10 ms·

For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

81 points by docdeek 8y ago

ainiriand 8y ago
It is a bet. They need to prove that they are there to play the game like the rest of the competitors. If they fail for many different reasons a small budget increase is not a big deal. They are ready to pay the fines.
- lvh 8y ago
  If they really are footing the bill themselves, what is their incentive to understate price? Closing deals before the real price of the actually-shipped tunnel is known?
FLGMwt 8y ago
This is terrible. $25 for 12 minutes from one place in the loop to O'Hare CTA is $2.50 for 37 minutes (the $5 is if you start from O'Hare) This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. $1bn or whatever absurd cost it comes out to be is much better spent on improving transit for the actual public. Or you know, to stop shutting down schools. EDIT: typo
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50 Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. You can't build your way out of traffic. The only solutions are tolls or quotas. In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt. > transit for the actual public Cars going through this tunnel are cars off other roads. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  - chapium 8y ago
    The highway corridor from downtown to Ohare is one of the worst commutes in the country. Expanding mass transit is a good thing from this point of view.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    Every additional lane and rail is a good thing because it is a net increase in capacity. Even if it's an expensive road or rail it removes the traffic that considers it a good value from everywhere else. >Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out. Crappy infrastructure increases the cost of geographic distance and that's bad for everyone. > You can't build your way out of traffic Reducing traffic isn't the point. The point is getting more people and goods to and from where they need to be. You can slap a $100 price on a subway ticket or a $100 toll on the highway if you want to reduce traffic. That doesn't help anybody except the people rich enough to regularly pay it. > The only solutions are tolls or quotas. Which themselves have a bunch of negative side effects because you're basically forcing that traffic onto other roads or other forms of transit and many trips will be forgone in the process. You can't create capacity out of thin air by manipulating the cost (money, time or some other metric) of the different transit options. You can only create the illusion of capacity by forcing traffic elsewhere. >In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt. Or a sign that your prices are so high that other options are still less worse by comparison.
    - bryanlarsen 8y ago
      "Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out." It's economic activity that has a huge amount of negative externalities and infrastructure cost. So if the economic activity generated has a value less than that of the externalities and costs, society is worse off. So we need a way of limiting demand so that any trip whose benefit is less than its infrastructure and negative externalities doesn't happen. Currently we mostly do this by making trips really slow and annoying during rush hour. There's obviously a better way but tolls are political suicide.
- thomasdelteil 8y ago
  The project will be financed by the Boring company, not by the city. The Heathrow express in London work on a similar concept, it takes 15 min to go to Heathrow compared to 1h with the tube, and they charge ~10 times the price of a regular tube ticket.
  - jcomis 8y ago
    And Heathrow express is nearly empty all the time...
    - sriram_sun 8y ago
      Well for clueless tourists like me, I sucked it up and paid up the 50 pounds or whatever it costs for the roundtrip to the airport.
    - SubiculumCode 8y ago
      Well I took it because I was silly enough to buy a flight with a transfer between London City and Heathrow. The first time I took a cab...238 pounds. Kill me. Next time I took the tubes, and was glad to get on the cushy express after the crowded London tubes...and I had to make my flight so another hour would not have worked for me.
  - handelaar 8y ago
    Which is why the Heathrow Connect (as was, it's about to become part of the new Crossrail line and has changed name and operator in the past 2 months I gather), which costs about £11 and runs on the exact same line but stops on the way and takes about 25 mins, has eaten its lunch.
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  > This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. This is not true for everyone though. Business travelers take cabs between the loop and o'hare. So, $25 is actually faster and cheaper -- so it's a great use of their money! Even if it was more expensive than a cab, most business travelers would happily spend a little more of someone else's (company) money to get there faster.
  - ma2rten 8y ago
    It would also benefit everyone else because there would be less congestion.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      The severity of congestion at peak demand is governed by what people will tolerate. The duration of congestion is what changes when you change capacity. Even if you doubled the amount of every form of transit overnight the severity of congestion at peak would quickly reach equilibrium at about the same level as before. Peak demand for transit (road, rail, etc) will always exceed available supply as long as the population of people moving at peak is larger than the instantaneous capacity of your transit system. Adding more capacity will always help the overall situation because it shortens the length of the time the that demand is higher than supply. It's like how course registration at universities tends to saturate the systems involved. Peak demands will always slow things to a crawl but additional capacity is beneficial because it shortens the time the service is degraded. Adding transit of any type doesn't make rush "hour" suck less, it makes rush hour shorter. edit:rearranged to more clearly make my point
      - gowld 8y ago
        Your comment is more correct if you remove the "No." "Less congestion" can mean either "shorter span of time" as you further explained, or "less congested at some time point". The former should be what readers jump to, because "congestion" is nearly binary at a moment in time -- either traffic is flowing smoothly (1-2x optimal travel time) or it is clogged (>2x travel time). "Slightly clogged" isn't really an important case for travelers.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  I was intrigued to learn that Musk wanted to build what is essentially a new take on the subway, but after reading this article am totally against the proposal. This is looking far more like an option for rich people to get away from the poors. Short of private helicopters, this is one of the few cities where the public transit option is faster than taking a limo. Musk wants to correct that imbalance by creating a faster option for those who can afford it. Cities should not support such things. I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen, just that the project shouldn't be given any special treatment, indemnification, or tax breaks. And what do we think will happen to the public option when all the influential people start using the premium service? Notice also that none of the people in the renderings has any luggage. They aren't even wearing coats. To which magical airport are they headed?
  - koverda 8y ago
    I strongly disagree with you. If this project manages to reduce the cost per mile of building public transportation, the public as a whole will benefit greatly in the years to come. I'm not rich and I would love there to be many more subway lines built out in our cities. It's the Tesla Roadster of public transit: an expensive proving ground for a technology with a mass-market demand. I'd rather the government give breaks to something with at least a sliver of hope of helping the common person - rather than tax cuts to wealthy, etc.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      > If this project manages to reduce the cost per mile of building public transportation, the public as a whole will benefit greatly in the years to come. I'm not rich and I would love there to be many more subway lines built out in our cities. The purported cost savings are primarily coming from making the system as incompatible as possible with traditional subways (i.e., the proposed tunnels are too small to be refit to accept standard loading gauge tunnels). Beyond that, the entire Loop concept boils down to a really low capacity system (subways generally are capable of moving 20,000 people an hour, all you really need is the rolling stock and traction power to make that happen; this system is talking about 2,000 people an hour with no room for upgrades without boring more tunnels--on par with a single highway lane). While the cost per mile might be reduced, the capacity is so low that the actual cost of the full system would be much higher.
- matt4077 8y ago
  Not to interfere with your cynicism, but the important information here is that Boring Co. is funding the construction itself. It's not public money being spent, and schools would be unlikely to receive any extra funding without this project. And, of course, this project is far more important as a real-world proof-of-concept for the technology than it is for its expected use for travelers. Reducing tunnel costs by 95%(!) would quite obviously result in dramatic quality-of-life improvements.
  - microtherion 8y ago
