What Chicago gets.
Faster trips, safer travel, and an economy that works for every corner of Chicago. Here is why tunnels beat sitting in traffic, and what they could do for the whole city.
Zero tax dollars
Our proposal is a fully privately funded network: no state, city, or federal tax money. Under our proposal, The Boring Company would pay for the tunnels, property owners such as buildings, garages, venues, and businesses can pay for a station they want on their property, and The Boring Company may also buy property for tunnel portal locations. Riders repay it through a single ride fee comparable to a CTA fare, or a daily, weekly, monthly, or annual pass (a full 'L' fare is $2.50, per transitchicago.com). This is the campaign's proposal, not a guarantee.
Time back
Point-to-point travel without stoplights, crashes, or construction zones. Airport trips become predictable instead of a gamble.
Weather-proof
Lake-effect snow, ice storms, and summer flooding stop at the portal. Underground travel is not affected by surface weather.
Neighborhood opportunity
Fast links let people live in any neighborhood and work anywhere in the city, and let employers recruit from every corner of Chicago.
Surface preserved
Tunnels leave neighborhoods, farmland, and parks intact instead of carving new highway lanes through them. Portals have small footprints, a few parking spaces or a garage level, so there is little disruption and no big station on every block.
Quieter, cleaner
Electric vehicles in tunnels mean no tailpipe emissions along the route and no traffic noise for neighbors above.
Jobs and skills
Tunnel construction, operations, and maintenance would create skilled work across the city, building on Illinois' strong trades.
Universities connected
UChicago, UIC, Loyola, DePaul, IIT, and Northwestern's Chicago campus linked into one research and talent network.
The whole city within reach
Every Chicagoan gets a fast route downtown, to the airports, and to the lakefront. Jobs, games, and culture become reachable for everyone.
Why tunnels, why Chicago, why now
Illinois already builds underground
Chicago dug roughly 60 miles of narrow-gauge freight tunnels under the Loop in the early 1900s, and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District's Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (the "Deep Tunnel") runs through the region's limestone and dolomite bedrock. Tunneling is part of our history.
Surface space is maxed out
Widening expressways through dense neighborhoods and farmland is slow, disruptive, and expensive. Tunnels move traffic below the surface while leaving homes, fields, and wetlands in place.
The technology has moved
Tunneling companies like The Boring Company are working to make smaller-diameter tunnels faster and cheaper to build. Their Las Vegas Convention Center Loop has been carrying passengers since 2021.
Small cars, point to point
Most car trips carry just one or two people: the average household vehicle trip in the U.S. carries about 1.5 people. So the most efficient way to move people is in small vehicles for one or two riders, moving quickly, not big buses or trains. With a train, you get to a station, ride, then take a car or bus from another station to where you are actually going. Loop tunnels are point to point, door to door.
Chicago has the worst traffic in the nation.
Time is the one thing none of us can earn back. Every hour stuck on the Kennedy or the Dan Ryan is an hour taken from family, work, rest, and the people we love. Tunnels give Chicagoland something more valuable than speed: they give people back their time.
Most congested urban area in the U.S. in 2025, and 3rd worldwide by INRIX impact rank.
Lost to congestion per Chicago driver in 2025, up 10% from the prior year.
Cost of that lost time for each Chicago driver in 2025.
Average round-trip commute in the Chicago metro each workday: 30.9 minutes each way (2024).
What 112 hours really means
INRIX found the average Chicago driver lost 112 hours to congestion in 2025. That is not an abstract number. It is time taken from the things that matter most. Here is what it adds up to.
Nearly five full days, around the clock, sitting in traffic.
Almost three weeks of vacation, spent idling.
More than two family dinners every week of the year, if each dinner is an hour.
Seven full Saturday and Sunday stretches of waking time, gone.
Based on 112 hours lost per driver in 2025 (INRIX 2025 Global Traffic Scorecard). Translations into days, dinners, and weekends are illustrative math, not findings from INRIX. The Texas A&M Transportation Institute measures delay differently and found 87 hours of yearly delay per auto commuter in the Chicago IL-IN area in 2024, tied for 9th in the nation (TTI 2025 Urban Mobility Report). Commuting itself adds up too: at the metro average of 30.9 minutes each way (Census ACS 2024), 250 workdays a year is about 258 hours on the road (30.9 × 2 × 250 ÷ 60).
