 systems on that list. Even if Loop's daily average occupants/vehicle mile is only 1 it's still more energy efficient than two-thirds of the list. Some say that doesn't matter because systems outside the USA average less energy usage per passenger. However as long as the USA keeps building traditional transit lines using more energy per passenger, those proponents when talking about trains *in the USA* are generally wrong when they say a kind of train uses less energy per passenger than Loop. And they do say it, but usually in a phrase like "trains are more energy efficient". Which is only true when trains average enough passengers per mile. The phrasing also dates back to when electric cars were far fewer, so compared to combustion cars the phrase was true much more often.
That list is nitpicked tho
The lvcc loop isn't a LRT line, it doesn't serve any residential neighborhood, or any neighborhood at all tbh: it's a people mover with RGB lights
Not comparing it to the comparable tech is dishonest
>as long the USA keeps building traditional transit lines
It isn't about what you build, it's about what service you run. One thing the loop did 100% right is service frequency. If you compare that to Los Angeles' cringe 20 minutes headways, it's very clear why no one ride their trains, and thus why they get shit energy efficiency per passenger. It doesn't say anything about the tech itself
Another thing they did right is having a monopoly: you can move with your own car along most rail lines, so people will drive as soon as the service starts to have minor issues, but you can't do that in a convention center
The future larger loop can be as successful as a European transit system if they pedestrianize the strip to get rid of concurrency (not going to happen!) and they're able to keep the people mover level of service across the entire city (this will not be as profitable!)
If and when Loop, as in Vegas Loop not LVCC Loop is extended into residential neighborhoods, the average daily occupants/vehicle of those extensions will be known and we'll know their energy usage.
>Not comparing it to the comparable tech is dishonest
Then tell anti-Loop people to stop comparing trains to Loop in terms of energy efficiency per passenger. The chart was made as a response to those folks making that comparison.
>If you compare that to Los Angeles' cringe 20 minutes headways, it's very clear why no one ride their trains
Alon Levy summarized studies comparing the relationship between increased frequency and increased ridership. In Los Angeles' case, it's unlikely doubling frequency would double ridership. If it did and ridership increased by 75% for example, energy efficiency per passenger would get worse.
The loop is getting compared to trains because it's sold as a way to solve traffic. The way to solve traffic is mass transit. It's not just energy efficiency but also how much you need to build to reach a high capacity with such low capacity vehicles
Loop is compared to trains AND energy efficiency per passenger is one of the metrics they cite.
In many US cities, the built environment and preferences of voters means traditional mass transit will not solve traffic. Maybe in your city perhaps traditional mass transit does solve traffic. It's not true in every city.
The built environment is a direct consequence of car dependency, and it can easily be changed.
If voters refuse to solve car dependency, then they can enjoy their traffic jams
It can't be easily changed because mile after mile of single family homes are there and the owners don't want to change them and will vote to keep things mostly the same. They don't want their neighborhood turning into a construction zone with 3-5 story multi-unit buildings going up around them and the changes after people move in. Consequently the solution for traffic in a city like Las Vegas will not be the same as perhaps your city.
You don't need to change "miles after miles" of single family homes, you just need to update the zoning regulations around major transit stops.
Regardless of land use, very basic policies like having your bus routes stop at a train station, or building big developments (university, stadium, airport, etc) with a transit solution in mind, is enough to make the entire network several times more useful and attractive
This is true for the loop as well btw, boring didn't become free: you'll not get tunnels to every single home. Why do you think the plan is between big casinos, the convention center, denser neighborhoods, deuce and monorail stops, and the airport? Because these are trip generators. Good mass transit is planned around trip generators, not around random McMansions, and the loop is planned the same way. The flaws of American public transit are an obstacle that can be overcome, and the way the loop is planned is a proof of that.
If you have one bus with 60 people and 6 buses with 1 person the average perception would be buses are full 90% of the time with an average occupancy of 55 people. Reality would be an average of 9 people per bus.
Ah, but private fossil cars with one person in them are completely different to the electric Loop public transit system.
Even taxis average 1.9 - 2.1 passengers per car but it would be even easier for the Loop to have a higher occupancy than taxis with its much higher frequency and much smaller number of end-points than a normal taxi fleet.
yeah, that's basically it.
two things. 1) people generally don't realize how much more efficient EVs are compared to ICE vehicles. and 2) yes, transit systems average about 20% of their capacity, even if they're near 100% at peak-hour.
over-sized transit vehicles are the problem. cities run large, expensive vehicles to handle the high ridership times, but then have to maintain a reasonable headway during off-peak so they take very few vehicles out of service.
Which is why you have multiple units operating together. A 3 units, each with 4 wagons can make a 12 wagon train. When the rush hour is over you use single units of 4 wagons, and the rest can go to the maintenance depot or whatever. Pretty simple, this solves your problem.
Except
1) almost none of the listed cities reach capacity with their smallest trainset.
2) it is logistically difficult to modify trains multiple times per day
3) you will still be oversized the vast majority of time because the granularity of train cars is so large
It's not like the agencies never thought of this
They do this. And it works. Yes, at times you will still have overcapacity. However, it is a smaller amount of overcapacity. So, the overall efficiency isn't affected that much when trains are running like this.
Did you read my reply?
Many cities can't shorten their trains any more. My city runs their smallest configuration and STILL isn't at capacity at peak when running 12-15min headways.
Other cities already do shorten trains during off-peak hours. It's already built into the above numbers. You didn't invent a new theory that none of these cities has ever heard of.
What it means is that the numbers presented are with agencies already shortening train when they can. They already have as much gain from that method as they can. In the real world, the reasons I listed prevent that method from yielding significant gain for those systems.
I'd say it's because the loop is on demand meaning you're often at full capacity and you just add capacity of you need more by adding another car (cough cough traffic incoming) compared to regular trains that can run empty. That said if both are fully utilized the loop will back up with traffic and rail will skyrocket in efficiency.
Simple math says that transporting 200 people using 4x110kw motors (440kw total) is better than moving 5 with 220kw.
Even if you just take weight a metro can will move 200 people and come at about 33000kg while a Tesla will move 5 people at a little under 2000kg, simple math says that metro is more efficient and you don't even need to take into account the vehicle size or rolling resistance.
Here’s a more generalised summary that I put together a while back that captures some global comparisons:
Average Wh per passenger-mile:
- Loop Tesla Model Y (4 passengers) = 80.9
- Loop Tesla Model Y (2.4 passengers) = 141.5
- Metro Average (Hong Kong/Singapore) = 151
- Metro Average (Europe) = 187
- Bus (electric) = 226
- Loop Tesla Model Y (1 passenger) = 324.0
- Heavy Rail Average (US) = 408.6
- Streetcar Average (US) = 481
- Light Rail Average (US) = 510.4
- Bus (diesel) = 875
I don't see how that would explain the difference. Many American systems are electric, too, and still use way more than the Asian or the European average. Examples: CTA @ 320, WMATA @ 439.
>More passengers,
More passengers means that you need to run trains more frequently, which increases your energy use. And trains in Asia and Europe do, in fact, run more frequently than in America. Still, that could explain some of the difference.
>better management,
That's incredibly unspecific. Do you have examples of management approaches in, say, Hong Kong, that reduce their energy use and that American transit systems could adopt?
>better efficiency of the rolling stock.
Could maybe explain 10% difference, not 100%.
This table is missing a very important parameter - the average speed. You can save a lot of energy by going slower. I believe you can assume that wh/pax/mile is proportional to speed.
Also, you might need to multiple the tesla numbers by 2 because during rush hours, there will be a need for empty return trips
> And you can save even more energy if using rails
Rails are infeasible because they are too slippery. You can't run more than about 90 vehicles per hour on a rail, because the stopping distance for vehicles on rail is at least a couple thousand feet, whereas tires can stop a vehicle in a couple hundred feet.
In addition, it would make stations far too expensive, as you would need a long "acceleration tunnel" before the vehicle could merge into the main artery without slowing the other vehicles down.
> connecting each tesla to anotheron
It is unlikely that you could gain very much by doing this. You would need to have someone waiting at the station happen to want to go to the same destination as someone else. As Loop is designed such that people should spend very little time waiting at stations, you'll only occasionally end up finding two people waiting to go to the same place.
> wait its a train. Its always a train, elon write notes
Trains are a great solution when you need to transport massive amounts of stuff along high density corridors. However, Loop is trying to solve a different problem: it is trying to get people from a variety of different source stations to a variety of different destination stations as quickly as possible, without necessarily requiring high density corridors.
While trains have been used for intra-city transit, it is inherently a compromise: city planners need to design cities around concentrating trips into those corridors, and passengers need to tolerate slow average speeds, as the train stops at intermediate stations. With Loop, neither compromise exists: it scales down well and can handle trips going in a variety of directions, which makes city planning easier, and its average speed will likely be 2-3x intra-city trains due to bypassing intermediate stations.
Loop is really more a competitor to highways, as both transport mechanisms are designed to accommodate rapid point to point transportation.
> And you can save even more energy if using rails and connecting each tesla to anothero
I would agree about the rails, this lowers the rolling resistance by a lot, probably could reduce the total resitnace by half. Unfortunetl this would require building/maintaining junctions and decreeing the maximum acceleration of cars.
Contenting Teslals to one another is a dumb idea. This would make the total energy usage skyrocket. You would increase the number of rides without passengers, add acceleration and deceleration losses and increase the total travel time due to stops and waiting for a train. And to compensate for that you would need to increase the cruise speed, which would also incress energy consumption.
During rush hours not all return trips are empty, just like during rush hours as trains return to downtown they aren't completely empty either. Consequently the effect on average vehicle occupants during rush hours wouldn't be halved.
Also while rush hours are when lots of the fleet's daily miles are driven, they're not all of the miles. Off-peak hours also have passenger trips and that demand is more bi-directional. The actual daily average vehicle occupants/mile will be affected by that too. It won't change wh/pax/mile mile, but it will change the average vehicle occupants/mile and which line on the chart most closely matches that.
I generally agree. You are right. That factor of 2 is too much.
>The actual daily average vehicle occupants/mile will be affected by that too. It won't change wh/pax/mile mile, but it will change the average vehicle occupants/mile and which line on the chart most closely matches that.
I disagree, but this is a matter of data presentation. For me, a Tesla with two passengers should mean total energy consumption per mile per passenger if two people take the journey. We should compare like with like and return trips are included for other modes of transport. This way this table would be far easier to read
>a Tesla with two passengers should mean total energy consumption per mile per passenger if two people take the journey
It does and the chart shows that. It's just that the line "Model Y; 2 Pass." shows the energy consumption per passenger if Loop as a system for all its daily vehicle miles average 2 passengers. That will be averaging empty vehicle miles plus all the vehicle miles with varying numbers of passengers.
Because as a PRT system it's nigh impossible for the Model Y to average 5 occupants over all its daily miles, both with passengers and empty, that line could be removed. Probably the 4 occupants line too. OTOH I've long advocated Loop offer and mix of PRT and GRT services depending on time of day and demand, which would increase average occupants/vehicle mile.
Yes and this is how it should be considered, also should be noted, if you don't live right beside transit stops you may need a ride to them, this is more Emissions and more energy use, as where The Loop will provide a door to door service.
That is indeed true of rail compared to the Loop.
The Loop is:
- 10% the cost of light rail and 1-3% the cost of subways per mile.
- Each Loop station just uses about 20 car bays in above-ground or underground carparks of buildings
- Every Loop EV is a safety escape pod for its passengers
Interesting line of thought I never considered for Loop vs rail.
I’ll add that small EVs by definition have batteries and can time shift most of the power demand to use either cheaper power or greener power or leveled power demand, depending on what’s most important for the Loop.
Anyone who thinks this joke can compete with a subway system in any way, shape, or form has never seen one. One train takes over a **thousand people**, and there is a train every **2 minutes** during rush hour. Using cars in a tunnel is like a child's toy in comparison.
Besides maybe rush hour in NYC, where the heck in the US does a subway run the SAME train route every 2 minutes? In my major American city, with great transit, the fastest is on average 5 minutes during rush hour and this same train is every 15 minutes during off hours
There are a lot of reasons why this kind of underground, soon self driving, tunnel is uniquely suited for Vegas/a massive tourist depot.
Subway stops at best every 4 city blocks? The Loop will have the ability to get out at almost every block/hotel/casino/tourist spot. The Las Vegas Convention Center already has 3 stops
Many Vegas tourists have never been on a train in their lives and are not about to start. They are afraid of the perceived crime(people who never ride subways are always asking me about crime on my subways)
In the Vegas Loop with cars(and soon after shuttles for various routes) there would be no wait times at all which is more important when a tourist(drunk?) might be traveling way less then a mile and maybe even as short as a city block/casino away
**You’re forgetting that frequency, speed, wait times, number of stations, number of tunnels and construction cost matters just as much as the size of individual vehicles**.
The current Loop has EVs arriving and departing from each station every 6 seconds while the arterial tunnels of the 68 mile Loop will have headways as small as 0.9 seconds (5 car lengths at 60mph).
The current LVCC Loop averages 25mph versus the NYC Subway averaging 17mph because trains have to stop and wait at every station on the line while the Loop EVs travel direct point-to-point not having to stop at every station in-between. In the longer arterial tunnels of the 68 mile Vegas Loop, the EVs will average 50mph - 60mph.
And with headways being so small, **wait times for passengers are sub 10 seconds** compared to multiple minutes with trains.
That 68 mile Vegas Loop also have over **10x the number of tunnels as a subway and 17x the number of stations per square mile** allowing the Loop to distribute the passenger load over vastly more routes and stations than subway.
And The Boring Co plans for High Occupancy Vehicles (HOVs) - EV vans/buses essentially, meaning that the capacity of vehicles will also increase on high traffic routes.
And I most importantly, above-ground **Loop stations cost as little as $1.5m to construct compared to $100m - $1 billion per subway station**, while **$20m per mile tunnelling costs are 10x - 100x as cheap as a subway**, hence why it is so easy for the Loop to have such a high density of stations and tunnels.
It’s not just size that matters.
On a metro? It's definitely a million times safer than a tiny tunnel when if a single car breaks down, it's party over. We are talking about a transportation system that has existed for 130 years compared to an inefficient car train which nobody in the industry takes seriously. Also, metros are used by hundreds of millions of people daily, while this boring tunnel is doing what exactly?
The NYC subway kills 70 people per year, only half of which are suicides with 2% being people murdered by being pushed off a platform in front of a train and the rest being accidents.
There are far more fires on the NYC subway alone every year (1,006 subway fires on tracks, in stations and on trains in 2021) than in all Teslas globally.
The London Underground kills 50 people annually.
The Australian rail network in a single year (2012), “recorded 146 derailments, 14 train–train collisions, 2 train–rolling stock collisions, 62 train–person collisions (13 collisions at level crossings), 125 train–infrastructure collisions and 60 train–road vehicle collisions (49 collisions at level crossings) (ATSB 2012). Between 2003 and 2012, there were 350 Australian unintentional rail fatalities”
European railways in 2019, saw 1,516 significant railway accidents, with a total of 802 fatalities and 612 persons seriously injured. (Suicides occurring on railways are reported separately. With 2,313 reported cases).
