The Boring Company, the tunneling venture Tesla CEO Elon Musk started in 2016 out of his personal frustration with surface-level gridlock, has made a significant step towards evolving beyond billionaire-passion project: The company has been selected to build and operate an 18-mile, 12-minute rapid transit connection between Chicago’s downtown Loop and O’Hare International Airport, according to news reports.
The project would be the first demonstration of Musk’s futuristic quasi-transit technology: autonomous 16-passenger vehicles that transport passengers on what the company calls “skates”—moving, multi-directional platforms that lower passengers from the surface underground and to their destinations at speeds of up to 150 mph. Most transit moves horizontally, some moves vertically; the concept for the “Chicago Express Loop” is to do both.
