I haven't seen any $ break outs of the Blue line work but I think the tie replacement around Jefferson Park is much more extensive and time consuming work. The subway work is more like heavy maintenance.

Fortunately, Blagojevich can't levy taxes, only the General Assembly can. In order for him to pass such a HUGE tax increase, he will undoubtedly have to compromise on some things and right now it seems as if transportation is the biggest concern.

Optimistically, CTA will end up with enough money to maintain current operations and proceed with system upkeep at the same pace as they have done it for the last few years. There is virtually no chance of them getting enough money to enter a "state of good repair".

Pessimistically, they will end up with enough money to operate while making weekend/non rush hour service cuts, etc.

I'm all for the tax increases to provide universal healthcare in Illinois. However, Rod needs to figure out one thing, transit is very important too. You can't play chicken with a system that's about to succumb to neglect.

Rod could have been a great leader if he learned to lead. He's much like Kruesi in that regard.

at this point in the game it should be 1. education 2. transit 3. universal healthcare.

Tie replacement work in the subway is just as expensive and potentially more time consuming. Old wooden ties are being torn out, and new concrete poured in place to form the new ties. Getting concrete in, old ties out, etc, is an access nightmare in the subway. This work has just begun on the Blue Line, actually right through the Chicago Station (you can stand on the platform and look at the first new concrete ties). The CTA has been replacing plates both inbound and outbound in the subway as well, and they are doing this in locations where the ties are not being replaced.

One of the biggest reasons replacing ties on the Ohare Ballast is more expensive is simply because their are many more ties that need replacing. The contract to replace subway ties I believe is for approx 6000 ties, not all the ties in the subway. And this includes ties in the Redline subway as well as well as the Blue line. Subway ties are particularly bad in certain areas, but fine in others. Ties out on the Kennedy are in horrible state for a distance measured in miles, not feet.

^Thanks for the post and welcome to the forum.

Love the screenname too, Sinefeld is the best sit-com ever.

They're pouring in place? I assumed they would use precast. Either way it's logistically pretty tough, since you gotta cut the rail, pop out the old rotting wood ties, demo the old concrete casing, then install the new ones.

Or maybe there are some issues that should be dealt with at the federal level (healthcare) and some at a more local level (transit), so Blagojevich needs to get back to earth. It's like Alderman Joe Moore legislating what we can and can't eat. Delusions of grandeur....no, delusions of adequacy. What an awful governor.

Thanks for the clarification on that! That's the most detailed explanation I've heard of it so far (although I've only talked to workers on the Chicago platform a couple times). I've seen the new ties in a few locations, and it seems like they're working on it even during the day. Anytime I take the train downtown after 9 AM there are always workers standing along the tunnel walls between Division and Chicago.

if healthcare isn't taken care of at the national level, it needs to be implemented at the state level. After all, lack of healthcare is a more pressing societal problem then just about any other. It ruins people on so many levels which makes waiting for Washington to do anything about it criminal in a way. The state should be just as involved in the state of its resident's health as in mass transit.

In the regard of leadership, Blago is weak since he doesn't understand consensus building on many issues. He's also made many bone headed moves (raiding pensions in the past).

I don't think Moore has legislated what you can or can't eat. He's legislated against extreme animal cruelty. I respect that.

Getting back to the topic, Blago needs to stop being an ass and stop using transit funding as leverage to his pet programs. Again, he should be building a coalition that gets Illinois's problems solved. Not using one issue against others. That's where I think he fails as a politico.

Bag of Dog poop just doesn't get it.......he thinks he is doing social justice issues as priority...but fails to forget the 3-4 hour communtes of single parent family heads taking out to the jobs from the city because that is where the jobs are. He is forgetting that poor people don't have cars, but still need to work so that they can pay for shelter and food.

If Rod of Bagovshidt was really into social justice issues he would be able to see the whole picture and not exclude this key element from it.

But raising taxes in Illinois to pay for healthcare simply puts us at a competitive disadvantage compared to other states, so businesses and jobs will leave. The problem has to be tackled at the federal level.

Similarly, Joe Moore isn't in a position to legislate against animal cruelty, he's in a position to fix potholes and get parking tickets expunged, or maybe on his biggest day pass some sort of noise ordinance. Legislating against animal cruelty should be done at the state or federal level, not at the city level, that's just ludicrous. Joe Moore's pet issue does nothing to actually reduce animal cruelty.

Like I said, both these guys have delusions of grandear......Rod is governor of Illinois, not President of the US.....and Joe Moore is just an alderman, not a congressman.