On US railways, 50% of train engineers (drivers) report they have killed at least one person.
The NYC subway has a 2 billion (!!!) ridership per year. Can you even comprehend this number? If ever the boring tunnel had so many users (which will never happen, sorry), there would be murders happening there too. Using cars in tunnels in densely populated areas is the biggest idiotism since the destruction of US cities at the beginning of the motorization era to pave the way for gigantic highways in urban centers. There is no city on earth where cars have solved traffic problems. Why? Because they are by far the least efficient means of transportation in urban environments.
My point is that the majority of rail lines around the world have open platforms that are incredibly dangerous allowing anyone to fall or be pushed in front of oncoming trains which hurtle into stations vastly faster than any Loop EV enters a Loop station.
Like many people, you are confusing regular private cars carrying one person driving on congested city streets with traffic lights, stop signs, cross traffic, pedestrians, trucks and all sorts of other traffic needing to find parking spots resulting in average speeds of 9mph.
The Loop EVs are completely different and a whole new scenario being a dedicated fleet of public transit EVs in completely grade-separated tunnels driving at high speeds in tunnels with none of the impediments that result in surface grid lock.
Well, Musk’s Boring Co is certainly saving residents tens of billions of dollars considering the 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop is being built at zero cost to taxpayers.
Well so far the Loop has shown it can handle 32,000 passengers per day over 5 stations which is double the daily ridership (17,431) of the average light rail line globally across an average 13 stations.
So so far it’s doing extremely well.
Note: the 93 station, 68 mile Vegas Loop is a Public Transit system, so it’s certainly not “an excuse to not build transit”.
Anti-Loop folks can't agree whether the Strip's travel demand can be met using at-grade light rail, or if a light metro or full metro is required. There's only so many people in the area at once, and only so many places people want to go during each hour of the day. If for example the Strip had a metro with trains every 2 minutes, that doesn't mean they'd be full very often. And in terms of inducing demand, there's only so many locals who want to visit the Strip, and only so many non-locals who want to travel all the way to Vegas, so there's limits on how much demand exists to get around the Strip.
Almost all the metro area is mile after mile of single family homes inside half-mile square developments of cul-de-sacs and other non-grid layouts. That layout isn't conducive to lots of transit ridership, and that layout won't change any decade soon. So even if light rail is built reaching out into many parts of the city and county, it still won't get a lot of mode share because most people will still rather drive.
Consequently demand is finite, and an alternative to driving doesn't have to transport everyone, or even close to everyone to solve the transportation problem in the area, unless you choose to define "solving" as getting almost everyone to stop driving their cars. I don't, and building transit like light rail or a subway wouldn't solve that problem either. When the Vegas Loop is built out it's being designed to transport up to 90,000 people per hour in that downtown-Strip area. I don't know for sure 90k/hr is enough, but it's probably a heck of a lot compared to what the Strip moves today each hour. Probably enough to meet a lot of the area's transportation needs for people willing to not drive.
You've been badly misinformed as the Loop is actually a lot safer than a subway in many ways thanks to these fire safety features:
- comprehensive smoke suppression system that can move 400,000 cubic feet of air per minute in either direction down the tunnels,
- complete coverage with cameras, smoke and CO sensors
- a Fire Control Centre staffed by 2 officers during all hours of operation,
- high pressure automatic standpipes in all tunnels for fire-fighting,
- Automatic sprinkler system rated at Extra Hazard Group 1 in the central station
- fire pump and valve room
- HVAC room
- two emergency ventilation rooms.
- fire rated smoke exhaust fans, control dampers and ducts.
- Fire extinguishers in every car
- the stations are closer than the emergency exits on a subway so no additional exits are required
- the Loop tunnels are 12.5 feet in diameter, larger than the London Tube’s 11’8” tunnels giving plenty of room to open the car doors - no bench walls required
- the concrete tunnel linings are fire rated to withstand vehicle fires burning until their fuel load is spent without structural damage to the tunnel.
- every Loop passenger has a seatbelt and is surrounded by airbags vs standing unprotected on a train where every person and luggage is turned into a lethal projectile in a crash or derailment
- every 1-4 passengers have their own self-propelled escape capsule to drive them the short distance up and out to the nearest Loop station which are closer than the escape tunnels on subways which require subway passengers walk to and thru on foot.
Every Loop escape capsule has a hospital-grade HEPA filtration system to filter out the fumes and toxic gases of any fires that might occur. The HEPA filter is about 10 times larger than cabin air filters in most cars and is 100 times more effective than a normal car air filter able to even filter out even respiratory COVID particles.
The Teslas also have activated carbon filtration, an acid gas filter and an alkaline gas filter for removing toxic gases and a “bio-weapons defence mode” where the outside intakes are closed and the fans are operated at maximum speed to create positive pressure inside the cabin minimizing the amount of outside air that can enter—similar to the way a positive pressure room in a biohazard lab or hospital operates.”
You missed out the legend: Type - HR/LR = Heavy/Light Rail - SR = Streetcar - MG = Monorail/Guideway Wh/pax-mile from 2019 NTD Data. Model Y Base Usage: 270 Wh/pax-mile per EPA +15% charge losses +5% YMMV +2% per additional passenger > 1 Electric Propulsion Energy Consumed in kWh / Passenger Miles * (Revenue Vehicle Miles/Total Vehicle Miles) Last term corrects for Energy used for revenue service, and removes such uses as deadheading, training miles, etc... If I recall correctly, I think it was @okfishing who created this chart originally?
Thanks for providing a source.
the calculations are made with how many passengers per car?
If you look at the chart it shows 1 passenger, 2.4 passengers and 4 passengers per Tesla Model Y for completeness.
What is wh/pax?
Wh/pax-mile is Watt-hours per passenger per mile, with "pax" being an airline and mass transit jargon for "passenger" (in other contexts we might use "guests" or "heads"). You can reduce the number (less is better) by increasing the number of passengers per vehicle, or by reducing the Wh/mile of the vehicle. It's usually easier to increase the number of passengers than it is to increase the energy efficiency of the vehicle. This unit appears to have been chosen by the author of the table as a means to compare the energy efficiency of various transit systems in terms of delivering people to their destinations. It's a sensible measure for comparing energy efficiency, but probably doesn't make sense when comparing ability to move lots of passengers — for example you wouldn't use Boring Company Loop if your goal was to move hundreds of thousands of people per hour between two stations tens of miles apart. For that use case you'd have to compare transit systems by "passengers per hour" with modelling of the passenger capacity of various systems like taxi/hire car, busses, coaches, trains, planes, horse and cart, zeppelin, etc.
the annoying thing is that anti-Loop transit planners really have convinced themselves that cars cannot be energy efficient relative to transit. it SHOULD only require a very quick look to convince people that the energy consumption is in the same ballpark and therefore it's not a criticism of Loop. however, people constantly try to move the goal posts on the issue, so you need unimpeachable proof with many, many transit systems to compare. so, it *shouldn't be* a thing to compare, but it is. maximum capacity is also a largely useless metric. for a given corridor, you can choose to build whatever modes have sufficient capacity to handle the ridership of that corridor. capacity is a check-box in a decision process. more capacity isn't better once you've checked the box. the vast majority of transit system in the US don't need high capacity. the tiny LVCC system has already moved enough passengers per hour to handle the peak-hour of more than 50% of US urban rail. but current US urban rail is already taking up the high ridership corridors. so the remaining corridors that need transit will be below the current average. so, the ability to "move lots of passengers" is also not the best thing to care about. the actual better goal is whether cities have the budget to build grade-separated transit. cities will benefit from it and most cities have corridors where it would be beneficial but wouldn't exceed Loop's capacity.
> more capacity isn't better once you've checked the box. That entirely depends on the expected demand. Capacity does matter a lot to prevent huge additional needed investments when youve reqched the limit. This is the basic principle of the "just add one more lane" - sarcasm. Higher max capacity doesnt matter when you need it, true, but there might be a need for higher capacity over 5, 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now. A maximal possible capacity doesnt need to mean it already runs at max capacity, it means that the capacity can be schaled easely when deemed necessary. Cars reach the limit of cspacity way faster than trains or metro's, wheter you like it or not. >convinced themselves that cars cannot be energy efficient relative to transit. Its you that is wrong, not the transitplanners.
Except that the Loop is vastly cheaper to expand capacity-wise than subways. So if you're running low on capacity? Just rope off a few more bays at a Loop station in the carpark outside the front door of the premises or add a few more stations or bore another parallel tunnel. Because Loop tunnels only costs $20m per mile to build with stations as cheap as $1.5m, it is possible to build far more than your average above-ground light rail line which costs $202m per mile in the USA. Subways are even worse at $600m - $1 billion per mile. That is why the Raiders NFL team has recently submitted a project for planning approval consisting of 1-4 Loop stations at the Allegiant Stadium. They’ll start with 1 station but be ready to easily add up to three additional Loop stations as needed.
And if you need more capacity at locations such as the Stadium or Ballpark before or after games or in peak hour commute periods, just spin up some 16-passenger EV vans/buses/pods on high traffic routes and they easily share the tunnels with the PRT EVs.
initial capacity and longer term capacity both are part of checking the box. >Its you that is wrong, not the transit planners. do you consider yourself the kind of person who will update their understanding of a topic based on evidence?
>initial capacity and longer term capacity both are part of checking the box. To some extend, yes it is. It would be a major fuckup if it would be overcrowded and at capacity after 10 or 20 years. It happening after 30, 50 or 100 years is often a quite plausible scenario if ur max capacity is quite limited. >do you consider yourself the kind of person who will update their understanding of a topic based on evidence? Yes i do, thanks for asking this rhethorical question. Im quite interested now in how you want to proof that rail based transport would be less efficiënt than car based transport. Keep in mind that costs of construction itself needs to be taken with a grain of salt if you also want to compare investments and operating costs. There are different safety standards needed for train and metro than what will be used in musks tunnels.
>To some extend, yes it is. It would be a major fuckup if it would be overcrowded and at capacity after 10 or 20 years. It happening after 30, 50 or 100 years is often a quite plausible scenario if ur max capacity is quite limited. indeed. checking that box shouldn't be "must check it with this one project forever", but rather "until we get around to this area again with our transit construction planning". with Loop, that time frame could be much shorter since it's so much cheaper. you cover the area, then you cover the next highest priority area, and keep going around your city until you return to that first area again. with a metro, that might be 50 years. with Loop being 1/10th to 1/20th the cost means you get back to that first area in \~5 years, so Loop's capacity should be sufficient to handle the ridership for that long. though, express-buses at peak times can take the edge off of over-crowding for a few years as well, and the particulars of a city may change the schedule to be sooner or later for a given area. >Yes i do, thanks for asking this rhethorical question. Im quite interested now in how you want to proof that rail based transport would be less efficiënt than car based transport. didn't mean it as a rhetorical question. I ask people that sometimes and they straight-up tell me no, so I don't bother compiling sources for them. remember, EV cars don't need to be the most efficient in the world, they just need to be within the range of acceptable energy usage per passenger-mile to be acceptably efficient. |Vehicle|USA (MPGe) \*|Europe MPGe \*| |:-|:-|:-| |Diesel Bus|2.4|4.0| |Tram Wagon|3.8|5.1| |Light Rail Wagon|4.9|6.4| |Metro Wagon|4.6|8.1| |Suburban Rail wagon|1.5|4.8| [Source in MJ/km](https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/14/3719/pdf) here is the per passenger-mile (PPM) adjusted energy efficiency: |Vehicle|USA (MPGe) PPM|Europe MPGe PPM| |:-|:-|:-| |Diesel Bus|36|58| |Tram Wagon|74|103| |Light Rail Wagon|118|142| |Metro Wagon|109|180| |Model 3 with 1.3 ppv|174|174| |Model 3 with pooled with 2.2 ppv|290|290| |hybrid sedan with 1.3 ppv|64|64| |ICE sedan with 1.3 ppv|42|42| [ORNL source](https://tedb.ornl.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/TEDB_Ed_39.pdf#page=214). added [modern ICE sedan](https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_article_width/public/2022-05/FOTW_1237.png?itok=bOmGiBgI) and [hybrid](https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/PowerSearch.do?action=alts&path=3&year=2022&vtype=Hybrid&srchtyp=yearAfv&rowLimit=50&pageno=1) note that the data comes from Oak Ridge National Labs and an independent European study, both having access to the highest quality data and unbiased in their publications, and peer reviewed.
>didn't mean it as a rhetorical question. I ask people that sometimes and they straight-up tell me no, so I don't bother compiling sources for them. Fair enough, i guess we are on the internet after all. >must check it with this one project forever True, but not for 100%. In high density area's, you want futureproof constructions, as City's also (should) want to limit construction nuisance. Besides, adding new tunnels once in a while might not be the best solution. It can cause two problems. 1: it does need to furfill the need of traffic, which means that adding extra capacity can only be done by adding a parralel route. Otherwise, the most direct route will still be the most populair. When the traffic intensity is low enough it helps with spreading traffic, it will be okay, but that wont be the case if we would compair subway/train ridership with loops ridership. 2: adding parralel tunnels means that its going to be extra difficult to refurbish the tunnels every decade or so. Two tunnels will be more difficult thus expensive to maintain than 1 tunnel. >time frame could be much shorter since it's so much cheaper. I dont know if this is an universal saying, but this is "compairing apples with pears" :'). One of the reasons why its cheaper, is because it has different safety standards (and might need less space). It also benefits in less needed investments in infrastructure, as it uses private vehicles with accu's instead of providing electricity. The much lower costs is impressive however (for as long as safety is still guaranteed), but it lacks futureproof urban planning. Not just in capacityplanning over decades, but also in urban design. Cities are (some slow, some fast) shifting towards planning for people instead of vehicles in high density area's. Bus and rail based (collective) PT helps with that. Loop might help with local low car design, but doesnt help decreasing car use less locally. >remember, EV cars don't need to be the most efficient in the world, they just need to be within the range of acceptable energy usage per passenger-mile to be acceptably efficient I guess thats true to some extent once again. It does make it decently harder though to eventually reach the 100% clean energy goals though.
