While attending CES in the affront to nature that is Las Vegas last week, I got to ride its shiniest transit system: The Vegas Loop, a dumb tunnel full of non-autonomous Teslas and AliExpress LED strips. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know quite how bad — or how short. See, the Vegas Loop serves a whopping two buildings that are across the street from one another, making it not much of a transit system at all. It’s a glorified crosswalk.
For CES Honda put me up in the Conrad Hotel, a part of the Resorts World complex, which sits directly across South Las Vegas Boulevard from the Las Vegas Convention Center — the site of CES. I cannot stress enough how close together these two buildings are.
Yet, for some reason, Resorts World and the LVCC are connected by the Vegas Loop, one of Elon Musk’s dumber (though far from the most evil) ideas. Traveling from Resorts World to the convention center’s West Station takes a full two minutes through the Loop, which I filmed for you in their entirety:
Riveting stuff, I know, but the video doesn’t show how sketchy the tunnel seemed. After purchasing the ticket, scanning a screenshot of the ticket a few feet away, and waiting for eight minutes in what was functionally a parking garage for a Tesla to actually show up and ferry me across the street, my personal Charon’s arrival was heralded by a cacophony of squeaks, rattles, and groans from the approaching Model Y. Former Jalop Adam Ismail and I both broke out laughing.
The ride itself was shockingly bumpy, weirdly variable in tunnel depth, and passed through areas that looked more like the backstage of a black box theater than the uneven-LED-strips-on-concrete aesthetic of the Boring Company’s tunnels. I did, however, find a single emergency exit within the tunnels — an unexpected but appreciated accommodation. All in all, from ticket purchase to arrival at the LVCC, I spent 10 minutes in Musk’s tunnel network.
Despite the incredible care and attention shown to my safety, I decided to make the day a comparison test. Rather than taking the Loop back to my hotel later on, I did something that many CES-goers found unconscionable: I walked back, even daring to cross the street.
The walk took me 11 whole minutes, just a single extra minute compared to the time I spent in the Vegas Loop rigamarole. My hair did end up a bit more windswept by the end of the return trip, but those were far from normal winds as my phone had been blasted by weather alerts about them all morning. I also should have worn a jacket, but that one is entirely on me. I keep forgetting that anywhere west of Colorado can be cold.
All in all, having compared the Vegas Loop side by side with its biggest competitor — a crosswalk — I’ve come to the conclusion that the Loop is even more pointless than I’d imagined. It’s truly a monument to Elon Musk’s personal wealth and deep loathing of anything that isn’t His, and it’s quite possibly the worst way to move people from one side of a street to the other. Even Las Vegas deserves better.
