^The second 40 percent is a line item in a budget that Congress refused to even hold the usual courtesy hearings on. So I don't really see the point of discussing it as anything other than fan fiction.

I don't think that really matters. The president's budget is a suggestion, yes - Congress will determine funding levels through the appropriations process.

However, the Core Capacity program was already authorized by Congress and Obama has already signaled his intention to give all or most of the FY2016 appropriation for Core Capacity, whatever that may be, to the RPM project. Unless Congress appropriates no money at all to Core Capacity, CTA will get some money.

CTA had record train ridership in 2015.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...212-story.html

This again?
 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...213-story.html

Is it clear whether there is enough demand for an express train to O'Hare? Toronto's new express train to Pearson hasn't fared well so far.

How Toronto got a ‘world-class,’ gold-plated, half-billion-dollar empty train

its deja vu all over again

does the current administration not realize that Uber will take you downtown (exact location in fact) for the same price as the ticket theyre proposing? anyone relying on public transit would just as well pay the 2.50 for an extra 20 minutes on the blue.

and even better to see that Block 37 terminal is off the table...lets see how many more white elephants we can build! lord knows we have plenty of extra money sitting around.

It's not necessarily clear, but it doesn't mean a good solution for Chicago is impossible. Having a downtown terminal that can ensure a painless (no-wait, and weather-protected) transfer to/from a taxi (or similar mode) could be one key to the puzzle. Block 37 would have been questionable for that, but a less congested area west of the river/expressway might be workable. Taxi fares have leapt past $50 with tip this January, so even $30 to West Loop plus a taxi transfer is worth a look.

All it takes is 1 mugging a year on the Blue Line to scare away tons of potential ridership from using the existing option. No way can you expect the majority visitor families or businesspeople with expensive laptops or other gear to risk the el. And regardless of whether you're from out of town, if you have any amount of luggage, a 45 minute clattering congested ride on the el becomes a non starter when taxis or on-demand private vehicles are so easy to get.

If you read the comments to the Tribune article, it's as though nobody gives a crap about pollution or comprehends that as the city grows in future decades the Kennedy will only get worse.

For it to make sense it needs to be fast. Period.

Even 25 mins seems too slow

And it has to be cheap. Less than half the cost of an Uber or taxi. The thing certainly wont pay for itself or even cover its operation costs. Not to say that is a deal breaker, since no transit really does that, but if we are going to spend money on transit projects I think there are better options for the city. Such as connecting the Brown to the Blue line. That would make getting to ORD easier for much of the Northside plus it has the benefit of being useful for commuters.

Assuming this is a mainline rail solution like Toronto's and not some half-assed thing in the Blue Line corridor, this isn't actually that difficult or outlandishly expensive.

-Add a fourth track to MD-West, or passing sidings to support 15 minute service levels (the ROW once had 4 tracks out to Harlem or so, and Metra owns the railroad)
-Build a downtown terminal somewhere around Halsted (the old Pickens Kane building was actually built as a C&NW freight terminal, so it's already set up for platforms and only ~500' from a Blue Line connection).
-Buy some DMUs

The difficult part (politically) is actually at the airport end. You need to find a way into the terminal complex, or get CN's cooperation to go up their tracks to a People Mover connection at the new rental car facility.

The time saved over the blue line is going to be virtually non-existent if a transfer to the people mover is required. Your solution might not cost in the billions, but it also isn't an improvement over what already exists, so the whole thing would be utterly pointless.

Emanuel tries to resurrect O'Hare express train plan
 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...213-story.html

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to resurrect Chicago's long elusive plan for an express train from downtown Chicago to O'Hare International Airport.....

so i heard

I don't think time savings is actually a big deal. The goal is to provide a user-friendly, limited stop system that connects the airport to downtown. The Blue Line, like the rest of the CTA system, is relatively slow and very cramped, by global standards. I think a better system would lure a lot of people out of taxis and rideshares, potentially reducing Kennedy congestion.

Maybe I'm crazy, but maybe they could axe the segment of the Blue Line from Rosemont to O'Hare and have the express train take over that segment?

You could reroute the Blue Line to the new rental car garage with transfer to APM. If the express is designed carefully, maybe it can have decent connections to CTA and discounted fares for airport employees... at that point, the only people left riding the Blue Line to O'Hare will be a handful of city-dwelling folks who want the absolute cheapest trip to the airport, so they deserve an extra 5-10 minutes trip...