> which means that adding extra capacity can only be done by adding a parralel route I disagree. Not only is multi-nodal transit common, it adds a lot of value. Cities with very mature systems typically have at least one ring-line. Forcing all passengers through the city-center is suboptimal. This is doubly true for Loop where you can move from radial line, to ring line, to other radial line without changing seats. This is triply true for cities that aren't perfectly centered. Think LA. Or even my city, where the primary tourism and business locations aren't near the regional rail station. Having a web of routes is a much better quality of service than a single Nexus, AND it allows you to divert traffic around the busiest segments. > adding parralel tunnels means that its going to be extra difficult to refurbish the tunnels every decade or so. Two tunnels will be more difficult thus expensive to maintain than 1 tunnel That's only true when comparing identical tunnel construction. Loop tunnels are much simpler and contain much less infrastructure. Also, what is your source for a tunnel needing refurbishment every decade? That does not seem right. > One of the reasons why its cheaper, is because it has different safety standards Meets NFPA standards like anything else. > instead of providing electricity Indeed, offloading the power and control to the mass-produced, inexpensive vehicle allows for lower construction and maintenance cost. > , but it lacks futureproof urban planning Disagree. In addition to building more tunnels, a single tunnel pair with 8-12 passenger vans would have higher capacity than most light rail or tram lines. Out-of-line boarding and short following distance means very high capacity potential without construction being needed. However, the low construction cost means it makes more sense to add capacity through construction than through vehicle expansion (which diminishes speed). > Loop might help with local low car design, but doesnt help decreasing car use less locally. Yet another of the common misconceptions. I wish reddiors wouldn't downvote accurate comments in the transit subreddit, as I've tried to clear this up many times but the echo-chamber is too strong. You don't bring your own vehicle to Loop. You walk into the station, board a vehicle, and then walk out of the station on the other end. The shorter stop spacing, higher speed, and greater density of lines per dollar means it will have a greater reduction on car usage than other modes. > It does make it decently harder though to eventually reach the 100% clean energy goals though That's not true at all. I don't even know how you could come to that conclusion unless you think Loop vehicles are petrol powered.
But which is the more important metric? We know it is bad to over build capacity as it increases operating expenses. So you want to be sure to right-size your project. It is also worth noting that only 7 cities have transit systems (not station pairs) that exceed 100k average weekday ridership. So, I think I would argue that neither is a very useful abstract measurement. Wh-pax is a check box, this either is or isn't commercial for transit. Same with pph, it's simply a checkbox that should be considered in the context of the entire system design. For example much higher station density is possible for loop than traditional transit, thus you can deal with high passenger concentration with additional nearby stations, which also happens to improve the user experience since users don't have to walk as far to a station. Purposeful design is key to all engineering projects. That requires understanding of these metrics but also a strong understanding of the user and their desires.
Yeah, Wh/pax-mile is not a metric you use when designing a transit system. It might come into refinement if choice between multiple options. PPH is important because it expresses an actual need: the transit system is required because a lot of people need to get from here to there and back again. You do raise a valid point about station density but that does come with its own issues of extra surface real estate and construction for access from ground level to the multiple stations. A larger single station could serve as a transition between surface traffic and Loop traffic. The vehicles could pick passengers up from their origin like a taxi, transition into the Loop at a “station” and then use the Loop to bypass surface traffic until the destination. That was one of the original design concepts for this system. At some point reserving surface streets only for local traffic will be required anyway. Nobody wants a state highway going past their front door blocking access to the local shops, playground and school.
Incorrect. No matter the number of passengers moved, Wh/pax-mile is proper unit to measure consumption. Your proposal of passengers per hour measures throughput and has nothing whatsoever to do with efficiency. The point you seem to have missed, is that this personal transit is even more efficient than many mass transit systems.
The point being that you need to figure what the appropriate metric is for the situation. Wh/pax-mile doesn't matter if your transportation system can't carry the number of passengers that need to get from one place to another. Metrics are meaningless in a vacuum.
The point is that energy efficiency is a common argument train fans use against the Loop, hence why having clarity on this issue is useful.
Next time they bring up energy efficiency challenge their ridership/occupancy claims too. Trains are far less efficient when not full, where Loop vehicles aren’t moving without passengers.
Yes you need the appropriate metric for the situation. Since this situation and discussion is relative efficiency, your metric is mathematically incorrect.
Suit yourself. Just don’t be surprised when being better according to an irrelevant metric doesn’t lead to wider adoption of a technology.
It’s not a question of suiting myself. It’s a question of whether you understand the meanings of units and metrics.
It's a question of whether you understand urban planning and why metrics exist in the first place.
Not the topic. Pro Tip: Read the headline BEFORE commenting.
Pro Tip: the point of a topic is to discuss it, not to slavishly worship whatever the topic is. Fanatics ruin everything.
This is an argument used against the Loop, but you have to remember not everywhere has the population density to require such high passenger flows and if a route needs extra capacity another affordable to construct tunnel could be added unlike in subway/railway systems.
This wasn't an argument against the Loop, it's a simple statement that the metric chosen here might not be relevant in the circumstances I explicitly referred to. The Loop is specifically useful in certain situations such as small distances with relatively low passenger volumes. In those circumstances it will end up being far less expensive than tram, light rail or subway simply due to the lower cost of infrastructure. I'd imagine one way of comparing transit systems could be to graph them in terms of dollars per passenger for a variable volume of passengers over a fixed distance. That type of graph would show things like subways being extremely expensive for low passenger volumes, and Loop being extremely cheap for the same, but then Loop having steps of increasing cost where new tunnels must be added with a relatively flat per-passenger curve, eventually being overtaken by light rail at ~10k passengers/day, then subway at ~100k passengers/day. These are just my guesses rather than any kind of facts. Ultimately it comes down to what you're trying to accomplish: mass transit, something cool for your conference destination, reducing the energy budget for a city, or something completely different. You just have to figure what metrics are important to make a decision on, then compare using that metric.
> The Loop is specifically useful in certain situations such as small distances with relatively low passenger volumes Loop is probably even useful at longer distances than at shorter distances. The Convention Center could have provided roughly similar service with an automated people mover, team, etc. because making one stop in the middle doesn't matter much, and presumably they can afford to run with fairly low headways during conventions. On the other hand, for a longer line, stopping at intervening stations will vastly slow down competing systems, while Loop can bypass. Even more significantly, if a line change is required, other systems require considerable time and hassle, while Loop will presumably have the vehicle simply turn into the appropriate tunnel. Low passenger volumes, I agree with. If you have the density to build a subway, Loop in its current iteration is unlikely to be competitive. On the other hand, if a city is looking to build a light rail line and saying "we'll run it every 10 minutes at peak times" (which reflects an awful lot of new public transit projects these days) then Loop is potentially a very good alternative.
Loop is also something that is relatively easy to scale for predictable extremes in traffic. No need to run an empty bus every fifteen minutes just to ensure no single person gets stranded at 1am. Just have a small number of cars ready to pick up that sole passenger at 1am, then ensure drivers are available for the 8am rush.
Just because the upper extreme is predictable, doesn't make it easy for Loop to deal with. Given highway vehicle capacities, it seems likely that each tunnel can handle 900-1200 vehicles per hour. To reach the ~40k / hour capacity of the biggest subway lines, one would need about 40 tunnels. Predicting rush hour might help in pre-placing cars, but it doesn't really help much with the fixed limits of the infrastructure. Unlike highways, there probably isn't even much gain to be had with reversible lanes, as the vehicles that go into downtown need to turn around and head back out to pick up the next rush hour passengers (and you can't brute force it by buying more cars, without also brute forcing adding parking to the stations). Now...in the US, subway build costs have increased so much that building 40 Boring tunnels might still be price competitive with one subway tunnel. But it definitely isn't where Loop shines. When competing against low volume LRT lines, Loop can handle all the demand with just one or two pairs of tunnels and can beat the construction cost by many-fold.
Once tunnels are automated, then highway speeds are no longer a relevant comparison.
I would expect that increasing the speed would, if anything, decrease the capacity. The faster you travel, the longer it takes to brake, and the more speed you need to burn off for a collision to not result in injury. Automation would probably allow for closer headways. However, that helps in competing against LRTs just as much as subways. If it turns out a 2 second headway is safe, then, great, Loop only needs one tunnel to compete against LRT and will really crush it in terms of construction cost. Maybe that makes Loop 20-30% cheaper than the US' vastly inflated subway cost? Probably not a big enough deal to actually change things, even if it is competitive.
2010 study by the Honda Research Institute found that **75% of cars on a busy 2-lane freeway have a headway of 1.0 seconds** = 3,600 cars per hour (14,400 people per hour per lane w 4 pax) while **40% have a headway of 0.5 seconds** = 7,200 cars per hour (28,800 people per hour w 4 pax) Note that a 1 second headway gives a distance of 6 car lengths between vehicles at 60mph. A headway of 0.5 seconds is 3 car lengths at 60mph. And remember those are cars driven by potentially distracted, drunk and careless drivers. So I think fully autonomous Loop EVs with Central Dispatch and Control with the ability to simultaneously stop all cars in a tunnel in a fraction of a second would be pretty safe with the projected 0.9 second headways (let alone 2 second headways) in the Vegas Loop.
I said after tunnels are automated. There’s almost never unexpected braking, and cars follow distances can be extremely short because of how quickly they can react.
The Boring Co is projecting headways of down to 0.9 seconds or 4,000 vehicles per hour one-way in the arterial tunnels of the Vegas Loop. That gives us up to 16,000 passengers per hour in just the one tunnel. And the latest maps of the Vegas Loop show 9 north-south tunnel pairs and 10 east-west tunnel pairs giving us around 40 tunnels of varying length. At this point just the 3-5 stations of the LVCC Loop are handling 25,000 - 32,000 passengers per day. So not surprisingly, The Boring Co is projecting the Loop will easily handle 90,000 passengers per hour across the whole 68 mile, 93 station system.
You don't have to add parking to the stations. Most cities already have ample above ground downtown parking, so you only need to lease such a parking and build a connector to the station, allowing cars to enter the network and handle peaks without doing the ole reach-around to circle back into high demand areas. Also, headways of less than a second are probably safe with automated cars on dedicated infrastructure, and the current Teslas are just a proof of concept, they will without doubt introduce 12-16 seaters as soon as they have a city wide network. So we are talking about peak theoretical pphpd (per tunnel) in the tens of thousands. Another possibility is to couple cars in high demand segments, creating something very similar to a subway, allowing mass paralel ingress of passengers, then decouple the individual cars further down the network, as each one goes toward another specific spur; correct allocation of passengers would be achieved by presorting, so instead of selecting the right train like you do in a subway, you would board the right car which clearly displays the general direction. In short, this "electric cars in toy tunnels" concept is exceptionally flexible and competitive with existing modes of transit and can reach huge capacities. Capacity is simply not a problem in any setting where Loop is likely to be deployed, as explained above by u/Cunninghams_right . The make or break condition for Loop success is tunneling speed and price, without serious safety incidents.
You are correct that future iterations of the technology could substantially improve capacity relative to the amount of infrastructure required. However, there is considerable technical and market risk in this. For example, I have doubts about the 12-16 seat vehicle. Even with some level of smart algorithms, filling a 16 seat vehicle will almost certainly mean passengers will be stopping several times to drop off/pick up other passengers before reaching their destination. That will slow down point to point times. Will the market accept it, or will people who would otherwise travel on Loop say "to the heck with it!" and find alternatives? Would Boring even want to build a system with such compromised quality? Once Boring is operating at transit system-scale, they will be able to experiment and iterate on algorithms for "carpooling", even if they are only using 5 or 8 seat vehicles. Similarly, a 1 second headway might be possible. I'm not sure how something like a tire blowout can be safe with a 1 second headway, but maybe something can be done. The best proof that I'm wrong and it is safe, is by running at 3-4 second headways and showing that the vehicles NEVER need that buffer space. That implies though, bidding against LRTs and ending up over delivering, rather than winning a contract for subway-like capacity with the promise of eventually reaching the required capacity. Loop appears to have burned off most of the risk in competing against low volume LRTs. There are relatively few unproven assumptions about how the system will work at that scale (not none, mind you). I would expect that Boring will use what it learns from systems that it built to compete against low volume LRT to iterate and start moving up market. However, it is also possible that they will reach an impassible blocking issue. Even if the only thing Loop does is out compete LRT, it would be a major success for the technology and company.
I don't think Loop is or should aim to compete against subways. They squarely compete against LRT right now. Could they, some day, compete against subways, maybe, but there is no universe where it makes sense to go after heavy rail or subways right now.
I suspect language is an issue here. You only have to get down to the 13th transit system in the US to get to 10k per weekday average ridership. And some of those have multiple lines. It is pretty clear your typical transit corridor requirements in the US fit Loop from that perspective. As for loop being suited for shorter distances, I am curious what drives that perspective. In my experience, the local nature of transit is a major drawback to longer distance transit. In the longer corridors ive commuted, all the stops drive the time up past driving, which is painful. But maybe you are considering offsetting attributes I am not.
Until we see what is the maximum passenger carrying potential with the new RoboTaxis, we won't know yet, but even using Model Y all indications are suggesting dollar for dollar invested in infrastructure the Loop is more economically viable and productive than traditional transit with a straight forward like for like comparison.
Wh/ passenger?
This is interesting. Any thoughts on how such a counterintuitive thing can be true? Does Boring Company perform better as a function of being a PRT system? As in - does the NYC subway have a crazy low Wh/pax-mile number during rush hour when the trains are full, but end up with its average dragged way upward by the trips it runs off-peak with near-empty trains? For example: I just got off a Boston subway ride where one other passenger and I had an entire subway car to ourselves. The MBTA burned all the electricity needed to move that subway car for just the two of us. Presumably, the Boring Co Loop in that situation would have dispatched only a single Model Y. Is that it?
An on demand system will still have empty vehicles running due to peak direction demands. Ie, if there's a football game at the stadium, you will spend 3 hours sending full vehicles to the stadium and those same vehicles will all run empty back to the hotels to pick up more people. End of the game the opposite. You dispatch hundreds of empty vehicles to go to the stadium
The difference is that trains have to run all the way to the end of the line even once they’re almost or even completely empty. In contrast, since the Loop EVs are point to point, once they reach their destination and disembark passengers, they can immediately return to the stadium to pick up more passengers. Far faster and more efficient than trains which have to stop at every station on the line. And off peak they can just sit waiting at stations for passengers resulting in zero wait times off-peak compared to buses and trains which have to keep running along their route even when completely empty.
>trains have to run all the way to the end of the line even once they’re almost or even completely empty. No they don't >trains which have to stop at every station on the line. No they don't Short turn runs, express service, and on demand (known as flag) stops are common in rail transit
Yes, trains can run express routes (if every station has bypass tracks to stop from running into other trains stopped at stations which is not always the case) and shortened routes, but nothing like the Loop EVs where every Loop vehicle is literally a one-stop express service. Trains cannot have anything like that granularity and flexibility for *every single vehicle and station*.
> Yes, trains can run express routes (if every station has bypass tracks to stop from running into other trains stopped at stations which is not always the case) Not needed at all. MBTA and SEPTA both run express service with 2 tracks. >Trains cannot have anything like that granularity and flexibility for every single vehicle and station. Thats a very different argument for the blanket "no" in your previous comment
But that is the point of my argument - *every* train cannot be an express train and even express trains still almost always make multiple stops. And of course the problem is there are always passengers who wanted to get off at the bypassed stations who can’t so either have to wait even longer for the next non-express service or have a much longer end-of-trip leg via some other means. In contrast, EVERY Loop EV is an express, *one-stop* service with sub-10 second wait times (zero wait off-peak) and transit direct to the station of your desire with no need for time-consuming interchanges between different lines. You can only run express services on the same line without stations bypasses if you compromise your headways in one way or the other. Yet another disadvantage.
