Out of the blue from my perspective, but any chance of putting light rail in it's own dedicated lanes in those underground streets? Not to ban cars from them but a least couple of lanes.

What we really need to attract is a bunch of rich Belgians, Luxembourgers and Lichtensteiners to build fancy mansions along King Drive again to bring back the Grand Boulevard glory days ...

Umm, yeah.

The underground streets are only in one small-ish section of the city (Illinois Center and Lakeshore East).

Wacker Drive is a much longer, double-decker avenue that extends outside of this area, but the underground lanes were built specifically to speed up truck traffic and remove them from the surface streets where pedestrians are. Vibrant, dense, cheerful pedestrian environment above, auto-dominated netherworld below.

There is one place, known as "Carroll Avenue", where the double-decking of the city fabric might allow for a successful transit line. It would probably be a BRT line like Ottawa's busway, with street-running portions at either end.

To us here at SSP, it's a cheap, no-brainer transit idea that could have a big impact, but to the people in charge in Chicago, it's out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

As dicey as it is to traverse, I for one will be sad to see the old Halsted bridge go. Far more elegant IMO than the new version, and one of the few surviving examples of the early bascule design.

^^^ Well said. At first I thought it would be cool to see a new bridge, but now I'm thinking "why can't they repair it"

It complements the Division bridge so well, another similar design. Unfortunately that one as well has suffered from neglect/deferred maintenance, and I can only assume its days are just as numbered. Hell, all those north side bridges are on borrowed time Im afraid.

Modern infastructure is crucial to any thriving city, but one with as many historic artifacts as Chicago (which become tourist draws in themselves) really needs to take a more balanced approach. At a minimum, I'd expect new stuff to be on par with the design of North Ave. This just feels half assed.

I'd be okay with it if the city put the bridges into storage. The various members could easily be stripped and repainted in a shop, and then reassembled at one of the various places on the river that a new bridge is needed (Polk, Taylor, 14th/16th, Erie).

I thought that the work done on the Division Street bridges in the last year or two was for the purpose of extending their lives indefinitely. (Not that they look that much improved now.) So I had thought that losing the Halsted bridge was a tradeoff for those.

It would be great to save them by relocating them, but I suspect that would be astronomically expensive.

If only the new bridge were an addition, not a replacement.

While I agree with you that ideally, the old bridge structures would be saved and reused at a new crossing location, I'm not so sure that reassembling elsewhere would be particularly easy or cheap, particularly since any new bridge would have to meet modern engineering design standards. It certainly wouldn't be impossible, and it would be a beautiful bridge when done, but I doubt it would be cheap --- the added design/engineering and prep costs would probably about wash with any materials savings, making the cost similar to or possibly a bit more expensive than an all-new bridge of a more cookie-cutter variety.

I do wonder why the new Halsted bridge is being built with two lanes in each direction. I could maybe see two northbound lanes to provide for turn lanes at the Halsted/Division intersection, but otherwise Halsted is only one lane to the north and all the way across Goose Island to the south.

At least Division plausibly has two full traffic lanes for about half a mile to the east and a full mile to the west of the bridge, so it makes a better case for widening the bridge as a bottleneck. Other than the merging bike traffic and people trying to make turns onto Division, the Halsted bridge is no such bottleneck.

Possibly for the future implementation of BRT. Bridges have no parking lane to steal, so a 4-lane cross section would be needed.

There's also a major intersection just one block north of the bridge, so widening the cross section would make the queue of cars at the light much shorter (all right-turning traffic gets to jump the queue).

Not using a cutting torch to chop up the bridge in small removable pieces and instead transport the contiguous girders and bridge "sides" if you will would cost an absolute fortune. Not that I'm against doing it - it's just that I know it would never be done. Even if they were to 're-create' the historic bridges at river crossing where there is a needed bridge - they would just recreate it out of new steel that isn't 100 year old corroded steel covered in 20 coats of toxic paint.

Hmmm. I think putting a 140-foot bridge across a 160-foot channel may violate one of the basic rules of bridgebuilding.

You could just build bigger anchorages and narrow the channel.... the main branch is set up this way. The south branch still sees shipping, though, so maybe that's not feasible.