Another off-the-wall idea: fully automate the Blue Line and with the savings on motorman pay, increase all-day headways to between 2-5 minutes, around the clock. The Blue Line, being completely divorced from the rest of the CTA network, is ideal for this. With higher frequency, you can shorten trains to 4 cars or even 2 cars and still meet demand while alleviating the crush-loading problems that make the Blue Line an uncomfortable choice for air travelers. Travelers would still have their butt in a seat the same amount of time vs today, but could save almost 10-15 minutes of waiting, especially at off-peak times.

How do you spell "White Elephant": http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...service=mobile

I think such a move would be tremendously unpopular with regular O'Hare blue line riders (particularly the workforce).

I don't have any problem with the city exploring and implementing if it can be done at a less than ruinous cost and actually stands a good chance of attracting ridership but I don't think it's a must have at this point. O'Hare and Midway's rail access is already better than our domestic competitor cites with maybe the exception of Newark since it has NEC access. I'd much prefer a solution that integrates with Metra and Amtrak in some way for more intermodal opportunity.

The fares are just too pricey to attract ridership.

Well, no reason not to dream big. A mainline rail tunnel going north-south under the airport with a station in the central terminal complex would have lots of usefulness, especially if it extended up to Touhy on the north end. The Hiawatha could be diverted to serve O'Hare...

dp

I fly out of O'Hare twice a month for work and I will still use a bus/cab connection to the blue line because I leave from my neighborhood and not the office. I personally like riding the CTA and find it very efficient, especially on the way home when cab lines are packed.

Okay, so the demographic for this high speed rail is not residents who live in the neighborhoods except maybe people in West Loop or River North (depending on terminal location). Now how about we consider convenience. Most people at my company just cab or uber to the airport because everyone gets company reimbursement and they like someone picking them up directly outside of their door. I cannot see business travelers selecting a high speed train to save their company $10-20 or going out of their way to some new connection terminal more than 4 blocks away from their office/hotel. We need to consider door to door connections. How often will this rail system move (every 15 or 30 minutes)? How many hotels are within close proximity? Do people arrive near security? Or do they have to travel another 10-15 minutes from the entry point?

Even if people do take a high speed train, hotels are scattered all over the CBD. If a business traveler is staying at a hotel near Aon, BCBS and the Prudential buildings, would they really walk many blocks to a West Loop or River North terminal? The blueline is still a closer distance from this area and people will most likely take a cab/uber anyway.

And if people were not getting reimbursed by their company? I am sure they will still select the cheapest option (blue line) if it is coming out of their pocket. I recently rode the blue line with the CEO/Founder of Trunkclub.com sitting adjacent to me. Clearly he rather save the company money with a $2.50 ride than spend $30 on a uber.

The city is better off stimulating new residential development by creating better CTA rail access in growing neighbhorhoods.

Spend all that money on better maintenance of the tracks and more trains / frequent service. You have far more to gain from the more frequent reliable service. Just seems like this project would cost way to much for little benefit.

That would be a conversation worth having.

The number one issue I see with the Toronto example is the price of the ticket is way to high. I think it has to be $20 or less to start to be an attractive alternative to a cab. Especially since taking an Uber to the airport now has substantially lowered the price out the airport at certain times from what I've seen/heard.
Or maybe a transfer point could be made to line up an above grade station to link up next to the Terminal 1 ATS station? It would be cheaper and would cut off a good 5 minutes for most passengers starting from that end of the ATS compared to the other end of the ATS over at Parking F/Rental Car facility.

I'd agree. Any change that would detour the Blue Line from a T2 endpoint so that richer patrons could use it as their station would be a non-starter politically.

Or maybe an option would be for every 2nd or 3rd Blue line train would include an extra car or two to make it a 10 car train. Is that even possible? What stations can handle 10 car sets along the blue line?

Have two of the cars have suspension upgrades, luggage racks, electric outlets, work desk, drink offerings, premium seating etc. Have it so that their doors only open at a limited number of stops that have enough room for 10 car sets (maybe just downtown/O'Hare). Make the price $10 or $15 tops. Again, you aren't getting there any faster but you removed from squishing your luggage across the aisle and having polar air gush into your face in the winters. It would surely be the cheapest option to implement.

Thinking about it a little more if you did heavy rail under or directly adjacent to the central terminal, rerouted the Hiawatha Service, connected Union Station to the SCAL so an airport shuttle could serve McCormick (using DMUs) the effort might be worth it.

So, this stinking pile of pork is back on the table. Just to save 20 minutes when anyone who isn't close to the CBD terminus would need to get to the station somehow, probably adding 20 minutes, when the Blue line has stops all over the place and still takes only 45 minutes. Add a stop at Jefferson Park - um, no, From JP to ORD is like 15 minutes on the Blue line and a stop would add what, 5-10 minutes to a high-speed train that would need to slow down, stop to pick up pax and then get back up to speed - taking away half the advantage.