Sample trips
Illustrative estimate| Trip | Typical drive today | Tunnel concept |
|---|---|---|
| Loop to O'Hare | Often 30 to 75+ minutes depending on traffic | Target: about 15 minutes |
Drive times are general approximations. Tunnel targets are illustrative goals for advocacy and depend on vehicle technology, speeds, station design, and engineering that has not been done. They are not promises or published figures from any company.
9 reasons it's safer
Rider safety is one of the biggest issues for public transit today, and the CTA is working hard on it: its 2026 budget includes $82.1 million for security services plus $5 million more for Chicago Police officers, and its security plan adds 75 percent more policing hours and taller fare gates at some stations (CTA budget; CTA security plan). Tunnels add something different.
Your own private car
No crowded car or platform. You ride in your own vehicle with the people you choose.
Picked up and dropped off where you choose
Your car meets you wherever you want, just like Uber, and drops you at your destination, so there is no waiting at a station. Under our proposal, it is an approved vehicle that is electric and likely autonomous.
One direction per tunnel
Each tunnel carries one-way traffic, so there are no head-on collisions, no cross traffic, and no intersections.
If a car stops, just get out and walk
There is no deadly third rail and no narrow walkway in the dark. The Boring Company says Loop has no 600 volt third rail or touch hazards and the driving surface gives over 9 feet of clear space to walk out.
Lit, ventilated, connected, with exits
Tunnels are fully illuminated with redundant lighting, have redundant bidirectional ventilation, fire detection and suppression, emergency exits, and LTE and WiFi. Emergency exits come about every 1,000 feet on average and never more than 2,500 feet apart, under the Vegas Loop fire code.
Ride by yourself, safely
In an autonomous car there is no stranger at the wheel. Today's Loop systems use trained drivers; autonomous operation is the campaign's long-term vision.
Charged and connected
Phone chargers in the car and a constant internet connection, so you can always reach help.
Watched over, always
Tunnels have 100% camera coverage with no blind spots and a 24/7 staffed Operations Control Center reachable by Blue Light Stations, cell, and WiFi. We propose remote safety monitors who can check in on any vehicle at any time.
Cameras all around and inside
A Tesla Model Y has cameras around the exterior for its driver assistance system and a cabin camera above the rear view mirror.
The vehicles have a safety record
Tesla Robotaxi miles with no safety monitor on board, Jan 22 to Oct 18, 2026.
People injured, 0 airbag deployments, and 0 pedestrians or cyclists hit over that period, per Tesla.
Injury collisions Tesla estimates human drivers would have caused over the same miles.
NHTSA's top rating, earned by Tesla Model S, 3, X, and Y, per The Boring Company.
Today the Vegas Loop uses trained drivers. Our expectation that autonomous Tesla vehicles like those in Robotaxi service would ride in a Chicagoland network is the campaign's view, not a statement by Tesla or The Boring Company. We see tunnels as a complement to the CTA, not a replacement.
An office, a theater, or a nap pod
The car knows who it is picking up and loads your saved settings. That is our vision for the experience:
Your temperature
The car knows who it is picking up and has the cabin set the way you like it.
Your music and shows
Your Spotify and Netflix logins, ready when you sit down.
Fast Wi-Fi
Satellite or high-speed internet to knock out calls and email on the way.
Camera for calls
Take a Zoom or Google Meet call from a quiet, private cabin.
Know your destination
Info on where you are headed, plus the best things to do in the city today.
Or just nap
Recline and rest, feeling safe because the ride is yours alone.
These are the campaign's vision of features, not current Boring Company product claims. On connectivity: Tesla has shown Starlink integrated into its Cybercab, and Elon Musk has said "all cars will have Starlink in the future" (PCMag). Built-in Starlink is not yet a feature of today's Loop vehicles.
No cost to the city. Time back for Chicago.
Zero cost to the city
Our model and goal: a system that is privately funded and privately operated, with no city operating subsidy. The city would not pay to build it and would not carry annual costs to run it. Under our proposal, The Boring Company would pay for the tunnels. Private property owners, such as buildings, garages, venues, and businesses, can pay for a station they want on their property. The Boring Company may also buy property for tunnel portal locations. The one likely public cost is a police presence at major stations, if the city chooses to provide it.
There is precedent. Clark County approved a 50-year franchise for the Vegas Loop, which is funded privately with no taxpayer money: The Boring Company pays for the tunnels, and properties pay for their own stations. The Boring Company also pays the county a franchise fee based on revenue.
