Did you hear that Elon Musk dug a tunnel under the Las Vegas Convention Center?
I think it is pretty universally known by now that the "Las Vegas Loop" is impractical, poorly thought out, and generally an embarrassment to society and industry. I will spare an accounting of the history and future of the system, but I will give a bit of context for the unfamiliar reader. The Las Vegas Loop is a (supposed) mass-transit system built and operated by The Boring Company for the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Besides four (ish) stations in the Convention Center, it has been expanded to serve Resorts World as well. It will, according to plan, be expanded to as many as 93 stops throughout the Las Vegas metropolitan area, despite the mayor of Las Vegas calling it "impractical" and "unsafe and inaccessible." This odd contradiction comes about because The Boring Company is footing a very large portion of the construction cost, while much of the rest is coming from casinos and resorts, making it extremely inexpensive for regional government agencies.
In practice, the Loop consists of a set of mostly double-bore tunnels of small diameter, which are traversed by Tesla Model 3 and Tesla Model X vehicles manually driven by humans at up to 40 mph. They have more recently switched to Model Y, but the operations manual I have predates that change, so let's stick with the older models for consistency. Each vehicle seats up to four. The system is nominally a PRT, or personal rapid transit, as the drivers take you to the specific station you request. The tunnel to Resorts World is single bore, and can admit vehicles in only one direction. A simple signaling scheme serves to prevent vehicles meeting head-on in single tunnels. While Loop and Boring Company marketing focuses heavily on the single underground station, all other stations are above ground. In the current state, I think it is actually somewhat generous to call the Loop an underground system, as most maneuvers and operations occur at surface level. It is perhaps best thought of as a taxi system that makes use of underground connectors to bypass traffic. Future expansion plans involve significantly more tunnel length and more underground stations, which will probably cause the system overall to feel more like a below-surface transit system and less like an odd fleet of hotel courtesy cars.
I am not going to provide a general review of the system, because many others have, and you can probably already guess what I think of it. Instead, I want to focus on some aspects that have not been as heavily discussed in other reporting: detailed operational practices, and safety and communications technology.
We are fortunate that, as part of its fire safety permitting, the Loop has been required to file its operations manual with Clark County. Unfortunately, the newest revision I can find online is 2021's Revision 7, which predates the Resorts World station and may be out of date in other ways as well. Still, it appears to be substantially correct, and much of what I will discuss is based on Revision 7 of the manual alongside several trips I have taken in the system.
Interestingly, the operations manual refers to the system only as the "Campus-Wide People Mover" or CWPM. This term seems to date to the original solicitations by LVCVA, but is not used in marketing.