I assume though that they would adjust the capacity depending on time of day and whether there's an event or something going on, to some degree.
It's a single lane tunnel and is thus one way. The parking are can only hold so many waiting vehicles and queued passengers. Their options for adjusting capacity are severely limited.
Then you consider what might happen if the lead vehicle in a convoy becomes disabled, or worse, starts on fire.
It's the same reason planes are safer per "passenger mile traveled" but aren't as safe per "total journeys taken." If you crash a plane you stand to injure or kill hundreds of passengers at once.
I watched that video the other day, pretty sure it didn’t say that. What it did point out though is that in most of the system, other than the one main line, there’s just one single-lane tunnel so that when a car is in a tunnel going one way, cars going the other direction have to wait to enter the tunnel until the tunnel is clear.
The title of the video seems pretty accurate: “The Vegas Loop Is Getting Progressively More Stupid.”
Based purely on my own observations, I'd guesstimate that station sees about 50-75 cars per day.
Tens of thousands of riders when I was there and not a spec of dirt. Very far from perfect, but a long way from useless.
Most videos I've seen recently show a system that, while functional, typically only has a handful of vehicles running simultaneously, each with carrying capacity for one party of up to 3 people.
In 2024-05, they did passenger 2,000,000 [2].
So 1,000,000 passengers in 14 months or ~420 days. That is a average throughput of ~2,400 passengers per day.
In comparison, the Tokyo Marunouchi line averages ~1,100,000 passengers per day [3]. That is ~420x the rate. Every single day, they do what the Las Vegas Loop does in a year.
The peak capacity that they claim without evidence is ~32,000 in a day [4]. The Maruonouchi line does in a day what the Las Vegas Loop at maximum capacity could theoretically do in a entire month.
[1] https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-boring-co-vegas-loop-1-m...
[2] https://www.teslarati.com/boring-company-2-million-passenger...
[3] https://www.japan-experience.com/plan-your-trip/travel-by-tr...
How did you arrive at tens of thousands of riders?
This will require considerable progress in tunneling r&d, which is their primary activity
Takes most of the biking joy away tho.
It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.
It's not the boring process. It's the use of concrete curing accelerants producing toxic sludge.
Often, the accelerants would spill into groundwater and mix with concrete and other debris, creating a toxic mix of sludge, sometimes about two-feet deep, that workers would often have to trudge through. The OSHA report cited workers with permanently scarred arms and legs, and one instance in which a worker was hit in the face and seared with the chemical mix. Temperatures would regularly rise to 100 degrees as workers often toiled for 12 hour days, sometimes for six or seven days a week, at a worksite nicknamed “the plantation” by some workers, who spoke to the Nevada safety agency for its report. Workers also claimed having to ask for permission to use the bathroom.
That's the OSHA complaint. The environmental complaint comes from disposing of that sludge.
Sludge removal and treatment is a standard problem in tunneling. Usually, it's pumped out with "trash pumps" that can tolerate rocks and sand. Then it goes through some basic processing - screen out the big rocks, separate water from wet sludge, run the water through a mini sewerage treatment plant on site, squeeze more water out of the sludge, add bentonite as an absorbent to lock up toxics, and truck away the dry sludge.[2]
What it seems The Boring Company has been doing is dumping the wet sludge on a vacant lot in Las Vegas [3] and waiting for the water to run off or evaporate. The vacant lot isn't even out in the desert outside the city; it's in town, and the nearby mall is annoyed.
Reports of water two feet deep in the tunnels means they skimped on pumps and water processing. They're using a TBM, which makes a concrete tube as it digs. Most tunneling operations keep the completed tube dry.
[1] https://www.inc.com/sam-blum/elon-musks-boring-company-subje...
[2] https://www.blackrhinosep.com/application/tunneling-slurry-s...
[3] https://lasvegas.citycast.fm/explainers/boring-company-drill...
A 250k penalty? Get real. Leffel said it like it is. What a sham.
This fine is a sham.
The fuck?
"You were driving so fast we gave you a discount on the speeding fine."
Fat Leonard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Leonard_scandal "Lets take the entire United States Seventh Fleet to the South Pacific for prostitutes and classified material handovers."
60 admirals got investigated. One, Admiral Gilbeau, got the first felony on active duty in modern history = 1.5 year prison, and continue collecting your $10,000 monthly pension (while in prison). There were admittedly some punishments, there was also a lot of community service, misdemeanor, $100.