This is the campaign's proposal. No agreement with the City of Chicago exists.
Time back, and a city that prospers
When people get their time back and the city moves more efficiently, Chicago prospers. Right now congestion is a heavy drag:
- No. 1 in the U.S.: Chicago drivers lost 112 hours to congestion in 2025, costing the typical driver $2,063 and the city $7.5 billion in lost time (INRIX 2025).
- $11.8 billion a year: the annual cost of congestion in the Chicago IL-IN area in 2024, or $2,363 per auto commuter, with 87 hours of delay per commuter (TTI 2025 Urban Mobility Report).
Every hour returned is an hour for work, family, and the neighborhood businesses that make Chicago great.
Easier commutes bring people back downtown
When getting to the office is fast and easy, more people choose to come in. Shorter, faster commutes bring workers back into the city, and with them the lunch crowds, after-work traffic, and street life that revitalize downtown. The research points the same way:
- Commuting is the top reason to stay home. Not commuting remains the No. 1 benefit of working from home in the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (March 2025), and workers with longer commutes want more remote days (Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, NBER, revised October 2026).
- Short commutes lead the office recovery. Placer.ai found that office visits from within five miles recovered fastest and grew fastest in the first half of 2026. In Chicago, 41.5% of office visits came from within five miles.
- Chicago is ready to come back. Kastle badge data showed Chicago office occupancy at 66.0% on Tuesday, June 30, 2026, fifth among the 10 metros it tracks, while downtown vacancy stood at 26.6% (Newmark, Q2 2026).
Make the trip downtown quick and predictable, and more of Chicago shows up.
Pay per ride, or ride all you want
Our proposal: 100% privately funded, zero tax dollars. Riders pay instead, the way that suits them. A single ride would be comparable to a CTA fare, and passes are for frequent riders.
Single ride
One-time ride fee, comparable to a CTA fare.
Daily pass
Unlimited rides for a day out or a busy workday.
Weekly pass
For a week of commuting or visiting.
Monthly pass
For regular commuters.
Annual pass
For everyday riders who want it all year.
Prices have not been set. This is the campaign's proposal, not a guarantee. For reference, a full CTA 'L' fare is $2.50 (transitchicago.com).
Room for a CTA's worth of trips
Chicago's transit system is remarkable. On an average weekday in 2025, riders took about 1.04 million rides on the CTA. A Loop network would not replace that. It would add capacity alongside it.
The Boring Company's stated target capacity for the full Vegas Loop, with 104 medium-sized stations.
The simple math: 1,042,505 rides ÷ 90,000 per hour = about 11.6 hours. At that capacity, a Loop system could carry as many trips as the CTA does in a weekday in under 12 hours of operation.
This is a capacity comparison, not a ridership prediction. The 90,000 per hour figure is a target for a full Vegas network, not a Chicago plan, and CTA counts rides (boardings), not unique people. The goal is to complement the CTA, giving Chicagoans one more great way to get around.
Win more conventions, lift the whole city
Airport access wins events
Convention planners weigh the trip from the airport, and McCormick Place can be well over an hour from O'Hare at rush hour. A Loop link could put anywhere on the alignment within minutes of the airport.
Proven at convention scale
The LVCC Loop has carried over 32,000 people in a single day at a Las Vegas convention.
A stadium connection
The Bears have sought $855 million in public infrastructure funding for an Arlington Heights stadium. A privately funded tunnel link is the kind of alternative worth studying.
Homes and opportunity
Property values typically rise near good transit, and fast, affordable trips can widen access to affordable housing and jobs.
Pricing example: Nashville
The Boring Company's president said Nashville fares should be similar to Vegas: about $4 a ride, about $7 round trip, and about $12 for a day pass. The Tennessean reported $5 downtown and $10 airport fares. These are Nashville examples, not Chicago prices.
Freight could move underground too
Goods, not just people
In the future, tunnels could carry freight as well as riders: semi-trucks, shipping containers, and big boxes moving below the city instead of on crowded streets and expressways. Freight trains could run in purpose-built tunnels too. This is the campaign's vision of future potential, not a current Boring Company offering.
The Boring Company recently showed a shipping container making it through a tunnel (October 19, 2026).
@boringcompany on X · Oct 19, 2026"Using TBC tunnels to transport freight. The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20’ shipping container. Fits like a glove!"View the post and video →Long term: expanding across the state.