I thought the point was solving traffic. Not making money. Even the headline contradicts itself.
We shouldn’t even bother to compare, the loop thing in Las Vegas is not a transport system, it’s an amusement ride.
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.
Also I haven’t really looked into this Vegas Loop thing until now, and the tweet was right, it only connects a convention center and a hotel LOL
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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One is a grift, the other one is actually meant to be a means of transportation
A few years back I actually found the hyperloop pretty novel and cool. Like put your car on skates and it could zoooom very fast. Yes a train would be better but this idea seems like a cool project. Fast forward now, and you still have to drive and stuff, it’s lame af.
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.
For a reference of scale, the largest high speed rail network in Europe is in Spain. Last year it moved some 33 million people (that’s just high speed, not including local slow trains or urban metro) and, while overall revenue data is not widely available (there are multiple operators reporting independently), it generated several billion dollars.
If you want to scale that to what it would do in the US with a similar network you can add a zero to all the numbers and you won’t be too far off.
Yeah, I’ve said this before, but USA seems like a perfect place to build a HSR right? It seems like an ez money too now that I think about it.
Copying my comment on !publictransport@slrpnk.net :
I’m not even from USA to be clear, but my limited image of USA is that it lacks efforts of building public transport, especially compared to other developed countries. Heck, compared to developing countries even.
One of the example, US seems like a perfect place to build a high-speed rail network. Yet, CAHSR seems to keep getting delayed. In comparison Morocco has a HSR. Even Indonesia has one opened last year.
Well think of it this way:
A politician COULD approve a project like this, and his area will see improvements in 2-7 years, and everything connected to the network improves in 4-10 years, and if the politician personally invests and things go well (they would, but yOu nEvEr KnOw) then the politician could stand to gain a decent chunk of ROI in a few years.
OR
The politician
accepts a bribelistens to lobbyists from the automotive industry, kills all competition to ICE vehicles and more roads, the area stagnates for the third decade in a row, and the politician is $10,000 richer today.Honestly the politicians hands are completely tied here. Their net worth is only $18 million, do you really think they can afford to wait a few years???
Overall low population density likely means even with high usage, you’d still be serving fewer people per mile of track than pretty much anywhere in Europe. A mile of HSR has to be more exact and defect free than a mile of road, and costs a hell of a lot more in labor and materials. Then there’s the cost of the land to build it on, because for some reason the existing right of way around interstate highways isn’t available.
I don’t think the U.S. is as perfect of a place for it as you think it is, but god damn I wish we’d at least try.
Spain’s average population density is on par with California. It would rank as the 10th most densely populated state in the US. And it is about the same size as California, too. Its GDP per capita is about one third of the US or California’s, and the whole infrastructure for high speed rail is 100% publicly funded. Private operators pay a fee to use the public tracks.
So yeah, no, that’s no excuse. Even at the state level pretty much any state with significant urban centres could pull this off.
Yeah, the D.C.-Bmore-Philly-NYC-Boston corridor is notorious for the tumbleweeds blowing forlornly down empty main streets at high noon, because of low population. /s
C’mon, that tired, old trope is so busted. Obviously, we build HSR where the people are/want to go, and not where the people aren’t/don’t want to go. The Northeast, the Great Lakes region, the West Coast, the East Coast, the South—all of these regions have the population density for a HSR network.
Much of the Desert Southwest, the Great Plains, the Great Basin, Alaska—we don’t have to criss-cross them with HSR routes to make the map look balanced.
I thought it was in France, well done Spain!
![[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}