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Similarly, Joe Moore isn't in a position to legislate against animal cruelty, he's in a position to fix potholes and get parking tickets expunged, or maybe on his biggest day pass some sort of noise ordinance. Legislating against animal cruelty should be done at the state or federal level, not at the city level, that's just ludicrous. Joe Moore's pet issue does nothing to actually reduce animal cruelty. Like I said, both these guys have delusions of grandear......Rod is governor of Illinois, not President of the US.....and Joe Moore is just an alderman, not a congressman. This is somewhat OT, but still relevent to the discussion of transit funding (i.e. with Blago in power, don't expect much positive progress on the transit front). |
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cheers. |
saw this earlier today. april 2nd three-tracking may or may not happen on april 2nd:
Switches, signals key CTA President Frank Kruesi said the agency is also on target to have an April 2 start date on the next phase of the Brown Line reconstruction project, which involves taking one of four tracks at Belmont and Fullerton out of service until 2009. Kruesi and CTA Chair Carole Brown have said that three-tracking won't begin unless newly installed switches and signals at Clark Junction -- the rail corridor where Brown, Red and Purple Line trains merge -- are up to snuff. One more meeting "So far, these tests have gone well," Kruesi said, but the next step, scheduled to take place this week and next, is to increase the number of test trains going through the junction to make sure the new equipment can handle rush-hour loads. The CTA board will hold a special meeting next week to decide whether to go ahead with three-tracking on April2. In the meantime, there will be one final community meeting on the plan from 6 to 8 p.m Monday at CTA headquarters, 567 W. Lake. suntimes.com _____ i will be interested to see as to how well the planning goes on this. i know travel times will increase, but i hope they can get these trains on tight schedules so the whole operation runs fairly smoothly, i.e., trains hitting their station (well, not literally), then moving on and a new train -- north- or south-bound -- eases in to the just vacated spot, moves on, and so on and so on. i know that will be a difficulty with slow zones (not even getting into those who will say an impossibility with the current administrators), but i believe viva' said that they were replacing ties from addison to the tunnel?? anyways, april 2nd won't be pretty. |
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I'll respectfully disagree with everything else you said but this thread isn't the place for it nor will either of us change the other's mind. Where we can agree on is that Blago needs to stop using important issues like mass transit hostage for other problems. It's ass-backwards. It's bad leadership. |
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By the way, I was walking home today and came upon a crash at Wells - apparently within a few minutes of it happening. A garbage truck smashed head-on into a track support post. From the looks of it, either the garbage truck was made out of a tin can or it hit HARD. I hope that the support post was not damaged - that's about the last thing the CTA needs right now. This was at Wells and Monroe, I think. |
^
I took the Blue line from Damen downtown to the red line and then up to Fullerton and switched to the Brown line at 4am two Fridays ago. Took me over 2 hours to complete the ride. Took one hour to go from Damen to Jackson on the blue line. It was absolutely insane. TWO hours to go about 5 miles. Yesterday I took the #11 bus from downtown at rush hour. Waited 15 minutes for the PACKED bus to get there. Then water started POURING out of the ceiling all over 4-5 chairs. I mean it was just GUSHING the whole way up north. Where'd it all come from? It was sunny outside. Then the bus wouldn't accelerate, so the driver had to put it in park in the middle of the street, shut it off, and power down the bus. He then had to start it up again so it would work. A few weeks ago the bus driver had to power down the bus in the middle of the street 3 different times as we went from downtown to Diversey. Another time the driver had to walk back and kick the doors closed every time someone opened them because they were broken and wouldn't register as "closed". Two other times in one week two different bus drivers got totally lost on the route and started going down wrong streets. The whole time they play that stupid recording touting their busses to get people home when track work starts. They could at least get us busses that KINDA run.... Two weeks ago I took the Diversey bus to the Blue line to O'hare. Took me an hour and 35 minutes to get there. I waited for 30 minutes in the middle of the day for a train to come to Logan Square and pick me up. Then we ran express - but it still took 45 minutes to go the few miles up to O'hare because of all the slow zones. |
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Otherwise I strongly recommend checking the CTA customer alerts web page if you're ever planning to ride the L system overnight (anytime after 11pm), since it gives heads up on trackwork....it sounds like you got nailed by that several times (for some reason single-tracking totally ruins the schedule, like they let 2 trains go in the same direction before swapping). They're doing alot of overnight work on the Red and Blue lately, almost every night (and they will be again this weekend). http://www.transitchicago.com/news/whatsnewA.wu The capital needs of the rail system are extreme and out of hand, but it's important not to forget the bus system either, which carries twice as many riders. One interesting thing, rail ridership is on a downward trend the last few months, while bus ridership is on an upward trend, which is exactly the opposite of the overall ridership trends for the past few years. Presumably, this is people giving up on the Red, Blue, and Brown lines and switching to buses. |
Rather than being all doom-and-gloomy about funding, let's talk about expansion and cheer up.
