For $1B, Elon Musk’s Tunnel to O’Hare Would Be a Miracle
citylab.com
citylab.com
The reason this is failing is because of awareness. I travel to Toronto for work 4-5 times every year (for the past 12 years). I heard about this extension being approved a couple years ago and I've never seen a sign for it in Pearson (there must be some somewhere). I've also asked people who live in Toronto whatever happened to this project and nobody even knows what I'm talking about.
Meanwhile, I learn from this article that it's actually up and running and they not only consider it a failure but they're using it to say other transit systems won't work. A Musk built project won't fail on awareness like this project has.
- I didn't know it was completed and operating.
- Bulk of residential population is 30-45min+ subway ride from Union Station anyway, might have assumed people travel from their offices.
- If due to a subway delay I miss a flight because I only paid $15 and wanted to save $30, the savings doesn't justify the risk. The independent probabilities of unavoidable delays on each leg of journey add up, where in car there are alternate routes.
- Would consider taking train if it came with flight insurance.
- There is no clear signage at arrivals of where the UP line is, as signage favors limousines, then taxis, then pickup, etc.
- Any signage would need to include scheduling information as walking to train to find it's not running means never going back.
I supported the UP line in principle when they were talking about building it, but can see why their numbers aren't up yet.
A new transit line is usually pretty big news in any city, but like I said... everyone in Toronto that I asked about it didn't know about it either. So they've really blown it on awareness. Thankfully, that's actually a pretty easy thing to fix.
The reason it's receiving slow adoption is because of the price. Even after they reduced the fare you can still get a taxi or Uber directly to your door for a little more than the fare price (Uber and Lyft were recently granted permission for pickups directly from the airport).
Additionally because of the lumpy nature of air travel and the multiple commuting stops the UP Express can be packed during peak times. The last time I got off a flight from London and took the UP Express downtown there was standing room only and no space in the luggage racks for my bags.
[1] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/how-toronto-t...
I don't think so. On google maps, UP is the only option shown when going from union to pearson. The thing is that most people still need to take public transit to get to Union station, so it's not convenient enough for most people.
I used to live in Etobicoke where there's an express bus to Kipling station (the closest subway station to the airport). There's also an express bus line from Kipling to the airport. The subway system is run by the same entity (the TTC) as the buses, so a fare to go from Union station (downtown) to Pearson airport costs $3.25 and gets you there in about an hour. Subways run every few minutes and the express line to the airport every 10. By comparison, the UP express (the new train line) fare costs $12.35 and gets you there in about 30 mins, running every 15 minutes. So when considering UP, you're looking at paying $9 more to save maybe 30 minutes travel time (from union station).
BUT, the catch is that UP only goes from the airport to union station. The TTC also serves the entire Greater Toronto Area, so for the same $3.25 you can get from _anywhere_ in the city to the airport, and if you have a monthly pass (which you most likely do if you commute), then it basically costs nothing to go to the airport. Why would you go all the way down to the harbor front just to pay another $12 to go back up to Etobicoke, when you can just take the TTC to go directly to the airport for no extra cost?
I guess other people must be different, or maybe not since ridership is low, but I don't check google maps unless I'm the driver (renting a car). If I'm planning on taking a cab I won't even open google maps at the airport, so I don't believe that is the right place to count on raising awareness of UP (for out-of-towners at least).
But I do agree with your other point about why people who live in Toronto would rarely use UP... that explains that part of it.
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 running.
I know nothing about this. Has this been done successfully before? What are the potential downsides I'm not thinking of?
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.
In general companies are faster movers than governments in these types of things. If that didn't happen then something prevented them from being able to do so.
The corrupted politicians are to blame here for blocking other companies from competing, not the business.
The net effect is that there is drastic under-investment from the private sector compared to the needs or the economic potential of a society with good infrastructure.
Typically P3 agreements are initiated by government and promised revenue exclusivity is the incentive to build.
A potential downside is that we might end up back in the 1940s, when the subways became unprofitable and cities were forced to buy them out of bankruptcy because residents came to rely on them.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_Contracts#Conditions
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 development quite a bit.
I am not aware of any extensive private tunnel construction that has occurred without public financing inside of the U.S.