    > Not to interfere with your cynicism, but the important information here is that Boring Co. is funding the construction itself. It's not public money being spent It's not uncommon for projects to start out that way, and then magically, public money starts appearing anyway. If this really remains a privately financed project (financed out of the deep pockets of Musk's companies, and completed on time due to Musk's uncannily accurate forecasts), then more power to them!
    - selectodude 8y ago
      Chicago doesn't have any money to spend on the project. It's not like there's a kitty and they can pull another few hundred million out to finish the project.
  - fishtank 8y ago
    It's a fine idea that public money will not be spent, but you don't have to look very far to find an example of the city and a development partner breaking the same promise (Obama Presidential Center: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kamin/ct-met-obama-center-transportation-kamin-0224-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kamin/ct-met-o...).
- koverda 8y ago
  This is short sighted. Do you think technology improvements in building out public transit won't make it out to the mass-market which addresses the needs of the general public?
- l33r 8y ago
  Simply because you're not the clientele, doesn't mean this is a bad idea. The CTA Blue Line is uncomfortable during rush hour traffic while carrying your luggage. This is probably geared towards tourist/Loop workers who would have paid for a $50-80 Uber/Taxi ride anyways.
- nelzya 8y ago
  In reality Blue Line (CTA) is much slower, you have to plan for an hour. It's almost impossible to use with big suitcases, it's the only line that's still using the old cars with dividers in the middle of the door. The airport express trains exist in all major European cities where they replace not public transportation but taxi and limousines providing convenient way to travel.
  - distances 8y ago
    > The airport express trains exist in all major European cities where they replace not public transportation but taxi and limousines providing convenient way to travel. Well, not all for sure. Many cities just have their normal city train service extended to the airport. I'd guess the express airport trains are common in countries with privatized rail transport, as that is often one of the most lucrative lines.
  - kevinmchugh 8y ago
    The 2400 series was retired in 2015. Does the 2600 series have the dividers?
- twistedpair 8y ago
  How much is it worth not to not miss your flight that you spend hundreds of dollars to book?
  - distances 8y ago
    The usual way is to just reserve enough time to get to the airport, no?
    - njarboe 8y ago
      That is true. So a reliable mode of transportation to the airport that is always 15 min saves people more that 20min than an unreliable system that averages 35min but sometime takes say 60 min. To use the unreliable system you have to always plan for the delayed time. Most people don't want to spend even more time sitting around airports.
- martinald 8y ago
  Assume it does cost $1bn, then that's 40million rides to break even (obviously a lot of other costs I'm ignoring here). If only 5% of people using OHare (80million) take it, then that's 10 years before it is paid back. Considering this infrastructure should last 50 years minimum, it could well be profit generating or at least revenue neutral.
  - Joeri 8y ago
    Musk always runs over budget by a multiple, it’s how he rolls. Maintenance is probably three times or more the initial outlay over a 10 year period. So, it probably won’t be profitable or revenue neutral. But it shouldn’t be. A brand new transportation mode is going to run at a loss until people figure out how to deploy it at scale. It would be weird for it to be profitable from day one.
    - nkoren 8y ago
      Maintenance for a tunnel over ten years is not three times the initial outlay.
    - spectrum1234 8y ago
      Budget or timeline?
  - selectodude 8y ago
    I bet fewer than 50 percent of people who go to O'Hare even leave the airport.
- gok 8y ago
  It's 37 minutes if you happen to be in the Loop and time the train perfectly. Oh, then it's another 10 minute walk to the gates. Oh and almost none of the Blue Line stations are accessible, so hope you're not in a wheelchair or carrying big bags (who takes luggage to the airport, after all?) Speaking of...where exactly do your bags go on crowded CTA car? I keep hearing this argument about the Blue Line from people who really don't sound like they've tried it. I'm happy we have it as an option but it's really not ideal. A 12 minute express with short headway and space for bags would be a total game changer. Everyone within ~25 minutes of the Loop would now be able to take transit to/from the airport in 40 minutes, not just people who happen to be going to/from the central business district. And the city isn't paying any of that $1B, they're really just giving Boring Company permission to try to pay for it on their own. It's not money that would otherwise be spent on CPS. I'm not completely convinced this is really the right solution. My personal pick would be using the Metra NCS route to run an express train and then moving the the O'Hare Transfer Station to be actually inside the airport, which would also make transfers with Amtrak and other Metra services easy. But that too would cost a lot more than $1B, and no one's jumping up to do it.
  - lvh 8y ago
    You are comparing the current state of the Blue Line against a proposed system, though. The argument is that you could improve the Blue Line significantly for $1B, and also that there's good reason to believe it's not actually $1B. (Doesn't have to be the Blue Line! Metra at Jeff Park or whatever with a track to OHare makes a ton of sense too.)
    - gok 8y ago
      If we were going spend a cool billion to improve the Blue Line, I'd spend it on anything but making the airport experience better. Make the stations ADA-compliant. Use the extra space on the Congress branch for triple- or quadruple- tracking. Upgrade the power system. But again, this is $1B not coming out of the CTA budget, it's $1B Elon Musk has burning a hole in his pocket.
      - 8y ago
- throwaway43244 8y ago
  In comparison, it costs about ~$8-12 for the 80km between Tokyo and NRT (~1.5 hour ride).
- hinkley 8y ago
  Tokyo built a toll road under the Bay they said saved an hour off your commute if I’m remembering. Opened about 20 years ago and they are charging around $21 each way if you use the electronic toll system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_Aqua-Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_Aqua-Line
- moorhosj 8y ago
  Based on your logic, people wouldn't be taking taxis/uber to the airport. It is both more expensive and takes longer, but people do it all of the time for the comfort and the quiet (which allows them to work). This is being built for business travelers. Many people fly in and out of Chicago on a Monday-Thursday schedule, they will use this train. All of those people will now be in a separate tunnel and everyone else will have more room on the highway and Blue Line. Sounds like a win to me.
- lucdurette 8y ago
  I agree This is a typical Chicago/Illinois gimmick again The state and the city is so corrupted, another attempt to distract from the other bull-shit they are trying to pull. The word is, only the mayor and the governor are interested in an express train. Everyone else is happy with the blue-line. Chicago is so parallized trying to make any decsion. I am ready to bet, the deal will fall aprat during the negocaitions
- zajd 8y ago
  Pretty awesome living in an oligarchy, no?
- prof1le 8y ago
  A quick google search shows that Chicago is already spending .5bn on improving the blue line (https://www.transitchicago.com/yournewblue/ https://www.transitchicago.com/yournewblue/). Why would they approve this project if they didn't feel this was sufficient? Only thing I can think is that the demand is going to be strong or they're thinking it's a steal with the contractor buying it out and are willing to experiment. I'm all for new transit solutions and I'm really interested in this one, picking this route in particular though is what's odd to me...
- psychometry 8y ago
  It's well worth it for people who just need to get to the loop. It would be better if the CTA added an express line, but there isn't room on the above-ground tracks.
- rory096 8y ago
  > This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. This is addressed in the RFQ, which includes a model of time value split into four markets: Business (HH income under $100K) $33 Business (HH income $100K and over) $92 Non-Business (HH income under $100K) $25 Non-Business (HH income $100K and over) $55 It includes this reasoning: >In the Project work, the values were adapted from a previous study on express service which found that the value of time for business trips is higher than those of non-business trips to O’Hare. In many recent studies, the value of time for long distance trips and work trips has been shown to be higher than VOT for everyday short trips. Trips to/from an airport could be considered as one leg of long distance travel. Also, the total cost of air travel is much higher than the cost of everyday travel; therefore, travelers may be willing to pay more to reduce the risk of missing their flight. Willingness to pay a high fee for airport trips is reported in other studies, for example, for business trips to airports, Harvey reports $42/hour, Furuichi & Koppelman report $73/hour and Hess and Polak report a value in the range of $93-155/hour. The value of time also varies across regions with large metropolitan areas such as New York/New Jersey having higher values than smaller cities. In the cited 2016 Airport Survey, taxi rides are still in the double digits for non-business low-income residents and drop-offs are as popular as rail (tripling the amount of time to account for, though I don't think they include this). In their reweighting of the survey (because "the Blue Line survey percentage was thought to be high due to over-represented CTA Blue Line use), the plurality took taxis in every category. http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/OES-RFQ-Complete-ADD2-Clean-20180119-2.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
