Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonknee | Hacker News Reader

Interesting tidbit in this RFP is the winner has to pay for it! So of course they chose a startup that hasn’t built anything and has no financing.

View on HN

If they build the tunnel at $20k/foot, the cost would roughly be $1.6B. The line will supposedly run every 30 seconds for 20 hours per day. That's 876k trips per year. If they charge $20/ride and it fits 16 people, it will generate $280M/year at 100% utilization, or 17% ROI. Maybe a more realistic number would be 40% utilization, which still gives a respectable 7% ROI.

To add some data: there were almost exactly 4 million riders that boarded at the O’Hare L station last year 8 million fares (assuming the number getting on is similar to the number getting off) is an estimate for the current public transit load from downtown-ish (big ish). Obviously they would like to canabalize many riders who don’t currently ride the train as well.

https://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/6/2017_CTA_Annual_Ri...

But a large fraction of those are probably people who work at O'Hare and they sure as hell won't be paying $40 each way when they can pay $105/month for a CTA pass.

For sure, just putting out the data so people can add their own assumptions. Personally I’m quite the skeptic.

The article claims service every 15 minutes during most of the day, which means it will be extremely unprofitable to build.

This isn't meant to return it's investment, it's meant as an operational testbed for musk's vision.

The 30 second figure is from The Boring Company:

> Electric skates will leave each station as frequently as every 30 seconds. The Chicago Express Loop will operate 20 hours per day, every day of the week.

Source: https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/

Ahh, I appreciate the correction!

I thought they were going to have a single track tunnel with passing sidings based on the 1.6 billion dollar construction costs, which would limit frequency.

Does Musk seriously believe he get two ~20 mile tunnels and terminals for $1.6 billion? I don't know if he's exceedingly ambitious or delusional, give that a underground that's depicted in the rendering would cost 1/4 of his budget.

That $1.6 billion was my back of the envelope estimate based on costs I found in the news. Apparently, there is a unnamed source quoted in the Tribune that the cost would be under $1 billion. Also, these skates are the width of an electric car, so one tunnel 28 feet wide should suffice for bidirectional traffic.

If your goal was to cut costs and your largest single expense was boring, you would choose two 14' bores over a single 28' bore, because a 28' bore has a cross section twice as large as the combined cross section of two 14' bores and variable costs for boring are roughly based on cross sectional area

One of the only things that I can agree with Musk in regards to this project is that larger tunnels are more expensive.

Wouldn't you need a third tunnel for emergency escape / access?

If they can really do it for that price, that’s impressive. In London one of the tube lines is being extended by 3.2km and it will cost $1.6b (£1.2b):

https://www.london.gov.uk//press-releases/mayoral/nle-tunnel...

London is relatively easy to tunnel in, and as it’s an extension existing rolling stock will be used (so no development or purchase costs).

The RFQ required that, but with only 8-16 people per vehicle, they'd have to go much more often to have any reasonable throughput.

Surely the operating costs and rolling stock costs will be more than $0. Maybe they can sell motion sickness medicine at exorbitant prices.

The founder of the company did build one of the first payment systems on Internet, first reusable rocket and made electric cars mainstream.

In Chicago, "no government funding involved" tends to be about as ironclad as the average "we take your privacy very seriously."

The financing would be provided by somebody else not the boring company itself. Probably a private company will get some bonds based on the project and pay for operating cost and such. Though Elon musk said he did not want public money.

Elon says a lot of things, and some of them even turn out to be true. The ones involving money though, seem to be less likely. This could work though, I think it’s more likely to never get off the ground. At least it’s just a tunnel, and not that Hyperloop crap. I actually have some faith in their ability to dig a tunnel, and zero faith in making a vac-train feasible.

You are just going to trash one of the most accomplished engineering magnets on earth without any rationale to back up your assertion? And please don't just follow with "it's well known that it won't work".

Magnate - magnets are very different things, and very rarely people. /pedant

I thought it was a reference to Musk's ability to attract engineers :-)

"engineering magnets"

I see what you did there! 10,000 Gauss for you!

> I think it’s more likely to never get off the ground

It's a tunnel, duh.

Heh, I walked face-first into that one. Touché.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com