Elon Musk’s Boring Company lands $48.7M contract for underground “people mover” in Las Vegas

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The Boring Company, Elon Musk’s tunneling and transportation startup, has landed a $48.7 million job to shuttle people in an underground Loop system around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This is the company’s first commercial contract.

The design for the project, dubbed Campus Wide People Mover or CWPM, will focus on the Las Vegas Convention Center, which is currently in the midst of an expansion that’s expected to be complete in time for CES 2021. The expanded Las Vegas Convention Center will span about 200 acres after completed. The LVCVA estimates that individuals walking the facility could travel two miles to the other.

In March, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority recommended that the Boring Company be chosen .  The board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority voted Wednesday to accept the contract.

The approval comes with many strings and demands The Boring Company to achieve certain milestones, details of that The Guardian published earlier this month. The contract withholds over two-thirds of payments until construction is complete and needs The Boring Company to meet ridership objectives.

The LVCVA estimated an initial $1.2 million outlay to TBC in fiscal year 2019, following by $15 million in 2020 and the final $32.47 million in 2021.

While the job is limited for now, TBC has said in the project could connect downtown, the Las Vegas Convention Center, the Las Vegas Boulevard Resort Corridor and McCarran International Airport.

This people mover will involve the construction of twin tunnels for one tunnel and vehicles, according to contract documents. The twin tunnels are anticipated to be less than a mile. There’ll be three stations for passenger loading and unloading and an elevator or escalator system for passenger access to every station.

The people mover, once complete is supposed to whisk people between stops at high speeds in modified electrical Tesla vehicles. The contract describes these vehicles. (Today, Tesla vehicles are not self driving, and instead have an innovative driver assistance system that handles certain tasks on highways such as lane steering and adaptive cruise control.) Before it opens to the public, the contract dictates that TBC test the system for three months.

Since Musk’s Boring Company lands one contract, security concerns have been raised on the design of another more ambitious Loop system from Washington D.C. to Baltimore.

Details of the 35.3-mile system, which emerged recently in a 505-page draft environmental assessment, shows a design that fails to meet several key national security standards. The system ignore the engineering practices seems to lack emergency exits and suggests passenger escape ladders that one fire safety scientist predicts & ldquo; the definition of insanity. ”

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