This is somewhat OT, but still relevent to the discussion of transit funding (i.e. with Blago in power, don't expect much positive progress on the transit front).

i was being simplistic. this is how my post should have read.

cheers.

saw this earlier today. april 2nd three-tracking may or may not happen on april 2nd:

Switches, signals key

CTA President Frank Kruesi said the agency is also on target to have an April 2 start date on the next phase of the Brown Line reconstruction project, which involves taking one of four tracks at Belmont and Fullerton out of service until 2009.

Kruesi and CTA Chair Carole Brown have said that three-tracking won't begin unless newly installed switches and signals at Clark Junction -- the rail corridor where Brown, Red and Purple Line trains merge -- are up to snuff.

One more meeting

"So far, these tests have gone well," Kruesi said, but the next step, scheduled to take place this week and next, is to increase the number of test trains going through the junction to make sure the new equipment can handle rush-hour loads.

The CTA board will hold a special meeting next week to decide whether to go ahead with three-tracking on April2.

In the meantime, there will be one final community meeting on the plan from 6 to 8 p.m Monday at CTA headquarters, 567 W. Lake.


suntimes.com

_____

i will be interested to see as to how well the planning goes on this. i know travel times will increase, but i hope they can get these trains on tight schedules so the whole operation runs fairly smoothly, i.e., trains hitting their station (well, not literally), then moving on and a new train -- north- or south-bound -- eases in to the just vacated spot, moves on, and so on and so on.

i know that will be a difficulty with slow zones (not even getting into those who will say an impossibility with the current administrators), but i believe viva' said that they were replacing ties from addison to the tunnel??

anyways, april 2nd won't be pretty.

I don't disagree with your assertion that it NEEDS to be a federal problem first and foremost because it does put us in a competitive disadvantage. However, ignoring the problem until the feds do something about healthcare is immoral IMO and I've seen nothing out of Massachussettes that says it will drive business away (although it's not an easy program to innitiate).

I'll respectfully disagree with everything else you said but this thread isn't the place for it nor will either of us change the other's mind.

Where we can agree on is that Blago needs to stop using important issues like mass transit hostage for other problems. It's ass-backwards. It's bad leadership.

Where's his "testicular virility" on transit issues?

This past Saturday I had a flight out of O'Hare so I walked up to the Grand Blue Line station at about 3:30AM. There was track work going on just south of the platform - in both directions. A southbound train came just as I was arriving and stopped at the platform for the entire 20 minutes I waited for a northbound train. It was still standing there when I left. I'm not sure any of the passengers cared though - it was St. Patrick's Day and about 95% of them looked like they were passed out drunk.


By the way, I was walking home today and came upon a crash at Wells - apparently within a few minutes of it happening. A garbage truck smashed head-on into a track support post. From the looks of it, either the garbage truck was made out of a tin can or it hit HARD. I hope that the support post was not damaged - that's about the last thing the CTA needs right now. This was at Wells and Monroe, I think.

^
I took the Blue line from Damen downtown to the red line and then up to Fullerton and switched to the Brown line at 4am two Fridays ago.

Took me over 2 hours to complete the ride. Took one hour to go from Damen to Jackson on the blue line. It was absolutely insane. TWO hours to go about 5 miles.

Yesterday I took the #11 bus from downtown at rush hour. Waited 15 minutes for the PACKED bus to get there. Then water started POURING out of the ceiling all over 4-5 chairs. I mean it was just GUSHING the whole way up north. Where'd it all come from? It was sunny outside. Then the bus wouldn't accelerate, so the driver had to put it in park in the middle of the street, shut it off, and power down the bus. He then had to start it up again so it would work.

A few weeks ago the bus driver had to power down the bus in the middle of the street 3 different times as we went from downtown to Diversey.

Another time the driver had to walk back and kick the doors closed every time someone opened them because they were broken and wouldn't register as "closed".

Two other times in one week two different bus drivers got totally lost on the route and started going down wrong streets.

The whole time they play that stupid recording touting their busses to get people home when track work starts. They could at least get us busses that KINDA run....



Two weeks ago I took the Diversey bus to the Blue line to O'hare. Took me an hour and 35 minutes to get there. I waited for 30 minutes in the middle of the day for a train to come to Logan Square and pick me up. Then we ran express - but it still took 45 minutes to go the few miles up to O'hare because of all the slow zones.