Compared to the cost of this, how much would it cost to increase the frequency of the Blue line, install luggage racks, and clean the cars a little better. I'm guessing a lot less.

There are MUCH better ways to spend what little transit money we have. Anything other than more upgrades to the blue line is a colossal waste of money.

If we had an extra $15 billion laying around to complete all our pipe dream transit projects then yea, let's blow a billion or two on this. But we don't, and until we do, there are more pressing transit improvements needed.

I don't understand why people here are endorsing some of these ideas. :shrug:

Yeah, based on the latest round of news, it seems like they've more-or-less already ruled out the Blue Line corridor.

I don't see how they could accomplish this without using Metra. Who knows, maybe this study will include a detailed professional analysis of the CrossRail proposal, or at least the section from McCormick-Union-O'Hare. The high fares envisioned by the city RFP, though, do not bode well for a transit solution that commuters can actually use.

Is linking to an article your counter to my argument or something? I don't see what you are trying to do/say here. :shrug:

NO, I am not trying to "counter" anything -- simply the newest additional information on the current topic.

Crossrail seems sucky at the airport end of things unless they do something with the terminals.

To me, it seems like a deep tunnel with only three (O'Hare, the Loop, McCormick) stations would be ideal. You could have one station under O'Hare, and design it so that future HSR could use the same tunnel and station if that ever actually happened, one station under the West Loop, and one station at McCormick ready to also connect to future HSR. Design it right and it forms a backbone for the West Loop Transportation Center that's been long planned but never any movement on. I mean, ideally you'd drop people under Lasalle at Clark/Lake or use Block 37 but I don't see anyone actually advocating that anymore so the deep tunnel, three-stop solution seems best. Deep tunnels with only stations at the ends and one in the middle wouldn't be all that expensive compared to "normal" subways.

This could cut the travel time from the airport to downtown to about 10-15 minutes, with another 5 minutes or so to McCormick. This solution, although costly, at least has the benefit of actually solving the problem. Which is more than can be said for any of the other proposals we've seen thus far. Not that I would be for spending billions on this idea either.

Great idea. Now we just need $10,000,000,000!

More additional information: http://www.chicagotribune.com/busine...16-column.html

"Gray Line" Advocate Mike Payne wants Rapid Service on the Metra Electric Line
 

you could do some other things to make it attractive - similar to hong kong's transit direct to the airport - you could have people check luggage downtown at a station and it's automatically transferred directly to your airplane...that system works well and is cheap and fast

LOL :haha:

Oh man that's pretty funny :haha: :ack: :lmao:

Are you guys all :koko: or just :fruit:?

$140,000,000,000+

That's how much debt this state is DROWNING in, of which the City of Chicago is solely responsible for more than 60 BILLION.

...I'm reading through these comments and seriously wondering: do you guys have any clue how fucked this state is, or are you all really THAT delusional???

I mean... I know he's a total piece of shit, but is he high!? Jesus. This guy is going to bankrupt us into Detroit. :no:

^ Hey genius, did you bother to read that they are trying to get it privately funded?

Do you read anything? Stop making a fool of yourself on a near constant basis

Private funding on a public transit project??? Haha, oh kay! :dunce:

Yes, I realize that it's a long shot. A lot of people do.

My response was to this retarded comment you made, aimed at a lot of us:

Nobody here thinks that the city is going to pour billions into building an O'Hare-downtown express train. Like the article said, they are seeking private funding for it. So it would not add to the city's debt to construct it, despite your assumptions.

Had you spent the 30 seconds it takes to skim the article, we wouldn't even have had this discussion. Similar to your complaints about the 606. But whatever, go ahead and throw in the dunce emoji :dunce:

I still have never seen a strong breakdown of what those numbers actually mean. Do you know what they mean, specifically?

How much of that number is debt with a dedicated source of funding? How much is unsecured non-pension debt? How much is Pension debt, and over what timeline is it calculated? 10 years? 30 years? 75 years?

Of the pension debt, how much of it actually needs to be paid in vs. how much could be grown out of with investment? What portion would a strong bull market eliminate the need of? How much bigger will it be if we have a sustained bear market?

Of those questions, the "how many years" one is the most critical. I mean, Illinois has an annual budget of almost $90 billion. $140 billion, if we could take 30 years to bring it into balance, would require paying a little over 5% of that annual budget toward the obligations.

Illinois' total GDP is over $600 billion. Over 30 years that's about $18 trillion dollars. $140 billion is less than 1% of that. $140 billion is about 2% of 30 years worth of payrolls in Illinois.