So here are the drawbacks to Musk's plan:
1. He may prioritize speed over safety, either unintentionally causing loss of life or limb because of construction practices or geotechnically destablize the foundations of the buildings and infrastructure that he's traveling under.
2. I firmly believe that it's going to cost far, far more than 1 billion. That leaves the chance of a big hole in the ground that may eventually fill with water.
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.
About the cost estimate, I don't have any other completely underground metro line in a developing country to compare. But Is it the labor costs in developed countries?
The reason you don't want to do that is because the private enterprise wants to maximize its profits. There is nothing wrong with that but in order to do so they will cut corners where ever possible and do the absolute minimum for upkeep.
Yes, this happens with poorly managed and financed public projects as well but public infrastructure can and sometimes must operate at a loss.
In fact a lot of public infrastructure does not pay for itself and is subsidized by tax dollars.
Government does this and when they do it it's much, much harder to hold them accountable. Look at the Big Dig or anything the MTA touches.
When a private company acts like this and the public notices there's at least the risk that some politicians will latch on to the issue (no politician ever lost public support by being tough on a company that was mistreating the public). When government is the wrongdoer it's needs to get incredibly bad before the other parts of government hold them accountable.
I find this idea really odd that a private company is going to cut corners. The fact is it has been the public projects that have cut corners. A private company always has the incentive to stay profitable and cutting corners is not how you play the long term game. Unlike the public held transport agencies they cannot just ask for a bailout or tax increase
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/chicago-to-pay-20-million-to-...
We could do what all normal business does for infrastructure. Revolutionary idea.
But it is a good idea. Often private mass transportation is illegal. This seems to be a hybrid model, I don't quite understand what this project entails in terms of obligations by both sides.
The downsides might be that they go bankrupt with a half finished tunnel and then the government has to either put in money to finish the project or start a new project.
$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
I keep hearing this argument about the Blue Line from people who really don't sound like they've tried it. I'm happy we have it as an option but it's really not ideal. A 12 minute express with short headway and space for bags would be a total game changer. Everyone within ~25 minutes of the Loop would now be able to take transit to/from the airport in 40 minutes, not just people who happen to be going to/from the central business district.
And the city isn't paying any of that $1B, they're really just giving Boring Company permission to try to pay for it on their own. It's not money that would otherwise be spent on CPS. I'm not completely convinced this is really the right solution. My personal pick would be using the Metra NCS route to run an express train and then moving the the O'Hare Transfer Station to be actually inside the airport, which would also make transfers with Amtrak and other Metra services easy. But that too would cost a lot more than $1B, and no one's jumping up to do it.
(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.)
But again, this is $1B not coming out of the CTA budget, it's $1B Elon Musk has burning a hole in his pocket.
Yep. I traveled from the Loop to O'Hare on the Blue Line with luggage. Once. Never again.
The L just isn't designed for people to be carrying anything larger than maybe a small bag of groceries.
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.
This is not true for everyone though. Business travelers take cabs between the loop and o'hare. So, $25 is actually faster and cheaper -- so it's a great use of their money! Even if it was more expensive than a cab, most business travelers would happily spend a little more of someone else's (company) money to get there faster.
Peak demand for transit (road, rail, etc) will always exceed available supply as long as the population of people moving at peak is larger than the instantaneous capacity of your transit system. Adding more capacity will always help the overall situation because it shortens the length of the time the that demand is higher than supply.
It's like how course registration at universities tends to saturate the systems involved. Peak demands will always slow things to a crawl but additional capacity is beneficial because it shortens the time the service is degraded. Adding transit of any type doesn't make rush "hour" suck less, it makes rush hour shorter.
edit:rearranged to more clearly make my point
"Less congestion" can mean either "shorter span of time" as you further explained, or "less congested at some time point".
The former should be what readers jump to, because "congestion" is nearly binary at a moment in time -- either traffic is flowing smoothly (1-2x optimal travel time) or it is clogged (>2x travel time). "Slightly clogged" isn't really an important case for travelers.
* "Relatively cheap" compared to taking the cab all the way to O'Hare.
Roads suffer from induced demand [1]. You can't build your way out of traffic. The only solutions are tolls or quotas.