This is ridiculous and why we have the problems with late-stage capitalism that we do. Fines are not high enough. No jail time for environmental crimes.
That's pretty much how courts work :(
The guy who gets busted for possession of 1g of cocaine might get 10-30 days, depending on jurisdiction, judge, and prior record.
Do you think the dealer who gets caught with 5 kilos gets between 137 and 410 years?
• Cleaner air at street level because vehicle exhaust stays underground and can be filtered, which would have massive health and environmental benefits
• Quieter cities with most traffic noise eliminated
• Cooler temperatures since asphalt and vehicle heat are removed from the surface (urban heat island effect)
• More space for trees, parks, and gardens, improving urban greenery.
• Lower stress levels thanks to quieter, greener surroundings.
• Better physical health from more walkable, pedestrian-friendly spaces.
But oh poor Musk (being the richest in the world) has to have his fine reduced.
Fine you say? Cool. That tells everyone that this is just a payment to continue as normal and to include this extra fee.
And that if this crime is a fine, then its only for the lower class.
it's always privatize the profits, socialize the costs
he's doing the same thing with Starlink which is going to vaporize many thousands of toxic satellites out of LEO into the atmosphere
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-space-orbit-satellit...
imagine what he's going to do on the Moon or Mars
This quote is particularly telling of a billionaire's mindset when the fines are too small to matter.
https://www.ktnv.com/news/workers-allege-chemical-burns-from...
Please avoid sneery swipes like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to do better than this. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Not what I said. I said he did it to try and kill high speed rail, not that he was solely responsible for its failure. And Musk did a whole lot more than tweet.
Just because you are ignorant of the significant evidence that this was (and remains) Musk's goal doesn't mean it isn't true. Ashlee Vance wrote about this way back in 2015: https://x.com/parismarx/status/1167410460125097990 . Just this year he used his involvement in DOGE to cut federal funding for what remains of the project: https://gizmodo.com/musks-doge-takes-aim-at-california-high-...
You're right that it's easy to mistake any statement like mine as being a blanket defense of Elon and dismissing valid criticisms, but this discussion as a whole has gone far afield of cement accelerators and chemical burns.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/california-dismantles-landmark-e...
It's not really that, it's a weird parody of "modern subterranean transportation". They could do interesting things with it, but right now it's just private roads. It isn't more efficient than a subway, it isn't more flexible, but it's likely more dangerous.
I suggest you actually look into what the the Boring Company's roads in Las Vegas actually are.
What you image as subterranean transportation isn't even what BC is striving for.
Looks at Hyperloop. Looks at London subway. Looks at NYC subway. Looks at literally any other subway Yeah, a poorly-made tunnel with cars that fit 2-3 people at a time while requiring each car to have their own driver is very modern and definitely worth environmental violations.
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
That sounds like a "real environmental hazard" to me.
https://violationtracker.goodjobsfirst.org/?parent=acs-sa&or...
Since the year 2000, they've had 45 fines (and many violations per fine) by the federal Occupational Safety & Health Administration, and nearly $8 million in fines. And over $200k in fines just last year. There's separately 34 global violations totalling is over $50 million in fines.
This doesn't make Elon's company's violations excusable - it is however clearly the course of business in construction that these sorts of things happen. I think this is a good criticism of capitalist pressures in general rather than Elon being uniquely shitty in how he operates his companies.
obligatory Elon sucks, i'm just allergic to bullshit and ragebait
Something tells me it’s not NIMBYism.
it's exactly NIMBYism which makes the installation of the very small inefficient gas turbines make economic sense.
because it would take too fucking long to get a transmission wire set up to the grid, not to mention about the fight required for starting a new power plant somewhere else.
(that said I think it's unethical to run those turbines there)
Clearly, anyone who says [complex, multifaceted loose grouping of kind of related things] is [extreme, polarizing claim with no evidence] is not worth listening to further.
Please explain exactly what regulations in this context were 'crafted and utilized by NIMBYs'. Please cite agency and ruling for each supposed grave offense to your anti-NIMBY sensibilities.
Here’s an article that has some details on some of the violations [1]. The sound like things that the state legitimately should be regulating and that this would have minimal impact on growth.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/elon-musk-boring-company-...
As far as the strip itself goes , well that's controlled by the corporate casino post-mafia folks. I think most of that stuff gets negotiated in backrooms.
