That $75 million figure made my bullshit detector start to squawk, so I did the math. The web site says it has a capacity of 4,400 visitors per hour, and assuming $3.75 per ride (if nobody gets the daily pass for $5), it only has to operate at maximum capacity all hours of the day and night, 24/7, for 6 months to bring in that amount of revenue.
So if the profit margin is 50%, the Vegas Loop can make $75 million in a year of continuous operation at 100% capacity. Seems legit. /s
I’m sure they meant 75m gross, at best.
Which, even if that’s true, I’m still laughing at him because it hasn’t fixed the traffic.
It’s like someone said they’d fix the US healthcare system and then bragged about how much money their health insurance company is making in response to people saying they did dick all to fix the system.
Until you realize that not fixing the traffic was the point. It’s not funny because he didn’t fix anything on purpose.
no, what he forgot to count were the state subsidies that pay for all of the expenses including building and operating costs and supplement the profit so that it makes it worth it for the investors to even bother in the first place
Even if it were gross revenue, that’s a highly-unrealistic number. Full capacity for 12 hours a day, every day of the year?
I tried to find the source of this and all I can find is “webpronews” which says:
With $75 million in annual revenue, 28,000 daily passengers, and 150 Teslas in operation, this underground transportation network is redefining how cities think about mobility.
So if it’s 28000 x 365, that’s $7.50 per trip. Of 1.7 miles. That’s suspiciously double the $3.75 listed on the Vegas loop site, which also offers a day pass for $5.00.
Still, even $37.5 to $50 million is some pretty significant revenue (not to be confused with profit). Does it carry 28,000 riders per day though? As best as I can tell, this is what a publication from the Board of Directors of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority claims is the record ridership, set during a Specialty Equipment Manufacturers Association convention. Even ignoring the suspiciously round number, the publication notes that rides were free on that day, and obviously it’s blatantly wrong to apply a record total to a daily average.
So essentially, the tweet is a dishonest interpretation based on another dishonest interpretation of dubious statistics. Lesson is, everything on Twitter is bullshit - emphasis on every. Even subparts of bullshit on Twitter are still bullshit, often layered on other bullshit. Twitter is the last asshole of the human centipede of bullshit.
You should include the relevant portion of the linked report in this comment.
From page 22:
This quarter also saw the three highest ridership days ever on the Las Vegas Loop during SEMA, carrying a record 28,000 passengers in one day. “Our goal for the free Loop service around the LVCC campus is to improve customer service, reduce attendees’ travel times, and provide a Vegas Only experience,” Reisman says. Our transportation and customer experience departments are already working directly with the building’s shows to educate attendees about the unique benefits of zipping from one side of our campus to the other in a free Loop car—shaving up to 45 minutes from their travel time.
I think I misread your post originally as saying “this report says what the record ridership is” rather than saying the 28k figure was from the report lol. My bad. I was like why not just say the number?
Thanks for doing the monster math
It’s a great American success because instead of being good at what it needs to do, it is good at making money for a rich person.
And only because of government support. Your tax dollars at work.
Jesus fucking Christ… I always knew this thing was dumb, but I was trying to think of similarly sized trains for a good comparison. I live near Atlanta. Our local airport Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport by passenger count. There is a train called the Plane Train that connects the terminals together. According to that page it has 2.8 miles of track which is similar to the LVCC Loop’s 2.2. The Plane Train carried “more than 250,000 people per day” (article from 2018, btw). The LVCC Loop has “demonstrated peak capacity of over 4,500 passengers per hour, and over 32,000 passengers per day.” The Plane Train uses 11 four-car trains during peak hours. The LVCC Loop uses 70 cars. Even if you wanted to make a weird comparison and say “but it’s not 88 cars” that wouldn’t make up for the 7.8x capacity of the Plane Train lol. Plus, each car is driven by a human. The trains are autonomous. I assume there may be someone monitoring it from some control area, but still.
