Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s scheme to create expensive express rail service to O’Hare has always been a dubious proposition. Involving tech mogul Elon Musk—of Tesla electric car and SpaceX rocket fame—and his fantasy of digging a new tunnel to the airport for high-speed “electric sled” travel, as the Emanuel administration recently expressed interest in doing, would almost certainly make the project worse.
Talk of the O’Hare express took a turn for the weird late last month with news that Musk may get involved. Greg Hinz of Crain’s reported that Emanuel’s staff is in talks with the 46-year-old entrepreneur about using his much-ballyhooed but largely hypothetical proprietary tunneling technology to dig a route from the Loop to the airport. Musk, who’s donated $55,300 to Emanuel’s election campaigns, claims that the new tube would accommodate miniature shuttles that could zoom across the northwest side at 125 mph.
But so far all Musk has done is to begin digging a 50-foot-long testing trench at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, south of LA. Meanwhile there’s no evidence whatsoever that he’ll be able to magically decimate the cost and duration of urban excavation. Recent municipal highway tunneling projects in Boston and Seattle devolved into massively expensive and time-consuming boondoggles, which should make Chicago think twice before enlisting Musk to dig a much longer route to O’Hare.
There are lots of practical ways the city can make transportation to the airport more convenient and pleasant. Let’s not trust the solution to a guy who doesn’t seem to know a high-speed transit tunnel from a hole in the ground. v
