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Elon Musk's Boring Company To Build High-Speed Transit Tunnels in Chicago (chicagotribune.com)
Chicago has picked Elon Musk's Boring Company to build a futuristic transportation link to the city's airport, The Boring Company said late Wednesday. "We're really excited to work with the Mayor and the City to bring this new high-speed public transportation system to Chicago!' it said in a statement posted on Twitter. Chicago Tribune: Autonomous 16-passenger vehicles would zip back and forth at speeds exceeding 100 mph in tunnels between the Loop and O'Hare International Airport under a high-speed transit proposal being negotiated between Mayor Rahm Emanuel's City Hall and billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk's The Boring Co., city and company officials have confirmed. Emanuel's administration has selected Musk's company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport. Negotiations between the two parties will ensue in hopes of reaching a final deal to provide a long-sought-after alternative to Chicago's traffic gridlock and slower "L" trains. In choosing Boring, Emanuel and senior City Hall officials are counting on Musk's highly touted but still unproven tunneling technology over the more traditional high-speed rail option that until recently had been envisioned as the answer to speeding up the commute between the city's central business district and one of the world's busiest airports.
Isn't it great that the working stiffs get to pay for a few billion dollars into Musk's pocket, while the rich people get to jet in and out of the Loop? How about fixing the fucking Blue line, which is late again today? Oh, that's right, black people take the blue line, and that's bad.
What a beautiful combination of racism and graft packaged in a press release that gets the idiot progressives all wet.
The fundamental problem with subway trains is that because they hold a large number of passengers they have to stop at every station. This limits the number of stations each line can have.
I can see a market for small, autonomous vehicles that behave like elevators operating horizontally, so they only need to stop at stations where someone needs to get on or off. In this usage there would also have to be 'step aside' capability, allowing multiple cars to operate on one line by being able to pass stopped cars. It would then be feasible to have a hundred tiny stations on your subway line, each one being nothing more than an elevator lobby with a short hop to the surface. An automated system could optimize travel so that each passenger would experience no more than a few sops on the average trip.