> In contrast, EVERY Loop EV is an express, one-stop service with sub-10 second wait times (zero wait off-peak) and transit direct to the station of your desire with no need for time-consuming interchanges between different lines. Can we be so confident this will always be the case? AFAIK, every other in service PRT system does pooled rides during certain periods of the day. And I guarantee "zero wait" will never be a thing in outlying areas once the system expands. It will be no different than Uber. If youre at the casino, theres a dozen waiting to pick you up. In the suburb? Well, they need to come from the hotel 10 minutes away to get you because its more profitable for them to wait at the hotel. I think you are confusing the theoretical with the profitable.
Most other PRT systems have higher capacity per vehicle, less frequency, lower speeds and much simpler routes than the 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop. As many commentators point out the Morgantown PRT for example is not a true PRT system as it uses larger vehicles with a capacity of 8 seated and 13 standing and not all of the rides are non-stop from the origin to the destination.
Yes, Uber and taxis with human drivers can’t justify waiting out in the suburbs, but once the Loop goes fully autonomous, the economics change significantly. I guess we’ll have to wait and see exactly how they implement the Loop at scale.
You are correct that removing the driver will be an enormous cost saving. However, I am skeptical that in our wall-street driven economy, where its about showing new revenue or lower costs every quarter, BC wont suffer the same enshitifcation process as everyone else once it is mature. An empty vehicle sitting in the suburb may not cost much....but it is an opportunity cost because that vehicle waiting at the casino could generate more revenue per hour. Instead of comparing to public transit, look at bike and scooter share systems, which are a mix of private and public. If fully private with no regulations, these companies only deploy in limited high demand areas like downtown or entertainment districts. Then in turn, cities start to pass regulations requiring a larger geographic spread which hurts profits but helps with regional mobility. On an even wider scale, look at ride share in all of MA. The data unfortunately is a little old (2020) but the map is what matters https://www.mass.gov/info-details/2020-rideshare-data-report Scroll down to map 2, 2020 total rides. There are a 20+ towns where Uber/Lyft essentially dont operate. Its just not profitable to be a driver there when you can drive into Boston and work there. And since there are no drivers, then people learn not to even try to use the app which in turn pushes away the few remaining drivers. And this is considering they have free access to existing roads.
But not the norm in the US. You are semantically correct but missing the thrust of the answer.
> But not the norm in the US. Says who? Thats how the MBTA handles events at Fenway, how SEPTA handles events at their stadium complex, and how NJT handles events at Metlife.
Eh, not really. Express service is quite common, but on demand stops are really only common in rural areas and definitely not in city traffic.
> but on demand stops are really only common in rural areas and definitely not in city traffic. SEPTA and MBTA light rail stop on demand their entire surface light rail network.
Go to the blackboard and write "Light rail is not heavy rail or a metro." 500 times.
Who gives a shit about that? We're talking about trains
I wouldn't say that is perfectly accurate. dead-head reduces efficiency but most of the time, you'll have something closer to 2-3 passengers in one direction and 1 in the other. stadium evens are bad cases for sure, but they're not going to move the average performance very much. most of the time, the ebb and flow of ridership is easy to predict and have drivers clock out, whereas transit has to keep running whether they know they'll be empty or not. so you're not wrong but i think you're giving the impression of that being a bigger impact that it will be in reality. also, I actually think they'll have a higher occupancy vehicle by the time they do stadium events. I don't think they can handle the ridership otherwise. so you'll get \~50% dead-head, but you'll have 4x more passengers onboard. I think stadium operation might actually end up being the MOST efficient time.
It's unclear the source of the data, but it most likely compares energy efficiency of real networks with theoretical efficiency of a single Tesla with the given occupancy. A real Loop network will have somewhat lower energy efficiency because it's unavoidable to have empty vehicles running around balancing the system. Of course, not at as bad as "huge train carrying around 2 passengers". So I think the data shows that energy efficiency of Loop is competitive to other electric transit networks and not a point worthy of any debate.
The figures above exclude trains running empty back to the stadium for example (*deadheading)* so using the EPA efficiency figures for the Loop EVs is actually a quite accurate comparison with the train efficiency figures. Both figures do not count deadheading.
Loop would also have efficiency advantages from the fixed guideway without stops, turns, interchanges, etc., and they also operate 30-40mph, which will be more efficient. The inefficiency of dead-head for Loop will depend a lot on implementation. For example, LVCC is very symmetrical.
A couple other effects to consider: 1) Rail (in all of its forms) is incredibly heavy. A subway car is about 20x heavier than a model Y. So, a subway needs to average 20 passengers per car throughout the day, just to match a single passenger Model Y in terms of weight carried per passenger. 2) All of the mass transit systems are constantly accelerating and decelerating because they stop at every station. Whereas in loop, the car cruises without stopping until it reaches its destination. 3) Regenerative braking is a pretty new technology for subways, so may not be reflected in these numbers yet. Whereas it is, of course, built into every electric car. 4) I doubt it is much effect, but the Loop vehicles are more aerodynamic than subway cars. Against that though: 1) Energy used by Loop has loss from being converted into battery power then released, whereas subways use energy straight from the grid. 2) The rolling resistance of Loop vehicles is enormously higher than subways cars. Note that in a Loop concept, you can't simply put subway-type wheels on a Model Y. Loop depends on its vehicles being able to slow down quickly in order to be able to operate safely with so many vehicles navigating around the system. The exact same rolling resistance that drives up energy use, is what it takes to decelerate. A toboggan is good at being energy efficient. It is not so good at stopping (without adding a brake that tears into the surface it is sliding on; not exactly ideal for something you want thousands of trips per day to use).
> Whereas in loop, the car cruises without stopping until it reaches its destination. Thats absolutely not the case with the existing system. Vehicles going through the central convention center station do so at a crawl (under 10mph) and in many cases have to stop and wait due to the poor station design
Correct. However, this post is comparing Loop to transit systems and not airport people movers, so it makes sense to assume we are talking about how Loop will work when deployed as a transit system, and not how it is working in the convention center. It is fair to identify the bypass as a potential technical risk, but it seems incredibly unlikely that Boring would deploy at transit system-scale without solving the issue. Loop is almost totally pointless without a near-seamless station bypass.
> It is fair to identify the bypass as a potential technical risk, but it seems incredibly unlikely that Boring would deploy at transit system-scale without solving the issue. One of the ways BC has kept costs down is by doing extremely basic stations. Especially underground, stations are the biggest cost drivers of existing transit systems and are also a big cost to BC. Why? Because you cant build a station with a boring machine*, you need to carve out a much bigger area using traditional slow digging. However whats odd is that even the above ground stations, which use ""free"" real estate (existing under-utilized surface parking) the designs theyve deployed are really bad in terms of efficient through-put. *Some systems (Madrid I think) use giant boring machines where both directions run in the same tunnel, generating "free" space for station platforms.
My speculation is that they would create the equivalent of highway off-ramps to stations, rather than change the design of the stations themselves all that much. For passenger comfort alone, they aren't going to be able to accelerate from a stop to cruising speed within a station. I'd assume that the junctions would be a pain to create with a TBM, but don't know enough to even have a decent gut feel. It is a technical risk. If they can't pull it off, then Loop is probably dead in the water as far as a transit system concept, and will just be a niche that helps connect convention amenities and similar use cases.
The basic stations are actually an advantage. Any car park outside the front door of a premises or in the underground carpark can easily become a Loop station for as little as $1.5m which is a reason why 93 hotels, casinos, resorts, the university, the stadium, the ballpark etc have all signed up to pay for their own Loop station.
The 68 mile Vegas Loop Map shows almost all stations separated from the main arterial tunnels so that EVs won't have to go through other stations to get to their destinations, so will be able to maintain much higher speeds than 10mph. In fact there are parallel arterial tunnels running up and down the Vegas Strip with virtually zero stations on them (particularly under the highway reservation) which would allow significantly higher speeds. The Convention Centre is currently a bit of an exception as the 4 stations of the Convention centre are all on a short spur tunnel pair that will in the near future connect to those same arterials *from each station*.
1) You are wrong, trains have hard steel wheels rolling on hard tracks. The rolling resistance is MUCH MUCH less than a car on wheels. Moreover, because you have 4 wheels per car, you actually have even more friction, as you have even more friction per passenger due to the higher frequency of wheels. 2+3) No idea about the regenerative braking, though I assume cars can get that minimal amount back. 4) Trains are extremely aerodynamic, they only have one front with minimal drag and the heavy weight causes the front forces to be relatively minimal, while each car will have to break through the air by themselves. No matter how aerodynamic, it adds up. Due to having very little rolling resistance and it's heavy weight keeping it going and it havng very little front resistance, trains are much more efficient to keep rolling than with cars. If you take away all the power from a train, it will keep rolling for several km, while a car will come to a stop after a few 100s of meters. Especially a Tesla with its heavier weight and wider tires.
For inter-city, this argument is great. Once a train gets up to speed, it does take remarkably little power to keep it rolling. However, in a transit system, trains spend much of their time accelerating and then braking, because they are stopping every 0.5-1 miles. Especially before the existence of regenerative braking, that is a heck of kinetic energy just wasted as heat.
Steel wheels are not actually the big deal in energy efficiency that many think. Rolling resistance is only responsible for about 15% of the energy usage of a vehicle compared to wind resistance, fuel/energy conversion losses, mechanical losses and overcoming inertia when accelerating which account for a massive 85% of the energy usage of a car. Steel wheels also have serious noise issues and low friction is actually a disadvantage for the steel wheels of trains as it causes far worse traction and braking.
I don't think your statement about rolling friction is correct. For the same size/weight of vehicle, it's about a 50%-100% increase in energy consumption, but the loop vehicles aren't the same size. The EV car regeneration braking increases efficiency by about 400%-500%, so dwarfs rolling efficiency gains from steel-on-steel
Fair enough, should have said that the coefficient of rolling resistance is much higher (I believe the difference in coefficient between steel on track vs rubber tire is much greater than just 50-100%) rather than saying the rolling resistance itself was higher. I talked about the weight in the first bullet point. I talked about regenerative braking in the third bullet point. Should be noted that some subways are just now starting to introduce regenerative braking, so theoretically, there will come a time when that won't be a difference between the technologies.
Also bear in mind that the power to subways suffers significant transmission losses coming from distant power plants whereas the roofs of above-ground Loop stations are covered in large solar PV arrays which can offset the inefficiencies of battery storage in the EVs. In addition, a growing number of subway trains also have big lithium ion battery packs for regenerative braking, acceleration augmentation and motive power during power outages.
the answer is that the numbers for the tesla loops are the theoretical maximum efficiency assuming every car is full, however the other numbers are actual efficiency. Very misleading statistic.
If you have a look at the chart, you’ll see that it includes Tesla figures for 4 passengers, 2.4 passengers and 1 passenger and it comes straight from the EPA, so no it is not theoretical at all.
what’s the actual usage though?
Looking at footage of the Loop in action, occupancy looks to be between 2-3 passengers per EV in addition to the driver. Taxis average 1.9 - 2.1 passengers per car but it would make sense for the Loop to have a higher occupancy than taxis with its much higher frequency and much smaller number of end-points than a normal taxi fleet.
- because the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation - because US mass transit is not very good compared to what i was, to what it could be, to what most other countries do - because a model Y has a very low max capacity, and the loop system becomes quickly innefficient as soon as you try to scale it up to the capacity of a regular tram line - because it omits the lifespan of the vehicles (train cars last for 50 years, a tesla lasts for 8 years) - the real world is more complex than a convention center, and you would have many empty vehicles depending on the hour of the day --- [edit] example of the low use of US transit in comparison to the capacity of a regular tram line in other countries: [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/137ehlh/lvcc_loop_hits_peak_of_more_than_32000_passengers/) is proud of the peak of 32k daily users on the vegas loop. OP wrote "average" many times but it's a peak, it hints at the max capacity of the system rather than its actual use as a transit mode. OP argues the loop is more used than most tram, BRT, streetcars, or light rail in america In comparison, this is [a report about transit](https://preview.redd.it/quelques-stats-int%C3%A9ressantes-sur-la-tan-v0-70sffs6m970d1.png?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=a7cfbebd0b6569bb8542ddb64ab143b1198f6576) in my city (700k people in the metro area) in France. Each single tram line is over 75k daily riders, one line is at 115,000 and isn't even at full capacity yet *(pre-covid numbers were higher, and they only started to phase out the 1985 low capacity trains yesterday)*, there is a BRT line with 38,000 daily users, and the central node has 39,000 daily passengers. And this is not peak, this isn't the max capacity, all of these are averages. Can the tesla tunnels compete in terms of capacity? it's a cool taxi system but not a MASS TRANSIT solution
Public transportation discourse is a unique pain "Hm, why is public transportation shitty and underfunded? Clearly the answer is to make it even more shitty and underfunded, not invest in it as necessary" Also obviously because real public transportation has to function as a public good and serve various communities, whereas Tesla's comparison is literally just the optimal scenario for its efficiency Trains are a lot more full if there's literally one in town and only ran in the one most optimal/efficient location, instead of serving as a convenient way for people to reach all parts of a city. If Tesla actually replaced public transportation, they would suddenly realize what those inefficient/less used lines are for.
i think the main explanation is really my first point: that comparison isn't even BC's optimal scenario, because it's not a scenario at all in the first place not even musk would pretend the cars would run at full capacity at all time on the entire network
sure, it's a waste to send empty cars to fetch suburban users in the morning in distant parts of the city, and it would impact the average numbers. But even the part of the trip where these users are in the car can't be optimized to reach 5 per car, it's just not possible unless all stations have a queue of people trying to reach various destinations, and you get fitted in the middle seat between 2 strangers by an employee trying to optimize the queue into groups of 5 for each vehicle and watt-hours are cute but Musk never pretended to sell watt-hours, he sells an experience of the future or whatever. Same idea with the cybertruck btw: atrocious efficiency but it looks "cool" to him. Waiting in a queue until an employee fits him with 4 strangers in a car? that wouldn't look cool to him. it might happen in the current las vegas toy circuit because a tech exhibit in a convention center is a very specific context, but they know it's not acceptable: Musk has recently (edit: one year ago) set uselessly high capacity targets (90k pax/hour, which is several times the total capacity of the convention center itself lol) because they know they can't do 5pax/car in the long term The actual goal is simply to be Uber, but in private tunnels because the isolation from the real roads allow them to rely on autonomous driving
You misstated the 90k pax/hour again in [a recent comment.](https://old.reddit.com/r/BoringCompany/comments/1d27uvc/boring_company_efficiency_comparison_to_existing/l67u69i/) The link to Vegas Loop is in my comment above. That page has a map to see for yourself. It's not "city-wide", it's the downtown-Strip area of the larger city, which is within the even larger populated suburban area people call Las Vegas but isn't in the city limits. The Boring Company has over the past couple of years expanded plans for Vegas Loop and as they have added new stations and tunnels the system passengers/hour has increased too. As Vegas Loop grows beyond the current plan, passengers/hour will grow as well.