- Turing_Machine 8y ago
  > This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. Many of whom get reimbursed by their employers for transportation costs, don't forget. $20 for an airport run is going to look damned cheap to the people who process the expense accounts. It will never be questioned.
igravious 8y ago
I followed the Chicago Tribune link because I wanted to read the article that provided this quote, “can build tunnels at least 14 times faster than previous efforts, which a company official acknowledged the company must still prove,” … and I got this! http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/chicagotribune.com/ http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/chicagotribune.com/ "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." edit: I'm not complaining and I'm not trying to derail (hah, see what I did there) the topic. I was expressing my surprise, first time this has happened to me.
- bonestamp2 8y ago
  They probably need to track people to make the advertising revenue they're counting on and they probably can't do that and serve Europe under GDPR regulations.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 8y ago
  You could make a comment complaining about GDPR, or you could just go here to read the article (without the privacy-invading bloat JS) here: http://archive.is/0ZmZ0 http://archive.is/0ZmZ0
  - dymk 8y ago
    Or he could do both. It’s a pain to click on a link and be redirected like that.
    - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
      I wish I was so lucky as to live somewhere where sites that violate my rights blocked me instead, as the case happens. Note that while it may take a couple extra seconds to find a workaround, the archive.is site respects the user's rights, so in the end, the user benefits from this process. I see GDPR-blocked comments are kinda like I see "paywall" comments: After a while, people noting a given site is blocked is just off-topic. It doesn't add anything people won't very quickly find out for themselves. I usually downvote them so they don't clutter up the main discussion. Meanwhile, a comment providing a way around the paywall, generally will get an upvote, because they're saving everyone else time, so we can all get to the real discussion.
bitslayer 8y ago
The design is bullshit. People would have their legs crushed as the car descends, and then they would fall into the hole and die.
- ben_w 8y ago
  People are very good at not being crushed by moving things or falling into massive holes. I myself fail to be crushed or fall into a massive hole literally every time I use an elevator. Or go past a building site. Or…
  - ceejayoz 8y ago
    The hole illustrated in the Tesla video is horrendously unsafe (almost like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster), but I'm 100% certain the final product won't look anything like that.
    - nickik 8y ago
      Yeah because this short concept video surly is the final version.
  - kevinmchugh 8y ago
    People die pretty regularly when elevator doors open before the car has arrived. Elevator doors that don't open unless a car is there are a major safety feature.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      “regularly” ⇏ (P(accident|all elevator use)»0)
      - kevinmchugh 8y ago
        by regularly I mean it's multiple stories every week on the industry podcast: http://www.elevatorradioshow.com/blog/2018/6/13/elevator-radio-show-507-week-6132018 http://www.elevatorradioshow.com/blog/2018/6/13/elevator-rad...
beat 8y ago
I wonder about vulnerability to terrorism here? How easily could a sufficient bomb disable the entire system for weeks or months? I started thinking this way while standing in line to go through security at JFK. There were about a thousand people milling about, and we hadn't gone through any sort of substantial security yet. And I was thinking that a bomb there could kill more people than taking out an airplane. Yay security theater.
- powvans 8y ago
  Terrorism is just as much, if not more, about theater than the security that protects against it. Airplanes have been targeted specifically because of the spectacular nature of such an event.
- dpcx 8y ago
  Probably no different than any other tunnel system anywhere in the world.
- jerf 8y ago
  It isn't the airports being protected, it is the airplanes specifically, because airplanes are extremely powerful guided missiles in the wrong hands. Prior to 9/11 even a hijacked plane was still ultimately viewed as an inconvenience at a civilizational level, but post-9/11 it is now recognized that planes are non-trivial weapons of war, the most powerful mobile thing that a civilian can hope to lay hands on. We can quibble with the exact steps taken to protect them, and the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of the steps, but ultimately, it isn't really irrational to protect them. Especially if you are any sort of believer in arms control, like, even a little bit; if you think civilians shouldn't be in possession of RPGs, and they shouldn't be easy to get, then you should be OK with some security around planes, because they are way more dangerous than an RPG. It shouldn't be possible to just stroll into an airport and casually pick up a 777.
bonestamp2 8y ago
> In Toronto, where the subway system doesn’t reach the international airport, a brand-new airport express line has fallen seriously short of ridership expectations, even with its one-way fare of $12.35 The reason this is failing is because of awareness. I travel to Toronto for work 4-5 times every year (for the past 12 years). I heard about this extension being approved a couple years ago and I've never seen a sign for it in Pearson (there must be some somewhere). I've also asked people who live in Toronto whatever happened to this project and nobody even knows what I'm talking about. Meanwhile, I learn from this article that it's actually up and running and they not only consider it a failure but they're using it to say other transit systems won't work. A Musk built project won't fail on awareness like this project has.
- Fsp2WFuH 8y ago
  Yes, it will fail for other reasons.
  - marter 8y ago
    Which are?
- perardi 8y ago
  Any good analysis out there as to why the UP Express hasn't done so well? I took it just this week, and it's certainly better than the bus they have to shuttle from the end of the subway line to Pearson.
  - RedCrowbar 8y ago
    I don't think it's fair to call UP Express a failure yet. It certainly had a bumpy start, but the ridership seems to have been improving recently [1] [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/how-toronto-turned-an-airport-rail-failure-into-a-commuter-victory/551012/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/how-toronto-t...
- king_magic 8y ago
  I can’t understand that (it being considered a failure) - the UP is super super convienent when I fly into TO.
ComputerGuru 8y ago
I can’t believe California pays 1 billion dollars a mile just to drill out tunnels. I think the going rate in Europe (not even China!) is something like $40M/km or fifteen times less than what California is paying per mile.
- bluedino 8y ago
  Even in one of the largest cities in the country? Can you dig a tunnel in London, Berlin, or Paris for that price?
  - fredley 8y ago
    You can for a lot less than $1bn/mile. Crossrail was ~£200m/mile. Even the Channel Tunnel, under the sea, was £300m/mile. Those prices are all inclusive, so that includes building stations, rolling stock etc. Also unlike old cities, there are no archeological issues when digging under LA.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - etiennemarcel 8y ago
    This article is interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... "But while the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile, the Line 14 extension is on track to cost $450 million a mile." (that price includes stations, emergency exits, rails and systems...)
  - notatoad 8y ago
    $250mm per km in paris and berlin. $145mm per km in Sao Paolo. $130mm per km in singapore. $58mm per km in madrid. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/1-billion-doesnt-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore/456/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/1-billion-doe... $55mm per mile ($34mm per km) would be pretty cheap, but closer to what the rest of the world pays for subways than what NYC does. accounting for musk-math, expect it to cost more like $70mm per km, which would put it on the low end but not the bottom of international subway construction costs.
danso 8y ago
> The Musk “Loop” would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership. Debatable too are the merits of this particular project for airport-bound Chicagoans—the Blue Line works pretty darn well... I'm much more of a New Yorker, but I'll admit that Chicago transit around the Loop is pretty damn good. It may not run 24/7 (IIRC) but going from downtown to either of the airports is a real pleasure compared to NYC.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  The Blue Line and Red Line do run 24 hours (admittedly with like up to 30 minute headways in the middle of the night). The other lines mostly have parallel night bus routes.
debt 8y ago