Its also outrageous that companies have to pay for workman's comp insurance /s
That's not something I proposed in my comment.
Please don't comment like this on HN. The guidelines ask us to "assume good faith" and avoid accusations of shilling. Commenting like this poisons discussions, and we're trying for something better than that here. Please observe the guidelines and make an effort to do better in future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
What an acidic thing to fling. I want us to build infrastructure. Nowhere did I say we need do whatever Musk says.
I want us to use cost-benefit analysis to judge infrastructure projects rather than the heavy moral framing we get a lot.
The only _real_ way to achieve the above goals are building bicycle friendly cities with diverse public transport options and less parking spaces. There are European cities that function more like this.
This is anathemic to the US of course.
https://www.sanpedromarbella.eu/san-pedros-tunnel-a-new-life...
What exhaust? These are all electric cars running in the tunnels.
I think we can do a little better while still reaping the improvements garnered by tunneling.
I can see several things I find _concerning_ about them...
Then we should stop with amatuer hour and outsource to China, where they've lapped us in tunneling technology. It will take more than one ketamine-fueled billionaire breaking laws in Vegas to catch up.
And re-entry is part of the cleanup plan. All satellites responsibly launched need a plan to deal with possible orbital waste. By decommissioning in this way, we're reducing overall impact of the constellation.
Given the immense possible good worldwide internet can provide, and the virtuous cycle it creates for the US launch industry, it's really hard to take these claims seriously.
It's hard to take your argument seriously if you think that's more important than preserving the environment
Polluting the upper atmosphere with copper, aluminium and other compounds with unknown consequences is hardly a cleanup plan
What is an example of a regulation that was a "huge" hinderance to innovation?
Looking at the past 40 years of the US technological progress and the only thing I seen hindering innovation are the tech companies themselves through monopoly, monopsony, patents, and regulatory capture. (Unless the last one is what you meant, but that's a regulation put in place by a monopoly to maintain its monopoloy and not to protect the air we breathe).
EDIT: I am referring to "innovation" not "execution".
> Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns.
In another part, the company is accused of dumping this water directly into streets (presumably without decontamination).
Because "Innovation" isn't the be-all-end-all of a regulation or shouldn't be one of its aims or concerns. As a hyperbole, I don't care about "innovation" if you need to throw 4000 people into an industrial shredder in order to do it.
Another day, another invocation of the golden mean fallacy.
Not to mention a fine won't do much for people who get sick and die.
You see this from time to time with headlines like "$CORP fined fifty MILLION dollars for ..." And then when you look into the details the fine turns out to be about one week of revenue and the offense resulted in early death for thousands of people over the past five years.
Ever worked in a company where you need approval from 7 separate teams to land a simple change? Just can't get anything done, no matter how useful. This is a huge problem. People generally do not understand what serialized blocking does to performance.
On the other hand the fines cited in the article seem laughably low. I don't know how much ground water was discharged, and how big of a deal it is, but at certain pricetag even billionaires will say: well, it's cheaper to get a cistern and take that water to a water treatment facility or something.
But all he's saying is he wants to run his company the way tech entrepreneurs have been for a while - "It's better to ask forgiveness than permission" which they like because it's favored toward them, and, by the time a regulator has caught up, they have made a pile of money, or lost it all and gone.
It’s telling that billionaires are human?
Fines being too small to matter are a phenomenon across the income spectrum. From delivery drivers dancing with New York meter maids to American tourists ignoring overseas traffic rules, the notion that inadequate fines stop deterring and become merely a nuisance is well know.
Would be useful to remember that if Musk or Bezos say something, it may have the same chance of being right as what a delivery driver would say.
IMO his statement is disingenuous at that higher level. It's telling that billionaires propose things that wouldn't personally cut into their liquid assets, but instead would come out of a company that shields them from personal responsibility.
Maybe they should have asked some railway engineers. Also why throw away the benefits of cars over railway when you inherit non of the benefits.
Zoox has permits to operate autonomously on Las Vegas streets. Tesla is unable to get permits to operate autonomously on isolated, one-lane, one-way streets with no pedestrians, cross-traffic, or even vehicles not under their control. That should tell you everything you need to know about how far reality is away from their corporate puffery.
Not to disparage, but how did you come to that conclusion? A train will always be able to fit more people/m^2 than several cars of equivalent length, due to things like ability to stand, not needing to have multiple engines and trunks, etc.
