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My argument is against your reasoning, that's all. I don't believe that this new L line will do anything for these communities. It won't eliminate poverty, it won't eliminate gangs or poverty (besides moving them elsewhere). I just don't see any reason to believe that. What I do hope is to see the lakefront hoods from the S. Loop to Hyde Park gentrify further, and rapid transit stops may help make these areas more appealing to gentrifiers as well as (?perhaps) immigrants. That's all I'm interested in. |
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I have only a vague abstract idea of what things Barrington or Palos Heights might need. |
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I'm sort of confused by these numbers. According to that CTA document, the Red Line Extension on the UPRR alignment is projected to have an annual ridership of 12.7 million. Dividing that by 365 gives ~35k per day. For the four stations on the proposed extension, that's an average of ~8,700 riders per station per day. That's well above the boardings per weekday last year for stations like Howard (6,387), Wilson (6,328), Sheridan (5,483), Cermak (4,428 in 2012), and Sox-35th (5,218 in 2012). Even 95th street (where most of these riders presumably transfer to the Red Line today) only had ~4 million boardings in all of 2012. And that's not even accounting for the fact that weekday ridership should be much higher for the extension, which would push it up from this simple average. Am I being stupid here and missing something? If not, this seems like a crazy high ridership projection... |
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"The Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission, affiliated with the Center for Neighborhood Technology, ranked the Gray Line as the most sensible and worthy transit idea out of all transportation projects being proposed for Chicagoland".... Did I generously bribe them from my Minimum Wage Paycheck? Also how did I manage to accquire a CMAP RTP Major Capital Project ID Number (#01-02-9003) Expensive Bribery again? |
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Well said. |
Speaking of south side transit, has there ever been a proposal to send a train (or even BRT) down Garfield? I would think that something that connects the MSI, 55/56/57 Metra/South Shore, U of C (somewhere between Woodlawn and Cottage Grove), Garfield Green, Garfield Red, Halsted, Ashland, Garfield/Western, and then ends at the Western Orange Line stop would be a huge step forward.
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I definitely think a 55th/Garfield BRT is in order. Maybe a better place to start than Ashland. It should go to Midway, though and give a direct connection from the airport to U of C.
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Well, X55 ridership was pretty anemic: 3000 per day. It's not like Garfield Blvd. experiences a lot of traffic delays.
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I could care less if you spent 20, 40, 60, or 100 years on the south side. It doesn't make for a sound argument. Give me one example in the United States, going back 50 years, when introducing a transit stop to an impoverished area led to drastic job growth, income growth, and investment absent gentrification and displacement of existing residents? Again, I think a few of these areas will eventually gentrify, that's all. What you think will happen, however, is a myth. |
You're missing his point. I've been following your posts for years and have always thought you're painfully out of touch with our city's needs. Your perspective seems solely based on real-estate demands of the wealthy, upper-middle class.
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More pie-in-the-sky theorizing about how awesome Union Station could be if any of the several thousand ideas already outlined for improving it were actually implemented rather than just discussed. http://www.suntimes.com/29801451-418...l#.VBGxEmRdW0u
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I once got an award for doing 85wpm in high school typing class. I try not to confuse that with receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
Is anyone aware of any future residential developments near the 51st and Garfield green line stations? I recently visited the Hyde Park campus of U of Chicago and I was surprised that the area around these transit stops have many open lots, despite the proximity to Washington park and the retail/dining scene on 53rd street.
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On paper, it seems like a pretty strong candidate: two major job centers at either end, ample road space along half the route and a narrow congested section on the other half. Most other east-west arterials don't have that anchor on the west end, so ridership is pretty directional and CTA wastes money on "wrong-way" service. |
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the X55's frequency and span was never meant to serve as the main service along that road, right? The 3,000 number seems less like a comment on the demand for services along Garfield and more like a comment on the relative convenience of the X55 and the regular 55. If BRT were built with a frequency and span that made it the more convenient choice, you'd see a lot more riders. Current weekday ridership on the 55 is about 11,000 - if you got the same boost on Garfield that the CTA modeled on Ashland, it would jump to ~16,000 with BRT. That's quite respectable for an investment of probably well under $100 million.
