
For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle - docdeek
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/06/for-1-billion-elon-musks-tunnel-to-ohare-would-be-a-miracle/562841/
======
bonestamp2
> 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.

~~~
motohagiography
Part of why I don't use the Toronto UP link is:

\- I didn't know it was completed and operating.

\- Bulk of residential population is 30-45min+ subway ride from Union Station
anyway, might have assumed people travel from their offices.

\- If due to a subway delay I miss a flight because I only paid $15 and wanted
to save $30, the savings doesn't justify the risk. The independent
probabilities of unavoidable delays on each leg of journey add up, where in
car there are alternate routes.

\- Would consider taking train if it came with flight insurance.

\- There is no clear signage at arrivals of where the UP line is, as signage
favors limousines, then taxis, then pickup, etc.

\- Any signage would need to include scheduling information as walking to
train to find it's not running means never going back.

I supported the UP line in principle when they were talking about building it,
but can see why their numbers aren't up yet.

~~~
bonestamp2
> I didn't know it was completed and operating.

A new transit line is usually pretty big news in any city, but like I said...
everyone in Toronto that I asked about it didn't know about it either. So
they've really blown it on awareness. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty
easy thing to fix.

------
apeace
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?

~~~
sschueller
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.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
>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.

Government does this and when they do it it's much, much harder to hold them
accountable. Look at the Big Dig or anything the MTA touches.

When a private company acts like this and the public notices there's at least
the risk that some politicians will latch on to the issue (no politician ever
lost public support by being tough on a company that was mistreating the
public). When government is the wrongdoer it's needs to get incredibly bad
before the other parts of government hold them accountable.

~~~
rhcom2
Part of the problem with the Big Dig were the government was defrauded by a
materials supplier who used substandard in order to cut costs.

------
FLGMwt
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
> _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)

~~~
njarboe
The concept of induced demand does not say you can't build your way out of
traffic. This idea seems to come up a lot in transportation discussions.
Driving a car on a road is not free in either money or time, so when a new
road fills up it is because more people are going somewhere they want to go
and are pay a cost to do so. Yes, when you build a new road near where there
are already traffic jams, the new road gets filled up. This is not some
magical thing that with infinite roads people will just drive all day so that
they are full. I think most people who use this phrase don't quite understand
it. The have learned that cars are morally bad and induced demand is some kind
of concept that says building new roads for cars is pointless. I ask you, if
there was a way for people to have instant point-to-point transportation that
had little environmental impact, would you support its implementation?

The whole point of Musk's tunneling project is that with tunnels you can build
as many tunnels as you want without the negative aspects of roads which are
mainly taking up surface space and making a lot of noise.

~~~
gowld
Infinite roads are not an option. If there is more pent-up demand than total
possible road capacity, then there will never be enough capacity.

~~~
njarboe
"If there is more pent-up demand than total possible road capacity, then there
will never be enough capacity." That is a tautology.

With tunnels you can probably increase capacity by 100 times without going
very deep. That would support some kind of crazy Hong Kong level density of
people in the whole LA basin. Everyone in the US could live there. After that
happens one can worry about this infinity demand potential.

------
skybrian
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
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.

~~~
gok
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.

------
ComputerGuru
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
Even in one of the largest cities in the country? Can you dig a tunnel in
London, Berlin, or Paris for that price?

~~~
fredley
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.

------
danso
> _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
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.

------
cameldrv
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
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.

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

------
ainiriand
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
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?

------
pasiaj
It would not be a miracle.

The new 13.5 kilometer subway section in Helsinki cost 88M€ per kilometer,
corresponding to $165 per mile.

------
rory096
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/...](http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-
content/uploads/2017/11/OES-RFQ-Complete-ADD2-Clean-20180119-2.pdf)

[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/...](http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/05/OES-RFP-Addendum-3-20180501.pdf)

[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-
ex...](https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-expensive-to-
build-urban-rail-in-the-us/551408/)

[5] [https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-
su...](https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-subway-
construction-costs-revised/)

------
igravious
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.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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
Or he could do both. It’s a pain to click on a link and be redirected like
that.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
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.

------
debt
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
> 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.

------
bitslayer
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
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
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
Yeah because this short concept video surly is the final version.

------
beat
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.

~~~
jerf
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.