I disagree. His original vision for these types of projects was an elevator from surface to tunnel for a vehicle(likely a Tesla). So with that in mind as kind of a barebones version, even if he was to build a 17 mile tunnel that was effectively a walkway I would consider that a success. But a 17 mile tunnel that can accommodate autonomous Tesla 3, just as an extreme example, that’d also be a success. The autonomy would work perfectly within the tunnel, it wouldn’t need a track. If there was elevators on both ends, then multiple Tesla’s could go in and be queued at the destination end for the elevator back to surface. It wouldn’t be 12 minutes but it’d still be way faster than rush hour. The electric skate version of the tunnel I think is the idealized version.
- untog 8y ago
  > But a 17 mile tunnel that can accommodate autonomous Tesla 3, just as an extreme example, that’d also be a success. Sounds like it would scale horribly compared to actual mass transit, though. The amount of space taken up per passenger would be huge if you use cars.
skybrian 8y ago
From the article: "The Musk 'Loop' would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership." So that's good, right? This looks like a situation where a high-capacity line isn't actually needed and one that's lower-capacity but cheaper to build line would save money. So maybe it's appropriate use of a technology that doesn't do what mass transit does?
- allannienhuis 8y ago
  isn't it saying that the loop capacity is 60% of the _current ridership_ of the blue-line? not 60% of an unused maximum. Seems to me the 'loop' would be criticised for being constantly busy & over capacity.
  - njarboe 8y ago
    Hopefully they can just increase the price to keep it at just capacity. As long as they don't charge a super high price to maximize profits and the train is mostly empty (like I see with many toll roads), I don't see why using price to keep it just full is a problem. Use the extra profits to build another tunnel.
  - gok 8y ago
    The "ridership of the entire Blue Line" number isn't particularly interesting here; very few of those people are going to the airport. A more interesting number is entries at the O'Hare Blue Line station, which is about 10,500 per weekday, or 440 per hour. So this design could accommodate something like a 5x increase in transit-to-ORD.
apeace 8y ago
The idea of having Boring Company pay for the construction and then reap the profits strikes me as a really great idea. When the government pays for construction, the contractors don't have a strong incentive to actually finish the project. They'll keep getting paid no matter how long it runs over or how over-budget it goes. But in this situation, Boring Co won't make any money unless and until they get it up and running. I know nothing about this. Has this been done successfully before? What are the potential downsides I'm not thinking of?
- nickik 8y ago
  > The idea of having Boring Company pay for the construction and then reap the profits strikes me as a really great idea. We could do what all normal business does for infrastructure. Revolutionary idea. But it is a good idea. Often private mass transportation is illegal. This seems to be a hybrid model, I don't quite understand what this project entails in terms of obligations by both sides. The downsides might be that they go bankrupt with a half finished tunnel and then the government has to either put in money to finish the project or start a new project.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - ComradeTaco 8y ago
    There is also the possibility that a poorly engineered or rushed tunnel could destablize the foundations of structures above.
    - nickik 8y ago
      Extremly unlikely with such a small tunnel that goes fairly deep under the earth.
- sschueller 8y ago
  It is the opposite of a good idea in my opinion. The reason you don't want to do that is because the private enterprise wants to maximize its profits. There is nothing wrong with that but in order to do so they will cut corners where ever possible and do the absolute minimum for upkeep. Yes, this happens with poorly managed and financed public projects as well but public infrastructure can and sometimes must operate at a loss. In fact a lot of public infrastructure does not pay for itself and is subsidized by tax dollars.
sgillen 8y ago
I really think the high costs of making rail in the US is a logistical problem, not a technology one.
rory096 8y ago
This article has several errors: >The Musk “Loop” would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership. The RFQ[0] makes clear that the intent is to compete against taxi and ride-share services, which comprise 52% of trips in the 2015 estimate, to CTA Rail's 20%[1]. The article says "the Blue Line works pretty darn well", but revealed preferences tell a different story. I can't find what O'Hare Xpress LLC (the other finalist) proposed, but the RFP[2] required respondents to specify "maximum passenger capacity: (i) per 15 minutes; and (ii) per hour". The JFK AirTrain was designed for 34,000 riders per day.[3] >Most transit moves horizontally, some moves vertically; the concept for the “Chicago Express Loop” is to do both. The tunnel will terminate at Block 37, where Chicago already has an unused, very expensive, giant subway station. This concept doesn't include elevators, as described so far. > The writer and transportation researcher Alon Levy compiled the grim per-mile pricing of recent tunnel projects for CityLab in January, shown below. This table gives a sense of how extraordinary Musk’s project would be on a cost basis—and how improbable. This cherry-picks a US price chart from an article[4] that's entirely about how tunneling is inordinately expensive in the United States compared to the rest of the world and refutes the idea that labor is the main cause. The cited article even has a pull-quote that says "There’s no reason why building subways and light rail in sprawling cities should be as expensive as it is." >If the Boring Company’s cost projection of $1 billion is anywhere near accurate, that pencils out to $55.5 million per mile—far and away, the cheapest construction cost for any subterranean transit line in the U.S. That should be $27.8 million per mile ($17.3m per km), since you'll presumably want it to go in both directions. This is low even compared to European transit,[5] but those tunnels are 2-3x the diameter. Really, this project is a Loop mostly in name, diameter and rolling stock — it doesn't approach the ambitious concept of operations (elevators, dynamic routing, and car access) that is planned for Maryland and LA. That should alleviate a substantial part of the technical risk, leaving it mostly as a financial risk for investors. Since (like most infrastructure) tunneling mostly consists of fixed costs, the most likely failure mode is not reaching completion at all. Once it's complete it's likely to be cash flow positive even if it has a poor or negative return on investment, so there's little incentive to shut it down. (This was echoed by Musk in the press conference.) [0] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/OES-RFQ-Complete-ADD2-Clean-20180119-2.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/... [1] Taxi/Uber: 5,164, CTA Rail: 2,011, Total: 9,956. n.b. These ridership estimates are for daily one-way trips, with total daily trips being twice those in the table. https://i.imgur.com/naVUjnA.png https://i.imgur.com/naVUjnA.png [2] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/OES-RFP-Addendum-3-20180501.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/... [3] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jfk-airtrain-jfk-2000/ https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jfk-airtrain-jfk-2000/ [4] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex... [5] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-subway-construction-costs-revised/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-su...
cameldrv 8y ago
If I were the mayor of Chicago, I'd take that money and spend it at the airport itself. This line shaves 25 minutes off the travel time for a fairly small subset of people. The gains to be made at the airport are far greater. I get there 25 minutes faster, only to spend the next hour screwing around at the airport. If we: 1. Staffed security such that there was never a line, 2. Staffed the ticket counter such that there was never a line, 3. Installed double ended jet bridges so that we could load and unload the plane twice as fast, 4. Put moving walkways everywhere, 5. Improved staffing and efficiency of baggage handling, such that you could drop your bag 20 minutes before the flight and have it get on the plane, We could shave 30 minutes off the airport experience, for every user of the airport, not just the ones that happen to be coming from downtown.
- s1300045 8y ago
  This is supposedly fully funded by the Boring Company. No tax money will be put in the project. At least that's what they are saying. The $8.5 billion O’Hare Airport expansion project is approved and underway, and it is also funded by the airlines via issuing bonds. Supposedly, no tax money will be involved either. Block 37 is also designed to serve as a downtown "terminal". Passengers will go through security and check in luggages before they board the trains. I don't know the regulations, but installing double ended jet bridges doesn't sound that easy to me. It's probably something FAA has to approve. Staffing issues at the ticket counter and security is also outside of the mayor's jurisdiction. It's decided by the airlines themselves, TSA, and the organization that runs the O'hare airport.
pasiaj 8y ago
It would not be a miracle. The new 13.5 kilometer subway section in Helsinki cost 88M€ per kilometer, corresponding to $165 per mile.