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Random question, but does anyone know why the Midway Orange Line was put to the southeast of the train/yard area? If it had come in west a bit and had the station more north they could have easily moved the yard around and then the station would be probably less than half the distance to the terminal. Just a straight walk west. I noticed that when I was there last week, all the walking....
Ok - just looked and I assume it's because of the alignment heading south out of the station for any future extension. Still looks like they could have fairly easily moved it to the north west and then just had the extension snake back over to the southeast to get that vacant strip heading south. |
They expected to extend the line to Ford City relatively soon. In fact, some rapid transit cars were delivered with "Ford City" destination signs.
Because we mostly experience that station only when we're en route to MDW, it seems like a shortsighted penny-wise pound-foolish decision. But if you look at the bigger picture of southwest side bus transfers and operations complexity when or if extended, it's a more understandable call. |
The walk to the terminal wouldn't be that bad if was a straight shot on moving walkways instead of that jogged all over nonsense through the deck.
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Frequent travelers sometimes ignore the signage and walk straight west out of the station, across the recirculation drive, and then cut through the ground floor of the parking garage into baggage claim level.
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The walk to the Midway from the Orange Line use to be twice as long...and for a few years it wasn't inside.
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As mentioned before, the Obama Library may go next to the Garfield stop. Everyone seems to think this will spur a ton of new development, I'm not so sure.
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This was once proposed for that site. http://wibiti.com/images/hpmain/550/276550.jpg |
double post
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Can't wait for the Lake Shore Drive redevelopment, but I know realistically it will be at least 10+ years away from starting. It will be nice to see more greenery east of the drive.
http://i592.photobucket.com/albums/t...406f4976ef.jpg |
http://my.chicagotribune.com/#sectio.../p2p-81368284/
International study critiques Chicago transit Quote:
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Transit deserts strand thousands far from jobs
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...htmlstory.html
By Tribune Graphics, @ChiTribGraphics "Approximately 438,500 people in Cook County live in a transit desert, an area with a high demand for transit but that is more than a half-mile from a train stop and a quarter-mile from high-quality bus service. A study of Cook County transit deserts proposes a host of projects to address the shortfalls......" |
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^ The agency should be 1/3 suburban, 2/3 city despite the funding differential.
Why? Because the suburbs owe their prosperity to Chicago's existence. And without transit, Chicago would have become Cleveland or Detroit long ago. The only reason I don't live outside the Midwest right now is due to Chicago's awesomeness. And I'll bet my right thumb there are a lot of other people who probably feel the same way. |
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Eventually the fiscal distress and economic hardship that plagues a large swath of Chicago will migrate to the suburbs as their job clusters empty out and head downtown. At that point the suburbs might actually start being more reasonable when it comes to regional collaboration and, personally, I think will start asking to be annexed again. But this can't happen if the city continually "plays nice" with the hostiles in the collar counties. |
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Sick. |
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The CEO would have no term limit, but the board members would be limited to a single 6 year term. The group would be required to retain independent auditors who would conduct yearly financial audits. CEO would set out overall transit strategy and board approves this and all capital expenditures. CEO would essentially operate like the CEO of a publicly traded company. Pipe dream, I know |
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the executives who live out their by their golf courses can fucking deal with it. also, the burbs are dying. people and companies are moving to the city. |
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deal with it. |
Some burbs are dying but others are so large now they can be considered small cities unto themselves. 200k population for a suburb is not tiny.
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If there MUST be a unified transit board, why not fill it based in part on where the money comes from? If your predictions of a suburban apocalypse come true, the money will all be in the city anyway. |
I think the question should not be where the majority of the money comes from but where the majority of the rides are taken/needed. But good luck getting anyone else to think that way.
