The Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, announced that he has entered into a preliminary agreement with The Boring Company, a company of Elon Musk, for the construction of an underground system that connects the city with O'Hare International Airport, the its main airport. Like most of the companies involving Musk, the plan is very ambitious and there are doubts about whether it will be implemented by delivering on its promises, including that of costing less than a billion dollars, a figure considered too low by most observers and experts. of transport. The Boring Company also promised to pay for the work in full, without affecting Chicago's weak public finances.
Elon Musk is best known for being the CEO of Tesla, a company that produces electric cars, and of SpaceX, a space company that in recent years is revolutionizing the sector of private space launches. For a year and a half, Musk has added a new company to his activities, which he called The Boring Company, which designs and builds new mass transit systems. The company is named after a pun with the term “boring”, which in English means both “boring” and “drilling”, indicating the main business area: creating underground tunnels where electric vehicles can move at high speed, alleviating surface traffic problems in cities.
The Boring Company has recently completed construction of a small test track in California and is negotiating with the city of Los Angeles, where it would like to build one of its first systems. Musk's idea is to place freight elevators along the roads to reach underground tunnels with his car, where he is transported from one point to another on electric trolleys without the need to get out of the car. In the case of Chicago, the project will be less complex: the tunnels will be traveled by minibuses with a maximum capacity of 16 people, with a more traditional system similar to those usually used to connect the different terminals of an airport.
The preliminary project involves the construction of a double tunnel from Chicago to its main airport, covering a distance of approximately 25 kilometers. The minibuses will travel at speeds of up to 240 kilometers per hour, making it possible to cover the distance in about ten minutes against the 40 minutes currently required. There will be the departure of a minibus every 30 seconds, with the prospect of transporting at least 2 thousand people every hour in each direction.
Musk explained that the minibuses are the ideal solution to reduce costs: they will be based on the chassis of the Model X produced by Tesla and can be used in smaller tunnels than those usually needed to pass a subway train with multiple cars. Ticket prices are not yet known, but there is an estimated $ 20-25 for one trip, half the fare for a taxi for the same route between O'Hare and Chicago. The agreement provides that the revenues are entirely destined to The Boring Company, which in exchange has undertaken to build the tunnel independently and to carry out maintenance on the system without resorting to public funds. Musk also hinted at some ideas to make the initiative more profitable, such as displaying advertisements inside the minibuses and making services acquired during the trip.
The new initiative for Chicago is very fascinating, but there are widespread doubts about the possibility of creating a system like the one proposed by The Boring Company in a few years and above all by spending less than a billion dollars for the entire work. It seems unlikely that the company will build a tunnel at a cost of 18-35 million dollars per kilometer, excluding the costs to build the stations which will still be very high, especially for the one in the city center to be built by taking over an ongoing project. and semi-abandoned by the municipality because of the high costs. The construction of the Second Avenue Subway line in New York has cost up to 1.6 billion dollars per kilometer. Of course building a subway line of this type involves higher costs (due to the size of the tunnels and the project in general), but it still gives an idea of how expensive it can be to drill beneath a large US city.
Using minibuses should actually allow The Boring Company to save some money, as their cost would certainly be less than the multi-million dollar cost of building a single train car. In any case, the management and maintenance costs of the system would remain, not to mention that a minibus requires a higher frequency of passage than a train with more capacious wagons.
Urban planner Yonah Freemark, who has long been involved in mass transit, told The Verge that the plan for Chicago appears to be a little too optimistic about costs. Doing the math, it could be assumed at least 100 million dollars to build each of the two stations, 500 thousand dollars for the construction of each vehicle and 50 million dollars to set up the necessary structures to carry out the maintenance. The Boring Company would be left with $ 200-700 million, depending on the number of minibuses it intends to build, to build the tunnels. The figure seems to be very low to be able to complete both of them, considering that there are many extra costs, due for example to the construction of emergency exits in different points of the tunnels, the ventilation systems and the possible displacement of underground utilities (pipes, cables ) that the tunnels could cross along the route.
The project is a risky bet for Mayor Emanuel himself, who has already made a commitment to renovate part of the O'Hare airport, with the construction of a terminal with an estimated cost of around 8.5 billion dollars. Emanuel has yet to negotiate many aspects of the deal with The Boring Company, but says he wants to make sure the infrastructure does something for the city, as well as not burdening its finances. One hypothesis is to leave the ownership of the tunnels to Musk's company, making them pay a concession for the use of the land, in order to guarantee the municipality a fixed income in the coming years.
The timing of the project is not clear, but The Boring Company claims to be able to build the two tunnels in just a couple of years, both because they are smaller than the classic ones, and because it has developed systems to speed up the work of the “moles” , the large machines that dig the ground and at the same time install the concrete linings of the tunnels. Musk, as always, does not seem to be very worried about the umpteenth challenge he has entered: “First of all, I would like to premise that we are doing a very difficult thing. It's tough stuff. It's new stuff. And I hope you will encourage us. If we can do it, it will be a great thing for the city. If we fail, well, I guess others and I will lose a lot of money. “