81 points by docdeek 8y ago

It is a bet. They need to prove that they are there to play the game like the rest of the competitors. If they fail for many different reasons a small budget increase is not a big deal. They are ready to pay the fines.

lvh 8y ago
If they really are footing the bill themselves, what is their incentive to understate price? Closing deals before the real price of the actually-shipped tunnel is known?

FLGMwt 8y ago

This is terrible. $25 for 12 minutes from one place in the loop to O'Hare CTA is $2.50 for 37 minutes (the $5 is if you start from O'Hare) This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. $1bn or whatever absurd cost it comes out to be is much better spent on improving transit for the actual public. Or you know, to stop shutting down schools. EDIT: typo

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50 Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. You can't build your way out of traffic. The only solutions are tolls or quotas. In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt. > transit for the actual public Cars going through this tunnel are cars off other roads. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
- chapium 8y ago
  The highway corridor from downtown to Ohare is one of the worst commutes in the country. Expanding mass transit is a good thing from this point of view.
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  Every additional lane and rail is a good thing because it is a net increase in capacity. Even if it's an expensive road or rail it removes the traffic that considers it a good value from everywhere else. >Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out. Crappy infrastructure increases the cost of geographic distance and that's bad for everyone. > You can't build your way out of traffic Reducing traffic isn't the point. The point is getting more people and goods to and from where they need to be. You can slap a $100 price on a subway ticket or a $100 toll on the highway if you want to reduce traffic. That doesn't help anybody except the people rich enough to regularly pay it. > The only solutions are tolls or quotas. Which themselves have a bunch of negative side effects because you're basically forcing that traffic onto other roads or other forms of transit and many trips will be forgone in the process. You can't create capacity out of thin air by manipulating the cost (money, time or some other metric) of the different transit options. You can only create the illusion of capacity by forcing traffic elsewhere. >In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt. Or a sign that your prices are so high that other options are still less worse by comparison.
  - bryanlarsen 8y ago
    "Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out." It's economic activity that has a huge amount of negative externalities and infrastructure cost. So if the economic activity generated has a value less than that of the externalities and costs, society is worse off. So we need a way of limiting demand so that any trip whose benefit is less than its infrastructure and negative externalities doesn't happen. Currently we mostly do this by making trips really slow and annoying during rush hour. There's obviously a better way but tolls are political suicide.
thomasdelteil 8y ago
The project will be financed by the Boring company, not by the city. The Heathrow express in London work on a similar concept, it takes 15 min to go to Heathrow compared to 1h with the tube, and they charge ~10 times the price of a regular tube ticket.
- jcomis 8y ago
  And Heathrow express is nearly empty all the time...
  - sriram_sun 8y ago
    Well for clueless tourists like me, I sucked it up and paid up the 50 pounds or whatever it costs for the roundtrip to the airport.
  - SubiculumCode 8y ago
    Well I took it because I was silly enough to buy a flight with a transfer between London City and Heathrow. The first time I took a cab...238 pounds. Kill me. Next time I took the tubes, and was glad to get on the cushy express after the crowded London tubes...and I had to make my flight so another hour would not have worked for me.
- handelaar 8y ago
  Which is why the Heathrow Connect (as was, it's about to become part of the new Crossrail line and has changed name and operator in the past 2 months I gather), which costs about £11 and runs on the exact same line but stops on the way and takes about 25 mins, has eaten its lunch.
bonestamp2 8y ago
> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. This is not true for everyone though. Business travelers take cabs between the loop and o'hare. So, $25 is actually faster and cheaper -- so it's a great use of their money! Even if it was more expensive than a cab, most business travelers would happily spend a little more of someone else's (company) money to get there faster.
- ma2rten 8y ago
  It would also benefit everyone else because there would be less congestion.
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    The severity of congestion at peak demand is governed by what people will tolerate. The duration of congestion is what changes when you change capacity. Even if you doubled the amount of every form of transit overnight the severity of congestion at peak would quickly reach equilibrium at about the same level as before. Peak demand for transit (road, rail, etc) will always exceed available supply as long as the population of people moving at peak is larger than the instantaneous capacity of your transit system. Adding more capacity will always help the overall situation because it shortens the length of the time the that demand is higher than supply. It's like how course registration at universities tends to saturate the systems involved. Peak demands will always slow things to a crawl but additional capacity is beneficial because it shortens the time the service is degraded. Adding transit of any type doesn't make rush "hour" suck less, it makes rush hour shorter. edit:rearranged to more clearly make my point
    - gowld 8y ago
      Your comment is more correct if you remove the "No." "Less congestion" can mean either "shorter span of time" as you further explained, or "less congested at some time point". The former should be what readers jump to, because "congestion" is nearly binary at a moment in time -- either traffic is flowing smoothly (1-2x optimal travel time) or it is clogged (>2x travel time). "Slightly clogged" isn't really an important case for travelers.
sandworm101 8y ago
I was intrigued to learn that Musk wanted to build what is essentially a new take on the subway, but after reading this article am totally against the proposal. This is looking far more like an option for rich people to get away from the poors. Short of private helicopters, this is one of the few cities where the public transit option is faster than taking a limo. Musk wants to correct that imbalance by creating a faster option for those who can afford it. Cities should not support such things. I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen, just that the project shouldn't be given any special treatment, indemnification, or tax breaks. And what do we think will happen to the public option when all the influential people start using the premium service? Notice also that none of the people in the renderings has any luggage. They aren't even wearing coats. To which magical airport are they headed?
- koverda 8y ago
  I strongly disagree with you. If this project manages to reduce the cost per mile of building public transportation, the public as a whole will benefit greatly in the years to come. I'm not rich and I would love there to be many more subway lines built out in our cities. It's the Tesla Roadster of public transit: an expensive proving ground for a technology with a mass-market demand. I'd rather the government give breaks to something with at least a sliver of hope of helping the common person - rather than tax cuts to wealthy, etc.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    > If this project manages to reduce the cost per mile of building public transportation, the public as a whole will benefit greatly in the years to come. I'm not rich and I would love there to be many more subway lines built out in our cities. The purported cost savings are primarily coming from making the system as incompatible as possible with traditional subways (i.e., the proposed tunnels are too small to be refit to accept standard loading gauge tunnels). Beyond that, the entire Loop concept boils down to a really low capacity system (subways generally are capable of moving 20,000 people an hour, all you really need is the rolling stock and traction power to make that happen; this system is talking about 2,000 people an hour with no room for upgrades without boring more tunnels--on par with a single highway lane). While the cost per mile might be reduced, the capacity is so low that the actual cost of the full system would be much higher.
matt4077 8y ago
Not to interfere with your cynicism, but the important information here is that Boring Co. is funding the construction itself. It's not public money being spent, and schools would be unlikely to receive any extra funding without this project. And, of course, this project is far more important as a real-world proof-of-concept for the technology than it is for its expected use for travelers. Reducing tunnel costs by 95%(!) would quite obviously result in dramatic quality-of-life improvements.
- microtherion 8y ago
  > Not to interfere with your cynicism, but the important information here is that Boring Co. is funding the construction itself. It's not public money being spent It's not uncommon for projects to start out that way, and then magically, public money starts appearing anyway. If this really remains a privately financed project (financed out of the deep pockets of Musk's companies, and completed on time due to Musk's uncannily accurate forecasts), then more power to them!
  - selectodude 8y ago
