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Comment by choxi | Hacker News Reader

He's building us an express loop in Chicago: https://www.boringcompany.com/chicago/

They're even paying for the whole thing, I think most residents here are excited about it.

Speaking as a Chicago resident, I don't think there's much enthusiasm (or opposition) for the project. It's not the kind of thing you'd take if you lived in the city: after all, it's a $25 express ride from the airport to the Loop. Most Chicagoans live out in the neighborhoods.

One thing that kinda shocked me was how limited its capacity was. The Blue Line "L" train actually has something like 10x the throughput despite being extremely slow (45 minutes vs 12). I don't know if that's a design limitation of the technology or if that's all the demand they anticipated. It makes me worried it's not scalable.

I'll take the opposite side and wager that few people in Chicago know about it and that it will never be built.

I don't think many people in Chicago even know about it, and experts don't think it'll happen at all. I'll believe it when I see it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/16/us/chicago-tunnel-elon-mu...

Musk says a lot of things. He is really amazing at getting press attention for himself. Ask Buffalo how Musk promises regarding the solar roof factory have gone so far...

Ahead of the job numbers he promised https://www.wgrz.com/mobile/article/news/tesla-shares-new-jo... . I will say that project is going very well.

Per your own link, Tesla has not yet satisfied the requirement. Tesla needs to hire 500 workers by April 2019, and so far has only hired 400. The other 400 were hired by Panasonic and don't get counted towards Tesla's total. Based on the abysmal/lack of solarroof sales in the past year, it's unlikely they'll need 100 new workers in the next 5 months.

Or how many Solar Roofs have been sold. I think 3 years in, they're still in the single digits.

The Boring company also plans to build a loop from DC to Baltimore, and it will also be self-funded.

https://www.boringcompany.com/eastcoast/

Everyone with a new transit option plans to demo it between DC to Baltimore. The two cities are close enough to each other that a new company could fund the demo largely by itself. But the real hope is to convince government to extend it to go between DC and NYC, which is where the real market opportunity is, and, naturally, being the first to develop the technology, the initial company is the sole supplier. So plans to build something from DC to Baltimore should be taken with a grain of salt.

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