It would probably be really complicated to transport the bascule mechanism as well as the bridge itself, especially if the bascule mechanism hasn't been maintained over the years.


Well, if not re-using the bridges, maybe they could be repurposed as sculptural elements in a park somewhere. They're icons of Chicago. Why should they be sold for scrap?

^^^ That's an excellent idea. They should take both halves of a bridge and move it to one of the new parks that keep springing up along the rivers and then place them as if the river is at grade and use them as the roof to a pavilion or picnic shelter of some sort. That would be a tremendously epic park feature. They could even expose the bascule mechanism which is usually hidden from view and place an educational exhibit at the ends of the bridge pavilion explaining how they work and the history of bridges in Chicago. Its not even like this would be expensive to do as you could just float a barge with a crane on it underneath the bridge, then undo its "hinges" and lower it on the barge and just float it over to its new home elsewhere along the river system. I would love to see them create a park along the Chicago South Branch devoted to Chicago's industrial past. Such a pavilion and exhibit would be an awesome start. Then they could get a few other industrial relics and place them around the park with plaques explaining them and it would be quite a local attraction. I think the ideal location for a park of this type would be the franklin point development or the huge open plot further south as an anchor park similar to LSE park.

I would favor putting a park as an anchor to the larger southern plot of land and then turning the St Charles Air Line into a high-line style park that would connect Notherly Island with this new park. The air line should be approached like a modern version of the Midway connecting Notherly Island to a new park along the river (which in turn would eventually link up to the river walk to the north). Just as the midway connects Jackson Park to Washington Park. This could also encourage the new developments on that parcel of land to be extremely pedestrian oriented as vehicles could only enter the neigbhorhood from the north being blocked by that other sweeping rail line to the south and east. The air line park would provide pedestrian access over the tracks from the south east.

Well, better too many than too few.

^^^ Uhhh there is no such thing as "too few" parking spots when there are two train stations on two different train lines within three blocks and you are at the intersection of like three bus lines. Guess what, unlimited quantities of free parking isn't a basic human right.

Absolutely Not! Especially given that this parcel is about 1000 feet from a subway stop (less than 5 minute walk) on the Red line and within about a 10 minute walk if 2 more L stops on the Brown line. Additionally there has been talk of a new Brown line stop at / near Division which would be literally about 160 feet away from this parcel.


So to your point that better too much parking...absolutely not. I do not know if your name portends from whence you have come but urbanity in Chicago is decidedly different in Chicago than in Texas....and in a parcel such as this one we do not need to coddle the auto as it has perhaps some of the best transit connectivity outside Manhattan!

an absolutely false and inherently anti-urban notion.

manhattan has WAY too few parking spaces. please explain to me how manhattan's built environment would be improved in any way waht-so-ever by flip-flopping that equation such that it had WAY too many parking spaces.


also, the nature of parking spaces is a huge part of the equation. underground parking that neither mars streetscapes nor inhibits street-oriented retail is very, very much the lesser of two evils compared to the property-tax-wasting, city-killing, surface parking lots one finds at atrium village.

In the transit vein i wish Chicago would add back some of the stations that were closed in the 1949 service change. Though new stations are not cheap I think adding a substantial number of these stations back along with appropriate zoning / planning near these nodes could help propel development.

Is it coincidental that some of Chicago's most stubbornly resistant to development areas are in areas coterminous with areas where CTA service was all but eliminated as a viable local transit option?

(Note GRAYED stations are former stations --- now largely demolished)
Redline with demolished stations
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/...ain-Howard.jpg


Green line with demolished stations

http://www.chicago-l.org/stations/sacramento.html
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/.../SouthMain.jpg
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/.../Englewood.jpg
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/...acksonPark.jpg

God the green line was decimated...I wonder in its time did it beat the red line for ridership?

Pink (former blue)
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/...as/Douglas.jpg

Yellow
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/...YellowLine.jpg




And a line that too bad was destroyed....would be nice if they could rebuild it and tie it in with a new major north - south line
http://www.chicago-l.org/operations/...t/Humboldt.jpg

Given that development is spreading west from wicker park into humbolt this line would be useful today