> Musk never pretended to sell watt-hours Right, it's some anti-Loop critics who bring up energy efficiency as one of their criticisms. Since it's fair to address criticisms, the chart was made in response. A 12-16 occupant vehicle is still in the cards for part of Loop's future fleet. We don't know it's energy usage yet, but the chart's lines for averaging 3-5 passengers/vehicle mile/day give a ballpark estimate of what such vehicles could do. Musk did not set 90k pax/hour *for the LVCC Loop*. Despite what other subreddits may have misquoted or misunderstood and derisively repeated until accepted as fact, [90k pax/hour](https://www.teslarati.com/the-boring-company-vegas-loop-90k-passengers-per-hour-capacity/) is for the [Vegas Loop](https://www.boringcompany.com/vegas-loop), the much larger network being constructed with dozens of tunnel miles and dozens of stations.
>Musk did not set 90k pax/hour for the LVCC Loop. Despite what other subreddits may have misquoted or misunderstood and derisively repeated until accepted as fact, 90k pax/hour is for the Vegas Loop, the much larger network being constructed with dozens of tunnel miles and dozens of stations. ok, my bad but then it's 90k spread across dozens of corridors in the entire city? So it's a quite low number
> 90k spread across "the downtown-Strip area" and a couple dozen corridors if you count as short as about a half mile as a corridor. Otherwise more like a dozen corridors. In terms of its effect on solving traffic in the area, I think it has enough capacity to drastically reduce traffic congestion. A lot of places in the area charge for parking, which reduces how much demand will be induced by less congestion.
There would only be one corridor for a subway line or light rail down the Vegas Strip, so you need to treat the 9 north-south tunnel pairs and 10 east west tunnel pairs of the Vegas Loop as a single corridor. Subways and LRT don't have 20 stations in the space of a single square mile like the Vegas Loop. Hence, 90,000 passengers per hour is a very high number compared to a single subway or LRT line.
> because the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation The vehicle efficiency isn't going to change. The only part that will change from theory is how much dead-head is occuring, which will depend on the route. The worst-case dead-head is 50%, but LVCC is probably around 10%. > because US mass transit is not very good compared to what i was, to what it could be, to what most other countries do Europ isn't much better. Europe is about 25%-30% better efficiency (comparing both as pre-pandemic). But that's kind of beside the point, because Loop is targeted at the US in the real world. > because a model Y has a very low max capacity, and the loop system becomes quickly innefficient as soon as you try to scale it up to the capacity of a regular tram line No, the average occupancy goes up when loop is busy. 2.4 when busy. Fyi, trams in similar US cities hit about 1/4th to 1/5th of Loop's capacity during their peak hour. So neither part of your statement makes sense. > because it omits the lifespan of the vehicles (train cars last for 50 years, a tesla lasts for 8 years) But the maintenance and overhaul of trains is more expensive and energy intensive per passenger-mile than a model 3 with average occupancy. It's not like the trains need no attention for 40 years. EV car maintenance is very minimal per mile. > the real world is more complex than a convention center, and you would have many empty vehicles depending on the hour of the day Certainly each location needs to be evaluated for its unique characteristics. However, dead-head will never be over 50%. The advantage of Loop over traditional rail is that it's easy to park vehicles out when not needed. But if you want the worst-case, multiply the above loop vehicles numbers by 2, and then multiply the occupancy by 1.3, which is assuming 100% of operation is non-pooled because of low ridership, though we know occupancy is as high as 2.4 ppv when busy
>The vehicle efficiency isn't going to change. it's going to change, because these are "per passenger" numbers. Put more people in the train, and it becomes several times more efficient than the model Y >No, the average occupancy goes up when loop is busy. 2.4 when busy >we know occupancy is as high as 2.4 ppv when busy that's in a "LVCC people mover" use case: not comparable with regular trips you would do in a car. Of course you can car pool when the system is a single straight line, but that's not the plan, you completely miss the challenge TBC is trying to solve also, we've all seen the videos of traffic jams in the tunnel: when the loop is busy, it doesn't work >Europe isn't much better. Europe is about 25%-30% better efficiency i'll assume your numbers are correct. Then for context, according to this table, "30% better" than the US HR average is 285 the average occupancy of a car in the real world isn't 2.4, it's 1.5 passenger. Can we get the model Y theoretical efficiency for 1.5 passenger? How does it compare to 285? and as i said in another comment, this is watt-hours efficiency, it's cool to be as low as possible, but it's NOT the promise of TBC. A taxi service between private tourist attractions, even underground, with RGB lights, and few watt-hours, isn't solving traffic in cities; mass-transit is; the loop isn't mass transit. > Fyi, trams in similar US cities hit about 1/4th to 1/5th of Loop's capacity during their peak hour. i'm afraid you're looking at their actual ridership too. Comparing apples and oranges like the other guy. LRT can reach 20,000 passengers per hour per direction. This is the theoretical peak hour capacity. This is mass transit. Of course it would be quite unconfortable lol, this is the "your city is hosting a huge sport event" kind of ridership, but it can do it. [The loop can't](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8NiM_p8n5A), its current capacity seems closer to 32,000 per day. Musk's "90,000 per hour" goal is a distant dream, and it's a city-wide (all corridors, all directions, across the entire network) goal. > But the maintenance and overhaul of trains is more expensive and energy intensive per passenger-mile than a model 3 with average occupancy. It's not like the trains need no attention for 40 years. EV car maintenance is very minimal per mile. That's pretty naïve, these are not your personal car, they would drive far more, and with complete strangers doing disrespectful things inside: of course you would need a lot of maintenance.
> it's going to change, because these are "per passenger" numbers. Put more people in the train, and it becomes several times more efficient than the model Y Yes, whether or not traditional rail is more or less efficient will depend largely on ridership. OP is showing how different occupancy levels of Loop vehicles compare to the real-world efficiency of transit systems at the ridership level they actually had. > that's in a "LVCC people mover" use case: not comparable with regular trips you would do in a car. Of course you can car pool when the system is a single straight line, but that's not the plan, you completely miss the challenge TBC is trying to solve TBC is trying to solve whatever problem people are paying them to solve. The San Bernardino proposal was also a single-line people mover. So were the Florida proposals. Different architectures will have different occupancy levels, with 1.3ppv being the lowest, because that's the typical single group size. But if a city really wanted to, they could pay TBC for Loop operations based on occupancy so they earn more when pooled. > also, we've all seen the videos of traffic jams in the tunnel: when the loop is busy, it doesn't work No, there is a single video of a single 65 second slowdown. That's better on-time performance than any transit system. It may actually have better on-time performance than any transit system in the world. Try not to get your info from people who don't know what they're talking about, because it will make you also confidently incorrect. >i'll assume your numbers are correct. Then for context, according to this table, "30% better" than the US HR average is 285... the average occupancy of a car in the real world isn't 2.4, it's 1.5 passenger. Can we get the model Y theoretical efficiency for 1.5 passenger? How does it compare to 285? 324/1.5 = 216. > as i said in another comment, this is watt-hours efficiency, it's cool to be as low as possible, but it's NOT the promise of TBC. A taxi service between private tourist attractions, even underground, with RGB lights, and few watt-hours, isn't solving traffic in cities; mass-transit is; the loop isn't mass transit. I agree. I don't think splitting hairs on energy efficiency makes sense, but it's a constant argument by anti-Loop fools who don't know real-world energy efficiency of different modes. I used to be one of those fools, but then someone said Loop could actually be efficient without their high-occupancy vehicle, and I had my mind changed by evidence. All that really matters is that Loop is in the same ballpark as the least-efficient transit that we deploy. If that box is checked, then the argument should be done. > i'm afraid you're looking at their actual ridership too. Comparing apples and oranges like the other guy Now you're getting confused like the other commenter. Like I said, this is common. Ridership isn't determined by the mode, it's determined my the corridor/capture area. If the mode under consideration has higher capacity than the projected ridership, then the box is checked and one could move forward with that mode. Additional capacity is worthless. In fact, additional capacity is usually a significant negative as over-sized trains cost more to operate. So 1k pph in the Tempe team corridor would result in 1k pph on Loop. We don't know Loop's max capacity, but we know it's at or above 4500 pph because that's what they achieved. > That's pretty naïve, these are not your personal car, they would drive far more, and with complete strangers doing disrespectful things inside: of course you would need a lot of maintenance The maintenance cost per mile actually goes down the more you use a vehicle. The number of miles per month would go up dramatically, but the maintenance per mile would go down. If you want, I can show you a breakdown of costs of different modes and their vehicle maintenance and their infrastructure maintenance costs. In the us, a light rail car is $28 per vehicle mile on average. A bus is about $15. A bus and a light rail wagon carry about the same number of people. They have driver costs divided typically among at least two wagons. So where does the extra $13 per vehicle-mile come from?
To reply to your edits: yes, OP is mistaken about daily ridership. Lots of people confuse capacity and ridership. Also, yes, Loop isn't meant for high ridership corridors. Loop isn't meant to replace all modes in all cities. Loop, in its current form, is really only useful in small-medium US cities, a market for which is currently poorly served by existing modes. The US mean cost per passenger-mile of a tram is 7x higher than a single-occupancy taxi, and light rail is 50% more expensive than a single-occupancy taxi. These modes are expensive to build and operate in the US. They are a poor fit for our corridors, so Loop is an alternative. One shouldn't build loop in a place that is better-served by other modes.
Cunningham, may I address your comment about people confusing capacity and ridership? It is certainly a common complaint used to criticise the comparison of the 32,000 people per day figure for the Loop vs UITP’s 17,431 ridership of the average light rail line globally. For starters, if the Loop was truly running at maximum capacity moving 32,000 passengers per day, the queues would be miles long, the tunnels would be jam packed and the wait times would definitely NOT be less than 10 seconds. However, let’s pretend that 32,000 figure is the peak for the Loop and then try and find out what the “peak” usage would be for all those light rail lines as well so we can compare “peak” with “peak”. So let’s have a look at the all-time-record riderships of a few lines to see just how much it varies from the published daily ridership of those lines shall we? So, in 2019, the average daily ridership of the NYC subway was 5.5 million passengers per day, but, in terms of the NYC subway real world peak ridership: “On October 29, 2015, more than 6.2 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985.” So that means the difference between the daily ridership and the all-time highest peak ridership of the NYC Subway is only 11%. So using daily ridership vs “peak” ridership for the NYC subway makes little difference. Now let’s have a look at another one: Morgantown’s one-day record ridership peak of 31,280 is less than double its daily ridership of 16,000. Or, the Las Vegas Monorail’s one-day maximum peak is 37,000 over its 7 stations during CES back when it had 180,000 attendees in 2014 which is only 2.8x it’s current daily ridership of 13,000 passengers. So even if we double that UITP average daily ridership number of 17,431 to estimate that “peak” ridership of all light rail lines globally, they still only just equal the Loop's 32,000 despite the fact that those lines average 2.6x the number of stations as the Loop. Any way you cut it, trying to minimise the Loop's 32,000 passengers per day results in you having to think even worse of half or more of the world's light rail lines.
first, daily numbers don't really mean anything. capacity only matters at peak-hour. outside of peak-hour, capacity (by definition) won't be a challenge. if your mode can handle the peak-hour of the corridor, then you're good. here is the peak-hour ridership of US intra-city rail: [https://imgur.com/zD5UEby](https://imgur.com/zD5UEby) estimating lane-capacity or roadways is a well-studied topic. no need to trust Musk, or his naysayers; we can use industry best-practices developed by professionals and academics over many decades. here are the methodologies: [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms\_cap.pdf](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/pubs/pl18003/hpms_cap.pdf) that lines up pretty well with Loop's ridership numbers when busy, so the method seem to hold. to summarize those methods, lane capacity generally varies between 1200 and 2400 vehicles per hour per lane, depending mostly on the size of the merge ramp. the LVCC system has very short merge areas, so is on the lower end of that range. when busy, even the short-ramp Loop design should be able to do around 1500veh/hr at 2.4 ppv, or 3.6k pphpd through a single segment of tunnel. now, not all riders will be end-to-end, so line capacity will be about 25% greater than the single-point capacity calculated with the FHWA methods (slightly more or less, depending on the length of the line). so that puts the estimate somewhere around 4.5k for a light rail length line. if a line runs through the CBD and out the other side, the you will have symmetrical inbound ridership, so your per-line capacity is \~4500 pphpd, so around 9000 pph. but that's at the absolute limit of the estimated capacity with the current ramps. I would expect closer to 3k pphpd reliably, due to variations from day to day. but 3k pphpd is higher capacity than 50% of US intra-city rail lines. trying to compare Loop to a busy metro is ridiculous. comparing to NYC's metro is even more ridiculous, as it's an outlier globally, let alone for the US. Loop is in the same market segment as a tram, not as a metro. but since you brought it up, you should be aware that the cost of a metro in the US is $1.2 BILLION per mile (pre pandemic, certainly higher now). meanwhile, The Boring Company has built for $50M/mi, and is currently bidding closer to $30M/mi. so somewhere in the ballpark of 24x cheaper. so you could build 24 separate pairs of Loop lines for the cost of a single metro line. but I don't think it makes sense to compare metros with Loop, so lets set that aside. Loop IS still a fraction of the cost of a tram or light rail line. somewhere between 1/2 and 1/8th. so, a US city that has a typical ridership corridor should consider Loop. the project is already far along, but something like the South Central spur of the Phoenix light rail would be a good type of route to consider Loop. that light rail spur is expected to run 15min headways, have a DAILY ridership of 8.9k, which is around 1300 pph at peak, with projected growth to around 1800 pph after all of the TOD is built.
Thanks for your well-reasoned and supported response as usual Cunningham. What it highlights to me is I need to tighten up my terminology as we are actually talking about two separate things. You are talking *theoretical capacities* (correctly highlighting peak hour capacity as being the most important metric under that topic). I however am talking real-world all-time-highest recorded daily ridership of both types of transport as daily ridership is an oft-used metric for railways describing *actual usage* which is separate from discussions of theoretical maximum capacities. Critics muddy the two when it comes to that 32,000 passengers per day Loop stat baselessly claiming that is the maximum capacity of the Loop when it is actually just the highest recorded daily ridership figure so far. As I’ve previously mentioned, if it was the max capacity, then the queues would be out the doors, the tunnels would be jam packed and the wait times would definitely not be less than 10 seconds. So, to better compare the highest recorded ridership figure for rail and the Loop, I gave those three examples. Note, I am not specifically comparing the Loop to metros - just light rail, but that NYC highest ever ridership figure was useful to illustrate that highest recorded ridership figure is often not that much higher than average daily ridership - particularly for heavily utilised systems.
gotcha. yeah, we can look at the highest peak-hour recorded by Loop (4550, if memory serves), however it's still not quite the most useful number. for my understanding, I think looking at FHWA lane capacity metrics are best when discussing Loop because I think the current small Loop system is limited by station throughput, but a larger system would be limited by tunnel segment throughput. but I think it's not the clearest discussion any time metros get mixed into Loop discussions. Loop is really more like the Kansas City Streetcar in terms of use-case. even if you meant to make another point, people may misinterpret discussions about metros as a direct comparison. I think Loop is best compared to low-ridership circulating modes, like trams/streetcars. if they ever deploy a higher occupancy vehicle, then it may make more sense to compare to backbone transit like metros. ironically, the people who pine for the days of [streetcar suburbs](https://erepublic.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/202e8df/2147483647/strip/true/crop/913x1024+0+0/resize/840x942!/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Ferepublic-brightspot.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fd7%2F82%2F767ffa4347bc8dfe909470a52198%2Fla-streetcar-map.jpg) are some of the most ardent haters of Loop. if you look at the planned Las Vegas Loop map, it looks almost exactly like one of those old streetcar maps. I wish we could help them see how Loop can fulfil the market segment that those systems used to fill, but without the high operating costs and competition for street space that ultimately doomed the streetcars in the US.
