Elon Musk anticipated renderings of the first commercial station built under Las Vegas by his tunnel company, The Boring Company.
The Tesla CEO founded the startup “as a bit of a hobby” in 2016 out of frustration caused by traffic in his hometown of Los Angeles. The Boring Company aim to offer a radical new option for urban transportation without interfering with existing infrastructure. As? With a network of tunnels that carry normal cars on "electric skates" that make them go at 240km per hour.
A prototype of the system was first demonstrated in 2018 and the first commercial system will open later this year. It will offer passengers a way to travel a kilometer in 2 minutes. At 60km per hour, without traffic lights and with the road straight it would take a minute, you might think. Not in the traffic of the Las Vegas Convention Center. In that area, with traffic it sometimes takes up to an hour to travel one kilometre. Do you understand how much is wrong with our transportation?
Musk tweeted an image of the tunnel station, an actual “subway” for cars, with the caption “Coming soon.”
In the image, a sort of parking lot with several Tesla Model 3s parked, and a display showing the time and order in which each electric vehicle will leave. The touch of class? The poster on the station wall with the popular Las Vegas maxim: “What happens here, stays here.” On the contrary: The Boring Company wants to spread its model far beyond Las Vegas.
Already in the city of the game, however, 3 stations are available
The €52 million project is being completed at a rate of 30 meters per day. Once completed it will have the capacity to transport up to 4.400 passengers per hour. When The Boring Company first opens the Convention Center Loop it will use a variety of Tesla vehicles equipped with drivers, although it eventually hopes to use fully autonomous shuttles.
“The system has the potential for future expansion and connectivity to resorts on the Strip, downtown Las Vegas, McCarran International Airport and beyond,” he wrote the Las Vegas Authority. The Boring Company claims that the tunnel system can transform the way people travel to cities around the world and has already made preliminary agreements with several cities in the United States.
“A vast network of tunnels many levels deep would help relieve congestion in any city, no matter how large,” says the company website. “The key to doing this work is to increase excavation speed and lower costs to a tenth or less. This is the goal of The Boring Company.”
The first prototype tunnel was excavated for a cost of 10 million euros, already a significant improvement in the cost of current technologies.
Excavation and recycling
Another potential benefit of the process of excavating this tunnel network is that the earth removed by tunnel boring machines can be used to produce bricks for building structures. “In typical tunneling projects, excavated soil is sent offsite to disposal sites,” the company says on its website. “This process is expensive, time consuming, noisy and can be dangerous for the environment. The Boring Company has developed technologies to recycle soil on site.”