    Chicago doesn't have any money to spend on the project. It's not like there's a kitty and they can pull another few hundred million out to finish the project.
- fishtank 8y ago
  It's a fine idea that public money will not be spent, but you don't have to look very far to find an example of the city and a development partner breaking the same promise (Obama Presidential Center: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kamin/ct-met-obama-center-transportation-kamin-0224-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/kamin/ct-met-o...).
koverda 8y ago
This is short sighted. Do you think technology improvements in building out public transit won't make it out to the mass-market which addresses the needs of the general public?
l33r 8y ago
Simply because you're not the clientele, doesn't mean this is a bad idea. The CTA Blue Line is uncomfortable during rush hour traffic while carrying your luggage. This is probably geared towards tourist/Loop workers who would have paid for a $50-80 Uber/Taxi ride anyways.
nelzya 8y ago
In reality Blue Line (CTA) is much slower, you have to plan for an hour. It's almost impossible to use with big suitcases, it's the only line that's still using the old cars with dividers in the middle of the door. The airport express trains exist in all major European cities where they replace not public transportation but taxi and limousines providing convenient way to travel.
- distances 8y ago
  > The airport express trains exist in all major European cities where they replace not public transportation but taxi and limousines providing convenient way to travel. Well, not all for sure. Many cities just have their normal city train service extended to the airport. I'd guess the express airport trains are common in countries with privatized rail transport, as that is often one of the most lucrative lines.
- kevinmchugh 8y ago
  The 2400 series was retired in 2015. Does the 2600 series have the dividers?
twistedpair 8y ago
How much is it worth not to not miss your flight that you spend hundreds of dollars to book?
- distances 8y ago
  The usual way is to just reserve enough time to get to the airport, no?
  - njarboe 8y ago
    That is true. So a reliable mode of transportation to the airport that is always 15 min saves people more that 20min than an unreliable system that averages 35min but sometime takes say 60 min. To use the unreliable system you have to always plan for the delayed time. Most people don't want to spend even more time sitting around airports.
martinald 8y ago
Assume it does cost $1bn, then that's 40million rides to break even (obviously a lot of other costs I'm ignoring here). If only 5% of people using OHare (80million) take it, then that's 10 years before it is paid back. Considering this infrastructure should last 50 years minimum, it could well be profit generating or at least revenue neutral.
- Joeri 8y ago
  Musk always runs over budget by a multiple, it’s how he rolls. Maintenance is probably three times or more the initial outlay over a 10 year period. So, it probably won’t be profitable or revenue neutral. But it shouldn’t be. A brand new transportation mode is going to run at a loss until people figure out how to deploy it at scale. It would be weird for it to be profitable from day one.
  - nkoren 8y ago
    Maintenance for a tunnel over ten years is not three times the initial outlay.
  - spectrum1234 8y ago
    Budget or timeline?
- selectodude 8y ago
  I bet fewer than 50 percent of people who go to O'Hare even leave the airport.
gok 8y ago
It's 37 minutes if you happen to be in the Loop and time the train perfectly. Oh, then it's another 10 minute walk to the gates. Oh and almost none of the Blue Line stations are accessible, so hope you're not in a wheelchair or carrying big bags (who takes luggage to the airport, after all?) Speaking of...where exactly do your bags go on crowded CTA car? I keep hearing this argument about the Blue Line from people who really don't sound like they've tried it. I'm happy we have it as an option but it's really not ideal. A 12 minute express with short headway and space for bags would be a total game changer. Everyone within ~25 minutes of the Loop would now be able to take transit to/from the airport in 40 minutes, not just people who happen to be going to/from the central business district. And the city isn't paying any of that $1B, they're really just giving Boring Company permission to try to pay for it on their own. It's not money that would otherwise be spent on CPS. I'm not completely convinced this is really the right solution. My personal pick would be using the Metra NCS route to run an express train and then moving the the O'Hare Transfer Station to be actually inside the airport, which would also make transfers with Amtrak and other Metra services easy. But that too would cost a lot more than $1B, and no one's jumping up to do it.
- lvh 8y ago
  You are comparing the current state of the Blue Line against a proposed system, though. The argument is that you could improve the Blue Line significantly for $1B, and also that there's good reason to believe it's not actually $1B. (Doesn't have to be the Blue Line! Metra at Jeff Park or whatever with a track to OHare makes a ton of sense too.)
  - gok 8y ago
    If we were going spend a cool billion to improve the Blue Line, I'd spend it on anything but making the airport experience better. Make the stations ADA-compliant. Use the extra space on the Congress branch for triple- or quadruple- tracking. Upgrade the power system. But again, this is $1B not coming out of the CTA budget, it's $1B Elon Musk has burning a hole in his pocket.
    - 8y ago
throwaway43244 8y ago
In comparison, it costs about ~$8-12 for the 80km between Tokyo and NRT (~1.5 hour ride).
hinkley 8y ago
Tokyo built a toll road under the Bay they said saved an hour off your commute if I’m remembering. Opened about 20 years ago and they are charging around $21 each way if you use the electronic toll system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_Aqua-Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Bay_Aqua-Line
moorhosj 8y ago
Based on your logic, people wouldn't be taking taxis/uber to the airport. It is both more expensive and takes longer, but people do it all of the time for the comfort and the quiet (which allows them to work). This is being built for business travelers. Many people fly in and out of Chicago on a Monday-Thursday schedule, they will use this train. All of those people will now be in a separate tunnel and everyone else will have more room on the highway and Blue Line. Sounds like a win to me.
lucdurette 8y ago
I agree This is a typical Chicago/Illinois gimmick again The state and the city is so corrupted, another attempt to distract from the other bull-shit they are trying to pull. The word is, only the mayor and the governor are interested in an express train. Everyone else is happy with the blue-line. Chicago is so parallized trying to make any decsion. I am ready to bet, the deal will fall aprat during the negocaitions
zajd 8y ago
Pretty awesome living in an oligarchy, no?
prof1le 8y ago
A quick google search shows that Chicago is already spending .5bn on improving the blue line (https://www.transitchicago.com/yournewblue/ https://www.transitchicago.com/yournewblue/). Why would they approve this project if they didn't feel this was sufficient? Only thing I can think is that the demand is going to be strong or they're thinking it's a steal with the contractor buying it out and are willing to experiment. I'm all for new transit solutions and I'm really interested in this one, picking this route in particular though is what's odd to me...
psychometry 8y ago
It's well worth it for people who just need to get to the loop. It would be better if the CTA added an express line, but there isn't room on the above-ground tracks.
rory096 8y ago
> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. This is addressed in the RFQ, which includes a model of time value split into four markets: Business (HH income under $100K) $33 Business (HH income $100K and over) $92 Non-Business (HH income under $100K) $25 Non-Business (HH income $100K and over) $55 It includes this reasoning: >In the Project work, the values were adapted from a previous study on express service which found that the value of time for business trips is higher than those of non-business trips to O’Hare. In many recent studies, the value of time for long distance trips and work trips has been shown to be higher than VOT for everyday short trips. Trips to/from an airport could be considered as one leg of long distance travel. Also, the total cost of air travel is much higher than the cost of everyday travel; therefore, travelers may be willing to pay more to reduce the risk of missing their flight. Willingness to pay a high fee for airport trips is reported in other studies, for example, for business trips to airports, Harvey reports $42/hour, Furuichi & Koppelman report $73/hour and Hess and Polak report a value in the range of $93-155/hour. The value of time also varies across regions with large metropolitan areas such as New York/New Jersey having higher values than smaller cities. In the cited 2016 Airport Survey, taxi rides are still in the double digits for non-business low-income residents and drop-offs are as popular as rail (tripling the amount of time to account for, though I don't think they include this). In their reweighting of the survey (because "the Blue Line survey percentage was thought to be high due to over-represented CTA Blue Line use), the plurality took taxis in every category. http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/OES-RFQ-Complete-ADD2-Clean-20180119-2.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
Turing_Machine 8y ago
> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50. Many of whom get reimbursed by their employers for transportation costs, don't forget. $20 for an airport run is going to look damned cheap to the people who process the expense accounts. It will never be questioned.

