If you view the picture full size, you can see a very racist Gold Dust billboard advertisement on the far right

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At least for downtown commutes, a busway would probably be more useful in retaining existing riders than capturing new ones. I have a hard time imagining a lot of west suburbanites catching a bus to transfer to the Blue Line. It’s also worth noting that most (if not all) the busways I’ve seen proposed—mainly in various Cook DuPage Corridor study documents aren’t exclusive busways, but HOV lanes with ramps to off-line bus stations. There’s also the issue of Oakbrook Center being several miles west of Forest Park. True, jobs are more dispersed and some bus shuttles would be necessary, but it would make more sense to have a rail station and transit center anchoring those routes at Oakbrook Center rather than way off at Forest Park. Just looking at the area from Google Maps, it also looks like with some improvements to the pedestrian environment and increased density a lot of Oakbrook Center jobs could be put within easy walking distance of an elevated terminal around Spring and Harger (also from the Cook DuPage study).

From what I understand the busway’s eventually supposed to be part of the big J-Line, which connects looks to me like it connects most the big employment centers without ever touching anyplace with decent residential density—I remember seeing someone comment on its absence in Go To 2040 and CMAP basically replying “could you at least try the route out before we spend hundreds of millions on grade-separated bus lanes in the suburbs?” Elk Grove wants to do some major redevelopment around a combined Elgin-O’Hare highway and transit corridor, and I got the impression that the idea was to extend the Blue Line through O’Hare and then along the new expressway median before heading north to Woodfield. I saw their presentation at a conference (sorry, can’t find it online) and was blown away by the ambition—it made me think of something out of China. That said, I don’t think the prospects of coordinating transit expansion with the O’Hare expansion are all that good.

Speaking of which, from what I understand that route mainly came on the radar because of the STAR Line taking advantage of the Jane Addams median, which is pretty much a perfect example of “sexy” rail. The northwest corridor report gave a busway excellent marks, putting its ridership basically on-par with the heavy rail alternative (and both ranked higher than light rail). Maybe they were being overoptimistic about the bus, but this makes sense to me—jobs really start fanning out in all directions around O’Hare, and the Rosemont CTA station seems close enough to serve as a good anchor for this. Also, since there would be multiple routes feeding into the busway, there would be higher frequency for on-line busway stations, and there were enough bus routes to allow for skip-stop operation, increasing speeds.

Of course, no one in the suburbs would ever think of riding a bus, no matter how convenient. And everyone loves Metra. And thus we get what’s essentially a slightly less frequent light rail line running clunky FRA-compliant DMUs down the middle of a highway from an awkwardly placed Metra station near O’Hare to somewhere outside Joliet. And even though we’re only stuck with it in long-range planning world, the fact that it’s assumed to eventually be funded means that everything still has to be planned around it.

Wow, you seem very knowledgeable for only your second post. :cheers: Welcome to SSP!

Yeah, the area in back of the mall is fairly leafy and green, and the streets are narrow. With some sidewalks and some increased density, it could be a nice little TOD node, directly feeding into the mall. I've heard concerns about the ride quality - would people really want to ride a bumpy L car all the way from Oak Brook to the Loop? Maybe they could get better rolling stock somehow.

China, or at least DC. If Elk Grove wants to be ambitious about TOD, that's great. As a 1960s planned community, they don't really have a downtown, so more power to them.

The J-Line is a good idea, but it needs to tie into Metra better than it does, so that you can access the system from suburban downtowns. You're right - it seems like a good way for city-dwellers to get to suburban office parks, but it wouldn't do much else.

The most obvious way to serve Oak Brook would be with a bus line every few minutes from Elmhurst Metra to Hinsdale Metra via various Oak Brook destinations.

That's a great short-term solution, although I'm still not sure it will entice a North Sider to take a three-transfer transit trip to their Oak Brook office job. Out in Barrington, I know the Pace shuttle to Prairie Stone isn't very well-used, even though the transfer is usually perfectly timed. This is possibly because the UP-NW line is inconveniently-placed for many North Siders.

Honestly, I don't know what Pace planners are thinking most of the time. It seems like they're trying to overlay a network-type system over a suburban environment that isn't dense enough to support it. The bus routes should focus on tying existing areas of employment density and residential density into the Metra system.

I'm not too sympathetic to the arguments that Pace should serve transit-dependent populations, especially because numerous people have now demonstrated that a basic used car and gas are affordable for all but the poorest individuals. Scarce transit dollars should be spent where they will generate the most ridership (and thereby take the most cars off the road, decreasing congestion and emissions).