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Hundreds of thousands of suburbanites use transit every single day to get to their jobs in the Loop. Don't you trust them? |
About 150,000 suburbanites come to the Loop daily on Metra or Pace. That leaves 4.8 million for whom transit is pretty much irrelevant. It's one thing to convince suburban transit representatives to improve or extend Metra service, to add Pace shuttles, perhaps even to improve downtown CTA service. But persuading them to run owl service on South Side crosstown routes, or to invest in Ashland BRT?
It's fine to make theoretical arguments about how the suburbs owe their very existence to the center city, but politics is the art of the possible. The suburbs have far more population, far more jobs, and contribute far more tax revenue to transit. And that pesky Supreme Court has allowed them to have their own state representatives, who won't be too keen to vote for a new regional transit agency run by the city. |
^. How does the MTA work in New York, politically? They have the same proportion of city dwellers vs suburbanites
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In reality, if the MTA was one regional transportation agency, there wouldn't be a distinction between LIRR and MetroNorth, PATH and NJTT would be better integrated into the system, and there wouldn't be redundancy in staffing (legal, HR, planning, etc) between each sub-agency. The MTA is really a one-off. Maybe I'm off, but from my casual observations, things seem to work this way. |
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The best way to justify the split is to use international standards of what kinds of transit get created in various densities and then split the money based on which areas have those kinds of densities. The split can be variable after every Census estimate and areas that have existing service higher than their density warrants can either pay out of their own budgets the difference or submit a 10-year plan to rezone and promote growth to bring the area up toward the required density. This would not only be objective and fair, it would give Chicago a huge mandate and incentive to invest in the South Side, because losing the Green Line would be a huge political blow to any mayor. It would also help justify appropriate construction of subways where they objectively make sense - in the Central Area - instead of extending them further and further away from the population center. In other words, basing it on density would not only be objective and fair, it would encourage positive planning instead of the obtuse aldermanic abuse of zoning we currently suffer from. |
Politically, Cook County government could be a useful intermediary between city and suburb... They already have a close relationship (like ~100 feet lol) and at the county level, Chicago is dominant with just over half the total population but not the only thing. Cook County revenues account for about 70% of total receipts. Plus, Cook County suburbs tend to be denser and more transit-friendly on average.
This gets at Mr D's plan to roughly expand the CTA to cover all of Cook County (minus the northwest panhandle) and therefore claim almost all of Cook County's tax revenue. Metra's share of Cook County money would decrease substantially but the city itself would begin to remit some money to Metra on the condition of improved service on Metra Electric, Rock Island and other Chicago segments . Notably, Toni Preckwinkle has come out strongly in favor of CrossRail Chicago and Transit Future, two visions that focus strongly on expanding good transit beyond the city limits. |
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Also, I'm not suggesting that poverty be foisted upon the denizens of the suburbs, I'm suggesting that an equal or greater portion of our social burden be borne by them. Anyone who disagrees is supporting a system of thinly veiled bigotry. Quote:
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To me the question i toss around most is ...is it to late already to change the broken model of suburban sprawl? When does this not become feasible anymore? The system is set up for complete reliance on the automobile and there really is no alternative if you live in the suburb. Despite what many of us may want...the suburbs are not going anywhere and retooling them away from cars i think is impossible. They are a huge waste of resources...maintaining the roads, sewers, power....the paving over of productive land, the endless waste of resources. My theory is that Eisenhowers Interstate Highway System plan is the true downfall of america...it forever signed in blood our dependence on the automobile and unknowingly launched the plague of suburbia on us all. END RANT
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Transportation geek that I am, I feel obligated to point out that Eisenhower had almost nothing to do with creating the Interstate Highway System—and to note that much of Northeastern Illinois's superhighway network was already under construction when Ike signed the 1956 bill. Suburban development was already roaring full speed ahead in the Chicago region by 1930, and the city approved its comprehensive system of superhighways in 1939.
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