In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt.
> transit for the actual public
Cars going through this tunnel are cars off other roads.
The whole point of Musk's tunneling project is that with tunnels you can build as many tunnels as you want without the negative aspects of roads which are mainly taking up surface space and making a lot of noise.
With tunnels you can probably increase capacity by 100 times without going very deep. That would support some kind of crazy Hong Kong level density of people in the whole LA basin. Everyone in the US could live there. After that happens one can worry about this infinity demand potential.
>Roads suffer from induced demand [1].
Demand is a good thing because it's economic activity that wouldn't have happened if the piece of infrastructure in question wasn't built out. Crappy infrastructure increases the cost of geographic distance and that's bad for everyone.
> You can't build your way out of traffic
Reducing traffic isn't the point. The point is getting more people and goods to and from where they need to be. You can slap a $100 price on a subway ticket or a $100 toll on the highway if you want to reduce traffic. That doesn't help anybody except the people rich enough to regularly pay it.
> The only solutions are tolls or quotas.
Which themselves have a bunch of negative side effects because you're basically forcing that traffic onto other roads or other forms of transit and many trips will be forgone in the process.
You can't create capacity out of thin air by manipulating the cost (money, time or some other metric) of the different transit options. You can only create the illusion of capacity by forcing traffic elsewhere.
>In any case, if you can't find anyone willing to pay to use your infrastructure (at a price that recoups the investment), that's a sign you overbuilt.
Or a sign that your prices are so high that other options are still less worse by comparison.
It's economic activity that has a huge amount of negative externalities and infrastructure cost. So if the economic activity generated has a value less than that of the externalities and costs, society is worse off.
So we need a way of limiting demand so that any trip whose benefit is less than its infrastructure and negative externalities doesn't happen.
Currently we mostly do this by making trips really slow and annoying during rush hour. There's obviously a better way but tolls are political suicide.
https://www.inverse.com/article/46041-elon-musk-s-tesla-plan...
> The only solutions are tolls or quotas.
Increasing density of traffic is another solution, for example buses or trains. Elon is proposing one more way to increase the density of traffic: up to 30 levels of tunnels (considering surface density of traffic). I don't know that he can achieve it, but I'm thrilled he's trying.
Isn't that a contradiction? Or are you saying induced demand only works for cars?
And, of course, this project is far more important as a real-world proof-of-concept for the technology than it is for its expected use for travelers. Reducing tunnel costs by 95%(!) would quite obviously result in dramatic quality-of-life improvements.
It's not uncommon for projects to start out that way, and then magically, public money starts appearing anyway.
If this really remains a privately financed project (financed out of the deep pockets of Musk's companies, and completed on time due to Musk's uncannily accurate forecasts), then more power to them!
Well, not all for sure. Many cities just have their normal city train service extended to the airport. I'd guess the express airport trains are common in countries with privatized rail transport, as that is often one of the most lucrative lines.
This is a typical Chicago/Illinois gimmick again The state and the city is so corrupted, another attempt to distract from the other bull-shit they are trying to pull.
The word is, only the mayor and the governor are interested in an express train. Everyone else is happy with the blue-line.
Chicago is so parallized trying to make any decsion. I am ready to bet, the deal will fall aprat during the negocaitions
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.
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/...
Why would they approve this project if they didn't feel this was sufficient?
Only thing I can think is that the demand is going to be strong or they're thinking it's a steal with the contractor buying it out and are willing to experiment.
I'm all for new transit solutions and I'm really interested in this one, picking this route in particular though is what's odd to me...
This is being built for business travelers. Many people fly in and out of Chicago on a Monday-Thursday schedule, they will use this train. All of those people will now be in a separate tunnel and everyone else will have more room on the highway and Blue Line. Sounds like a win to me.
Many of whom get reimbursed by their employers for transportation costs, don't forget. $20 for an airport run is going to look damned cheap to the people who process the expense accounts. It will never be questioned.
Cities should not support such things. I'm not saying that it shouldn't happen, just that the project shouldn't be given any special treatment, indemnification, or tax breaks. And what do we think will happen to the public option when all the influential people start using the premium service?
