Chicago already has two rail systems that go in that direction. One, the CTA Blue Line, literally connects O’Hare and the Loop. The other, Metra, goes most of the way to the airport already.
In conclusion, maybe we should have more trains on the El, express and otherwise, or invest in Metra to get to the airport, instead of betting on an unproven, totally new, single-use kind of transit?
That was somewhat my first thought - "Why not just upgrade the Blue Line to a 4 track system so they can run express trains on it?"
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could halve the El service's time from the loop to O'Hare by having a train that only has stops at major connection points - Clark & Lake, (maybe) Logan Square, Jefferson Park, Cumberland, and O'Hare.
But, of course, the Blue Line runs down the middle of I-90 between Jefferson Park and Cumberland, so there's probably not really any room to expand to a 4-track system.
How about instead the US as a nation returns to not being cowards about attempting aggressive new efforts at leaping forward on infrastructure.
We should be doing a lot more things like this, rather than basking in our pathetic decades-long stagnation of clinging to barely good enough.
Every American should be angrily protesting the backwards, ancient transport systems the US relies on.
The Fed should be mandated with establishing a $1+ trillion infrastructure development fund, by 'printing' dollars over 20 years to fill the program. We should further leverage Federal agencies like DARPA, corporate R&D, inventors, foreign capabilities, and the vast US university system, to fund and spur radical efforts to build new, experimental infrastructure everywhere.
Today's regressive, conservative approach would have never enabled the US to build the Interstate Highway System. It's time for a radical change, the sooner the better. We must stop tolerating mediocrity by proclaiming that things are good enough as is.
That is my frustration with American infrastructure investment. We can never just invest in what exist and what works, on a consistent reliable basis. It always has to be some kind of ego project like this. It’s infurating because we waste so much money and make all of our lives harder for it, but the population at large seem to be suckers for it.
I mean Chicago is literally investing nothing in this. So there's nothing they're betting here. Their "bet" basically is that they don't need to spend any more money on transit. The worst case is they're in exactly the same situation they are now.
I don't get it. Aren't there lots of companies around the world that already have this equipment and have done this kind of work for years? Drilling holes for trains is nothing new. What does Musk's company offer that is different? Is it just branding and marketing to make drilling holes the next big thing?
Is there really that much margin in drilling tunnels that they can just undercut competition while using the same equipment and technology and still make money?
First, nobody who's lived in Chicago for more than about thirty minutes can possibly believe that this will end up being free to the city. At some point, somehow, we're going to pay.
Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare! This is an incredibly marginal improvement, and only benefiting a group that already has plenty of options. The existing train systems are focused entirely on an outdated model of exclusively bringing people to and from downtown. And huge swathes of the city don't even get that.
The blue line is slow, crowded, loud, frequently requires delay-inducing maintenance, and is often very dirty and smelly. The article says “40 minutes,” but that’s the absolute best you could hope for. You have to plan at least 1:15 minutes for the blue line from the loop if you want to be confident you won’t be late.
A 20 minute direct trip on a modern train would radically improve every aspect of getting between the airport and the city, and would be a welcome support as the city’s ancient trains continue to deteriorate.
New trains are difficult because of right-of-way - everything's built up by now, no room on the surface. Boring a tunnel can be a way out. Why all the resistance? If this one works out, Chicago may get their 'huge swathes' on a workable underground transit system.
> Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare!
People who don't like or use transit love to talk about trains to the airport. It reveals a lot about how they view transit. To wit: it's a novelty, for special situations, for when you couldn't otherwise use your car to get where you're going.
It's not real transportation, in other words. It's a shuttle for the exceptions in your life.
Why would anyone expect it to be free? Of course they'll charge fares. It important to remember that CTA fares don't cover the full cost of services, it also gets money from taxpayers. And building a new line would most likely involve an appropriation or maybe issuing bonds that get paid back over decades. For this, the city won't have to put out any money of its own, nor take any risk.
I am curious how they'll deal with the new line siphoning off revenue from the existing service. I assume that they'll negotiate this (maybe a share of revenue?), what the price will be, routing, etc.
>Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare!
I wouldn't say that it's perfectly fine. The Blue Line to O'Hare has become notorious for it's overcrowding. I think the goal is to reduce some of that congestion to O'Hare and get people to stay at hotels in the city. I'm not convinced that it's worth it though.
> we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare
I wouldn't call that perfect. It takes at least an hour from the loop to O'Hare on a good day.
In comparison, the Stockholm Arlanda airport is 5 miles further from Stockholm Central than O'Hare is to the Loop, and it takes the Arlanda Express high speed train 20 minutes to get there.