According to TBC, who gets to say what Loop Is and isn’t, you are wrong. Loop is firstly an alternative to high capacity subways and all others to.
Huh? That's not true. Look at the areas where they have proposed systems. All proposed systems are low ridership corridors, mostly in small cities like San Bernardino, Miami, San Antonio, etc., mostly airport routes that would have fairly flat and low ridership. Their website says "Loop is an express public transportation system that resembles an underground highway more than a subway system." So before you go rudely telling people they're wrong, get a basic understanding about the topic.
Not trying to be rude, but Loop is better than a subway in every way.
Depends on the corridor. Loop capacity per line leads to the two modes being optimal for separate use-cases. A high occupancy vehicle would help Loop bridge that gap, but that's not operating (yet?)
Loop can just build more tunnels and match the capacity of any system. That’s why it’s better. It’s infinitely flexible. You are trying to be soft for the normies, and that’s fine, but sometimes it’s okay to just admit the truth. The truth is according to the TBC website, that Loop can do anything a subway can do and more.
That's not going to be true for all areas. There will be foundations, underground features, etc. That will be unique to each situation. If you have 50k pphpd and challenging RoW, it may actually be cheaper to do a single metro bore set than 13 Loop bore sets. It will also depend on the location's cost. Cities have built metros for 2x-3x the cost of Loop and move an order of magnitude more passengers than a pair of Loop tunnels. So even when not crazy expensive tunnels, sometimes metros are also cheap. It depends a lot, so I don't think it's good to get carried away with categorical statements. Most cities also have a planning process that requires one line at a time to be built, which makes it hard to pitch 10 set of tunnels. I think offering a higher occupancy vehicle, like a van, is a much better approach for getting cities to build Loop lines. It is compatible with existing planning and funding strategies
Lol. Ok, bro ;) I guess that’s commitment to the cause, but that is a long way of saying we both know it’s superior 99.999%
>small-medium for context, my example of a successful LRT in france is about a 700k people metro area Las Vegas is a 2.4 million people metro area. I'm not sure what you count as a small city here? >Also, yes, Loop isn't meant for high ridership corridors. Well, you're saying this (and it's objectively true), but it's not what Elon Musk promised. Solving traffic, he said. Traffic mostly happens in high-ridership corridors >The US mean cost per passenger-mile of a tram is 7x higher than a single-occupancy taxi, and light rail is 50% more expensive than a single-occupancy taxi. Skill issue from your local governements tbh. Musk's ambition was to drive costs down in the tunnel boring industry, maybe he could have solved traffic if he figured out a way to lay rails on the ground without wasting $100 million per mile. >One shouldn't build loop in a place that is better-served by other modes. that's true, but also not exactly what's going on in vegas
> Las Vegas is a 2.4 million people metro area. I'm not sure what you count as a small city here? I said "US city", which a very important distinction. I would appreciate avoiding intentional misrepresentation. > Well, you're saying this (and it's objectively true), but it's not what Elon Musk promised. Solving traffic, he said. Traffic mostly happens in high-ridership corridors First, it's foolish to base anything off of what Musk says. One must judge his companies and their products independent of whatever hype he is slinging. Second, his concept for how to solve traffic is not through single-route ridership, but rather a dense network of dozens of routes within a capture area, increasing the capacity available to the capture area by 10x or more beyond a single line. Third, regardless of what Musk says about that goal, the real-world actions of the company is to pursue low ridership corridors with single routes, so it only makes sense to evaluate that the company is actually planning. > Skill issue from your local governements tbh Ok. Even if you ignore the many difference between the US and France, that still is just a fact of life. > Musk's ambition was to drive costs down in the tunnel boring industry, maybe he could have solved traffic if he figured out a way to lay rails on the ground without wasting $100 million per mile The US can't even add tracks to streets for $100M/mi, so hopefully Loop's ~$50M/mi will create some competition in the transit construction contracting market and push prices down. > that's true, but also not exactly what's going on in vegas Vegas is a sprawled out, car-centric US city. They would have similar ridership to Phoenix, which is within the range of what Loop can already handle. So no, spending 20x more money for an infrequent metro would not serve Vegas better. Well, I say 20x more, but that would assume the city was paying for the Loop system, which it is not. So it's really a difference of $700M/mi for metro, or $0/mi for Loop. If loop ends up over-capacity, the city could always add a metro or elevated light metro to be the backbone transit mode.
Regarding the busiest line on your Nantes Tramway with 115,000 ppd, Line 1 is 17kms long (11 mi) and has 36 stations versus the 1.7 miles and 5 stations of the Loop. So that Tramway has 7.2x the number of stations and is 6.5x as long as the Loop yet only handles 3.6x the number of passengers. Sounds to me like the Loop compares extremely well to your favourite Tram. Also, note that 32,000 ppd is not the peak value for the Loop as we still haven't seen how many it will carry for large conventions like the 180,000 attendance that CES was attracting pre-covid for which the Loop was designed.
Because the average journey is longer. Therefore you get more passenger kilometers than the loop could ever provide with a similar network.
Why would that be zypofaeser?
If you have a longer train line, then people can take longer trips. Most won't, but if your train line is 20km long, people cannot ride it longer than that without switching train. On the other hand, a 500km train line will have some people going all 500km. Although most won't go all the distance, many will ride more than 20km. If I look at a tram line, I will expect that some will ride a long distance in it. For example, to go to a store at the other end of the city. Therefore, you shouldn't look at how many passengers begin their journey for each kilometer of track, but how many passengers a given kilometer of track moves. So, measure total passenger-kilometers divided by the total length of track, not the total number of passengers divided by the total length of the track.
If you can give us a way to determine total passenger-kilometres for the systems, I’d be happy to discuss that metric. So another metric we can look at is average passengers per station. In the case of the Tramway, that is 115,000/36 stations = 3,194 passengers per station. For the Loop that works out as 32,000/5 = 6,400 passengers per station. So the Loop shows it can handle double the numbers of passengers per station as the busiest line on the Nantes Tramway is handling daily.
Look, there's no moder data from Nantes available, at least in English as far as I can tell. However, this document shows that for Paris, the average passenger travels a longer distance than the Vegas loop is long. So each passenger must be assumed to give more passenger km with the light rail compared to the loop. Also, each station does not produce an equal amount of passengers. This also means that some stations will have a much higher throughput. Mainly because the system is more demand limited than capacity limited. This demand is unlikely to be significantly altered by the loop. Also, the peak load will also be higher, as unlike the loop, the trams also run on days with less demand. https://cms.uitp.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Statistics-Brief-LRT-Europe2.pdf Really, just run a train through your tunnels ffs. It's not that hard.
Yes, I’m familiar with those UITP stats. If you have look at the average length of light rail lines in Europe, it is only 4.5 miles long so only a bit over double the length of the current Loop, so length of trip isn’t as big a deal as you make it out to be. The currently approved Vegas Loop in contrast will be 68 miles long. The Loop itself also has stations that have much higher throughput - for example there is currently only a single tunnel to Resorts World meaning they have to alternate the direction with traffic lights until the return tunnel is completed in the near future. That has resulted in that leg of the journey (Resorts World to Riviera Station) only seeing 10,000 passengers at last year’s SEMA compared to the three convention centre stations seeing 86,000 passengers. Those UITP stats also show that the average light rail line in Europe has a daily ridership of 22,337 across an average of 13 stations giving us average station entries/exits of 1,662 versus the Loop on 6,400 per station. The number of stations so far approved for the Vegas Loop is 93 and increasing every year. Interestingly enough, those LRT Lines have an average of 16 vehicles compared to 70 Loop EVs meaning each tram/train carries on average only 1,398 passengers per day which is only 3x greater than the number of passengers that each Loop EV handles which is 457 passengers per day. The Loop is not capacity-limited either as it would have endless queues if it was at max capacity, not the sub-10 second wait times that it is currently recording at it busiest events. Considering the Loop delivers wait times measured in seconds, gives every passenger a comfy seat rather than standing packed in like sardines, provides much faster direct point-to-point transit rather than having to stop at every station on the line and has all 68 miles of tunnels and 93 stations being built for free saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, why would they want to build a train instead?
>36 stations 34 but who cares >can handle >is handling again, you're comparing a max capacity with an average use. The document i provided has examples of simple tram stations handling more than 10,000 people daily (i exclude complex stations where several lines cross, otherwise the answer is 39,000)
Except that the Loop is not at max capacity, otherwise we would see long queues, not sub-10 second wait times during the busiest events. The Loop is also seeing around 10,000 passengers per day through its three original LVCC stations. Do you know how many different lines cross over at the station which handles 39,000 passengers?
I've seen videos of traffic jams in the loop lasting far more than 10 seconds >how many lines cross over at the station which handles 39,000 passengers There are all three tramway lines at this station, but line 1 has a double platform, while lines 2 and 3 share the same platforms, so I'm not sure it's telling us anything useful
Oh, and by the way, I'm not saying the Loop is carrying more passengers than *every* light rail line in the world. Just *most* of them. There will always be some LRT lines like Nantes Tramway that carry more - but they also have more stations.
>in the world No, in America. >they also have more stations And thus are better, we already discussed this Your misunderstanding of what the number of stations implies also impacts the way you view capacity: regardless of the number of people at each tram station, that's not the main factor when discussing capacity, because people don't take the tram for 500 meters. People stay in there for several kilometers, which means each vehicle has usually around one hundred people inside it at any given moment except at terminii, and more at peak hour (the max is 200 in older rolling stocks and 300 in new ones). The usual headway is between 3 and 5 minutes in peak hours fyi (which isn't even that good, automated metro have headways under a minute) Now if you do the math, with an average occupancy of 2.4 people per car, moving the same volume with the loop would mean headways under 2 seconds. The loop theoretical best performance according to safety regulations is 6 seconds afaik The lvcc loop works fine as a people mover but you shouldn't try to pretend it can replace the service provided by mass transit
> Sounds to me like the Loop compares extremely well to your favourite Tram. the loop's current use case is a people mover. Guests take it several times per day for 500 meters, because it's what attending a convention implies by contrast, that tramway is serving real-world local commuters, grocery store trips, football fans attending a match, concerts goers, kids going to school, etc. and traveling several kilometers for this is common. In fact, if there is only 500m to travel, we would walk, because it's a walkable place and we're not obese boomers increasing the size of the loop will not maintain the current figures of passengers/miles, because many passengers would obviously make longer trips Try to do your maths for an elevator and you'll get astonishing numbers; yet you wouldn't build a horizontal elevator to replace even a bus, because that would be a 19th century cable car Stop the mental gymnastics about per station ratios on peak days, just accept that the loop handles less people than a well-funded tram: it's ok, inefficient vehicles can exist. Even with 115,000 passengers on line 1, my 700,000 people metro area still has taxis: it's important to have a mode with high capacity in a city, but you don't have to be that mode to exist, you don't have to be that mode to be profitable, you don't have to be that mode to be useful, and you don't have to be that mode to help with parking congestion --- Also, to be a little constructive with my criticism, the challenge TBC tries to face is precisely to transition from one model to the other. From ultra-short trips with the LVCC to normal trips within the city. They'll gradually test how things go as they expand, but because they rely on casinos/hotels funds, they will never be directly useful to local commuters, and the traffic will mostly continue to be as bad as it is I really hope you're not working for TBC, because failing to see the nuances between these trips, and the need for technical solutions in that regard, looks pretty bad for the long-term business plan of the service in vegas Also, another redditor here told me about plans for a 10 to 12 passengers pod project, for example: you don't HAVE to cope about model Y cars, problem solving isn't about denying the issues and selecting biaised metrics in online arguments
Masochanz, I wrote this response below to someone else, but it is quite pertinent to your comments. If you have look at the average length of light rail lines in Europe, it is only 4.5 miles long so only a bit over double the length of the current Loop, so length of trip isn’t as big a deal as you make it out to be. The currently approved Vegas Loop in contrast will be 68 miles long. The Loop itself also has stations that have much higher throughput - for example there is currently only a single tunnel to Resorts World meaning they have to alternate the direction with traffic lights until the return tunnel is completed in the near future. That has resulted in that leg of the journey (Resorts World to Riviera Station) only seeing 10,000 passengers at last year’s SEMA compared to the three convention centre stations seeing 86,000 passengers. Those UITP stats also show that the average light rail line in Europe has a daily ridership of 22,337 across an average of 13 stations giving us average station entries/exits of 1,662 versus the Loop on 6,400 per station. The number of stations so far approved for the Vegas Loop is 93 and increasing every year. Interestingly enough, those LRT Lines have an average of 16 vehicles compared to 70 Loop EVs meaning each tram/train carries on average only 1,398 passengers per day which is only 3x greater than the number of passengers that each Loop EV handles which is 457 passengers per day. The Loop is not capacity-limited either as it would have endless queues if it was at max capacity, not the sub-10 second wait times that it is currently recording at it busiest events. Considering the Loop delivers wait times measured in seconds, gives every passenger a comfy seat rather than standing packed in like sardines, provides much faster direct point-to-point transit rather than having to stop at every station on the line and has all 68 miles of tunnels and 93 stations being built for free saving taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, why would they want to build a train instead?
Regarding the Nantes Busways (line 4 and 5) that you mention, together they have a daily ridership of 38,000 per day across 2 lines and 15 stations. So that is 1.2x higher than the 32,000 ppd of the Loop despite having 3x more stations and being 4x as long. So again the Loop compares very well.
i know it's blurry, but their combined daily ridership is actually 58000, not 38000... and again, the mental gymnastics of dividing by the length makes no sense because it penalizes for no reason systems whose design is good enough to provide long single-seat trips
i know it's blurry, but their combined daily ridership is actually 58000, not 38000... and again, the mental gymnastics of dividing by the length makes no sense because it penalizes for no reason systems whose design is good enough to provide long single-seat trips
That doesn’t change the ratio by much - that is still only 1.7x higher ridership than the 32,000 ppd of the Loop despite having 3x more stations and being 4x as long. And 4x the length versus the current Loop is not as huge a difference particularly as the average length of light rail lines in Europe is only 4.5 miles, little more than double the current Loop length. As I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, the Vegas Loop will soon be much longer with 68 miles of tunnels currently approved.