igravious 8y ago

I followed the Chicago Tribune link because I wanted to read the article that provided this quote, “can build tunnels at least 14 times faster than previous efforts, which a company official acknowledged the company must still prove,” … and I got this! http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/chicagotribune.com/ http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/chicagotribune.com/ "Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism." edit: I'm not complaining and I'm not trying to derail (hah, see what I did there) the topic. I was expressing my surprise, first time this has happened to me.

bonestamp2 8y ago
They probably need to track people to make the advertising revenue they're counting on and they probably can't do that and serve Europe under GDPR regulations.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
You could make a comment complaining about GDPR, or you could just go here to read the article (without the privacy-invading bloat JS) here: http://archive.is/0ZmZ0 http://archive.is/0ZmZ0
- dymk 8y ago
  Or he could do both. It’s a pain to click on a link and be redirected like that.
  - ocdtrekkie 8y ago
    I wish I was so lucky as to live somewhere where sites that violate my rights blocked me instead, as the case happens. Note that while it may take a couple extra seconds to find a workaround, the archive.is site respects the user's rights, so in the end, the user benefits from this process. I see GDPR-blocked comments are kinda like I see "paywall" comments: After a while, people noting a given site is blocked is just off-topic. It doesn't add anything people won't very quickly find out for themselves. I usually downvote them so they don't clutter up the main discussion. Meanwhile, a comment providing a way around the paywall, generally will get an upvote, because they're saving everyone else time, so we can all get to the real discussion.

bitslayer 8y ago

The design is bullshit. People would have their legs crushed as the car descends, and then they would fall into the hole and die.

ben_w 8y ago
People are very good at not being crushed by moving things or falling into massive holes. I myself fail to be crushed or fall into a massive hole literally every time I use an elevator. Or go past a building site. Or…
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  The hole illustrated in the Tesla video is horrendously unsafe (almost like a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster), but I'm 100% certain the final product won't look anything like that.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Yeah because this short concept video surly is the final version.
- kevinmchugh 8y ago
  People die pretty regularly when elevator doors open before the car has arrived. Elevator doors that don't open unless a car is there are a major safety feature.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    “regularly” ⇏ (P(accident|all elevator use)»0)
    - kevinmchugh 8y ago
      by regularly I mean it's multiple stories every week on the industry podcast: http://www.elevatorradioshow.com/blog/2018/6/13/elevator-radio-show-507-week-6132018 http://www.elevatorradioshow.com/blog/2018/6/13/elevator-rad...

beat 8y ago

I wonder about vulnerability to terrorism here? How easily could a sufficient bomb disable the entire system for weeks or months? I started thinking this way while standing in line to go through security at JFK. There were about a thousand people milling about, and we hadn't gone through any sort of substantial security yet. And I was thinking that a bomb there could kill more people than taking out an airplane. Yay security theater.

powvans 8y ago
Terrorism is just as much, if not more, about theater than the security that protects against it. Airplanes have been targeted specifically because of the spectacular nature of such an event.
dpcx 8y ago
Probably no different than any other tunnel system anywhere in the world.
jerf 8y ago
It isn't the airports being protected, it is the airplanes specifically, because airplanes are extremely powerful guided missiles in the wrong hands. Prior to 9/11 even a hijacked plane was still ultimately viewed as an inconvenience at a civilizational level, but post-9/11 it is now recognized that planes are non-trivial weapons of war, the most powerful mobile thing that a civilian can hope to lay hands on. We can quibble with the exact steps taken to protect them, and the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of the steps, but ultimately, it isn't really irrational to protect them. Especially if you are any sort of believer in arms control, like, even a little bit; if you think civilians shouldn't be in possession of RPGs, and they shouldn't be easy to get, then you should be OK with some security around planes, because they are way more dangerous than an RPG. It shouldn't be possible to just stroll into an airport and casually pick up a 777.

bonestamp2 8y ago

> In Toronto, where the subway system doesn’t reach the international airport, a brand-new airport express line has fallen seriously short of ridership expectations, even with its one-way fare of $12.35 The reason this is failing is because of awareness. I travel to Toronto for work 4-5 times every year (for the past 12 years). I heard about this extension being approved a couple years ago and I've never seen a sign for it in Pearson (there must be some somewhere). I've also asked people who live in Toronto whatever happened to this project and nobody even knows what I'm talking about. Meanwhile, I learn from this article that it's actually up and running and they not only consider it a failure but they're using it to say other transit systems won't work. A Musk built project won't fail on awareness like this project has.

Fsp2WFuH 8y ago
Yes, it will fail for other reasons.
- marter 8y ago
  Which are?
perardi 8y ago
Any good analysis out there as to why the UP Express hasn't done so well? I took it just this week, and it's certainly better than the bus they have to shuttle from the end of the subway line to Pearson.
- RedCrowbar 8y ago
  I don't think it's fair to call UP Express a failure yet. It certainly had a bumpy start, but the ridership seems to have been improving recently [1] [1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/how-toronto-turned-an-airport-rail-failure-into-a-commuter-victory/551012/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/how-toronto-t...
king_magic 8y ago
I can’t understand that (it being considered a failure) - the UP is super super convienent when I fly into TO.

ComputerGuru 8y ago

I can’t believe California pays 1 billion dollars a mile just to drill out tunnels. I think the going rate in Europe (not even China!) is something like $40M/km or fifteen times less than what California is paying per mile.

bluedino 8y ago
Even in one of the largest cities in the country? Can you dig a tunnel in London, Berlin, or Paris for that price?
- fredley 8y ago
  You can for a lot less than $1bn/mile. Crossrail was ~£200m/mile. Even the Channel Tunnel, under the sea, was £300m/mile. Those prices are all inclusive, so that includes building stations, rolling stock etc. Also unlike old cities, there are no archeological issues when digging under LA.
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- etiennemarcel 8y ago
  This article is interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... "But while the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile, the Line 14 extension is on track to cost $450 million a mile." (that price includes stations, emergency exits, rails and systems...)
- notatoad 8y ago
  $250mm per km in paris and berlin. $145mm per km in Sao Paolo. $130mm per km in singapore. $58mm per km in madrid. https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/1-billion-doesnt-buy-much-transit-infrastructure-anymore/456/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2011/11/1-billion-doe... $55mm per mile ($34mm per km) would be pretty cheap, but closer to what the rest of the world pays for subways than what NYC does. accounting for musk-math, expect it to cost more like $70mm per km, which would put it on the low end but not the bottom of international subway construction costs.

danso 8y ago

> The Musk “Loop” would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership. Debatable too are the merits of this particular project for airport-bound Chicagoans—the Blue Line works pretty darn well... I'm much more of a New Yorker, but I'll admit that Chicago transit around the Loop is pretty damn good. It may not run 24/7 (IIRC) but going from downtown to either of the airports is a real pleasure compared to NYC.

cozzyd 8y ago
The Blue Line and Red Line do run 24 hours (admittedly with like up to 30 minute headways in the middle of the night). The other lines mostly have parallel night bus routes.

debt 8y ago

I disagree. His original vision for these types of projects was an elevator from surface to tunnel for a vehicle(likely a Tesla). So with that in mind as kind of a barebones version, even if he was to build a 17 mile tunnel that was effectively a walkway I would consider that a success. But a 17 mile tunnel that can accommodate autonomous Tesla 3, just as an extreme example, that’d also be a success. The autonomy would work perfectly within the tunnel, it wouldn’t need a track. If there was elevators on both ends, then multiple Tesla’s could go in and be queued at the destination end for the elevator back to surface. It wouldn’t be 12 minutes but it’d still be way faster than rush hour. The electric skate version of the tunnel I think is the idealized version.