A little OT but what is it called when a rail system is setup purely to ferry people to and from the heart of the city?
Philadelphia is the same way. New York on the other hand is more of a spaghetti mess. I wonder if that interconnection does things for the city too, like encourage growth in more areas.
> Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare!
No way man. I used to commute from cumberland stop to downtown, I would be physically exhausted by the time I got to my stop 1 hr later. 1 hr on CTA is very different from 1 hr on metra, the seats are so cramped, you cannot open your laptop, constant pee smell, so many stop-starts take a toll on your body. Current CTA cars don't allow for people travelling to ohare with even one suitcase, there is no place to put your suitcase.
If the commute was 12 minutes, I can imagine so many people with families will move out of the city to enjoy more space out northwest. I would definitely consider moving out near ohare if commute was 12 minutes to downtown. I can only imagine this will bring down rents/ housing prices in the city. I will go downtown to enjoy an evening if the commute was only 12 mins. This is a game changer in my book not ' marginal improvement'.
Detroit's Mayor Mike Duggan wants a subway to run from the airport to downtown. He said he's waiting for Boring Co's project to finish in LA so he can check with the mayor to see if it's worthwhile.
For those wondering « WTF », the project is fully financed by the contractor. The risk taken by the City is zero. Worst case scenario they rebid after the Boring company crashes and burns. For Musk, the business equation thus relies on the costs of construction to be correctly balanced with future revenues obtained from operating the line over the next decades. If you do it right like Hong Kong MTR, it’s a cash cow. If not, well, it’s Eurotunnel.
Isn't this extremely risky of a thing to do? Give rights to a company that has developed nothing for a design that has not been implemented anywhere else? Every major city outside of the US in the world has solutions to this, mostly being direct express trains. Why do something different like this?
One possibility: because when those projects are awarded in U.S. to the usual suspects, the projects start with exorbitant costs and decade-long timelines and then the price goes up and timeline slips by years.
Chicago already has a subway train from O'Hare to the loop. It takes ~40 minutes to get downtown and is often crowded (and at night may have homeless people sleeping in it), but a normal express train would usually not beat it in time (an express train might be twice as fast, but won't come as often), so something like this becomes attractive. Also, the previous Mayor built a massive hole in the ground downtown for an express train, and it makes it look less bad if it's used.
If this works I'll be surprised... but happy. But realistically, I'll probably still take the blue line to O'Hare unless Musk's toy accepts my monthly CTA pass.
When I was younger, I'd always be looking for ways to do things cheap. The CTA Blue Line: $2.25 to the airport and $5.00 back to the loop? What a deal!
But now that I'm older, I'd rather pay more to reduce the agony if I could. It's just me. The CTA Blue Line to O'Hare for me is an uncomfortable 40 minutes. Uncomfortable because there's no room for a suitcase and you feel like a douche if you put on the seat next to you. It's a boring 40 minutes. You can't sleep because it's never a good idea to nap on the CTA. I guess you can do stuff on your phone (cell signals are good) but I'm not big on that.
That said, I still take the Blue Line to the airport. Because during rush hour, it's the only game in town.
I'd be very surprised if they attempted to build anything other than an electric train. If they're trying some sort of "hyperloop" I would share your skepticism, but as I understand it the Boring Company is about boring tunnels more than anything else (at this stage anyway.) Is an Elon Musk company capable of boring a regular tunnel and putting a regular train in it? I don't know the current state of their boring machines, but it seems like it should be feasible.
The blue line is desperately in need of an express track and the CTA needs a loop that that isn't just a few city blocks.
Living in the northern part of Chicago always means traveling into the loop on the red line and then taking an endless amount of time on the blue line as it stops at a ton of stations. The bus isn't an option with luggage and Lyft is just an unpleasant extra expense on top of paying for my luggage.
>Elon Musk's Boring Co. is the winner in a bid to build a multibillion-dollar high-speed express train to Chicago’s O'Hare International Airport. The result gives the young company a big boost in legitimacy as it tries to get transportation projects underway in Los Angeles and Washington.
So, basically, they've won the right to make a proposal to finance their own construction of an airport link--which understandably just about no one else was interested in doing.
If you can shoot rockets into Earth's orbit and land them back, you should be ok and be surrounded by the right people to shoot some pods up and down a tunnel. :)
>...the city set a goal of connecting downtown with the airport in 20 minutes or less, with service every 15 minutes for the majority of the day. It also requested that fares be below the current rates for taxis and ride-share trips.
> "I suspect it's going to evolve a few times before anything concrete gets done"
That is a nice way of saying bribes, navigating institutional corruption and then of course dealing with organized crime. This is Chicago so good luck.
