Last June, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced that the city had selected tech guru Elon Musk’s Jetsons-esque scheme to build and operate the O’Hare Express, an airport transit system employing high-speed electric pods as a faster, cushier alternative to the Blue Line. The inventor says his Boring Company will use proprietary digging technology to tunnel some 18 miles from Block 37 to O’Hare at a fraction of the cost and time of conventional methods. Then, he says, he’ll shoot customers through the passage in 16-person pods at over 100 mph using “electric skate” technology, reducing the current 40- to 45-minute trip time to a mere 12 minutes.
“I’d kill it,” added Paul Vallas. “I can’t wait to kill it.”
In December, Chicago officials attended a press event for a 1.14-mile tunnel the Boring Company dug in the Los Angeles area. While some of them claimed to be wowed by the demo, it consisted of bumpy rides in a Tesla Model X electric car instead of the autonomous pods Musk had promised prior to the unveiling. And rather than using next-level tunneling technology, the company had excavated the 12-foot-wide passage with an old tunnel boring machine (a machine with a circular cross section that can dig through everything from sand to hard rock) previously used to build sewers in Oakland.
Sriraj cited the cautionary tale of Toronto’s Union Pearson Express airport service, which saw dismal ridership until fares were slashed from about U.S. $20 to roughly $9. Keeping the service running at that ticket price would likely require a subsidy of tens of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer funds. He added that initial ridership projections for Denver’s A-Line airport train, which currently costs $10.50, were also overly optimistic.
Update [February 28, 2019]: With the elimination of Bill Daley, just about the only candidate who had anything positive to say about the O’Hare Express, from the mayoral election, the possibility of the project moving forward under the next mayor became much less likely. Both Toni Preckwinkle and Lori Lightfoot, the two mayoral hopefuls heading to the April 2 runoff, have thrown shade at Elon Musk’s proposal. In addition to Preckwinkle’s comment at a candidate forum that any transit investments should be focused on the CTA and Metra, Lightfoot previously told the Tribune that Musk’s and the Emanuel administration’s claim that taxpayers won’t wind up subsidizing the express is “a fiction.”
