My in-car navigation once again delivered me to the wrong parking lot as I visited the Las Vegas Barrett-Jackson car-auction extravaganza at the end of June. Once I extracted myself from an employee-only lot I had no business being in, I drove myself to a completely different, yet still incorrect, parking lot ($10 all day!) within the growing, sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center complex. The LVCC now stretches across multiple buildings and multiple city blocks, many of which are split by surface streets full of active traffic. The parking lots are a maze of barriers and signs with arrows. There’s a monorail overhead. It’s not yet 9 a.m. and outside temps are already flirting with 100 degrees. There’s a lot going on. Inside the building, I look for the ticket kiosk where my credential is held, and instead find an information booth, where the attendant kindly informs me that I am about as far away from where I need to be as I possibly could be and still be in the LVCC complex. Because of course. I’m informed that I could walk there and be there in 15 minutes, which didn’t sound awesome in the heat.
“Or,” he told me, “you could take the Loop.”
My chariot awaits.
The Loop, I discovered, is an underground network of one-way tunnels that ferry dopes like me from the wrong parking lot to the correct one for free. (Minus tips. Vegas is a town built on tips.) There are three stations–one underground, where I entered, and two above-ground taxi stands–and a total of 1.7 miles of underground roadway. According to the website it cost $47 million to build the roads and the three stations, was built without disturbing traffic above ground, and took a year to construct and complete. It’s owned by the Boring Company, an Elon Musk joint, so it’s little wonder that instead of some anodyne tram, you are confronted by an armada of shiny new Teslas. Down the escalator you go and into a the front seat of a waiting Tesla (Model 3? Model Y? Who can tell), AC blowing ice-cold on this triple-digit morning. You are whisked through a tunnel and to your final destination. It is not an automated system–there is a driver. The speed limit in the tunnels (judging by the in-car navigation screen) is 40mph, and instead of a sweaty quarter-hour walk through the baking streets of the city, you’re at a taxi depot outside your destination in about three minutes. The company claims that, during SEMA 2021, they carried between 24,000 and 26,000 passengers a day. The morning I was there, there was no queue, and with designated representatives directing me to a car, seating was immediate.
There is a vaguely Disneyland vibe about the underground station, all brightly-colored walls changing color every few seconds, tunnels that snake out to who-knows-where, and shiny new machinery designed for your comfort and (presumably) enjoyment–all that was missing was the endless, snaking line to clamber aboard. considering the high ceilings, it wasn’t too echoey–conversation could be had at standard decibel levels in the station. It felt modern, rather than a science-fictiony far-flung future. The cars were driven by a human, not by remote control. (My offer to take the wheel from the driver was kindly but firmly rebuffed.) Driving through the tunnel itself had me recalling the uphill climb at Space Mountain (minus the incline), but instead of piped-in sound effects and lights shooting back behind my head to increase the sensation of speed, the tunnel was simply illuminated in a sort of greenish-aqua light. The walls were close enough that 35mph felt plenty quick as it was, without any effects. The ride between stations was quick, barely long enough to register: no muss, no fuss, and most importantly for a tightwad like me, no cash outlay. I enjoyed it a lot more than I would have enjoyed walking. And after my 8,500 steps around the Barrett-Jackson showroom that day, I was happy to sit in air-conditioned comfort, even for a moment, to transport me back to where I left my long-suffering Grand Caravan to bake in the unrelenting sun.
I don’t know if this is the future, frankly, but it made my present that much easier to endure.