As said earlier on similar boring company related topic, the metro in (say) Tolouse (France) or Turin (Italy) has been made using small tunnels (and unmanned carriages, Matra VAL system) several years ago already:
As the article notes - the Blue Line currently runs from the Loop directly to Ohare in about 40 minutes for $5 (though realistically more like 50 minutes). I am not sure how much more I would be willing to pay for the trip to only take 20 minutes... $10 at most?
Nitpick: Loop to O'Hare is only $2.50. It's just the return trip that costs $5.
I'd probably keep using the El for my own purposes, but I could see business travelers liking this option. They're already taking cabs, which charge more like $30 or $40 to get downtown (IIRC) and can probably take as much as an hour to make the trip if traffic is bad.
Business travelers would pay a lot more than $10. They already do pay a lot more to avoid taking the train. During peak times the Blue Line to Ohare takes more than 40 minutes. Also the ride is fairly unpleasant.
No public financing? How will the builder make a return on the capital, from fares? Ugh. It will be expensive and risky now. Hope there is a public component of the operating entity.
Having seen the success of Musks's other projects I have high hopes for this. But I'm not seeing anything overly negative here, just some healthy scepticism and questions?
[+] [-] lvh|7 years ago|reply
The El (that’s the blue line) already has absurd capacity problems. Chicago airport transit, at both Midway and O’Hare, is already pretty great compared to similarly sized airports: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/planes-trains-and-taxis...
In conclusion, maybe we should have more trains on the El, express and otherwise, or invest in Metra to get to the airport, instead of betting on an unproven, totally new, single-use kind of transit?
[+] [-] bunderbunder|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they could halve the El service's time from the loop to O'Hare by having a train that only has stops at major connection points - Clark & Lake, (maybe) Logan Square, Jefferson Park, Cumberland, and O'Hare.
But, of course, the Blue Line runs down the middle of I-90 between Jefferson Park and Cumberland, so there's probably not really any room to expand to a 4-track system.
[+] [-] adventured|7 years ago|reply
We should be doing a lot more things like this, rather than basking in our pathetic decades-long stagnation of clinging to barely good enough.
Every American should be angrily protesting the backwards, ancient transport systems the US relies on.
The Fed should be mandated with establishing a $1+ trillion infrastructure development fund, by 'printing' dollars over 20 years to fill the program. We should further leverage Federal agencies like DARPA, corporate R&D, inventors, foreign capabilities, and the vast US university system, to fund and spur radical efforts to build new, experimental infrastructure everywhere.
Today's regressive, conservative approach would have never enabled the US to build the Interstate Highway System. It's time for a radical change, the sooner the better. We must stop tolerating mediocrity by proclaiming that things are good enough as is.
[+] [-] erentz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverdrake11|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlindner|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m3kw9|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maym86|7 years ago|reply
Is there really that much margin in drilling tunnels that they can just undercut competition while using the same equipment and technology and still make money?
[+] [-] nat|7 years ago|reply
First, nobody who's lived in Chicago for more than about thirty minutes can possibly believe that this will end up being free to the city. At some point, somehow, we're going to pay.
Second, we already have a perfectly fine train to O'Hare! This is an incredibly marginal improvement, and only benefiting a group that already has plenty of options. The existing train systems are focused entirely on an outdated model of exclusively bringing people to and from downtown. And huge swathes of the city don't even get that.
[+] [-] ForrestN|7 years ago|reply
A 20 minute direct trip on a modern train would radically improve every aspect of getting between the airport and the city, and would be a welcome support as the city’s ancient trains continue to deteriorate.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dionidium|7 years ago|reply
People who don't like or use transit love to talk about trains to the airport. It reveals a lot about how they view transit. To wit: it's a novelty, for special situations, for when you couldn't otherwise use your car to get where you're going.
It's not real transportation, in other words. It's a shuttle for the exceptions in your life.
[+] [-] thinkcontext|7 years ago|reply
I am curious how they'll deal with the new line siphoning off revenue from the existing service. I assume that they'll negotiate this (maybe a share of revenue?), what the price will be, routing, etc.
[+] [-] ben010783|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't say that it's perfectly fine. The Blue Line to O'Hare has become notorious for it's overcrowding. I think the goal is to reduce some of that congestion to O'Hare and get people to stay at hotels in the city. I'm not convinced that it's worth it though.
[+] [-] princekolt|7 years ago|reply
I wouldn't call that perfect. It takes at least an hour from the loop to O'Hare on a good day.
