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

Post by spectrum1234 » Sun, Jun 17, 2018, 5:10 AM UTC

Joeri wrote: post #39

martinald wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assume it does cost $1bn, then that's 40million rides to break even (obviously a lot of other costs I'm ignoring here). If only 5% of people using OHare (80million) take it, then that's 10 years before it is paid back. Considering this infrastructure should last 50 years minimum, it could well be profit generating or at least revenue neutral.

Musk always runs over budget by a multiple, it’s how he rolls. Maintenance is probably three times or more the initial outlay over a 10 year period. So, it probably won’t be profitable or revenue neutral. But it shouldn’t be. A brand new transportation mode is going to run at a loss until people figure out how to deploy it at scale. It would be weird for it to be profitable from day one.

Post by pas » Mon, Jun 18, 2018, 7:51 AM UTC

gok wrote: post #87

lvh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are comparing the current state of the Blue Line against a proposed system, though. The argument is that you could improve the Blue Line significantly for $1B, and also that there's good reason to believe it's not actually $1B. (Doesn't have to be the Blue Line! Metra at Jeff Park or whatever with a track to OHare makes a ton of sense too.)

If we were going spend a cool billion to improve the Blue Line, I'd spend it on anything but making the airport experience better. Make the stations ADA-compliant. Use the extra space on the Congress branch for triple- or quadruple- tracking. Upgrade the power system. But again, this is $1B not coming out of the CTA budget, it's $1B Elon Musk has burning a hole in his pocket.