Mayor Rahm Emanuel and entrepreneur Elon Musk strolled into a room that for a decade has been a subterranean symbol of Chicago’s high-speed rail boondoggle, and declared the infamous station a key part of a futuristic downtown-to-O’Hare transit system.
After pausing for a crowd of cameramen and gawkers recording footage of them touring the unfinished Loop CTA “superstation,” the two officially announced plans Thursday for an express connection between O’Hare International Airport and downtown using the billionaire Musk’s untested technology.
If the system, which the mayor repeatedly referred to only as the letter “X,” succeeds, Chicago would rocket itself to the forefront of mass transportation’s next wave, Emanuel said.
“Chicago is always on the cutting edge, Chicago is always looking over the horizon to see what’s next,” Emanuel said. He placed Musk’s plan to whisk riders from downtown to O’Hare in 12 minutes among other great civic projects in Chicago history.
“Were there doubters when Chicago reversed the flow of the river? Yes. Where are they today?” Emanuel asked as Musk looked on. “Were there doubters when Chicago said we’re going to build the first skyscraper in America? Yeah. Where are they today? Were there doubters when we said we’re going to have the tallest building in the world known before as the Sears Tower? Yes, there were doubters. Where are they today? My view is it’s easy to be a critic or a cynic. What jobs do they produce, what economic growth do they produce?”
There are considerable hurdles for Musk’s Boring Co. to clear before the 16-person vehicles can start zipping to and from the airport. Not least among them is that Boring’s digging and transit technology has not been tested on a large scale.
For the announcement, Emanuel chose the superstation in the Block 37 retail development. Almost 10 years to the day after the CTA board suspended work on the station, Musk said his autonomous vehicles would eventually take off from there.
The setting carried risks. If Boring fails to deliver, the lasting image of the endeavor will be Emanuel and Musk standing in the belly of the station former Mayor Richard M. Daley sank $250 million into for his own unrealized high-speed train idea.
At one point, Musk said Emanuel’s takedown of doubters was “spot-on,” prompting the mayor to ask with a smile, “Can I have some stock?”
Musk acknowledged the skepticism surrounding the idea but pointed to his other successes as reason he should get the benefit of the doubt.
“I do think that there is a role for doubters,” Musk said. “People should question things, and it shouldn’t be taken as a given that things are going to work, because often things do not work. But I think if you look at someone’s track record, companies’ track record and what progress has been made, it’s reasonable to extrapolate into what they would do in the future.”
But in a comment that might raise eyebrows among Chicagoans who have gotten caught in red tape here, Musk said the city is an attractive place to work in part because “the number of approving authorities is small,” perhaps a nod to the difficulties he has had getting tunnel projects off the ground elsewhere.
Musk set an aggressive timeline, saying he hopes to start digging in as soon as three to four months and that the tunnel could be operational 18 months to two years after digging starts. “It’s very unlikely to be more than three years” before people are using the system, he said.
Musk said he would use “a combination of union and nonunion labor” for the work and that the new transit system would be the first “useful” application of his digging and transit technology, with wide public use and revenues matching the costs.
The tech billionaire was quietly assured as he described the Chicago project. Musk said it might not make much money, but it would show others the technology works and can be useful.
“Essentially, as soon as the regulatory approvals are done, we will be ready to begin tunneling,” he said. “I feel very confident the technologies that need to be solved here are, while difficult and new, significantly less difficult than, say, what we do at SpaceX or Tesla,” his aerospace and electric car companies.
While Emanuel will certainly point to the airport transit plan in his campaign for a third term as evidence he is the best choice to lead Chicago into the future with bold, big-ticket infrastructure projects, his opponents aren’t going to concede the point.
Mayoral challenger Dorothy Brown released a statement Thursday questioning Boring’s technology as “unproven futuristic ideas” and characterizing the Musk announcement as “more of a distraction and smokescreen” from the Chicago Public Schools student sexual abuse scandal that the Tribune detailed in a series of recent articles.
“The Mayor and CPS need to be laser focused on protecting our children,” Brown’s statement read in part. “Nothing has been proposed to date that gives children that may be involved in sexual assault situations right now a way out.”
And Ald. Scott Waguespack, 32nd, a frequent Emanuel critic, called the proposal “a fanciful project” that “makes the mayor look cool” in an election year.
“For him to say it’s a free lunch, everybody knows that doesn’t exist,” Waguespack said, referring to Emanuel’s promise that the project would not cost taxpayers any money.