I did some math and you're clearly right. I think I imagined that with driver-less vehicles leaving much more frequently (10s per minute) one could catch up to the capacity of a small light rail system but that's clearly not the case. I had imagined that _maybe_ it could be an approach for a lower capacity system in the future.
My math as someone who is not knowledgeable in how to get this data is as follows:
In Seattle is running 4 car trains at 8 minute headways at peak which works out to 7500 people per hour at crush load (4 cars, 250 people per car, 7.5 times per hour). This would require 125 vehicles with 5 seats leaving every minute which is clearly impossible.
Looking at Portland's MAX, it looks like they often run 2 car service with 160 passengers of capacity each with service every 15 minutes so 1280 people per hour (2 cars, 160 per car, 4 services per hour).
1280 people per hour could be served by a 5 seat vehicle leaving every ~15 seconds. This I suppose is what I had expected would happen when I tried to imagine the best case scenario for this service.
7500 isn't that high - the Manchester Metrolink did 46M user journeys in year ending March 2025 (~5250/hour assuming 24/7 which it isn't.) Docklands Light Railway did 97.8M (~11000/hour ass.24/7)
Numbers from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/light-ra...
There's no real need in a static environment, and much simpler ways to do it. Children's toys can follow a line painted on something; they just need proximity sensors and a basic signalling system (RF or also painted on the road) for where to stop and done.
There's no real need for the car to "see" beyond "am I going to run into something" and they operate at speeds where stopping is very feasible.
They're also a bad rival for light rail because they already have to dig a tunnel and the conveyance operates on a fixed path. They picked a domain that light rail is already incredibly good and efficient at.
It was a chemical to speed up grout curing. I don’t know which one. I looked up a few and they were corrosive petrochemicals with like 20-letter-long names and an acute health exposure rating of 4 on the MSDS. They also didn’t provide PPE or instructions on what PPE was necessary. And have you ever gotten any significant amount of gasoline on your skin? It burns and it is not safe. Here’s a list of chemicals in common gasoline mixtures: Gasoline, Toluene, Hexane, Xylene, Octane, Ethanol, Trimethylbenzene, n-Heptane, Pentane, Cumene, Ethylbenzene, Benzene, n-Hexane, Cyclohexane.
Even if it was just the water in the tunnel — how about you try 8+ hours of heavy work in steel toed boots with damp feet, let alone standing in ankle deep water filled with corrosive chemicals. Even standing still in clean water, your skin basically turns to paste after not too long.
With the way the job market is trending in tech, you might have the opportunity to find out one day while someone sitting in a Herman miller chair in a climate controlled office building dismisses your pain as petty griping.
Those kind of chemicals (including gasoline!) are in all the most common products like Watco Danish Oil floor finish that you can buy from home depot and use inside your home (and burn in your car for everyone to enjoy). They speed up curing. I don't recommend them! But they're very, very ordinary. If you want a product without them, you have to go out of your way to get it, unfortunately. (I recommend Tried and True Danish oil, which you'll find is significantly more expensive, and takes far longer to cure, but has no ill health effects)
These chemicals are being sprayed at high enough pressure to splash them, all day long, in enclosed spaces, in the presence of lots of other people. Even if it was bleach, that would require significant effort to protect the people in that environment from injury. They didn’t do that, the workers are human beings that deserved that, and that shouldn’t be minimized.
It's interesting, though, that your first impulse is to defend the robber barons that made this happen.
their guess was pretty good
cement or curing agents are hardly the environmental apocalyptic scenario for the beautiful and pristine environment of downtown Vegas, hm?
https://fee.org/articles/how-the-faa-is-keeping-flying-cars-...
1. For some reason it only talks in terms of the USA, there's a whole world of manufacturers that could have stepped up to create flying cars if the market was interested.
2. There was, for a very long time, a thing called a "microlight" which allowed people to own their own snap private air craft (although not generally VTOL)
Source please.
Otherwise there is a significant difference between using and selling.
Google: how many days of jail time 1 gram cocaine california
As with many legal questions, the matter of jurisdiction comes into play. Possession of any amount in Texas, is supposed to dictate a higher length sentence on average. Florida, heavier than CA but far less than TX guidelines. In actuality, courts tend to sentence based on defendant history and current political climate.
Educate us on how methalox rockets are a significant environmental concern?
In my week in Vegas for SEMA from 8am to well after dark it was always jam packed. That’s tens of thousands of riders.
