a boring (Company) post

15 Jun

Written By Thomas

When the richest man in the world thinks something, it’s always worth taking note.

OK, so Elon Musk was only briefly the richest man in the world (now, once again, overtaken by Jeff Bezos) but still $150 billion can get you a long way in life.

America has always been unduly influential, and rich people in America carry clout.

So it’s worth being aware that Elon Musk isn’t really onboard with the consensus amongst transport and mobility professionals in Europe (and some big American cities) that the future is about public transport and micro-mobility.

For Elon Musk the future is about… cars.

Yes, they’ll be electric, but they’re definitely cars.

And for the extent of this, let’s drop in on the first implementation of his “Public Transportation System” (as he calls it) in Las Vegas.

This opened last week and is the first “public transport” system to be built by the Musk-owned Boring Company.

In Muskland, a “station” is not served by trains or trams, it is served by - yes - a row of Teslas:

The initial line is a three-station route of just 1.7 miles running underneath the main exhibition centre. But Musk has ambitions to extend it throughout Las Vegas as a proving ground for deployment elsewhere.

Elon Musk claims the capacity of the service, which had its first passengers last week, is 4,400 per hour and that the Las Vegas-wide network serving all major destinations including the airport and the Strip will have a capacity of 50,000 an hour

Though he gives no indication of how this will be achieved given that it is based on cars.

Even with the cars operating autonomously (which the fire department are currently prohibiting), that is only five passengers per vehicle. The capacity Musk is claiming would require 880 vehicle movements per hour or 15 per minute. Even if the safety of the autonomous technology could be proved at such headways (and in an entirely closed environment such as this, that doesn’t feel unlikely) the dwell times of passengers alighting and boarding makes this seem incredibly unlikely.

“World of Concrete”

With wonderful lack of irony, the first users of the service were attendees at the “World of Concrete” exhibition. And that is gloriously appropriate because that’s exactly what Elon Musk is pitching.

Two of the three stations are surface and, with the tunnel portals, they take a grotesque amount of space for the actual capacity they offer. I can’t find any publicity shots of the surface stations but you can see one at minute 4 of this video. There’s a lot of concrete involved for not many people.

Yet Musk is seriously pitching this service as a “public transportation” solution. He claims that driving Teslas through tunnels has advantages over conventional metro services like being able to go at 150mph (though without any evidence this is actually possible; the Las Vegas service is limited to 35mph) and low Covid risk as the Teslas have occupancy “as low as one” (which is, of course, self-evident. Any transport can have occupancy “as low as one”, as much of the rail and bus network discovered during lockdown).

The reality is that Musk has invented driving cars through road tunnels but is pitching it as something new and exciting. And he’s got the star factor to get away with it. But he also has a remarkable record of successful execution. He’s turned Tesla into a profitable business and more or less knocked NASA out of space travel with his rocket company SpaceX.

If Elon Musk wants to do something, he tends to do it.

The Las Vegas Raiders president Marc Badain, who wants a station at his brand-new stadium, said (via Review-Journal):

“It’s such a simple concept. It’s amazing that it hasn’t been thought of before. If you can take that many people off of the road and still get to a location in a much quicker timeframe I don’t see how it can’t be massively successful.”

But driving cars through tunnels really has been thought of before! Just visit Birmingham.

Here’s an American news report that manages to turn a new road tunnel into the “future of transportation”:

“The future of transportation”, Elon Musk-style.

Fort Lauderdale in the USA is said to be in the final stages of contract negotiation with the Boring Company to build them a route. If the hype continues, they may not be the last.

Yet it all comes with an extraordinary amount of greenwash. Musk claims to be motivated by climate change but he burns gargantuan amounts of kerosene to fire planes to Mars and executes bitcoin trades that accounted for $100m of its $600m operating profit, despite Bitcoin’s appalling impact on climate change.

Teslas, like all electric cars, are more carbon-efficient than petrol cars. But they’re not more space-efficient and they’re a lot less carbon-efficient than public transport. Batteries are much less carbon-efficient than electric catenary and a five-person vehicle commands a much greater carbon footprint for manufacture and disposal than a 90-person vehicle.

By claiming his tunnels with cars in them are public transport he is engaged in a dangerous bait and switch. “Do you want cheaper public transport for your city?” “Yes!” “Great! Buy my cars.”

Don’t let him get away with it.