Commercial wormhole from Las Vegas to Shanghai.
Editor’s note: This article is from WeChat public account “Brain body” (ID: unity007) , the author is a panda. Authorized to reprint.
Speaking of Las Vegas, we can think of a bunch of related symbols: casinos, hangovers, GTAs, drunken fans… but now Las Vegas will add another important logo – Musk The first landing city of The Boring Co., an underground rail transit company.
This spring, the Board of Directors of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau (LVCVA) approved a contract with The Boring Co. to design and build a Loop system for the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The exhibition area of the Vegas and the university campus area.
Muske won the $48.7 million order, defeating another classic vehicle in the Las Vegas city, the monorail.
And recently, The Boring Co. has entered China in a big way, and even proposed to build an underwater tunnel. Many people say that by entering China, where infrastructure construction is very active, Musk can also obtain the title of “foundational demon” by widening the tunnel. Is this really the case? Is Loop mode really suitable for China? It is better to start with Las Vegas, the first Loop landing case, and try to find the future of The Boring Co. in China.
From Monorail to Loop, did Musk really create a viable new way of transportation?
Before the Las Vegas Strip, there is a 6.3-kilometre monorail that runs on the rails as the famous Las Vegas monorail, which requires no drivers and travels from early morning to midnight. On the avenues of tourists, tourists are sent to famous hotels, restaurants and performance venues.
Not only in Las Vegas, but also in many parts of the world, this kind of train that is convenient for short-distance traffic. The rail transit line between Chongqing’s rail transit line 2, the Beijing International Airport terminal, and the monorail train in the Kuala Lumpur business district are just a few examples of countless cases.
Obviously, a single rail is the most typical feature of a monorail. Because only one track is needed, the advantage of the monorail train is obvious. It only needs to be supported by the elevated frame and the pier, the vertical footprint is extremely small, and the construction difficulty and cost are also very low. Compared with the large-scale subway, the monorail train is very suitable for those cities that have already been built well, using space such as road isolation belts. In some countries where road rights and land rights are complex, monorail trains also have great advantages in terms of access rights.
Of course, because of the monorail design and bearing problems, the application scenarios of monorail trains are relatively limited, and there are many restrictions on capacity, uphill routes, turns, and so on. Therefore, monorail trains are often used for transportation connections with fixed routes and few stops. For example, from satellite cities to urban areas, shopping malls, suburban attractions, and so on.
In the Las Vegas project, the monorail was considered to be Musk’s main competitor. As a result, the fare was too low and the operating company behind it closed down, and the monorail was unable to participate in the bidding.
Therefore, we found that the Loop introduced by The Boring Co. in the application scenario of the monorail shows a very strong alternative – the tunnel tunnel adopted by Loop combined with the vertical small ground station, also has a small footprint. It is suitable for improving the characteristics of building cities. In the original plan, Loop is an underground tunnel dedicated to electric vehicles, but in the Las Vegas project, Loop offers a custom-made “capsule electric vehicle” capable of carrying 8-16 people. pedestrian. This carrying capacity is clearly much lower than that of subways and even monorail trains.
According to previous tests, the maximum speed of the Loop can reach 207 kilometers. With far greater speed than the subway and monorail, Loop’s lack of carrying capacity can be further compensated.
More importantly, the current data shows that the cost of Loop is relatively low. In the Las Vegas project, the one-mile tunnel budget is $48.7 million, which is equivalent to about 213 million yuan for a one-kilometer. According to media reports on Xi’an monorail, Xi’an monorail cost is about 150 million yuan per kilometer. If you calculate the construction cost between China and the United States, the difference between the cost of Loop and the monorail train is not great – at least it is much lower than the subway of more than 500 million yuan per kilometer.
When Musk meets the infrastructure madness: Does the Loop mode really apply to China?
In the case of Las Vegas, the least we can see is that most of the ones that apply to monorails also apply to Loop. For example, the transportation needs between the university town and the urban area, the transportation needs between the outer suburbs exhibition center and the urban area, and so on. At the same time, Musk himself mentioned that the “initial heart” of The Boring Co. was created because it could not stand the traffic congestion of the city and hoped to create a three-dimensional plane traffic mode in a three-dimensional way.. Therefore, the traffic supplement inside the city is also one of the applicable scenarios of Loop.
Can these capabilities really be copied into Chinese cities?
The first thing we need to know is that today’s China has gradually passed the period of crazy construction. Take the shed reform project that evacuates a large number of residents from the city center to the suburbs. The data shows that the target of the shed reform plan has been swayed this year, and the investment volume may fall by 50%. At the same time, China’s investment in urban rail transit construction is unshakable.
The data shows that from 2010 to 2018, the average annual growth rate of China’s operating urban rail length is 19%, and the mileage of urban railroads under construction in 2018 is 6367.5 kilometers. Under dense subway and urban rail route planning, traffic demand will be quickly digested. Just like the expansion of Chinese colleges and universities after 2000, there was a wave of building a new campus in the suburbs. Today, most of these campuses have subways and urban homosexuality. At the same time, China’s intensive underground transportation infrastructure will undoubtedly increase the difficulty of Loop “drilling holes”.
On the other hand, it is worth noting that Loop’s “drilling hole pattern” is really like the rumor, has no effect on the building on the ground?
In the case of Las Vegas, the contradiction between the monorail and the Loop is not in the case of who won the big list, but in the monorail train owner Monorail believes that the construction of the Loop will give the current Monorail trains pose danger. In an explanation file for Clark County officials, Monorail’s CEO mentioned that because the loop must dig directly under the monorail elevated track, it has a major impact on vertical and lateral loads.
Although Loop said that it would “deep the hole deep enough” to avoid the impact on the monorail, there is no doubt that Loop will cost a lot to avoid other ground and underground facilities during the construction process. Affected.
So it seems that for China, the scene suitable for Loop is likely to be the traffic demand of the new high-end residential area-transport hub/commercial circle in the suburbs; or the connection between the newly developed tourist attractions; Newly developed pavilion parks such as conferences and events; and connections in giant enterprise parks on the outskirts of the city.
In short, the following conditions must be met: in the new development zone, the infrastructure environment is simple and easy to construct; the travel demand has a fixed route; the B-side buy order avoids the risk of commercial operation.