Notice also that none of the people in the renderings has any luggage. They aren't even wearing coats. To which magical airport are they headed?
If this project manages to reduce the cost per mile of building public transportation, the public as a whole will benefit greatly in the years to come. I'm not rich and I would love there to be many more subway lines built out in our cities.
It's the Tesla Roadster of public transit: an expensive proving ground for a technology with a mass-market demand. I'd rather the government give breaks to something with at least a sliver of hope of helping the common person - rather than tax cuts to wealthy, etc.
The purported cost savings are primarily coming from making the system as incompatible as possible with traditional subways (i.e., the proposed tunnels are too small to be refit to accept standard loading gauge tunnels). Beyond that, the entire Loop concept boils down to a really low capacity system (subways generally are capable of moving 20,000 people an hour, all you really need is the rolling stock and traction power to make that happen; this system is talking about 2,000 people an hour with no room for upgrades without boring more tunnels--on par with a single highway lane). While the cost per mile might be reduced, the capacity is so low that the actual cost of the full system would be much higher.
2000 for a typical mixed-use highway lane. A dedicated/managed lane can move several times that number. 50-person buses at two per minute = 6000 people per hour. For sheer people moving potential, things like escalators and moving walkways actually do pretty good. They are just very slow.
Where will you build a revolutionary first transportation system for the masses? Literally every form of transport started as a luxury.
> Literally every form of transport started as a luxury
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 technology that doesn't do what mass transit does?
And the cost of subway in Europe is much more than $40M/km. The Crossrail project in London is 118 km and 15 billion GBP (http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/crossrail-in-numbers). That's about $280 million/mi. Definitely less than the LA project, but it's the same order of magnitude and much of their mileage is in suburban London.
Also unlike old cities, there are no archeological issues when digging under LA.
$55mm per mile ($34mm per km) would be pretty cheap, but closer to what the rest of the world pays for subways than what NYC does. accounting for musk-math, expect it to cost more like $70mm per km, which would put it on the low end but not the bottom of international subway construction costs.
"But while the Second Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion a mile, the Line 14 extension is on track to cost $450 million a mile." (that price includes stations, emergency exits, rails and systems...)
Berlin calculated some planned subway extensions (U1, U8 lines) at $120M to $280M per mile (2017), tho, those are short extensions of existing tunnels of about 1 km each and only estimations not actual costs.
I'm much more of a New Yorker, but I'll admit that Chicago transit around the Loop is pretty damn good. It may not run 24/7 (IIRC) but going from downtown to either of the airports is a real pleasure compared to NYC.
1. Staffed security such that there was never a line, 2. Staffed the ticket counter such that there was never a line, 3. Installed double ended jet bridges so that we could load and unload the plane twice as fast, 4. Put moving walkways everywhere, 5. Improved staffing and efficiency of baggage handling, such that you could drop your bag 20 minutes before the flight and have it get on the plane,
We could shave 30 minutes off the airport experience, for every user of the airport, not just the ones that happen to be coming from downtown.
The $8.5 billion O’Hare Airport expansion project is approved and underway, and it is also funded by the airlines via issuing bonds. Supposedly, no tax money will be involved either.
Block 37 is also designed to serve as a downtown "terminal". Passengers will go through security and check in luggages before they board the trains.
I don't know the regulations, but installing double ended jet bridges doesn't sound that easy to me. It's probably something FAA has to approve. Staffing issues at the ticket counter and security is also outside of the mayor's jurisdiction. It's decided by the airlines themselves, TSA, and the organization that runs the O'hare airport.
The new 13.5 kilometer subway section in Helsinki cost 88M€ per kilometer, corresponding to $165 per mile.
>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.
The RFQ[0] makes clear that the intent is to compete against taxi and ride-share services, which comprise 52% of trips in the 2015 estimate, to CTA Rail's 20%[1]. The article says "the Blue Line works pretty darn well", but revealed preferences tell a different story.
I can't find what O'Hare Xpress LLC (the other finalist) proposed, but the RFP[2] required respondents to specify "maximum passenger capacity: (i) per 15 minutes; and (ii) per hour". The JFK AirTrain was designed for 34,000 riders per day.[3]
>Most transit moves horizontally, some moves vertically; the concept for the “Chicago Express Loop” is to do both.
