I have not seen this posted yet or if it did then it got much less attention than deserved.
Earlier this week, it was reported that the Boring Company had quietly filed a request to the government to double the size of the Vegas Loop plan to 65 miles and 69 stations. Just look at the size of this beauty:
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The story appears to have been originally broken by
TechCrunch.
Considering that Boring Co have barely completed any of the initial 29-mile plan (the completed segments are the yellow ones on the map), this news suggests that either they are getting way, way far ahead of themselves with wildly out-of-control ambition, or it means they expect an extreme increase in the construction rate in the next few years.
65 miles of tunnels is a staggeringly large amount. They are not playing around anymore. This plan would make the Vegas Loop the sixth-largest public mass transit system in North America as measured by length and the seventh-largest by station count, even though Las Vegas is merely the 43rd-largest metro area on the continent in terms of population.
For comparison, the New York City subway system has 145 miles of tunnels, yet the greater NYC metro area has 11x the population of the greater Las Vegas area. So if this plays out as planned, soon Vegas, a mid-sized city about the size of Cincinnati or Brussels, will have 25x more miles of underground public mass transit infrastructure per capita than NYC. Bet you didn’t see that coming.
Also, it's not just about Vegas. It's about the pace of construction and what we can extrapolate based on it. If they can build 65 miles in Vegas in X years, how many years will it take to build similar systems in N other cities? If this works and can be built in a matter of a few years as this move apparently indicates, then the United States might come back from being the laughingstock of the urban transportation planning world to become the global leader within a couple of decades. I bet you didn't see that coming either.
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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As always, this matters to Tesla for several reasons, most importantly that the Loop is ultimately meant to be robotaxi expressway racetrack. If you believe Tesla can achieve Level 4 autonomous driving then one of the key questions is how fast Boring Co can build Loops to serve the Tesla Network fleets. Remember, in March 2022 Elon stated that for Tesla Master Plan Part 3 “Main Tesla subjects will be scaling to extreme size, which is needed to shift humanity away from fossil fuels, and AI. But I will also Include sections about SpaceX, Tesla and The Boring Company.” Conspicuously absent from Investor Day was any of this promised inclusion of SpaceX and Boring, so I’m still waiting for more info. Maybe it will come in the Master Plan white paper. Regardless, it’s clear Elon has in mind some kind of Tesla-Boring integration that's deeper than what has been publicly disclosed.
It’s also important for marketing and product exposure because Vegas is by far the #1 tourist city in the Western Hemisphere with over 40 million visitors per year, although most of them are Americans traveling domestically rather than international tourists. This is like the marketing equivalent of half the NYC subway trains instead being Model Ys. That's kind of a big deal. Butts in seats lead to Tesla sales. The little initial Loop has already given over 1 million rides; the 65-mile system might do around a million rides
per day if the full-sized Vegas Loop gets similar ridership numbers as comparably sized systems like Atlanta's MARTA. This would work out to an average of 1000000/65/2 = 8k passengers per day per mile of track (remember, there's two lanes in each mile, one for each direction) or about 500 riders per hour across a 16-hour peak usage window each day. The Vegas metro area plus its visitors usually totals around 3 million people so if one out of six people uses the system for an average of two rides per day (round trip commutes mainly) then 1 million rides is a plausible estimate. So many butts in seats.
