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CHICAGO – When Elon Musk agreed this summer to build a futuristic tunnel on his own to Chicago's busiest airport, many Chicagoers have expressed their doubts.
The idea seemed whimsical: electric pods spun under the city at 150 miles at the time. And experts have asked if the Musk company could dig a 17-mile tunnel in a few years.
Then Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the tunnel's main support, stunned Chicago this month by announcing he would not run for a third term, questioning the future of the project. A few days later, Mr. Musk, the general manager of electric car manufacturer Tesla, was examined for apparently smoked marijuana during an interview. The episode followed a turbulent summer that led to the resignation of the company's account manager and raised questions about Mr. Musk's emotional state.
Mr. Emanuel and Mr. Musk emphasized that the project is progressing and is technically feasible, but some transportation experts believe that it is unlikely to happen and if this happens, it will take longer than planned. Although Mr. Musk's engineers are able to tunnel faster than other companies, his pod system, on which the entire project is based, is not yet complete.
"There is an air of unreality in the project," said Joseph P. Schwieterman, a professor of public policy at DePaul University in Chicago. "There are so many challenges to overcome".
A spokesman for Musk's tunneling company, Boring, declined to comment on the Chicago project or doubts about its feasibility. But Mr. Emanuel says the project is "absolutely" still going on. He bets that Mr Musk, who has sent rockets into space, can achieve another wonder, this time underground.
"We are going to align all the parts so that it stays on the cruise control," Emanuel said in a recent interview, noting that he had eight months left in power and that Musk should start digging next year.
Musk has agreed to cover the estimated $ 1 billion price tag, although some have overturned the high price that runners would face, saying the line would be for the rich.
Musk's incursions into the tunnels are part of a wave of nation-wide proposals from private companies that are more like the animated TV show "The Jetsons": driverless cars, unmanned planes, flying taxis, magnetic levitation trains and electric scooters. While cities across the country are struggling with terrible traffic and wilting infrastructure, Silicon Valley has fallen in love with the repair of transportation.
"It's an amazing and vibrant period," said Robert Puentes, president of the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington. "The pace of change is faster than anything I've seen in my career."
Yet, the wave of new ideas has made it difficult to know what is feasible and what is not, like a "bus at the limit of traffic" in China that was in the grip of scandal.
"It's very difficult to understand the reality of hucksterism," said Jon Orcutt, a director of the Transit Center, a research group in New York.
At the same time, the astronomical cost of building railroad lines in the United States has made it difficult for cities to open new projects. The Second Avenue subway, which opened in New York last year, cost $ 2.5 billion for every new mile of track, which is more than anywhere else in the world. Huge plans to move underground roads in Boston and Seattle have been delayed and overwhelmed.
For the Chicago Tunnel, the list of challenges and unanswered questions is long, prompting the Better Government Association, a non-partisan monitoring group, to sue the city for more information. A specific route has not been identified. It's hard to know if Mr. Musk's company can dig faster than traditional methods and how much Chicago could reap future profits if the tunnel is successful.
Mr Musk, the billionaire at the origin of SpaceX rockets, is committed to reducing the costs of underground digging, with faster machines and fewer workers. The Boring Company has announced similar plans for a tunnel in Los Angeles to transport people to the Dodger Stadium. The company is digging a two-mile test tunnel at SpaceX headquarters, outside of Los Angeles, as a workshop for its ideas.
Mr. Emanuel said the "skate" technology is not exaggerated – it would be a modified Tesla vehicle chassis that would roll on a concrete runway. The plan for Chicago is distinct from Hyperloop, a similar idea of Mr. Musk that would create a vacuum inside a tube to eliminate air friction, allowing the pods to travel a lot more. quickly.
"The biggest challenge is to find the driverless Tesla software," Emanuel said. "It's the most difficult piece from an engineering point of view."
But Mr. Emanuel's unexpected decision not to stand for re-election leaves the project in a bad position. Some candidates who have already announced their intention to run for mayor have criticized the tunnel as improbable – a dazzling distraction from the intractable problems of the city. Paul Vallas, the former head of the Chicago Public Schools who heads, has called the tunnel project "the gold of the fool".
The city is currently negotiating a contract with Boring. Mr. Emanuel said he expected it to be approved by City Council later this year. Then comes the environmental review, a notoriously slow process that could take at least a year.
Chicago has reasons to be cautious. Mr. Musk's tunnel would begin at a downtown transit station envisioned as the starting point for express trains for the city's airports several years ago under former mayor Richard M. Daley. It cost over $ 250 million but has been put to sleep.
The city's decision to privatize its parking meters and the Chicago Skyway, a major toll road, was widely criticized.
"We want to look at the project with the appropriate degree of skepticism, given Chicago's record of projects like this," said David Greising, Executive Director of the Better Government Association.
Michael Horodniceanu, the former head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's capital city in New York, said the project would easily cost more than a billion dollars. He likened Mr. Musk to Jules Verne, the 19th century author who had a bold imagination.
"I think challenging the system so people can think differently about how things are done is a healthy thing," Horodniceanu said.
In New York, it took more than a year for a gigantic TBM to dig less than three miles from Second Avenue metro. The machine dug about 40 feet a day – a slow pace that Mr. Musk described as quieter than a snail, and that he wants to beat.
Some wondered if the tunnel was the best use of time and limited resources of the city, especially since it was largely intended for business travelers. A train could carry more than 1,000 passengers instead of 16.
"He is proposing a very expensive and low-capacity project that deliberately targets the better-off," said Orcutt, former head of the New York Department of Transportation.
When a transit expert raised similar concerns on Twitter, Mr. Musk called him an idiot. But despite all the complaints in Chicago, even Mr. Musk acknowledged that failure was a possibility.
"If we succeed, it will be a good thing for the city," Musk said at a press conference in Chicago in June. "And if we fail, well, I guess others will lose a lot of money.
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