Chicago taps Elon Musk’s Boring Company to build

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Chicago taps Elon Musk’s Boring Company to build high-speed transit tunnels that would tie Loop with O'Hare

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/poli...story.html

Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O’Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk’s The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed.

Emanuel’s administration has selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport. Negotiations between the two parties will ensue in hopes of reaching a final deal to provide a long-sought-after alternative to Chicago’s traffic gridlock and slower “L” trains.


In choosing Boring, Emanuel and senior City Hall officials are counting on Musk’s highly touted but still unproven tunneling technology over the more traditional high-speed rail option that until recently had been envisioned as the answer to speeding up the commute between the city’s central business district and one of the world’s busiest airports.

Emanuel and Boring officials said it’s too early to provide a timeline for the project’s completion or its estimated cost, but they said Boring would pay for the entire project. That would include the construction of a new station at O’Hare and the completion of the mothballed superstation built at Block 37 under previous Mayor Richard M. Daley, who like Emanuel pushed for high-speed rail access to O’Hare.


Musk and Emanuel are expected to formally announce the proposal Thursday afternoon at that long-dormant underground station.

Under the proposal, passengers would be able to travel from the Loop to O’Hare in just 12 minutes at an estimated cost of $20 to $25 per ride. A final route for the high-speed tunnels is still subject to negotiations, and a Boring official and Deputy Mayor Robert Rivkin declined to identify where it might run.

Boring’s preferred preliminary route, however, would follow Randolph Street west from Block 37 and then run under the Kennedy Expressway northwest before tracking north under Halsted Street and northwest under Milwaukee Avenue. The tunnels then would run northwest under Elston Avenue near Goose Island before again crossing under the Kennedy Expressway near Bryn Mawr Avenue and heading west to O’Hare, according to a source familiar with the plans who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The transit system’s O’Hare station is planned near the new global terminal Emanuel has announced as part of an $8.5 billion overhaul of the airport, the source said.

All told, Boring has estimated the project will cost less than $1 billion, according to a source familiar with the company’s proposal but not authorized to speak publicly because of ongoing negotiations.

In exchange for paying to build the new transit system, Boring would keep the revenue from the system’s transit fees and any money generated by advertisements, branding and in-vehicle sales, Rivkin and the company said. Ownership of the twin tunnels has not been determined, but the Emanuel administration plans to seek a long-term lease to Musk’s company, a source familiar with the proposal said.

Myriad regulatory, safety and environmental questions also could affect the project’s construction and timeline, Boring and city officials acknowledged.

For now, though, Emanuel is selling the idea as the latest bold “transformative” innovation in a city that found itself at the forefront of American railroads and became an early linchpin in the nation’s aviation system.

“If you look at the history of Chicago … every time we’ve been an innovator in transportation, we have seized the future,” Emanuel said in an interview with the Tribune on Wednesday. “I think figuring out — when time is money — how to shrink the distance between the economic and job engines of O’Hare and downtown positions Chicago as the global leader and global city in the United States.”

Beyond the big-picture rhetoric, however, plenty of questions remain.

In California and Maryland, Boring has run into regulatory hurdles and concerns from elected officials about its unproven technology.

Musk’s company is still digging its first test tunnel in Hawthorne, Calif., and the passenger vehicles, which the company refers to as “skates,” have yet to be thoroughly tested for public use.

The economic feasibility of Boring’s project relies on Musk’s confidence that it can build tunnels at least 14 times faster than previous efforts, which a company official acknowledged the company must still prove.

And while the concept of a self-driving tram or vehicle is not new, the particular model Boring envisions — based on a modified Tesla Model X car chassis — still has to be built on a large scale.

Emanuel remained undeterred by the uncertainty, pointing in large part to Musk’s success in building electric-car powerhouse Tesla and aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, the first private company to send a spacecraft to the International Space Station, among other accomplishments.

“We’re taking a bet on a guy who doesn’t like to fail — and his resources. There are a bunch of Teslas on the road. He put SpaceX together. He’s proven something,” Emanuel said of Musk. “The risk — with no financial risk — is I’m betting on a guy who has proven in space, auto and now a tunnel, that he can innovate and create something of the future. Given his track record, we are taking his reputation and saying, ‘This is a guy in two other transportation modes who has not failed.’ That’s what we’re doing.”


An image from video offers a conceptual look at The Boring Company’s loop technology, which it plans to use for high speed transportation between downtown and O’Hare International Airport. The high-speed underground public transportation system would transport up to 16 passengers at a time on self-driving electric vehicles built on a Tesla chassis.

The vehicles, called “skates” by Boring, would top speeds of more than 100 miles per hour, traveling the 17 miles between an underground station at Block 37 and one at O’Hare in 12 minutes.

Musk, who Forbes estimates has a net worth of $20 billion, founded Boring in late 2016 to “solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic.”

The entrepreneur’s main solution is a concept called “Hyperloop,” an “ultra high-speed” underground transit system in which passengers ride through a vacuum tunnel system in self-driving electric pods with pressurized cabins at speeds of more than 600 mph.

The concept Musk and Boring envision for Chicago, however, is more basic and simply dubbed “Loop.”

In the Loop system, 16-passenger vehicles would have both vertical and horizontal wheels. Boring officials stress the vehicles are “confined” and will “not be a car on auto drive.”

Those eight “guiding wheels” will run along a nearly 18-mile track. The four vertical wheels would be similar to traditional tires on a car running along a concrete shelf on the ground. Four additional wheels on the sides of the vehicle would likely be made of steel with a polyurethane coating and would help move the vehicle by running along concrete curbs along the tunnel’s walls.

“It is not on any kind of auto steering,” the official said. “It is a mechanical operation where the guide wheels turn the vehicle.”

The “skates,” as Musk and others call them, would be able to reach top speeds of 150 mph in the tunnels’ straight stretches while speeds would be reduced around curves, according to Boring.

READ MORE: Hyperloop promises a 30-minute trip from Chicago to Cleveland, but multiple challenges ahead »

While the tunnel’s northwest route is preliminary and subject to final negotiations and engineering studies, Boring officials said there would be no use of eminent domain to seize land or the rights to any land underground.

Any public right of way Boring will use will be underground and will not necessitate closing any surface roads. Boring would buy or lease any land needed aboveground, the company official said.

The Chicago system is expected to be able to handle nearly 2,000 passengers per direction per hour, with cars leaving every 30 seconds to two minutes, city officials said. How much a ride will cost is subject to final negotiations, but Boring has stated a goal of charging between $20 and $25 — or half the cost of a typical ride-share or cab ride to O’Hare, a source familiar with the talks said.

Key to Boring’s efforts to disrupt the transportation industry is digging tunnels smarter, faster and cheaper.

The Chicago tunnels would be 14 feet in diameter, or about half the size of typical tunnels, and thus, can be dug faster and for less money, Boring officials say.

At a recent question-and-answer session in Los Angeles, Musk also said the company’s boring machines would have three times the power and would run on Tesla batteries without the expense of miles of high voltage cables that other machines use. Musk also said Boring would build the tunnels’ concrete shells as it continues to dig and was working with “first-rate” engineers to find ways to remove dirt faster.

“This is the only way we can think of to address chronic traffic issues in major cities,” Musk said at the event, envisioning a day when hundreds of levels of underground tunnels could be built. “We think it’s the one way that could work and is worth trying.”

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