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.
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In exchange for paying to build the new transit system, Boring would keep the revenue from the system’s transit fees and any money generated by advertisements, branding and in-vehicle sales, Rivkin and the company said. Ownership of the twin tunnels has not been determined, but the Emanuel administration plans to seek a long-term lease to Musk’s company, a source familiar with the proposal said.
Myriad regulatory, safety and environmental questions also could affect the project’s construction and timeline, Boring and city officials acknowledged.
For now, though, Emanuel is selling the idea as the latest bold “transformative” innovation in a city that found itself at the forefront of American railroads and became an early linchpin in the nation’s aviation system.
“If you look at the history of Chicago … every time we’ve been an innovator in transportation, we have seized the future,” Emanuel said in an interview with the Tribune on Wednesday. “I think figuring out — when time is money — how to shrink the distance between the economic and job engines of O’Hare and downtown positions Chicago as the global leader and global city in the United States.”
Beyond the big-picture rhetoric, however, plenty of questions remain.