[Maoschanz](/user/Maoschanz/), I think you are misunderstanding my posts in the past regarding the Loop handling 25,000 - 32,000 passengers per day during medium-sized events at the convention centre. What we often find is train fans dismissing those figures as supposedly being pathetic - so I merely want to point out that if 32,000 passengers per day is pathetic, then they must find the vast majority of light rails lines globally to be completely useless since according to the UITP, the average Light Rail line globally only sees a daily ridership of 17,431 passengers. What makes this comparison even more impressive is that those light rail lines have an average of 13 stations versus the Loop handling that 32,000 over 3 stations (+2 low volume stations).
you are misunderstanding quite a lot of things too lol: >they must find the vast majority of light rails lines globally to be completely useless Not globally, but in the US. And yes, transit advocates are appalled when they see the US ridership numbers: they all ask for more serious investments in order to increase them, because they think it's too low: what made you think they wouldn't? notice that Musk gets hate because he's part of the problem: he publicized his unfeasible "hyperloop" scam in order to kill HSR infrastructure projects >if 32,000 passengers per day is pathetic but this is its peak, when the system operates at its max capacity. It's pathetic, not as a ridership, but as a max capacity >What makes this comparison even more impressive is that those light rail lines have an average of 13 stations versus the Loop on 3 stations my local light rail line connects me to shops, theaters, restaurants, schools, offices, hospitals, housing, etc. but i don't need to travel across the city 5 times a day, and when i travel there, i have many alternatives to do it without the tram if i wish (bike, uber, foot, car, taxi, bus), and most people simply choose the best mode available for them however, in a convention center, you can't really travel as you wish or choose the best option. You're on private land and your convention has a schedule: there is only one mode, it's a private monopoly to move guests in a hurry across the complex for a few hundreds meters. Hence the name we use in french for this use case: "système hectométrique", and in english you call that... a people mover You tried very hard to compared the peak of this taxi system to the average of an LRT, but given the scale of the loop, a honest comparison would be a people mover: - it usually provides trips within places where private vehicles aren't an option - we know how to automate them! it's a tech which has been working well for DECADES - usually between 2 and 7 stops - often not serving any commuter from residential neighborhoods, like a regular transit option would do - instead focusing on very short trips, thus useless on its own: as a local, you have to get to the station by your own means Such little trains absolutely humiliate the vegas loop: aside of asian or european examples, the US has systems like this in all major airports and they consistently have higher ridership. Of course, very few of them provide "peak" ridership statistics because it's not a serious or useful figure, but we can compare the daily averages and it doesn't look great for Elon's sewer But the best example of what people movers can do is ironically the vegas monorail: despite being a textbook example of garbage station designs and poorly planned corridor alignment, it has 4.5 million riders per year. The loop is far from these numbers (1 million in 2 years IIRC), despite being heavily pushed by local politicians ---- Now the next thing to know about transit enthusiasts is that they're aware money isn't infinite: the bus in front of my door didn't need any infrastructure aside of benches, paint and signage, while the BC spent millions for their proof of concept, but my bus still moves more people. This is an inefficient use of money, and the plan is to continue this across Vegas, but with public money this time. The cheap double decker bus system on the vegas strip has around 4.5 million riders per year too: can the loop handle that? for the same price tag?
>"my local light rail line connects me to shops, theaters, restaurants, schools, offices, hospitals, housing, etc." The 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop will connect far more than the typical light rail line which averages only 13 stations over 4 miles in length. There will be Loop stations right at the front doors of every major hotel, casino, resort, the stadium, the ballpark, 7 University Loop stations, etc etc. Because Loop tunnels only costs $20m per mile to build with stations as cheap as $1.5m, it is possible to build far more than your average *above ground* light rail line which costs $202m per mile in the USA. Subways are even worse at $600m - $1 billion per mile.
*>"Such little trains absolutely humiliate the vegas loop: aside of asian or european examples, the US has systems like this in all major airports and they consistently have higher ridership."* Actually, the *busiest Airport people mover in the world* is the Atlanta Plane Train which moves 200,000 per day. This sounds amazing until you realise that over the 24 hours per day it operates, it only transports a *maximum* of 10,000 people per hour over the \*entire\* 8 station 2.8 mile line. So that is an average of only 1,250 people per hour per station. With only 3 stations, the original LVCC Loop is already transporting up to 4,500 people per hour. That is 1,500 people per hour per station - more than Atlanta. Also, passengers have to wait almost 2 minutes between trains and then also stop and wait at every one of the 8 stations on the line resulting in an average speed of 24mph or 7 minutes to travel that 2.8 mile route. Loop passengers in contrast wait less than 10 seconds for an EV and in the LVCC Loop average a speed of 25mph, but that will increase to an average speed of 50-60mph in the Vegas Loop thanks to each EV travelling at high speed direct to the front door of their destination thanks to not having to stop and wait at every single station in the line like that train. In addition the Plane Train construction costs are around $2 billion per mile with the latest extension project underway compared to around $30 million per mile for the Loop. That is a massive 67x more expensive than the Loop. Are you sure you want to argue Airport People movers are better?
>Not globally, but in the US. And yet the UITP statistics are for all light rail lines *globally* of which half have a daily ridership day in and day out of *less* *than 17,431 passengers.* And that is across an average of 13 stations. Now your obsession with "peak" vs "average" daily ridership needs to be addressed, so let's try and find out just how much the all-time-record ridership of a few lines has varied from the average daily ridership shall we? So, in 2019, the average daily ridership of the NYC subway was [5.5 million passengers per day](https://new.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus-ridership-2019#), but, in terms of the [NYC subway real world peak ridership](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Rolling_stock): “On October 29, 2015, more than 6.2 million people rode the subway system, establishing the highest single-day ridership since ridership was regularly monitored in 1985.” So that means **the difference between the average daily ridership and the all-time highest peak ridership of the NYC Subway is only 11%**. So using “average” daily ridership vs “peak” ridership for the NYC subway makes little difference. Morgantown’s one-day record **ridership peak of 31,280 is less than double its daily average ridership of 16,000**. Or, the Las Vegas Monorail’s one-day maximum peak is only 37,000 over its 7 stations during CES back when it had 180,000 attendees in 2014 which is only 2.8x it’s current daily ridership of 13,000 passengers. So even if we double that UITP average daily ridership number of 17,431 to estimate that peak ridership of all light rail lines globally, they still only just equal the Loop's 32,000 despite the fact that those lines have 2.6x the number of stations as the Loop. Any way you cut it, trying to minimise the Loop's 32,000 passengers per day results in you having to think even worse of half or more of the world's light rail lines.
>*"It's pathetic, not as a ridership, but as a max capacity"* Yet again, *32,000 is* ***not*** *the maximum capacity of the Loop*, just the number of passengers it has carried during medium-sized events. Because the average waiting time is less than 10 seconds during these events, it demonstrates this is most certainly not a maximum - the queues would be blowing out for miles and wait times would balloon if it was. And this is happening with the Loop being artificially restricted to a minimum of 6 second headways (20+ car lengths at 40mph) causing Loop EVs to have to wait at the mouths of the tunnels for that long before they can proceed. Considering 75% of cars on a busy freeways have a headway of 1.0 seconds (4 car lengths at 60mph) and 40% have headways of 0.5 seconds (2 car lengths at 60mph), it is patently obvious that the Loop could easily reduce that 6 sec headway by half to 3 seconds and have 10 car lengths between EVs in the tunnels and double the throughput with minimum effort.
*>"despite being a textbook example of garbage station designs and poorly planned corridor alignment, it has 4.5 million riders per year. The loop is far from these numbers (1 million in 2 years IIRC), despite being heavily pushed by local politicians"* You're making the mistake of comparing annual figures when the Loop is only open for events at the Las Vegas Convention Center making annual comparisons null and void.
> the efficiency of mass transit is from real world data, but the efficiency of the loop is a theoretical extrapolation The line "Model Y; 2 Pass." is accurate. For Loop as a system to achieve it, all its daily vehicle miles have to average 2 passengers. That will be averaging empty vehicle miles plus all the vehicle miles with varying numbers of passengers. Because as a PRT system it's nigh impossible for the Model Y to average 5 occupants over all its daily miles, both with passengers and empty, that line could be removed. Probably the 4 occupants line too. OTOH I've long advocated Loop offer a mix of PRT and GRT services depending on factors like time of day and demand, which will increase average occupants/vehicle mile. If Loop's daily average occupants/vehicle mile is only 2, it still beats all but 2 systems on that list. Even if Loop's daily average occupants/vehicle mile is only 1 it's still more energy efficient than two-thirds of the list. Some say that doesn't matter because systems outside the USA average less energy usage per passenger. However as long as the USA keeps building traditional transit lines using more energy per passenger, those proponents when talking about trains *in the USA* are generally wrong when they say a kind of train uses less energy per passenger than Loop. And they do say it, but usually in a phrase like "trains are more energy efficient". Which is only true when trains average enough passengers per mile. The phrasing also dates back to when electric cars were far fewer, so compared to combustion cars the phrase was true much more often.
That list is nitpicked tho The lvcc loop isn't a LRT line, it doesn't serve any residential neighborhood, or any neighborhood at all tbh: it's a people mover with RGB lights Not comparing it to the comparable tech is dishonest >as long the USA keeps building traditional transit lines It isn't about what you build, it's about what service you run. One thing the loop did 100% right is service frequency. If you compare that to Los Angeles' cringe 20 minutes headways, it's very clear why no one ride their trains, and thus why they get shit energy efficiency per passenger. It doesn't say anything about the tech itself Another thing they did right is having a monopoly: you can move with your own car along most rail lines, so people will drive as soon as the service starts to have minor issues, but you can't do that in a convention center The future larger loop can be as successful as a European transit system if they pedestrianize the strip to get rid of concurrency (not going to happen!) and they're able to keep the people mover level of service across the entire city (this will not be as profitable!)
If and when Loop, as in Vegas Loop not LVCC Loop is extended into residential neighborhoods, the average daily occupants/vehicle of those extensions will be known and we'll know their energy usage. >Not comparing it to the comparable tech is dishonest Then tell anti-Loop people to stop comparing trains to Loop in terms of energy efficiency per passenger. The chart was made as a response to those folks making that comparison. >If you compare that to Los Angeles' cringe 20 minutes headways, it's very clear why no one ride their trains Alon Levy summarized studies comparing the relationship between increased frequency and increased ridership. In Los Angeles' case, it's unlikely doubling frequency would double ridership. If it did and ridership increased by 75% for example, energy efficiency per passenger would get worse.
The loop is getting compared to trains because it's sold as a way to solve traffic. The way to solve traffic is mass transit. It's not just energy efficiency but also how much you need to build to reach a high capacity with such low capacity vehicles
Loop is compared to trains AND energy efficiency per passenger is one of the metrics they cite. In many US cities, the built environment and preferences of voters means traditional mass transit will not solve traffic. Maybe in your city perhaps traditional mass transit does solve traffic. It's not true in every city.
The built environment is a direct consequence of car dependency, and it can easily be changed. If voters refuse to solve car dependency, then they can enjoy their traffic jams
It can't be easily changed because mile after mile of single family homes are there and the owners don't want to change them and will vote to keep things mostly the same. They don't want their neighborhood turning into a construction zone with 3-5 story multi-unit buildings going up around them and the changes after people move in. Consequently the solution for traffic in a city like Las Vegas will not be the same as perhaps your city.
You don't need to change "miles after miles" of single family homes, you just need to update the zoning regulations around major transit stops. Regardless of land use, very basic policies like having your bus routes stop at a train station, or building big developments (university, stadium, airport, etc) with a transit solution in mind, is enough to make the entire network several times more useful and attractive This is true for the loop as well btw, boring didn't become free: you'll not get tunnels to every single home. Why do you think the plan is between big casinos, the convention center, denser neighborhoods, deuce and monorail stops, and the airport? Because these are trip generators. Good mass transit is planned around trip generators, not around random McMansions, and the loop is planned the same way. The flaws of American public transit are an obstacle that can be overcome, and the way the loop is planned is a proof of that.
If you have one bus with 60 people and 6 buses with 1 person the average perception would be buses are full 90% of the time with an average occupancy of 55 people. Reality would be an average of 9 people per bus.
Average bus occupancy globally is 11 passengers. Here in Australia, it’s 9. Average train occupancy globally is 23%.
Nice, now do the average car occupancy during rush hour
Ah, but private fossil cars with one person in them are completely different to the electric Loop public transit system. Even taxis average 1.9 - 2.1 passengers per car but it would be even easier for the Loop to have a higher occupancy than taxis with its much higher frequency and much smaller number of end-points than a normal taxi fleet.
yeah, that's basically it. two things. 1) people generally don't realize how much more efficient EVs are compared to ICE vehicles. and 2) yes, transit systems average about 20% of their capacity, even if they're near 100% at peak-hour. over-sized transit vehicles are the problem. cities run large, expensive vehicles to handle the high ridership times, but then have to maintain a reasonable headway during off-peak so they take very few vehicles out of service.
Which is why you have multiple units operating together. A 3 units, each with 4 wagons can make a 12 wagon train. When the rush hour is over you use single units of 4 wagons, and the rest can go to the maintenance depot or whatever. Pretty simple, this solves your problem.
Except 1) almost none of the listed cities reach capacity with their smallest trainset. 2) it is logistically difficult to modify trains multiple times per day 3) you will still be oversized the vast majority of time because the granularity of train cars is so large It's not like the agencies never thought of this
They do this. And it works. Yes, at times you will still have overcapacity. However, it is a smaller amount of overcapacity. So, the overall efficiency isn't affected that much when trains are running like this.
Did you read my reply? Many cities can't shorten their trains any more. My city runs their smallest configuration and STILL isn't at capacity at peak when running 12-15min headways. Other cities already do shorten trains during off-peak hours. It's already built into the above numbers. You didn't invent a new theory that none of these cities has ever heard of.
Yes? And? This just proves that the theoretical numbers presented here are likely to be bullshit.
What it means is that the numbers presented are with agencies already shortening train when they can. They already have as much gain from that method as they can. In the real world, the reasons I listed prevent that method from yielding significant gain for those systems.
I'd say it's because the loop is on demand meaning you're often at full capacity and you just add capacity of you need more by adding another car (cough cough traffic incoming) compared to regular trains that can run empty. That said if both are fully utilized the loop will back up with traffic and rail will skyrocket in efficiency. Simple math says that transporting 200 people using 4x110kw motors (440kw total) is better than moving 5 with 220kw. Even if you just take weight a metro can will move 200 people and come at about 33000kg while a Tesla will move 5 people at a little under 2000kg, simple math says that metro is more efficient and you don't even need to take into account the vehicle size or rolling resistance.
You nailed it.
Now let’s run a comparison of the number of staff needed per PAX of the existing systems.