What was it like when you rode it?
Edit: I can’t find a source for any number for the increase. If you know could you share one?
Ah nevermind this seems solid https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02731...
If the truth isn't somewhere in the middle, then by definition it must be on one of the two extreme edges. That's a pretty bad (and ironic) fallacy to commit, unless you think everything in this world (or at least all regulations) are binary (either perfect or completely worthless)
In one dimension. If both sides are fundamentally wrong, the middle is probably also mischaracterised.
Pro-and anti-phlogiston theorists [1] weren’t validated by a little phlogiston. They were superseded by oxygen theory.
Not even in one dimension. But that is obviously also a categorization/composition issue and therefore subject to other, potentially fallacious and accordingly named, pitfalls.
Just because accurate results aren't to be found "somewhere (unspecific!) in the middle" doesn't mean that one a) finds them precisely in the (extreme) edges, or fringes, and b) that the middle is completely excluded, especially in the analysis and comparison of dynamic systems (e. g. macroeconomic analysis).
Okay, go convince a few billion Indians and Chinese they should wait to industrialize because the environment can’t take it.
Growth versus preservation. India is trashing its air quality burning coal near its cities. Yet that power is lifting millions out of poverty and into the world's second-largest middle class.
Everyone would prefer clean air ceteris paribus. But for a lot of those people, economic security is "more important than preserving the environment."
The weather? Or the latest invasion that you've launched? That's probably boring, so it's a tricky situation.
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I have a hard time understanding this criticism. Why not do both?
It seems to me like underground highways make sense as an alternative to above ground highways in urban areas, not that they're an alternative to rail. There's lots of cities with excellent public transport that also make use of underground car travel (Melbourne for e.g.). If a company can figure out how to (safely) make underground highways more quickly and more affordably, it seems like that means we may need to do above-ground roads less frequently -- why would that not be a good thing?
Further, obviously Musk has a PR angle in facilitating tesla traffic here as the test bed in early days, but I don't see any reason that this couldn't be repurposed to rail use at scale.
Being able to make underground tunnels cheaper and faster is cool. Using them for cars is mostly a boondoggle with clearly superior alternatives.
I suspect in practice the actual approach is going to be a mix of all of the above. So my reasoning is primarily that if all cities won't give up cars anyway, it seems objectively better to make it easier to at least move more of them underground. I suppose one case where I would change my mind is if there was evidence that more affordable underground roads reduced the investment in public transit.
…what is it?
You might be shocked to learn the first airplane couldn’t take passengers.
Things improve, or at least attempt to. Even if it fails, I’d rather live in a world where new ideas are being tried and tested and not always talking about how good my horse and cart is.
Do you think that they are going to ignore environmental laws for JUST this project, or do you think that is their modus operandi? I’d be happy to have a tunnel system installed near my home, even if there’s temporary disruption during the construction process. What I wouldn’t tolerate is active, and unmonitored (by TBC’s insistence on “self-monitoring”), pollution occurring near my home. Fines only cover so much, and un-polluting something after the fact costs far more than the fines that are being levied and, when it comes to pollutants that harm humans (like improper disposal of chemicals from digging, as they have been fined for), you can’t just “undo” the human harm with a fine.
> The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections.
Yes, why do they even do that. Not that they are never any improvements, but this pretty much a solved problem. They have a stupid amount of NIH syndrome, but apply that to the physical world and that always results in fatalities.
You can, in fact, not discharge your sewage and contaminated water into public spaces even if you are trying something new. What a concept.
Clearly they broke the law, and will be punished for it as the law demands. Good.
This isn't some new early stage innovation that can grow into a great new thing, it's a shittier version of something we already have.
Tokyo Marunouchi is a multi-branch line totaling 17 miles; the Las Vegas Loop is a (not yet complete) single tunnel just one-tenth that distance.
This is a strange comparison.
Having tens of thousands of drivers over an unspecified time period rather than simultaneously isn’t really a flex imho.
I was stating what I saw when I rode it.
You saw tens of thousands of riders?
That anecdote just doesn't jibe with the throughput numbers -- that's why it seems like a flex, it's grossly inflated.
Now before we go into pedantry and you talk about how 'riders' meant 'all willing participants who are sitting in line' , fine -- i've been to SEMA and I understand those crowds , but those aren't riders. It's a misreporting of the situation, and frankly it seems intentional.