In comparison, the Stockholm Arlanda airport is 5 miles further from Stockholm Central than O'Hare is to the Loop, and it takes the Arlanda Express high speed train 20 minutes to get there.
[+] [-] lakechfoma|7 years ago|reply
Philadelphia is the same way. New York on the other hand is more of a spaghetti mess. I wonder if that interconnection does things for the city too, like encourage growth in more areas.
[+] [-] nwah1|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dominotw|7 years ago|reply
No way man. I used to commute from cumberland stop to downtown, I would be physically exhausted by the time I got to my stop 1 hr later. 1 hr on CTA is very different from 1 hr on metra, the seats are so cramped, you cannot open your laptop, constant pee smell, so many stop-starts take a toll on your body. Current CTA cars don't allow for people travelling to ohare with even one suitcase, there is no place to put your suitcase.
If the commute was 12 minutes, I can imagine so many people with families will move out of the city to enjoy more space out northwest. I would definitely consider moving out near ohare if commute was 12 minutes to downtown. I can only imagine this will bring down rents/ housing prices in the city. I will go downtown to enjoy an evening if the commute was only 12 mins. This is a game changer in my book not ' marginal improvement'.
[+] [-] rmason|7 years ago|reply
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/20...
Meanwhile Chicago's mayor, Rahm Emmanuel, just slipped ahead of him in line ;<).
[+] [-] crocal|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonknee|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tcbawo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noobermin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kjksf|7 years ago|reply
See for example California High-Speed Rail: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/12/californias-77-billion-high-...
Or "The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth" (in New York): https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
Apparently we do need to give it to someone who can control the cost and deliver things within our lifetime.
[+] [-] cozzyd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Maybestring|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Codemonkeyism|7 years ago|reply
Eddy: ‘PR!’
Saffy: ‘Yes, but…’
Eddy: ‘PR! I PR things! People. Places. Concepts.’
[+] [-] cozzyd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wenc|7 years ago|reply
But now that I'm older, I'd rather pay more to reduce the agony if I could. It's just me. The CTA Blue Line to O'Hare for me is an uncomfortable 40 minutes. Uncomfortable because there's no room for a suitcase and you feel like a douche if you put on the seat next to you. It's a boring 40 minutes. You can't sleep because it's never a good idea to nap on the CTA. I guess you can do stuff on your phone (cell signals are good) but I'm not big on that.
That said, I still take the Blue Line to the airport. Because during rush hour, it's the only game in town.
[+] [-] JackCh|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Larrikin|7 years ago|reply
Living in the northern part of Chicago always means traveling into the loop on the red line and then taking an endless amount of time on the blue line as it stops at a ton of stations. The bus isn't an option with luggage and Lyft is just an unpleasant extra expense on top of paying for my luggage.
[+] [-] aerovistae|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|7 years ago|reply
So, basically, they've won the right to make a proposal to finance their own construction of an airport link--which understandably just about no one else was interested in doing.
[+] [-] keyle|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
>...the city set a goal of connecting downtown with the airport in 20 minutes or less, with service every 15 minutes for the majority of the day. It also requested that fares be below the current rates for taxis and ride-share trips.
This seems technically rather undemanding. My local train service does 16 miles in 12 mins from St Albans to West Hampstead using some very run of the mill electric trains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thameslink,_Southern_and_Great...
[+] [-] paulie_a|7 years ago|reply
That is a nice way of saying bribes, navigating institutional corruption and then of course dealing with organized crime. This is Chicago so good luck.
[+] [-] jaclaz|7 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12935974#12937599
Not exactly "news" and for the moment at least the boring company bought a used TBM:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002501
[+] [-] alexlrobertson|7 years ago|reply
http://www.rtachicago.org/index.php/plan-your-trip/travel-ti...
> CTA "L" train fare $2.50
More realistically there's a single-ride ticket for $3.
> Single-Ride Ventra Tickets cost $3, which provides up to 2 transfers within 2 hours
[+] [-] tqi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bunderbunder|7 years ago|reply
I'd probably keep using the El for my own purposes, but I could see business travelers liking this option. They're already taking cabs, which charge more like $30 or $40 to get downtown (IIRC) and can probably take as much as an hour to make the trip if traffic is bad.
[+] [-] crisdux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purplezooey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kennydude|7 years ago|reply
That's not very exciting at all. Heathrow has them already, and even further back the Morgantown PRT from 1975...
[+] [-] Proven|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulsutter|7 years ago|reply
“Without tunnels we’ll be in traffic hell forever” -Elon Musk
Better electric transportation is an unalloyed good.
[+] [-] cozzyd|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dayaz36|7 years ago|reply