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Elon Musk’s $49 Million Las Vegas Loop Makes Perfect Sense—for Las Vegas

https://www.citylab.com/transportati...c-cars/590287/

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- The Boring Company will develop an underground “people mover” for the Las Vegas Convention Center that’s more marketing flash than public transit. — Last week, the Boring Company won a $48.6 million bid to design and build a “people mover” beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. The payout represents the first actual contract for Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s tunneling venture. And Las Vegas, a tourist city that wants to be seen as a technology hub, will get a new mobility attraction with the imprimatur of America’s leading disruptor.

- But the Boring Company won’t exactly be delivering “new” technology when it opens the “LVCC Loop.” To interconnect the sprawling convention center campus, which attracts 1.4 million visitors a year to confabs like the Consumer Electronics Showcase, it will dig a pair of concrete tunnels, 12 feet in diameter and less than a mile long. The asphalt-paved tubes will be just wide enough for a single vehicle to drive down. (There will be three stations, as well as a short pedestrian tunnel.)

- This is not the futuristic system of electric car-sleds that Musk once proposed for Los Angeles and Chicago, let alone a frictionless hyperloop. Instead, Las Vegas is getting a permutation of two well-known existing technologies: 1) cars, and 2) tunnels. (Asked to explain his scaled-back ambitions on Twitter, Musk responded: “This is simple and just works.”) Remove the mercurial inventor-tycoon from the equation, and you’ve got a fairly rudimentary project. — Musk claims that his Boring Company does innovate in one very important way: It is capable of digging tunnels cheaper than just about anyone else.

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