PLUS! It’s not like The Plane Train is some crazy high tech solution! It was first made in 1980. I remember in pre 9/11 days riding it to the terminal to see off family members as they left for flights. Not much has changed about it. People don’t get on it and think “wow this is so cool.” It just works!
Elon Musk could not beat a simple train system in an airport built in the 1980s.
Yeah but how much revenue does the plane train make? /s
The important thing is that it’s making $75 million a year, not that it’s profitable or that it’s efficient.
The .com “Revenue is value” bullshit has persisted and it sucks.
Sure bud, 75 million a year.
Let’s be super generous and say this thing operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. And let’s say we’re talking about turnover, not profit when saying it “makes” 75 million a year. And let’s say they do a 100 trips an hour all day long. That would mean a single trip would cost over $85. Yeah right, in your dreams buddy.
Knowing how musk operates, it’s 5 million in profit and 70 million paid by Vegas or some government handout as some sort of fucked up deal he managed to get
More likely is 100 million in losses, but 175 million paid by vegas
This sub seems like it’s got more disinformation and engagement bait than a lot of others. I agree with the concept but a post about a tweet retweeting someone’s blatantly false info is just dumb.
I assume it is revenue. That would be realistic but absolutely laughable, my local public transport company makes 240 million Euros in revenue every year. They also operate at a 140 million deficit but I doubt that tunnel is any different. Neither will it have transported 200 million people either.
It made him money but did not fix traffic lol
Elon is grafting as per usual, it’s government funded:
TBC doesn’t generate revenue from charging passengers (the rides are free)… Only LVCVA provided a substantive reply, and none addressed the question of capacity, nor the outstanding questions about children or passengers with mobility issues.
For instance, during a large trade show like CES, the LVCC will pay TBC $30,000 for every day it operates and manages the system
At a frankly embarrassing capacity too:
If the Loop can demonstrate moving 2,200 passengers an hour, TBC will get $4.4 million
- San Francisco’s BART moves about 3-4 million people per month(~ 5,000 per hour)
- Boston’s MBTA moves on average 700,000 to 800,000 people per week (~4,1000 per hour)
- And then there’s the NYC Metro 2-6 million people per day.
Honestly it’s just kinda cringe that las Vegas doesn’t have a train system. Sure it’s wider than tall but they could do the Japanese style two tier train pricing (low cost every stop, crammed in, and higher cost express that’s less frequent and has assigned seating).
Las Vegas has a monorail but it only connects a handful of casinos on the strip. There had been proposals to connect it to Downtown Vegas and the airport, but I don’t think that there is any money set aside to make it happen.
According to the Boring Company, the LVCC loop has a “demonstrated peak capacity” of 4,500 passengers per hour but only 32,000 passengers per day. I don’t know the reason for the discrepancy - I assume there are operational limitations or it doesn’t run 24h/day or something. But to my mind we have to use the 32k figure, which yields a paltry 1,333 passengers per hour.
Now technically a direct comparison would be to a single subway line, not the entire system. BUT we also need to compare it with the maximum capacity, not the actual ridership, which blows the doors off the stupid tunnel. I’ve seen numbers for BART as high as 48,000 passengers per direction per hour.
Anyone who cursorily looks at public transport logistics realizes that time deficiencies almost never lie on the actual motorization method. Electric, diesel, rail, rubber, car, bus, train, etc. All of those factor’s influence pale in comparison to embarking and disembarking times.
It doesn’t matter if you can make the trip in 15 minutes or an hour, if you always have to wait 40 minutes to disembark, then that trip is always capped at 40 at the least time it can take. The Vegas tube terminals are absurdly small. Thus people have to wait a long time to board a car, which isn’t the most efficient thing to get on or off. And they have to wait a lot in line before getting to a park spot to disembark. Then it’s the fact that each has to be driven by a person who need regular food and bathroom breaks and general rest. And there’s a driver per every 3 or 4 passengers. Inefficiencies begin to build up.
