The Boring Company will connect the center of Chicago with the airport through tunnels

Musk rejoices permission to start work, which gave the mayor of Chicago, Ram Emanuel

Drilling company Ilona Mask The Boring Company has received permission from the Chicago authorities to build transport tunnels that will connect the business center of the city with O'Hare Airport. As planned, special platforms will be installed in the tunnels. They, in turn, will transport buses with passengers at speeds of up to 240 km / h.

Ilon Musk announced plans to create transport tunnels at the end of 2016. Almost immediately after this announcement, The Boring Company was created. It immediately began to work, however, only short test tunnels were originally built. This was a very important stage in the formation of a drilling company, because if the test tunnels seemed unreliable to experts from regulatory organizations, Mask would not have been allowed to drill underground transport routes.

The main goal of the company is to create a system of transport tunnels for ordinary cars. According to the concept, a dense network of such tunnels will have many exits to the surface. A car or a bus will be parked on a special parking platform, which will lower the vehicle into the tunnel and transport it to the necessary point of the city. After arrival, the car will likewise be raised to the top. Ilon Mask said that the idea of ​​creating something similar came to him after he had once again got stuck in traffic on a regular road.



As for Chicago, here The Boring Company will solve the problem with a large number of transport, and as a result, the problem with traffic jams. The Boring Company has already built a trial version of a tunnel in California, and negotiations are underway on the construction of underground transport lines with the authorities and other states. There are no workers of the tunnels yet, all the works that are going on are of a test character.

Chicago is the first city in the world where a full-fledged network will be built. According to the project, the system will use specialized electric buses, which were also presented in March of this year, The Boring Company. These buses will depart from the station every 30 seconds and can accommodate up to 16 passengers at a time. The length of the tunnel will be about 30 kilometers. A transport network will be called Loop - this is a somewhat simplified version of what Musk announced earlier.

Representatives of the company stressed that buses - this is not the transport under the control of the autopilot.

It is worth mentioning the planned cost of such a trip, which will be about $ 20. One taxi ride from the airport to the city center will cost much more. Overcoming the same journey on a suburban train will cost a little less, but longer than in the case of a taxi or an underground route. The trip from the airport to the city center in the case of Chicago will take only 12 minutes.

According to the authors of the project, the Chicago system is capable of carrying about 2,000 passengers per hour in one direction. Transport systems that move through the tunnel will be fed to the place of loading every 30 seconds. The diameter of the tunnel is about 4 meters. This is half the diameter of a standard US transport tunnel. Thus, the drilling work will be cheaper, and the construction of tunnels will move at a faster pace.


The concept of transport for Chicago tunnels is somewhat different from the general concept presented by Musk earlier

In addition to the underground tracks, The Boring Company plans to build a network of road tunnels in Los Angeles and create two large vacuum train tracks (this is Hyperloop, yes) on the west and east coast of the United States. Ilon Musk said that he received an oral permission to build a highway that will connect New York and Washington with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore. Travel time on this route will be only 29 minutes.

Unfortunately, the Chicago authorities do not disclose the details of the transaction. The city administration claims that now the details of the project are still being discussed, so it is a bit early to make any statements. The expected duration of the negotiations does not exceed a month. During this time, in addition to issues of a technical nature, financial nuances should also be discussed - after all, administrations need investments in the budget. Anyway, all these details will become known not earlier than in a few weeks, so it is too early to guess.