Has multi-tracking of any lines been proposed in recent history? It would certainly be possible on the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line, since they built the highway for 4 tracks, but only installed 2. An express service would allow CTA to use the 2 abandoned stations they have as local stations. Hopefully, IDOT won't cannibalize the space for more lanes. It honestly looks wide enough for 6 tracks in some places. I also thought it was cool that they effectively 4-tracked the Dan Ryan branch of the Red Line for maintenance by installing tracks in the breakdown lane of the highway, while ripping out the old tracks. |
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The Forest Park and Dan Ryan lines are already FAST, I dunno if much would be gained by 4-tracking. I mean its less than 25 minutes from Jackson to 95th, and the Forest Park branch is something similar. It's amazing what no slow zones would do... |
^ It's impossible to fight graffiti completely. It's really kind of sad (or cool, depending on whether you see graffiti as vandalism or art).
New York's notorious graffiti problem in the subway was long ago cleaned up by Guiliani, but these days you still see all sorts of graffiti painted and scratched onto train windows. It's almost like the drug war. You can confiscate as much weed as you want, but you'll never get it all. |
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Grafitti is the lease of our worries along the Orange Line route. The whole thing looks rather unappealing to a first-time visitor: The backs of old and unmaintained factories, vacant lots, and tons of suburban-looking townhouses all the way up until South Loop.
When I'm on that train with people coming into town, I often find myself explaining that Chicago as a whole doesn't look like this. |
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^ Yeah, I see your point. But I'd guess that, by percentage, probably 70% of Chicago's streets are cool and beautiful/interesting residential neighborhoods, not the stuff you see on the Orange Line. I enjoy most of the neighborhoods the Orange line passes through as well, just not that corridor.
Generally speaking, I find that ride to be depressing. Typically I like gritty neighborhoods and warehouses, trains, the whole bit. I guess what I dislike about that ride is the icky townhouses and kind of suburbanized character to the grit, if that makes any sense. |
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Anyhow, perhaps we are drifting too far off topic.. |
Southwest Side neighborhoods like Bridgeport and Brighton Park have filled vacant industrial parcels with cheaply-built suburban-style townhomes. While this brings more people to these areas, the style of building is not very urban at all.
Viva, that's good to hear about the Blue Line. If they 4-track the Blue Line for that stretch, that means that, if they ever extend the Brown Line westward to Jeff Park, it can also extend to O'Hare by default. That would allow for a lot of interesting routes a train could take. |
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I hear this criticism of the newer townhomes all the time, but I think cities are just developing differently, that's all. The old days of common brick, obsessive detailing, and total lack of garages are over. That doesn't mean that everything built henceforth must forever be maligned as cheap suburban rubbish. |
^ TUP, you don't hear me complaining about all townhouse developments. Some of them are actually quite nice and manage to be good urban neighbors. I'll have to take some pictures of these things on the SW side, and I can explain what I'm talking about. I'll post them in the Gen. Dev thread if I get a chance.
I want to apologize to everyone for starting all of this in the transit thread. I thought for some reason that we were discussing it in the General Developments Thread. |
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Does anyone know the timeline for starting up the beefed up bus service? Today our bus was at capacity by the time we reached Webster going downtown. We had to pass dozens of people waiting on the sidewalk because we couldn't fit anymore people on. I naturally assumed this week would see much higher ridership on the busses as people test the waters and prepare for next week. I figured CTA would understand this and start increasing the number of busses this week as well in anticipation - does anyone know what their schedule is? |
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