^ Doing so would require operating the Loop 24/7, and I thought that would be a non-starter for cost reasons. That and the fact that it greatly complicates routine maintenance on the Loop, which has a lot of complex and critical signals and switches.

I suppose they could operate the Orange as a shuttle from Roosevelt during the wee hours, but then you need to make two transfers from the Blue Line. If planners want to eliminate the gap in service to Midway, it would honestly be easier to just run a few nonstop shuttle bus runs up the Stevenson, with a few downtown stops along State and Michigan. For everything else there is the N62.

Isn't this a zero-sum game? I mean, I support a truckway or some other scheme to speed goods movement, but these industrial corridors are already full of businesses, just not high-value-added ones. You could goose the vacancy rate down a bit maybe.

Manufacturing isn't like residential or office, as far as I know - they don't build up to use land more intensely, or at least they haven't done so since the 1950s. They can add additional shifts if they are successful, but generally manufacturing operations grow by moving to a larger site in an area with cheap land. That means you might be able to lure businesses with better-paying jobs to these urban corridors, but you probably won't do much to the raw number of jobs. Given the trend in manufacturing away from multi-story buildings, I doubt you would ever achieve the Hawthorne Works employment density those areas once had.

That's setting aside the fact that the industrial corridors, long-term, are the city's escape valve for residential growth, since they are the only place where developers can build significant density without NIMBY opposition. The PMD concept is ultimately doomed for this reason...

^^^ The only reason industrial got so dense in the first place was that our cities and economy required it. Large trucks and modern logistics didn't exist yet. People still walked to work or took mass transit. Most goods were transferred by hand to railroad cars. Denser industrial development meant greater efficiencies. As industry has become more and more automated and modular, the advantages to being spread out have greatly increased.

More room to work in has always been an advantage for industry, it just wasn't really an option in the past.

^ Right. Why would manufacturing want to open up in tight urban locations with access challenges when the suburbs offer cheaper land and more of it? I think the ship has sailed on industrial uses in Chicago, outside of certain industries that benefit from being in the city like printing, food/produce distribution, building materials and fabrication, etc.

Of course, the city contains multitudes and there is tons of land for manufacturing in city limits down around Calumet...

You'll note I didn't even mention reviving industrial sites in the city, only the first-ring suburbs. But in those towns, it certainly appears that a lot of postwar industrial sites are underused, with a little warehousing (if anything) going on in a reasonably modern building and site that could be competitive with sites of the same vintage around O'Hare, if only truck access were better.

I also distinguish between skilled manufacturing, where Illinois is still pretty healthy, and big basic industry that requires lots of land and piles of raw materials and railroad access. In my view, those kind of operations are not coming back to our region.

Thanks for the info!

Moreover I'm not sure why you'd need to…doesn't MDW have a voluntary curfew in place from 11PM to 6AM.

I've noticed metra had been replacing Tracks on BNSF with concrete ties (only about 100 yards as of now). Also there seems to be a good stretch along metra electrics tracks near the van Buren stop that also has concrete ties. Anyone know the reasoning?

^Where? Metra has nothing to do with any BNSF MOW. BNSF and UP services are operated by those railroads under a purchase of service agreement. And any tracks from 21st Street north into Union Station are owned by Amtrak, not Metra or BNSF. BNSF does own their tracks west of 16th & Canal as well as their coachyards.

Too bad alternating service would likely be a non starter, running the Orange through the State Street subway late night would be interesting.

You could even have the Orange and Brown merge from 130am to 430am providing 24 hour service to both the Ravenswood branch and Midway... with increased state street frequency to the North side, and a handy transfer at Jackson to the Blue.

This would be perfect, gives both lines 24 hour service, and doesn't require the Loop to be in operation.

I phrased that poorly. I meant I noticed on Metra that BNSF is replacing ties with concrete ones. I noticed it around Halsted. Also if you look down the Jackson street bridge over grant park you can see some of the track now have concrete ties.

Yeah, good idea. All the track connections already exist...

Cocktail napkin calculations put an elevated 2-lane each way truck expressway with CTA train tracks underneath running more or less along the that train line paralleling Cicero from Jefferson Park to 79th, and curving over to the Dan Ryan, with transit stations at every transfer point and approximately every mile in between and access ramps to the expressway only at interchanges and once in each stretch between interchanges at somewhere between $5 and $6 billion. That's a lot of money, but I'm willing to bet a case could be made for it, especially if the truck expressway were a tollroad. The time to do it would be now, while vast stretches of the route are heavily depopulated.

Oak St?
 

On my last cab ride, my driver took the Oak St. going east. At one point in the Cabrini Green area, the street becomes a parking lot, before becoming a full-fledged street again. Why hasn't the city fixed this? My driver said the city didn't want to make it a thru street?

The City plans to fix it, it just hasn't gotten to it yet. Check out page 14 or 15 of this document:
http://origin-www.thecha.org/assets/...14_reprint.pdf

Yeah, it's not a thru street, it was vacated in the 1950s for the Cabrini Extension homes and the superblock planning strategy that was popular at the time. Crossing there is technically trespassing into CHA property. Plenty of adventurous drivers and pedestrians still do it, of course, but if you park there you will get ticketed.

As emathias notes, the CHA and city planners want to reconstruct the street to make it open again. Most likely they will try to shift this cost onto the developers who eventually build housing on the adjacent land. The developer, in turn, may seek TIF money to build this infrastructure, or a write-down of the land sale price from CHA to offset this significant cost.

Watch this space, there may be news in the next few months...

There are probably ways to cut costs here. Instead of stacking them, you could run them side by side and eliminate the railroad entirely in certain segments. A busway could be combined with the truck way on 4 demarcated lanes, instead of rail, with simple prefabricated shelters at each station.

I don't think the route is as depopulated as you suggest. Maybe in Garfield Park and North Lawndale. The majority of the route runs through working class Hispanic neighborhoods that underwent a fairly smooth racial transition and haven't really seen population loss.

We should build a cut + cover "Lower Cicero" the entire length of the road. You could get freeway speeds down there without disturbing the cityscape above. In fact, using my magic money tree, I'm going to go ahead and build lower level streets under Ashland, Pershing, Western, and Irving while I'm at it and limit the upper level streets to one lane each direction with BRT and bolevard like landscaping.

CTA already through-routes Midway and Kimball trains in early rush hours. Between 6-7am every other train departing Midway turns into a Kimball train after Roosevelt. IMO, this should be a permanent routing at all hours as one train line. Doing so would reduce movements through Tower 18 and open up the Loop to additional capacity.