PACE is three different systems. There are the legacy local-service lines, most notably the former Nortran and West Towns networks, which serve towns such as Highland Park and LaGrange and Joliet and Harvey where local routes are pretty important as part of the safety net for those who cannot drive. Then there are the feeder buses taking suburbanites to the Metra stations. And finally there are the experiments done with express routes to help reverse commuters get to suburban employment centers.

I'm puzzled by your assertion that the transit-dependent should be told to buy cars while we chase after fickle discretionary riders. A car on the road is a car on the road, and the experience in LA and dozens of other "new-rail" cities has been that we spend $30 per new rider trying to attract middle-class professionals to sexy new trains, while inexpensive modest improvements to bus service produce huge ridership gains among the working class and recent immigrants.

It's just not smart spending to build a rail line to some single terminus in Oak Brook that's a half-mile or more from actual office entrances. Cumberland on the O'Hare line is about the best layout we could ever wish for in a suburban office park on a rail line—yet only a tiny number of those office workers arrive on the Blue Line.

Three systems? Hmmm....

See, this is the stuff that confuses the hell out of people. These are three different types of service, performing different functions, that Pace has attempted to whitewash and unify into a half-assed "network".

If the services were differentiated clearly, perhaps many riders wouldn't be so intimidated by the system. Visual communication is your specialty - surely you know what I'm talking about.

If the ridership data supports bus service to a given destination, be it an apartment complex, industrial park, or office campus, I'm supportive. It just often seems to me that Pace buses are running empty trying to serve poorer areas of the suburbs, when I know they would have a decent number of users if they simply ran lots of office-park feeder shuttles to major rail stations. That's because the office-park shuttles would be simply tying more destinations into existing rail corridors that already have a high number of users. Most Pace service, as far as I can tell, is like stringing two crumbs together with a rope - not the best use of rope, and who cares if the two crumbs are connected?

Metra is intuitively easy to understand. CTA is a bit more complex, but it makes sense too.

But I find it absolutely absurd to expect anyone to understand, let alone utilize, the Pace system. The suburbs are not uniformly dense enough to support transit service, and they do not have the convenient rational grid of streets that the city does. Since I can't understand the pattern in Pace's routes, I can't begin to consider its effectiveness. I can only go by anecdote and personal experience - both of which have been miserable.

Pace should look to Viva by Toronto for a model that they should follow. That system is awesome and looks fantastic - which of course is something that eludes so many US transit - seemingly complete aloofness over the connection between image(fleet design, technology, integrated branding, station and stop infrastrucutre) and ridership appeal.

ardec,

I think you've more or less identified the various factors that define the impossibility of Pace's mission.


While I agree that the branding should certainly be emulated (or at least taken more seriously as part of transit's overall identity), the biggest difference is that Pace's travel market is much more likely to have free parking at their place of employment, so people are much less tolerant of the multi-leg commute trips that are a fact of life in Toronto. If you've got free or nearly free parking at the destination, the transfer penalty alone is likely to eliminate most of transit's competitiveness for middle class travelers, before even getting into travel time considerations.

Many thanks—although a lot of that knowledge comes from being a long-time lurker. ;)

I think Pace has been trying to improve their image lately—I’ve seen their new paint scheme on the Edens and it looks pretty slick, although I also saw that the bus was stuck in traffic with me, which is not so slick. If metro Chicago upgraded their shoulders for buses and emergency vehicles it would certainly help with this problem, but the research I’ve seen about shoulder-riding buses is that they’re better at retaining passengers than attracting new ones.

Pace is looking into signal priority and improved stops (at wider spacing) along Milwaukee and Cermak between Berwyn and Oak Brook. The latter makes a lot of sense—you go through a couple of denser, highly walkable suburbs to a major employment center only a couple of miles away—but I can’t think of any other corridors are as lucky geographically. Niles wants to couple bus improvements with pedestrian improvement and redevelopment along Milwaukee, but though you have to give them credit for leveraging a pretty small investment in transit for all they can, in the end it will still probably lead to a marginal improvement in transit ridership.

Still, I wonder if the lines in inner-ring suburbs could be marketed as a “frequent network” with minimum frequencies of fifteen minutes, limited stops (quarter-to-half-mile spacing in most cases), and on some corridors signal priority. Since the grid’s pretty strong in the older suburbs, it would be fairly legible and could serve as an improved feeder to Metra and the outlying CTA stations. And even though its riderhsip would be weak by Chicago standards, it might be on-par with systems in mid-sized cities. I wonder…

http://www.chicagotribune.com/classi...7521354.column

Change of direction for Wacker project
North-south rehab will be more focused than east-west reconstruction

Jon Hilkevitch
Getting Around
9:42 p.m. CST, December 26, 2010

[QUOTE]People who drive, walk, ride a bus or pedal a bicycle in downtown Chicago might want to mark December 2012 on their calendar as the completion date for the next Wacker Drive reconstruction project.