It's Friday night so I lack the motivation to go on a stats-finding expedition, but anecdotally this seems like a circular issue to me. Public transportation sucks, so no one wants to fund it and we invest money into car infrastructure. Traffic gets worse, but public transportation is still bad because we haven't improved it, so we dump more money into car infrastructure, and etc.
I do hear you about the practical realities, though. Most people will drive if they can, because it is more convenient (so long as we can keep building more roads, even at exorbitant prices).
I think there would be far less support if people could see what they're actually spending on car infrastructure. At least in the US, it's currently so fractured it's hard to get an idea. Registration fees, gas taxes, federal taxes that get pumped into highway maintenance, etc. There's no clear "we spend $X on car infrastructure, and we could have really good public transportation for $Y".
So essentially they made a ride comparable to Space Mountain that takes about 2200 passengers per hour.
https://www.pbssocal.org/redefine/group-sues-to-block-new-de...
- State by state money transmission licensing: Fintechs like PayPal and Stripe had to get 50+ separate state licenses, creating huge compliance costs and delaying product launches.
- FDIC De Novo Bank Rules: caused a collapse in new bank formation for nearly a decade (only a handful of new banks were approved between 2010–2016).
– Over 20 state laws restricted cities from building their own broadband networks, protecting incumbents and stalling fiber deployment.
- Slow spectrum auctions and rigid allocation by FCC delayed rollout of 5G infrastructure compared to countries with faster processes.
- State-based regulation patchwork for insurance: each US state has its own insurance regulator requiring 50+ separate filings for new products, slowing national rollout of innovations
- ACA: while expanding coverage, created heavy administrative burdens for smaller insurers and startups trying to innovate in plan design or digital enrollment
- Conflicting state laws and lack of federal standards created uncertainty for companies like Waymo and Cruise, delaying scaling of self-driving technology.
- Drone FAA rules: heavily limited commercial drone use, slowing the rise of delivery and mapping applications until modernized rules came into effect.
- California's recent, very nuanced "Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act" targeting frontier models and "safety" and "risk reporting" like "critical safety incidents"
https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/public-sector/our-insigh...
What? The Pyramids, Roman aqueducts, domes, et cetera weren’t innovations?
Complete de-regulation of a sector, say banking or medicine, would certainly encourage a lot of innovation. A lot of people would also be hurt in the process.
Your work history will impact the way you view this issue IMO.
I for one have seen mid-5 figures spent on a dumpster enclosure, because of building codes.
Not one (token) example, but "many". But I'm as curious as you are and thirsty for some well-researched and replicated numbers. ;)
I was in and around multiple stations for a week, from early till late, and never saw a single one anything other than packed. Lineups up the turned off escalators topside were extremely common. Many tens of thousands of people were riding.
FWIW I was at the event that caused the worlds biggest event centre (the Vegas convention centre) to expand, because it wasn’t big enough to host the event.
Millions and millions of people in and around the convention centre, all serviced by the loop.
What are you doing to fix that?
>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.
This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.
e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.
> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development
This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.
The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.
The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.
Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.
latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...] [...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith
You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'
I want to build infrastructure too. Just not at the cost of the destruction of the world we live in.
By framing a regulation as some ploy? You're just as ridiculous
Instead of bringing up safety, I'd bring up the microplastics and other pollutants emitted by the technology of the elastomeric tire and which might be an intrinsic property of cost-effective use of the technology.
https://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/d01045/#:~:text=Zero%20Fa...
Sounds like trains are pretty safe to me.
Cars get into accidents way more frequently. The American freight rail system derails at a more frequent rate because the private operators are incentivized to really not do any maintenance at all.
Trains don’t “regularly” derail. And when they do, they aren’t as fatal as the median highway crash.
There are unlikely to be too many fatalities in this system because it runs slowly. (Unless Li-on batteries cascade combust somehow.)
if you don't automatically assume bad faith when dealing with hypercapitalist private infrastructure projects, you're going to be taken advantage of. every time.
that, or you're on the payroll. there's not a ton of wiggle room here.
> A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that-at low levels of competence-holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others' cunning.
GP explicitly specified such an environment. Musk is the epitome of a hypercapitalist - an outlier in terms of wealth, fame, ambition, and micromanagement.
Do you intend that isn't stifling, that a regulatory environment that requires spending 5 figured to house 2 dumpsters isn't stifling?
And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.
As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.