untog 8y ago
> But a 17 mile tunnel that can accommodate autonomous Tesla 3, just as an extreme example, that’d also be a success. Sounds like it would scale horribly compared to actual mass transit, though. The amount of space taken up per passenger would be huge if you use cars.

skybrian 8y ago

From the article: "The Musk 'Loop' would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership." So that's good, right? This looks like a situation where a high-capacity line isn't actually needed and one that's lower-capacity but cheaper to build line would save money. So maybe it's appropriate use of a technology that doesn't do what mass transit does?

allannienhuis 8y ago
isn't it saying that the loop capacity is 60% of the _current ridership_ of the blue-line? not 60% of an unused maximum. Seems to me the 'loop' would be criticised for being constantly busy & over capacity.
- njarboe 8y ago
  Hopefully they can just increase the price to keep it at just capacity. As long as they don't charge a super high price to maximize profits and the train is mostly empty (like I see with many toll roads), I don't see why using price to keep it just full is a problem. Use the extra profits to build another tunnel.
- gok 8y ago
  The "ridership of the entire Blue Line" number isn't particularly interesting here; very few of those people are going to the airport. A more interesting number is entries at the O'Hare Blue Line station, which is about 10,500 per weekday, or 440 per hour. So this design could accommodate something like a 5x increase in transit-to-ORD.

apeace 8y ago

The idea of having Boring Company pay for the construction and then reap the profits strikes me as a really great idea. When the government pays for construction, the contractors don't have a strong incentive to actually finish the project. They'll keep getting paid no matter how long it runs over or how over-budget it goes. But in this situation, Boring Co won't make any money unless and until they get it up and running. I know nothing about this. Has this been done successfully before? What are the potential downsides I'm not thinking of?

nickik 8y ago
> The idea of having Boring Company pay for the construction and then reap the profits strikes me as a really great idea. We could do what all normal business does for infrastructure. Revolutionary idea. But it is a good idea. Often private mass transportation is illegal. This seems to be a hybrid model, I don't quite understand what this project entails in terms of obligations by both sides. The downsides might be that they go bankrupt with a half finished tunnel and then the government has to either put in money to finish the project or start a new project.
- deleted 8y ago
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- ComradeTaco 8y ago
  There is also the possibility that a poorly engineered or rushed tunnel could destablize the foundations of structures above.
  - nickik 8y ago
    Extremly unlikely with such a small tunnel that goes fairly deep under the earth.
sschueller 8y ago
It is the opposite of a good idea in my opinion. The reason you don't want to do that is because the private enterprise wants to maximize its profits. There is nothing wrong with that but in order to do so they will cut corners where ever possible and do the absolute minimum for upkeep. Yes, this happens with poorly managed and financed public projects as well but public infrastructure can and sometimes must operate at a loss. In fact a lot of public infrastructure does not pay for itself and is subsidized by tax dollars.

sgillen 8y ago

I really think the high costs of making rail in the US is a logistical problem, not a technology one.

rory096 8y ago

This article has several errors: >The Musk “Loop” would have a capacity of 2,000 passengers per hour in each direction, which is about 60 percent of the Blue Line’s current, mostly-under-capacity average hourly ridership. The RFQ[0] makes clear that the intent is to compete against taxi and ride-share services, which comprise 52% of trips in the 2015 estimate, to CTA Rail's 20%[1]. The article says "the Blue Line works pretty darn well", but revealed preferences tell a different story. I can't find what O'Hare Xpress LLC (the other finalist) proposed, but the RFP[2] required respondents to specify "maximum passenger capacity: (i) per 15 minutes; and (ii) per hour". The JFK AirTrain was designed for 34,000 riders per day.[3] >Most transit moves horizontally, some moves vertically; the concept for the “Chicago Express Loop” is to do both. The tunnel will terminate at Block 37, where Chicago already has an unused, very expensive, giant subway station. This concept doesn't include elevators, as described so far. > The writer and transportation researcher Alon Levy compiled the grim per-mile pricing of recent tunnel projects for CityLab in January, shown below. This table gives a sense of how extraordinary Musk’s project would be on a cost basis—and how improbable. This cherry-picks a US price chart from an article[4] that's entirely about how tunneling is inordinately expensive in the United States compared to the rest of the world and refutes the idea that labor is the main cause. The cited article even has a pull-quote that says "There’s no reason why building subways and light rail in sprawling cities should be as expensive as it is." >If the Boring Company’s cost projection of $1 billion is anywhere near accurate, that pencils out to $55.5 million per mile—far and away, the cheapest construction cost for any subterranean transit line in the U.S. That should be $27.8 million per mile ($17.3m per km), since you'll presumably want it to go in both directions. This is low even compared to European transit,[5] but those tunnels are 2-3x the diameter. Really, this project is a Loop mostly in name, diameter and rolling stock — it doesn't approach the ambitious concept of operations (elevators, dynamic routing, and car access) that is planned for Maryland and LA. That should alleviate a substantial part of the technical risk, leaving it mostly as a financial risk for investors. Since (like most infrastructure) tunneling mostly consists of fixed costs, the most likely failure mode is not reaching completion at all. Once it's complete it's likely to be cash flow positive even if it has a poor or negative return on investment, so there's little incentive to shut it down. (This was echoed by Musk in the press conference.) [0] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/OES-RFQ-Complete-ADD2-Clean-20180119-2.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/... [1] Taxi/Uber: 5,164, CTA Rail: 2,011, Total: 9,956. n.b. These ridership estimates are for daily one-way trips, with total daily trips being twice those in the table. https://i.imgur.com/naVUjnA.png https://i.imgur.com/naVUjnA.png [2] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/OES-RFP-Addendum-3-20180501.pdf http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/... [3] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jfk-airtrain-jfk-2000/ https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jfk-airtrain-jfk-2000/ [4] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex... [5] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-subway-construction-costs-revised/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-su...

cameldrv 8y ago

If I were the mayor of Chicago, I'd take that money and spend it at the airport itself. This line shaves 25 minutes off the travel time for a fairly small subset of people. The gains to be made at the airport are far greater. I get there 25 minutes faster, only to spend the next hour screwing around at the airport. If we: 1. Staffed security such that there was never a line, 2. Staffed the ticket counter such that there was never a line, 3. Installed double ended jet bridges so that we could load and unload the plane twice as fast, 4. Put moving walkways everywhere, 5. Improved staffing and efficiency of baggage handling, such that you could drop your bag 20 minutes before the flight and have it get on the plane, We could shave 30 minutes off the airport experience, for every user of the airport, not just the ones that happen to be coming from downtown.

s1300045 8y ago
This is supposedly fully funded by the Boring Company. No tax money will be put in the project. At least that's what they are saying. The $8.5 billion O’Hare Airport expansion project is approved and underway, and it is also funded by the airlines via issuing bonds. Supposedly, no tax money will be involved either. Block 37 is also designed to serve as a downtown "terminal". Passengers will go through security and check in luggages before they board the trains. I don't know the regulations, but installing double ended jet bridges doesn't sound that easy to me. It's probably something FAA has to approve. Staffing issues at the ticket counter and security is also outside of the mayor's jurisdiction. It's decided by the airlines themselves, TSA, and the organization that runs the O'hare airport.

pasiaj 8y ago

It would not be a miracle. The new 13.5 kilometer subway section in Helsinki cost 88M€ per kilometer, corresponding to $165 per mile.