But before you do that, make a big red circle around Monday, Jan. 3, and maybe add a few exclamation points or scribble an unhappy face.

Picking up where the last Wacker project left off eight years ago, demolition will begin in one week, weather permitting, to rebuild the 55-year-old section of Upper and Lower Wacker from Randolph to Monroe streets, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation./QUOTE]

Chicago Proposal
 

Jumping in for the first time here, but hopefully not the last.

Here is my proposal:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_yxxaxxHmgH.../s1600/cta.jpg

(Apologies for the quality: I'm having issues with adobe right now).

Key points:
1) I split off the Circle line from a new line on Western, that turns east on Howard and runs to Howard and Sheridan. I think trying to combine them creates the worst of both worlds.
2) A new subway aunder Cicero, from Old Orchard to Blue Island.
3) A much smaller Circle line (North Ave, Michigan, Cermak, and Halsted), that serves the high density core.
4) East-west shuttles from Halsted to the Lake on Chicago, Grand, Monroe, Cermak, and Roosevelt. The goal is that most (if not all) of the core is within 1/4 mile walk of a subway station.
5) Extension of the Green line east and west, and the Brown line west to Jefferson Park.
6) New east-west subways on Fullerton, 47th (east from Western), and 86th Street.
7) COnstruction of a high-speed rail express between the Loop (Block 37 station), O'Hare, and Midway (with a possible transfer station at Jefferson Park).
8) transfer stations at all connection points between CTA and Metra, starting with the Davis Street Station in Evanston.


This is not a cheap proposal(!), but it has the benefit of flexibility; lines can be easily(!!) added as money and interest permit. Even if just(!) the two main north-south lines and the circle line were built a significant portion of the City would be significantly better served by rail transit.

There are some other improvements that could be made, if money is no object :jester: :

--Put the existing elevated lines underground
--Put a roof and walls around the highway stations, with sliding doors to the trains. those stations could be heated/cooled as weather permits
--A superstation at Monroe and the River, combining the Monroe Shuttle, Amtrak, and Metra. It would be a 1 block walk in either direction from the shuttle to the other trains, but it would be underground and heated, and would be the one link between the three downtown.
--I suppose a north south line could be built on Austin from the Blue line station to the north city limits.

Ok; my two cents worth. critique away! :whip:

Chicago's transportation infrastructure weakening

Next mayor faces challenges for funds for CTA, O'Hare, roads

By Jon Hilkevitch, TRIBUNE REPORTER
5:23 p.m. CST, December 23, 2010

CTA to test train tracker in January

By: Lorene Yue December 30, 2010

(Crain's) — The Chicago Transit Authority is launching a test of its train tracking system next month.

The system will give arrival times at all 144 el stations via a website. Riders choose one of the eight rail lines and then a specific station to find trains arriving within a 15-minute window.

Read more: http://www.chicagobusiness.com/artic...#axzz19d9X101i

^ can't wait. i absolutely adore bus tracker. i've found it to be reliably accurate and it has been extremely helpful in those "should i wait for a bus or just hop in a cab" situations. train tracker will hopefully do just the same.

http://www.chicagonewscoop.org/renov...after-2-years/

Renovated L Platforms Require Costly Repairs as Wood Planks Deteriorate After 2 Years
By PATRICK REHKAMP and ROBERT HERGUTH December 30, 2010

Wooden L platforms that were rebuilt over the past few years as part of the $530 million Brown Line renovation are already deteriorating at some stations.

Officials with the Chicago Transit Authority began noticing the decaying wood in August 2008 — two years after the first stations were completed, the C.T.A. said.

Since then, about $300,000 has been spent replacing an estimated 10,000 square feet of Southern yellow pine decking at eight Brown Line stations — Chicago, Sedgwick, Armitage, Diversey, Montrose, Rockwell, Francisco and Kedzie — according to records and interviews.

What did they not use pressure treated wood?

Why are they still using wood at all? Forget purity, who cares if the decking is a composite that will actually last?

I'm not quite sure. Wood is historically used for the platforms. It can also last a very long time.

My guess is that pine was the cheapest option - plus, it's been used successfully on many other stations. Cedar would have been great, but it's more expensive. Same goes for composites like Trex or Azek.