So, under one metric, from departure to arrival, yes the tube itself could carry 4k people an hour. But as a transport system as a whole it is awful at capacity and collapses as soon as so many people actually try to use it. This is a system that experienced a traffic jam inside the tube in their inauguration day, because that’s just what cars do when so many are at close proximity.
Spitballing here, but given the low per vehicle capacity and the inherent de/acceleration required at each stop, Vegas may be better served with a moving walkway for those 2.2 miles of total network length.
And it’d be far more accessible for people with reduced mobility or wheelchair users too
I don’t think it’s fair to compare entire train networks to this. Peak ridership at similarly sized station to this would be more accurate (and I’m sure they’d still dwarf it). I think the Loop is just 2 (possibly 3) stations, right?
I thought the point was solving traffic. Not making money. Even the headline contradicts itself.
I’ll be perfectly honest as a non-American who tries to not hear about Musk, I had no idea this was actually built.
I’d heard about it, but I didn’t think they’d be stupid enough to actually build it.
Some people are “idea” guys, other guys are wealthy. When these are separate people, great things can come of it. When they are both the same person, stupid shit comes of it.
I mean they built a tunnel. We’ve been building tunnels since before electricity was invented.
And as mentioned it’s no different to the tunnel of love at Disney, or a sky bridge between two hotels in Vegas.
Yeah, but they clearly didn’t build this one properly.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/elon-musk-boring-company-tunnel-sludge
You might be thinking of the hyper loop, that weird vacuum thing. That didn’t get built. This is just a tunnel with a taxi service in it.
That’s the one I was thinking of.
The whole idea of a network of vehicles running under the city makes me think of some words dystopian future where there’s a literal underclass of people living underground, and - oh…
Futurama. Futurama is what I’m thinking of 😂 and that one episode of Doctor Who in New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York 👍
I have yet to see any evidence that Musk is an idea guy.
I’m an idea guy. The ideas he funds are idiotic. My theory is he has a team of idea guys and he asks them what would be cool, then funds it.
He is an ideas guy in the worst possible way - he comes up with a half-baked thought and then has a team of people far more talented than him work out the logistics of making it a reality, and takes all the credit for the result. Granted, those people are well compensated for their role, but it’s so dumb how laypeople just heap praise onto musk as if he could realistically be the CEO of 5 companies simultaneously and still adequately perform his duties without any kind of delegation or outright negligence.
My idea: More trains.
For anyone interested, that’s the U4 line in Hamburg, Germany, at the “HafenCity Universität” station.
Cool, thank you!
This is a 3.5km tunnel with a speed of 55km/h. Thats 3.8 minutes of travel. No fucking way this thing could ever be profitable.
Isn’t this simply a private lane for whoever pays?
Thats the one in California, the one in Vegas has drivers and is between the convention center and a hotel.
IIRC their peak capacity estimates do things like assume loading/unloading times for a family of 4 with luggage to be under 30 seconds too.
“Everybody laughed at Elon when he said he could do a thing! Now he does a completely easier, unrelated thing!”
Checkmate liberals?
It is hard to “solve traffic”…especially by selling more cars…but Elon made a profit in gimmick town by building a profit-seeking gimmick…so, take that, doubters! That’s definitely what you said he couldn’t do!
We shouldn’t even bother to compare, the loop thing in Las Vegas is not a transport system, it’s an amusement ride.
For some reason Americans don’t think trains are sexy. Mostly though there’s a belief that they’re extremely expensive, difficult to maintain, worse to use than cars, and too inflexible. The first two are more true about highways than railroads and the hyperloop is the worst of both worlds and really just the manifestation of Elon and many Americans’ distaste for interacting with and as part of the public.
![[image] Sometimes it feels like folks in US would build anything but efficient transit 🤦](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/9fee6912-22f8-44a0-b34c-75dd59e25f54.png){kind=link}