Originally Posted by ardecila (Post 3610282)

After an ungodly sum of money, all we get is a big cavernous space underneath a shopping mall in the Loop, and all the urban legends that this will spawn.

Originally Posted by the urban politician (Post 3611436)

^ Yeah, my only major criticism of the project is that it's not really the best concept. As many here have said, using the Metra ROW instead as an express train between OHare and downtown seems to make the most sense. Couple that with an underground trolley that goes back and forth between Block 37 and Union Station, and you've got yourself a wonderful set up.

The city could still do that, couldn't it? After all, a "shell" under Block 37 is all that we have at this point..

Originally Posted by jpIllInoIs (Post 3610682)

Just a cursory look on MS Earth shows that the Bloomingdale ROW is still intact and unencroached upon. Could this serve as a route for the O'Hare Express?

Originally Posted by k1052 (Post 3611446)

I can't imagine anything more expensive than building an "underground trolley" between Union Station and B37. Unless you're planning to use part of the disused freight tunnel network as a people mover.

Originally Posted by jpIllInoIs (Post 3610682)

Just a cursory look on MS Earth shows that the Bloomingdale ROW is still intact and unencroached upon. Could this serve as a route for the O'Hare Express?

Originally Posted by emathias (Post 3611520)

Actually, the city has maintained an underground right-of-way (meaning, they'd limited the amount of utilities underground) under Monroe. Since a large part of the expense of a subway in Chicago would be the utility relocation, if they used Monroe it wouldn't necessarily be so bad. The hardest part would actually be getting under the River, I would think.

Originally Posted by dagobert (Post 3611775)

Association is not causation, or a more statistical term Correlation is not Causation. In any introductory statistics or econometric analysis course you would learn that there are a number of dependent variables that impact the independent variable.

To say that their is a relationship between amount of parking downtown and public ridership you would have to do a bit of cross-sectional time series data analysis (also known as panel data or longitudal data analysis) which also looks at other contributing factors such as price of oil (we saw a big decline in price of oil in mid 1980s through late 1990s), amount of jobs downtown vs. suburbs, amount of people living downtown vs. suburbs, amount of crime recorded in the city vs. suburbs, amount of crime on CTA trains, cost of driving one mile in a car vs. cost of taking CTA train one mile, cost of parking, etc. Maybe a bigger contributing factor to a decline in ridership after 1984 was decline in price of oil and thus cost of drving and not building of parking in the loop. I might poke around some databases to see if such a study had ever been done for any major American city.

We also have to worry about omitted variable bias (or confounding) since we aren't talking about a controlled experiment but an observational study (looking at historical data). For example we can't measure perception of how safe people feel taking CTA trains as opposed to a car.

Also social attitudes (towards driving, commuting downtown, living in the city) in mid-70s might have been similar to those in early 80s since social attitudes are fairly similar from one year to the next, but they may vary considerably over longer period of time. So if this is true that social attitudes in late 90s are different than in 70s and assumption of independent error terms across observations in a time series is violated. The reason why this is important is because under the classical econometric model error terms for each observation need to be independent of one another. Otherwise error terms reflect omitted variables that influence the demand for parking or public transit ridership. This could also lead to autocorrelation and other problems.

Hope this helps you understand the sheer complexity of analyzing such complex problems as this one, those results are scientific and unbiased.

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego (Post 3611836)

Transit/parking related discussion from the General Developments thread that Steely deemed too off-topic despite having to do with proper amounts of parking in downtown Chicago, which seems like a "General Development" issue to me, but OK...


If you actually read the post of mine that you cited, you'd note that I specifically stated that my stats didn't constitute causal proof, but whatever. I'd consider posting stats on historical transit ridership, gas prices (remember when transit ridership plummeted in the late 90s when oil was $15/barrel? Me neither.) but I hesitate to bother...

Originally Posted by dagobert (Post 3611967)

For your cross-sectional time series analysis on transit ridership to be useful you will want to use more variables than just gas prices, cost of parking downtown, and amount of parking available. Otherwise you'll have omitted variable bias. Preferably you will want to use quarterly data to increase the number of observations since n=30 is the bare minimum for it to be any good and also you should do seasonal adjustments. It might take some time to track down the sources for a lot of pertinent variables but it would make for a fascinating research study. I’m curious of results myself.

Originally Posted by Busy Bee (Post 3611472)

I've been saying this for a while now. I wish transit administrators and politicians would read this thread.

Originally Posted by the urban politician (Post 3613472)

^ I'm pretty sure at some point they considered that alternative.

But my amateur look at this situation leads me to one conclusion: Daley wants the Airport Express hub to be at Block 37, not at Union Station.

The east loop area has been Daley's major focus during his entire time in office. Millennium Park, the revitalized Theatre district, State St, and now the (admittedly weak) final centerpiece--Block 37. I think Daley wants this area to be the center of it all for Chicago, and according to his vision this is the most logical place to put the Airport Express stop. I imagine he sees this area potentially being a much larger draw for leisure & business travelers, etc and attracting even more high-end hotels.