If this works I'll be surprised... but happy. But realistically, I'll probably still take the blue line to O'Hare unless Musk's toy accepts my monthly CTA pass.
But now that I'm older, I'd rather pay more to reduce the agony if I could. It's just me. The CTA Blue Line to O'Hare for me is an uncomfortable 40 minutes. Uncomfortable because there's no room for a suitcase and you feel like a douche if you put on the seat next to you. It's a boring 40 minutes. You can't sleep because it's never a good idea to nap on the CTA. I guess you can do stuff on your phone (cell signals are good) but I'm not big on that.
That said, I still take the Blue Line to the airport. Because during rush hour, it's the only game in town.
I used to live in San Mateo, CA near 92 / Hillsdale (up in the hills between US-101 and I-280). My wife, daughter, and I would fly out of SFO Airport to Arizona or North Carolina frequently. Rather than paying for a taxi or for on- or near-airport parking (Uber/Lyft wasn't a thing yet) we'd opt to take the SamTrans bus from Belmont -- the service was good, on-time per schedule, and cost $2 per adult each way, meaning we could be away for a week or two and pay just $8 round-trip to/from airport.
The minor catch was where to park our car in Belmont while we were away. There was plenty of parking about two or three blocks away from the bus stop (Belmont Caltrain) in places not directly in front of any houses or condos. We took seven or eight such trips ... no problem!
... till it was a problem. After one almost-three-week trip we got back to the airport and then went on to Belmont -- CAR WAS MISSING. So we figured the car had been stolen or towed. I called the police to see which, and they confirmed the car had been reported as "abandoned" and impounded.
Apparently Belmont (and perhaps other municipalities) have a 72-hour law for cars parked on public roads. You must "move your car" every 72 hours, or else risk somebody reporting your vehicle as abandoned. We must have taken somebody's favorite parking spot.
Total monetary damage, with city fees, towing fees, storage fees, our cut of the towing-and-storage-company's side-kickback to a city government official ... all came out to about $800. I figure across all our trips we probably ended up with a net loss compared to taxi-or-airport-parking.
This is harmonized by state law, CVC 22651(k). It's probably safe to assume every city and county (which therefore means the whole state, excepting federal reservations) has such a local law.
So then why not a high speed train instead of individual vehicles? You would think the capital cost of a tunnel over it's lifetime (100+ years going by the NYC subways) is not substantial compared with magnitudes more in individual vehicle operating costs.
Not to mention trains have much higher throughput, energy efficiency, less worry over spacing via stopping distance etc over individual propulsion methods, and airports are pretty bursty in terms of traffic volume.
The answer seems pretty clear with the disdain Musk expresses of sharing public space with the average person. https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t... (which for me, also explains the obsession with Mars as some sort of refuge from disaster on Earth)
He's clearly focused on more cars as the solution to the urban issues that cars are causing.
This is meant to evolve into a citywide transportation system where you choose your destination at the outset. Each pod can navigate itself, switch tunnels, and wind up closer to your destination than a subway could ever hope to as there will be far more stops (multiple thousands across the city instead of < 500).
Clearly the airport express route is meant to be the beginning of something much larger.
Trains would not make sense for such a system.
If you assume an optimistic 4 people per vehicle with an optimistic 5 second interval between vehicles (which is probably not safe at the high speeds due to the frequent merges), that gives you ~50 people / minute / lane, or 3000 per hour. A single CTA 8-car train at crush capacity (admittedly uncomfortable) can carry nearly 1000 people.
Now a frequent system with high occupancy vehicles and transfers could work, but that's the same thing as a subway.
(Sorry for the excessive commas.)
Designing a transport system around some guy's phobias seems like a bad idea.
The system described only has a 2k/hour peak capacity. It's unusable as real public transport.
> "It is unclear exactly what the Boring Co. high-speed airport link would involve, but last year Musk tweeted about his ideas for Chicago. "Electric pods for sure," he wrote. "Rails maybe, maybe not."
Living in the northern part of Chicago always means traveling into the loop on the red line and then taking an endless amount of time on the blue line as it stops at a ton of stations. The bus isn't an option with luggage and Lyft is just an unpleasant extra expense on top of paying for my luggage.
The L can be nice/mediocre but the red line has a reputation that is well justified.