So, basically, if the only thing Illinois did was re-instate the income tax to 5%, that debt would be manageable. If Illinois managed to cut spending by 5% and kept revenues steady, we wouldn't even need to re-raise taxes to get the debt taken care of over 30 years.

In other words, the issue is not really a financial problem at the core, the issue is primarily a political one.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is possible at a reasonable budget that the private sector could support, IF it ends at the remote lot or possibly T5 and interfaces with ATS to get people the last mile. The question is whether the plan will fly politically.

We're probably talking about a mainline rail solution - Metra tracks, not CTA, with little or no new grade separations. So are people in the communities along the rail line willing to deal with trains every 7-8 minutes (15 minute frequency, two directions) even if they are short and relatively quiet? Crossing gates closing that often?

Will Metra commuters accept schedule changes and being (literally) sidetracked in favor of a few well-heeled air travelers?

Stop making sense. Irrational fear, scorched-earth austerity, and the death of unions is clearly what is needed.

I agree that the Metra ROW will be one of the engineers top choices, But I think (hope) the project will be bigger than just running extra Metra trains.
There seems to be a convergence of several agency priorities which may mean the time is right for a larger project including the A-2 rail/rail separation.
Really the A-2 is critical to all future intercity and intraurban rail projects on the northern tier of Greater Chicago and many in the northern Midwest.
The following projects would use the improved A-2 interlocking :

• O'Hare Express (if this route is selected)
• Direct O'Hare to McCkmk/Hyde Park service
• Direct to O'Hare - Wolverine service (Its on Michigan DOT wish list)
• Additional Hiawatha's up to every hour for 12 hours/day.
• Any Hiawatha's with stops at O'Hare.
• Adding MD-N Wadsworth extension with stops at Abbott and Gurnee.
• More frequency on NCS line with stops at O'Hare and CUS.
• Add 2nd daily Chi-Minneapolis Amtrak.
• Extend MD-W line to from Elgin to Rockford, terminating in CUS.
• Extend UP-W line to Dekalb - NIU terminating at Olgilve.
• Any Rockford, Dubuque Amtrak service (probably dead)
  
  Frankly, outside of the red line/brown line flyover, the A-2 separation is the most versatile, multi purpose rail infrastructure project that Chicago could undertake to insure the growth and vitality of the downtown terminals as the fulcrum of pax rail travel.

Don't forget "we have to be competitive, we have to be competitive..."... you know, with the poor right-to-work states that is.

As if it needs to be acknowledged, the whole country is in a race to the bottom in the name of "competitiveness"... code for being able to pay as little as possible for production (operating expenses) because shareholders demand it, or we'll just move to SE Asia. Occam's razor tells me the driving force is greed, nothing more, nothing less.

Could not agree with you more on the need to separate A-2. However, such a project would be very expensive. No private operator would want to fund this, it would kill the budget for any O'Hare Express.

Of course, it would be great if we found public funding for this portion of the project...

Organization before Electronics before Concrete dictates that you should forget about separating A-2, and instead swap some of the trains' destinations so they don't have to cross each other anymore. You make this project which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars into a project of just realigning some tracks at A-2. Perhaps you would also have to add a fourth track on approach to Union Station, something which should be done anyway even if A-2 is separated. All of this would cause very little inconvenience to anybody - who would really care that much if their train terminates at Union Station instead of Ogilvie or vice versa? The stations are two blocks apart for Pete's sake, or actually even catty corner from each other when you consider the Madison Street entrance to Union Station. Plan the service such that it is balanced according to the capacity of the respective terminals.

Put those hundreds of millions of dollars towards something else instead.

Not so easy. UP-N and UP-NW have to go into Ogilvie in any case. There aren't enough slots to be vacated by UP-W to make way for three other commuter lines plus Amtrak. Union Station would actually be well under capacity in this case and would not need a fourth track, while Ogilvie would need additional platforms and circulation upgrades.

Also, UP-N and UP-NW would lose access to their daytime staging yard at California.

All that is not to say you can't go one level up to an Elektronik solution, though the slow acceleration of Metra's heavy diesels doesn't make things easy. Imagine a 4-way stop where you've got nothing but semi trucks lined up waiting...

The solution as far as yards are concerned is simple, serve Ogilvie trains at Western Yard and Union trains at California Yard.

Amtrak really should probably stay at Union Station for the sake of transfers and having a national network. But is a super expensive grade separation at A2 necessary for that or could an alternative be found?

Another alternative would be to move only MD-N and Amtrak to Ogilvie, along with UP-N and UP-NW, while keeping NCS and MD-W at Union Station along with the relocated UP-W.