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For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

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Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#111

Post by gok »

allannienhuis wrote: post #58
skybrian wrote: post #54

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 tec…

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.

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.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#112

Post by tqi »

gok wrote: post #40
FLGMwt wrote: post #3

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

It's 37 minutes if you happen to be in the Loop and time the train perfectly. Oh, then it's another 10 minute walk to the gates. Oh and almost none of the Blue Line stations are accessible, so hope you're not in a wheelchair or carrying big bags (who takes luggage to the airport, after all?) Speaking of...where exactly do your bags go on crowded CTA car? I keep hearing this argument about the Blue Line from people wh…

It just seems like this would serve a very narrow market. When I lived in Lincoln Park, I usually planned on the trip to O'Hare taking ~90 minutes (Red->Blue). This was to avoid a $40-$50 cab fare. Would I have been willing to pay an extra $25 to shave off 30 minutes? Probably not.

If I was a business traveler, I would almost certainly prefer taking a car from wherever I was directly to the airport unless I happened to be staying/working right near the stop. The convenience of not having to get to the station, privacy, not having the transfer, etc would outweigh the 20-30 minute savings. Unless traffic was completely backed up in which case having that option is nice.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#113

Post by SubiculumCode »

jcomis wrote: post #37
thomasdelteil wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The project will be financed by the Boring company, not by the city. The Heathrow express in London work on a similar concept, it takes 15 min to go to Heathrow compared to 1h with the tube, and they charge ~10 times the price of a regular tube ticket.

And Heathrow express is nearly empty all the time...

Well I took it because I was silly enough to buy a flight with a transfer between London City and Heathrow. The first time I took a cab...238 pounds. Kill me. Next time I took the tubes, and was glad to get on the cushy express after the crowded London tubes...and I had to make my flight so another hour would not have worked for me.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#114

Post by jcranmer »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #20

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.

They don't. The cost of just boring a tunnel is typically somewhere in the region of $50 million/mile. $1 billion/mile is on the mildly pricey side for building a twin-tube subway tunnel, all-inclusive of stations, rolling stock, substations, etc. The Boring Company is guilty of pointing to the latter to complain about tunneling costs while quoting the former for their costs.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#115

Post by ant6n »

nickik wrote: post #93
sandworm101 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was intrigued to learn that Musk wanted to build what is essentially a new take on the subway, but after reading this article am totally against the proposal. This is looking far more like an option for rich people to get away from the poors. Short of private helicopters, this is one of the few cities where the public transit option is faster than taking a limo. Musk wants to correct that imbalance by creating a fa…

If you never have progress for rich people then you will never have much progress at all. Where will you build a revolutionary first transportation system for the masses? Literally every form of transport started as a luxury.

What about walking?

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#116

Post by rory096 »

FLGMwt wrote: post #3

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

> This is only benefitting people for whom 25 minutes is worth $20/$22.50.

This is addressed in the RFQ, which includes a model of time value split into four markets:

Business (HH income under $100K) $33

Business (HH income $100K and over) $92

Non-Business (HH income under $100K) $25

Non-Business (HH income $100K and over) $55

It includes this reasoning:

>In the Project work, the values were adapted from a previous study on express service which found that the value of time for business trips is higher than those of non-business trips to O’Hare. In many recent studies, the value of time for long distance trips and work trips has been shown to be higher than VOT for everyday short trips. Trips to/from an airport could be considered as one leg of long distance travel. Also, the total cost of air travel is much higher than the cost of everyday travel; therefore, travelers may be willing to pay more to reduce the risk of missing their flight. Willingness to pay a high fee for airport trips is reported in other studies, for example, for business trips to airports, Harvey reports $42/hour, Furuichi & Koppelman report $73/hour and Hess and Polak report a value in the range of $93-155/hour. The value of time also varies across regions with large metropolitan areas such as New York/New Jersey having higher values than smaller cities.

In the cited 2016 Airport Survey, taxi rides are still in the double digits for non-business low-income residents and drop-offs are as popular as rail (tripling the amount of time to account for, though I don't think they include this). In their reweighting of the survey (because "the Blue Line survey percentage was thought to be high due to over-represented CTA Blue Line use), the plurality took taxis in every category.

http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#117

Post by ant6n »

bbeekley wrote: post #66
ComputerGuru wrote: post #20

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.

I don't think CA pays $1 billion/mi just to drill. The Purple Line Extension project in LA is forecast to cost $8.2 billion total and covers 9 miles ( http://media.metro.net/projects_studies/westside/images/fact... ). That's pretty close to $1b/mi but it's also all-inclusive and a subway underneath one of the densest, busiest streets in LA. And the cost of subway in Europe is much more than $40M/km. The Crossrail pro…

Crossrail has 21km of (twin) tunnels, which apparently cost 1.5B (just the tunnelling contracts). (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossrail)

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#118

Post by peatmoss »

apeace wrote: post #74

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 run…

It's worth noting that public-private-partnerships can lead to some perverse situations that are pretty antithetical to democratically-led governance.

Companies that build the infrastructure typically have expectations around revenues in the long run. Very frequently there are provisions built in that prevent governments from turning around and building other infrastructure that competes with the privately operated infrastructure.

Imagine a civil engineering firm builds a new highway funded by tolls. Now imagine 20 years from now, the city wants to build a transit link because the highway is at capacity and the government wants to shift travel to more ecological / efficient modes. What happens when the tollway operator hires some travel forecasters that show the new transit link cutting into their toll revenues? You end up in a strange circumstance where you're no longer just doing transportation planning balancing the desires of the citizens, the funding, and the technical challenges of transportation... you're now balancing all those things plus the business interests who are less interested in fixing transportation than they are interested in maintaining their maximum toll revenues.

P3 infrastructure projects have many good aspects, but they have some really gnarly downsides as well.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#119

Post by jandrese »

ComradeTaco wrote: post #107
apeace wrote: post #74

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 run…

Okay, my bachelors was in civil engineering and I have worked in construction and engineering for just over two years now. Most public projects today have generous structured incentives that are given to companies for meeting goals for time and budget. We work to these incentives. Keep in mind that often you cannot be aware of the things that will go wrong until you actually do them. This happens in software developm…

If he hits the $1 billion target this will be the civil engineering project of the century. It's hard to overstate just how optimistic that figure is compared to literally every other mass transit project worldwide.

The craziest part is that there is already a much cheaper and not that much slower option to get to the airport. This project seems rather Quixotic.

Re: For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle

#120

Post by pg_bot »

cassieramen wrote: post #108
gok wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mass transit systems we have were originally privately built and operated until they became unprofitable in the 1930s-40s at which point they were publicly taken over. More recently there has been a resurgence of "public-private partnerships" where a private company builds a project and then gets a long term deal to extract money from it once it's done. Denver's recent transit expansion is one example. A potenti…

It's important to remember that the federal government was actively subsidizing the urban exodus to suburbia in the 1940s. The subway became unprofitable due to federal housing policy and the local or state government ended up having to bail it out.

The NYC subway became unprofitable due to the terrible contracts that the operators signed.[0] Specifically they could not increase the fare greater than five cents, which doomed them because of inflation. The city took over the BMT and IRT companies on June 1st 1940. Suburbanization did not really start occurring in the US until after the end of WW2.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Contracts#Conditions

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