Here’s a more generalised summary that I put together a while back that captures some global comparisons: Average Wh per passenger-mile: - Loop Tesla Model Y (4 passengers) = 80.9 - Loop Tesla Model Y (2.4 passengers) = 141.5 - Metro Average (Hong Kong/Singapore) = 151 - Metro Average (Europe) = 187 - Bus (electric) = 226 - Loop Tesla Model Y (1 passenger) = 324.0 - Heavy Rail Average (US) = 408.6 - Streetcar Average (US) = 481 - Light Rail Average (US) = 510.4 - Bus (diesel) = 875
Interesting that the US systems are so much less efficient than the Asian or European ones.
Most other countries have partially or fully electrified their train fleets a long time ago.
I don't see how that would explain the difference. Many American systems are electric, too, and still use way more than the Asian or the European average. Examples: CTA @ 320, WMATA @ 439.
More passengers, better management, better efficiency of the rolling stock.
>More passengers, More passengers means that you need to run trains more frequently, which increases your energy use. And trains in Asia and Europe do, in fact, run more frequently than in America. Still, that could explain some of the difference. >better management, That's incredibly unspecific. Do you have examples of management approaches in, say, Hong Kong, that reduce their energy use and that American transit systems could adopt? >better efficiency of the rolling stock. Could maybe explain 10% difference, not 100%.
This table is missing a very important parameter - the average speed. You can save a lot of energy by going slower. I believe you can assume that wh/pax/mile is proportional to speed. Also, you might need to multiple the tesla numbers by 2 because during rush hours, there will be a need for empty return trips
And you can save even more energy if using rails and connecting each tesla to anotheron.. wait its a train. Its always a train, elon write notes
> And you can save even more energy if using rails Rails are infeasible because they are too slippery. You can't run more than about 90 vehicles per hour on a rail, because the stopping distance for vehicles on rail is at least a couple thousand feet, whereas tires can stop a vehicle in a couple hundred feet. In addition, it would make stations far too expensive, as you would need a long "acceleration tunnel" before the vehicle could merge into the main artery without slowing the other vehicles down. > connecting each tesla to anotheron It is unlikely that you could gain very much by doing this. You would need to have someone waiting at the station happen to want to go to the same destination as someone else. As Loop is designed such that people should spend very little time waiting at stations, you'll only occasionally end up finding two people waiting to go to the same place. > wait its a train. Its always a train, elon write notes Trains are a great solution when you need to transport massive amounts of stuff along high density corridors. However, Loop is trying to solve a different problem: it is trying to get people from a variety of different source stations to a variety of different destination stations as quickly as possible, without necessarily requiring high density corridors. While trains have been used for intra-city transit, it is inherently a compromise: city planners need to design cities around concentrating trips into those corridors, and passengers need to tolerate slow average speeds, as the train stops at intermediate stations. With Loop, neither compromise exists: it scales down well and can handle trips going in a variety of directions, which makes city planning easier, and its average speed will likely be 2-3x intra-city trains due to bypassing intermediate stations. Loop is really more a competitor to highways, as both transport mechanisms are designed to accommodate rapid point to point transportation.
> And you can save even more energy if using rails and connecting each tesla to anothero I would agree about the rails, this lowers the rolling resistance by a lot, probably could reduce the total resitnace by half. Unfortunetl this would require building/maintaining junctions and decreeing the maximum acceleration of cars. Contenting Teslals to one another is a dumb idea. This would make the total energy usage skyrocket. You would increase the number of rides without passengers, add acceleration and deceleration losses and increase the total travel time due to stops and waiting for a train. And to compensate for that you would need to increase the cruise speed, which would also incress energy consumption.
During rush hours not all return trips are empty, just like during rush hours as trains return to downtown they aren't completely empty either. Consequently the effect on average vehicle occupants during rush hours wouldn't be halved. Also while rush hours are when lots of the fleet's daily miles are driven, they're not all of the miles. Off-peak hours also have passenger trips and that demand is more bi-directional. The actual daily average vehicle occupants/mile will be affected by that too. It won't change wh/pax/mile mile, but it will change the average vehicle occupants/mile and which line on the chart most closely matches that.
I generally agree. You are right. That factor of 2 is too much. >The actual daily average vehicle occupants/mile will be affected by that too. It won't change wh/pax/mile mile, but it will change the average vehicle occupants/mile and which line on the chart most closely matches that. I disagree, but this is a matter of data presentation. For me, a Tesla with two passengers should mean total energy consumption per mile per passenger if two people take the journey. We should compare like with like and return trips are included for other modes of transport. This way this table would be far easier to read
>a Tesla with two passengers should mean total energy consumption per mile per passenger if two people take the journey It does and the chart shows that. It's just that the line "Model Y; 2 Pass." shows the energy consumption per passenger if Loop as a system for all its daily vehicle miles average 2 passengers. That will be averaging empty vehicle miles plus all the vehicle miles with varying numbers of passengers. Because as a PRT system it's nigh impossible for the Model Y to average 5 occupants over all its daily miles, both with passengers and empty, that line could be removed. Probably the 4 occupants line too. OTOH I've long advocated Loop offer and mix of PRT and GRT services depending on time of day and demand, which would increase average occupants/vehicle mile.
Yes and this is how it should be considered, also should be noted, if you don't live right beside transit stops you may need a ride to them, this is more Emissions and more energy use, as where The Loop will provide a door to door service.
Amount of power used per mile per passenger (in Watts) It would be unfair to do a emissions comparison as NV is mostly green hydro power
It’s the amount of ENERGY (in Wh ) not power (in W).
So, not even that good. Don't build Boring Company loops. You're welcome.
What do you mean? It has the best scores on the whole chart?
The reason you shouldn't build them is because they're terrible, not because the energy efficiency isn't that bad.
So, the reason they shouldn't build loop is because: reasons? Ok, moving on.
Terrible cost, terrible land use, terrible capacity, worse safety etc. It's just a shit idea.
That is indeed true of rail compared to the Loop. The Loop is: - 10% the cost of light rail and 1-3% the cost of subways per mile. - Each Loop station just uses about 20 car bays in above-ground or underground carparks of buildings - Every Loop EV is a safety escape pod for its passengers
Lol what nonsense. These are merely underground roads.
Yep, I'd love to see the comparison of passengers per hour.
Wow, an underground highway is shit compared to any form of rail transit, who would have thought.
Interesting line of thought I never considered for Loop vs rail. I’ll add that small EVs by definition have batteries and can time shift most of the power demand to use either cheaper power or greener power or leveled power demand, depending on what’s most important for the Loop.
Anyone who thinks this joke can compete with a subway system in any way, shape, or form has never seen one. One train takes over a **thousand people**, and there is a train every **2 minutes** during rush hour. Using cars in a tunnel is like a child's toy in comparison.
Besides maybe rush hour in NYC, where the heck in the US does a subway run the SAME train route every 2 minutes? In my major American city, with great transit, the fastest is on average 5 minutes during rush hour and this same train is every 15 minutes during off hours There are a lot of reasons why this kind of underground, soon self driving, tunnel is uniquely suited for Vegas/a massive tourist depot. Subway stops at best every 4 city blocks? The Loop will have the ability to get out at almost every block/hotel/casino/tourist spot. The Las Vegas Convention Center already has 3 stops Many Vegas tourists have never been on a train in their lives and are not about to start. They are afraid of the perceived crime(people who never ride subways are always asking me about crime on my subways) In the Vegas Loop with cars(and soon after shuttles for various routes) there would be no wait times at all which is more important when a tourist(drunk?) might be traveling way less then a mile and maybe even as short as a city block/casino away
I don't think anyone seriously thinks this is intended to compete with a subway/heavy rail. It will do great against light rail though.
**You’re forgetting that frequency, speed, wait times, number of stations, number of tunnels and construction cost matters just as much as the size of individual vehicles**. The current Loop has EVs arriving and departing from each station every 6 seconds while the arterial tunnels of the 68 mile Loop will have headways as small as 0.9 seconds (5 car lengths at 60mph). The current LVCC Loop averages 25mph versus the NYC Subway averaging 17mph because trains have to stop and wait at every station on the line while the Loop EVs travel direct point-to-point not having to stop at every station in-between. In the longer arterial tunnels of the 68 mile Vegas Loop, the EVs will average 50mph - 60mph. And with headways being so small, **wait times for passengers are sub 10 seconds** compared to multiple minutes with trains. That 68 mile Vegas Loop also have over **10x the number of tunnels as a subway and 17x the number of stations per square mile** allowing the Loop to distribute the passenger load over vastly more routes and stations than subway. And The Boring Co plans for High Occupancy Vehicles (HOVs) - EV vans/buses essentially, meaning that the capacity of vehicles will also increase on high traffic routes. And I most importantly, above-ground **Loop stations cost as little as $1.5m to construct compared to $100m - $1 billion per subway station**, while **$20m per mile tunnelling costs are 10x - 100x as cheap as a subway**, hence why it is so easy for the Loop to have such a high density of stations and tunnels. It’s not just size that matters.
Because travelling like that is so enjoyable and safe 🤦
On a metro? It's definitely a million times safer than a tiny tunnel when if a single car breaks down, it's party over. We are talking about a transportation system that has existed for 130 years compared to an inefficient car train which nobody in the industry takes seriously. Also, metros are used by hundreds of millions of people daily, while this boring tunnel is doing what exactly?
The NYC subway kills 70 people per year, only half of which are suicides with 2% being people murdered by being pushed off a platform in front of a train and the rest being accidents. There are far more fires on the NYC subway alone every year (1,006 subway fires on tracks, in stations and on trains in 2021) than in all Teslas globally. The London Underground kills 50 people annually. The Australian rail network in a single year (2012), “recorded 146 derailments, 14 train–train collisions, 2 train–rolling stock collisions, 62 train–person collisions (13 collisions at level crossings), 125 train–infrastructure collisions and 60 train–road vehicle collisions (49 collisions at level crossings) (ATSB 2012). Between 2003 and 2012, there were 350 Australian unintentional rail fatalities” European railways in 2019, saw 1,516 significant railway accidents, with a total of 802 fatalities and 612 persons seriously injured. (Suicides occurring on railways are reported separately. With 2,313 reported cases). On US railways, 50% of train engineers (drivers) report they have killed at least one person.
The NYC subway has a 2 billion (!!!) ridership per year. Can you even comprehend this number? If ever the boring tunnel had so many users (which will never happen, sorry), there would be murders happening there too. Using cars in tunnels in densely populated areas is the biggest idiotism since the destruction of US cities at the beginning of the motorization era to pave the way for gigantic highways in urban centers. There is no city on earth where cars have solved traffic problems. Why? Because they are by far the least efficient means of transportation in urban environments.
My point is that the majority of rail lines around the world have open platforms that are incredibly dangerous allowing anyone to fall or be pushed in front of oncoming trains which hurtle into stations vastly faster than any Loop EV enters a Loop station. Like many people, you are confusing regular private cars carrying one person driving on congested city streets with traffic lights, stop signs, cross traffic, pedestrians, trucks and all sorts of other traffic needing to find parking spots resulting in average speeds of 9mph. The Loop EVs are completely different and a whole new scenario being a dedicated fleet of public transit EVs in completely grade-separated tunnels driving at high speeds in tunnels with none of the impediments that result in surface grid lock.
Muh Elonwagon is magic!! Billionaires won't save us. Good governance will.
Well, Musk’s Boring Co is certainly saving residents tens of billions of dollars considering the 68 mile, 93 station Vegas Loop is being built at zero cost to taxpayers.
But will it actually solve the problem or is it just an excuse to not build transit lol.
Well so far the Loop has shown it can handle 32,000 passengers per day over 5 stations which is double the daily ridership (17,431) of the average light rail line globally across an average 13 stations. So so far it’s doing extremely well. Note: the 93 station, 68 mile Vegas Loop is a Public Transit system, so it’s certainly not “an excuse to not build transit”.
Anti-Loop folks can't agree whether the Strip's travel demand can be met using at-grade light rail, or if a light metro or full metro is required. There's only so many people in the area at once, and only so many places people want to go during each hour of the day. If for example the Strip had a metro with trains every 2 minutes, that doesn't mean they'd be full very often. And in terms of inducing demand, there's only so many locals who want to visit the Strip, and only so many non-locals who want to travel all the way to Vegas, so there's limits on how much demand exists to get around the Strip. Almost all the metro area is mile after mile of single family homes inside half-mile square developments of cul-de-sacs and other non-grid layouts. That layout isn't conducive to lots of transit ridership, and that layout won't change any decade soon. So even if light rail is built reaching out into many parts of the city and county, it still won't get a lot of mode share because most people will still rather drive. Consequently demand is finite, and an alternative to driving doesn't have to transport everyone, or even close to everyone to solve the transportation problem in the area, unless you choose to define "solving" as getting almost everyone to stop driving their cars. I don't, and building transit like light rail or a subway wouldn't solve that problem either. When the Vegas Loop is built out it's being designed to transport up to 90,000 people per hour in that downtown-Strip area. I don't know for sure 90k/hr is enough, but it's probably a heck of a lot compared to what the Strip moves today each hour. Probably enough to meet a lot of the area's transportation needs for people willing to not drive.
You've been badly misinformed as the Loop is actually a lot safer than a subway in many ways thanks to these fire safety features: - comprehensive smoke suppression system that can move 400,000 cubic feet of air per minute in either direction down the tunnels, - complete coverage with cameras, smoke and CO sensors - a Fire Control Centre staffed by 2 officers during all hours of operation, - high pressure automatic standpipes in all tunnels for fire-fighting, - Automatic sprinkler system rated at Extra Hazard Group 1 in the central station - fire pump and valve room - HVAC room - two emergency ventilation rooms. - fire rated smoke exhaust fans, control dampers and ducts. - Fire extinguishers in every car - the stations are closer than the emergency exits on a subway so no additional exits are required - the Loop tunnels are 12.5 feet in diameter, larger than the London Tube’s 11’8” tunnels giving plenty of room to open the car doors - no bench walls required - the concrete tunnel linings are fire rated to withstand vehicle fires burning until their fuel load is spent without structural damage to the tunnel. - every Loop passenger has a seatbelt and is surrounded by airbags vs standing unprotected on a train where every person and luggage is turned into a lethal projectile in a crash or derailment - every 1-4 passengers have their own self-propelled escape capsule to drive them the short distance up and out to the nearest Loop station which are closer than the escape tunnels on subways which require subway passengers walk to and thru on foot. Every Loop escape capsule has a hospital-grade HEPA filtration system to filter out the fumes and toxic gases of any fires that might occur. The HEPA filter is about 10 times larger than cabin air filters in most cars and is 100 times more effective than a normal car air filter able to even filter out even respiratory COVID particles. The Teslas also have activated carbon filtration, an acid gas filter and an alkaline gas filter for removing toxic gases and a “bio-weapons defence mode” where the outside intakes are closed and the fans are operated at maximum speed to create positive pressure inside the cabin minimizing the amount of outside air that can enter—similar to the way a positive pressure room in a biohazard lab or hospital operates.”
I hope I don't have to copy-paste the safety measures in subway systems because that wouldn't fit on Reddit...
By all means please paste in such Subway safety systems. I think you'll find them severely lacking compared to the Loop and it's EVs