The tunnel will terminate at Block 37, where Chicago already has an unused, very expensive, giant subway station. This concept doesn't include elevators, as described so far.
> The writer and transportation researcher Alon Levy compiled the grim per-mile pricing of recent tunnel projects for CityLab in January, shown below. This table gives a sense of how extraordinary Musk’s project would be on a cost basis—and how improbable.
This cherry-picks a US price chart from an article[4] that's entirely about how tunneling is inordinately expensive in the United States compared to the rest of the world and refutes the idea that labor is the main cause. The cited article even has a pull-quote that says "There’s no reason why building subways and light rail in sprawling cities should be as expensive as it is."
>If the Boring Company’s cost projection of $1 billion is anywhere near accurate, that pencils out to $55.5 million per mile—far and away, the cheapest construction cost for any subterranean transit line in the U.S.
That should be $27.8 million per mile ($17.3m per km), since you'll presumably want it to go in both directions. This is low even compared to European transit,[5] but those tunnels are 2-3x the diameter.
Really, this project is a Loop mostly in name, diameter and rolling stock — it doesn't approach the ambitious concept of operations (elevators, dynamic routing, and car access) that is planned for Maryland and LA. That should alleviate a substantial part of the technical risk, leaving it mostly as a financial risk for investors.
Since (like most infrastructure) tunneling mostly consists of fixed costs, the most likely failure mode is not reaching completion at all. Once it's complete it's likely to be cash flow positive even if it has a poor or negative return on investment, so there's little incentive to shut it down. (This was echoed by Musk in the press conference.)
[0] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/...
[1] Taxi/Uber: 5,164, CTA Rail: 2,011, Total: 9,956. n.b. These ridership estimates are for daily one-way trips, with total daily trips being twice those in the table. https://i.imgur.com/naVUjnA.png
[2] http://chicagoinfrastructure.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/...
[3] https://www.bechtel.com/projects/jfk-airtrain-jfk-2000/
[4] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2018/01/why-its-so-ex...
[5] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2013/06/03/comparative-su...
… and I got this!
http://www.tronc.com/gdpr/chicagotribune.com/
"Unfortunately, our website is currently unavailable in most European countries. We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market. We continue to identify technical compliance solutions that will provide all readers with our award-winning journalism."
edit: I'm not complaining and I'm not trying to derail (hah, see what I did there) the topic. I was expressing my surprise, first time this has happened to me.
I see GDPR-blocked comments are kinda like I see "paywall" comments: After a while, people noting a given site is blocked is just off-topic. It doesn't add anything people won't very quickly find out for themselves. I usually downvote them so they don't clutter up the main discussion.
Meanwhile, a comment providing a way around the paywall, generally will get an upvote, because they're saving everyone else time, so we can all get to the real discussion.
So with that in mind as kind of a barebones version, even if he was to build a 17 mile tunnel that was effectively a walkway I would consider that a success.
But a 17 mile tunnel that can accommodate autonomous Tesla 3, just as an extreme example, that’d also be a success. The autonomy would work perfectly within the tunnel, it wouldn’t need a track. If there was elevators on both ends, then multiple Tesla’s could go in and be queued at the destination end for the elevator back to surface.
It wouldn’t be 12 minutes but it’d still be way faster than rush hour.
The electric skate version of the tunnel I think is the idealized version.
Sounds like it would scale horribly compared to actual mass transit, though. The amount of space taken up per passenger would be huge if you use cars.
I'd expect the final implementation to look more like http://subwaynut.com/irt/chambersn1/chambersn130.jpg.
I started thinking this way while standing in line to go through security at JFK. There were about a thousand people milling about, and we hadn't gone through any sort of substantial security yet. And I was thinking that a bomb there could kill more people than taking out an airplane. Yay security theater.
Especially if you are any sort of believer in arms control, like, even a little bit; if you think civilians shouldn't be in possession of RPGs, and they shouldn't be easy to get, then you should be OK with some security around planes, because they are way more dangerous than an RPG. It shouldn't be possible to just stroll into an airport and casually pick up a 777.