Waguespack noted that there have been no public hearings on the project and said much remains unknown about its social, environmental and legal effects. “The mayor’s already decided what he wants,” the alderman said.
He also expressed concern about Musk’s history of labor disputes and worker safety issues. “We have to look at this guy’s track record,” Waguespack said.
Tesla has been before the National Labor Relations Board this week facing allegations it repeatedly interfered with the rights of its Fremont, Calif., factory workers who wanted to unionize. Musk has been vocally critical of the United Auto Workers union, particularly on Twitter, saying “they want divisiveness and enforcement of 2 class” system, which he said contradicts the spirit of the American revolution.
“US fought War of Independence to get *rid* of a 2 class system!” he tweeted last month. “Managers & workers shd be equal w easy movement either way. Managing sucks btw.”
He was also asked on Twitter about a complaint before the NLRB alleging “union busting tactics including surveillance and harassment.”
“That means nothing,” Musk responded. “Literally your Mom could file for NLRB.”
Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, expressed skepticism. Hopkins, who’s among the large group of aldermen who usually vote with Emanuel on major projects, said he doesn’t understand how the private company expects to make a profit and would like to know what analysis it’s using to calculate its expected return on investment.
“If they want to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, I’ll be the first one there at the groundbreaking,” Hopkins said.
He also said the city could lose out on other, more realistic opportunities if it becomes “infatuated” with the project, which he said would be a cost for taxpayers.
If Musk’s tunnel system becomes a reality, it would pass under mayoral ally Ald. Walter Burnett’s 27th Ward.
Burnett said there may be some grumbling from unions about work rules or other specifics, but he noted that Emanuel has developed a strong relationship with organized labor leaders. The alderman predicted the unions would see the potential for added jobs in the future if Musk’s vision to eventually build a network of tunnels under the city becomes a reality.
“The mayor is in this circle with all these billionaires,” Burnett said. “That really helps, especially when they’re willing to come here and spend their own money.”
Emanuel’s administration selected Musk’s company from four competing bids to provide high-speed transportation between downtown and the airport. Boring’s plan is by far the most cutting-edge of the bunch, in keeping with Musk’s penchant for investing in new technology. His other endeavors include Tesla electric cars and SpaceX aerospace manufacturing, and earlier this year he sold thousands of Boring’s flamethrowers to the public.
The autonomous 16-passenger vehicles zipping through the tunnels at speeds over 100 mph would indeed be the stuff of science fiction, though the Emanuel administration has sought to downplay the project’s more unproven aspects.
Under the proposal, passengers would be able to travel from the Loop to O’Hare in just 12 minutes at an estimated cost of $20 to $25 per ride. Boring has estimated the project will cost less than $1 billion, according to a source familiar with the company’s proposal but not authorized to speak publicly because of ongoing negotiations.
At its core, though, the Musk plan hinges largely on his ability to safely and quickly dig big tunnels starting downtown and winding beneath Chicago’s North Side to the airport.
While nobody has talked publicly about a specific path, a source familiar with the plans told the Tribune that Boring’s preferred preliminary route would follow Randolph Street west from Block 37 and then run under the Kennedy Expressway northwest before tracking north under Halsted Street and northwest under Milwaukee Avenue. The tunnels then would run northwest under Elston Avenue near Goose Island and continue northwest before turning west and following Bryn Mawr Avenue and then again crossing under the Kennedy and continuing west to O’Hare.
Boring is digging a test tunnel outside Los Angeles and has sought approval to dig another tunnel from Los Angeles to Culver City, Calif. The company also is proposing a high-speed transit tunnel between Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Those projects have prompted a lawsuit by community groups in Los Angeles worried about the environmental impact of a tunnel under their neighborhoods, and a jurisdictional fight among elected officials and public agencies in Maryland over who gets oversight there.
Daley envisioned the Block 37 shopping center near City Hall sitting atop a station for the high-speed rail. After the CTA and the city spent more than $250 million on the Block 37 “superstation,” Daley ordered the work stopped in 2008, saying the technology was outdated and more than $100 million more was still needed for completion.
The high-speed-to-O’Hare dream was dead until Emanuel resuscitated it in a May 2015 interview with the Tribune, shortly after he won his second term. In a February 2017 infrastructure speech, the mayor announced that the city had retained Robert Rivkin, a former federal transportation official and now deputy mayor, to create “an express train” to O’Hare.
Twitter: @_johnbyrne @royalpratt @BillRuthhart
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