Chicago taps Elon Musk's Boring Company to build high-speed transit tunnels

[brooklynite]

Source: Chicago Tribune

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.

n 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.

Read more: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-met-ohare-high-speed-transit-elon-musk-boring-company-20180613-story.html

[underpants]

1. That name cracks me up

[greatauntoftriplets]

9. Same here.

[George II]

2. Yawn! Oh wait, they mean HOLES, not personality!!!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

3. Does his company have any experience on an actual project? NT

[brooklynite]

7. They've been doing their own proof of concept work in Los Angeles

They've been working on a 2-mile tunnel to test the technology.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. I remember sitting comforably in a reasonably fast, but half empty, train in the median...

zipping past miles of rental cars stopped dead on the highway.

Got to the Loop in no time at all.

How is spending billions on untested tunnels going to change that?

[brooklynite]

5. "No time at all" is actually 45-50 minutes (on the Blue Line)

Musk's travel pods will (according to the claim) do it in 12 min.

[TreasonousBastard]

6. deleted-- dupe

[bucolic_frolic]

8. It's no reflection on Musk

but I think it's our Autobahn