With the exception of the lost bus drivers, those bus issues sound like they happened because of how old CTA's bus fleet is (both in terms of actual age and in vehicle miles since they're out in revenue service so much). Lack of capital funds and all that. Those nice Nova LFS buses (the 6600 series) purchased in 2001 are due for their mid-life overhaul in the next year but that's nowhere in sight, so those should start falling apart soon too. The current order of New Flyers (the 1000 series) coming in are only enough to fully replace the oldest of the old crappy buses (the 5300-series Flxibles from 1991).

Otherwise I strongly recommend checking the CTA customer alerts web page if you're ever planning to ride the L system overnight (anytime after 11pm), since it gives heads up on trackwork....it sounds like you got nailed by that several times (for some reason single-tracking totally ruins the schedule, like they let 2 trains go in the same direction before swapping). They're doing alot of overnight work on the Red and Blue lately, almost every night (and they will be again this weekend).
http://www.transitchicago.com/news/whatsnewA.wu

The capital needs of the rail system are extreme and out of hand, but it's important not to forget the bus system either, which carries twice as many riders.

One interesting thing, rail ridership is on a downward trend the last few months, while bus ridership is on an upward trend, which is exactly the opposite of the overall ridership trends for the past few years. Presumably, this is people giving up on the Red, Blue, and Brown lines and switching to buses.

Rather than being all doom-and-gloomy about funding, let's talk about expansion and cheer up.

Has multi-tracking of any lines been proposed in recent history?

It would certainly be possible on the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line, since they built the highway for 4 tracks, but only installed 2. An express service would allow CTA to use the 2 abandoned stations they have as local stations. Hopefully, IDOT won't cannibalize the space for more lanes. It honestly looks wide enough for 6 tracks in some places.

I also thought it was cool that they effectively 4-tracked the Dan Ryan branch of the Red Line for maintenance by installing tracks in the breakdown lane of the highway, while ripping out the old tracks.

Yes, they want to 4-track the Kennedy from Jeff Park to O'hare as part of the Airport Express Project...I think that part costs like $500 mil, give or take, since it also involves pushing the retaining walls of the expressway out and relocating some bridge piers.

The Forest Park and Dan Ryan lines are already FAST, I dunno if much would be gained by 4-tracking. I mean its less than 25 minutes from Jackson to 95th, and the Forest Park branch is something similar. It's amazing what no slow zones would do...

^ It's impossible to fight graffiti completely. It's really kind of sad (or cool, depending on whether you see graffiti as vandalism or art).

New York's notorious graffiti problem in the subway was long ago cleaned up by Guiliani, but these days you still see all sorts of graffiti painted and scratched onto train windows.

It's almost like the drug war. You can confiscate as much weed as you want, but you'll never get it all.

I've noticed this too, and not only that, but the railcars and stations on the Orange Line have a much more serious tagging/etching problem than the other lines.

Grafitti is the lease of our worries along the Orange Line route. The whole thing looks rather unappealing to a first-time visitor: The backs of old and unmaintained factories, vacant lots, and tons of suburban-looking townhouses all the way up until South Loop.

When I'm on that train with people coming into town, I often find myself explaining that Chicago as a whole doesn't look like this.

^ The irony being, of course, that much of Chicago does look like that

^ Yeah, I see your point. But I'd guess that, by percentage, probably 70% of Chicago's streets are cool and beautiful/interesting residential neighborhoods, not the stuff you see on the Orange Line. I enjoy most of the neighborhoods the Orange line passes through as well, just not that corridor.

Generally speaking, I find that ride to be depressing. Typically I like gritty neighborhoods and warehouses, trains, the whole bit. I guess what I dislike about that ride is the icky townhouses and kind of suburbanized character to the grit, if that makes any sense.

^ Not sure about that. I have done some extensive "visiting" in much of Chicago's south and west sides and I think that 70% number may be a bit optimistic

^ I have seen strip malls, but I don't recall these 'suburban' townhomes from my many trips on the Orange Line.

Anyhow, perhaps we are drifting too far off topic..

Southwest Side neighborhoods like Bridgeport and Brighton Park have filled vacant industrial parcels with cheaply-built suburban-style townhomes. While this brings more people to these areas, the style of building is not very urban at all.

Viva, that's good to hear about the Blue Line. If they 4-track the Blue Line for that stretch, that means that, if they ever extend the Brown Line westward to Jeff Park, it can also extend to O'Hare by default. That would allow for a lot of interesting routes a train could take.

^ I think it's time we widen our definition of urban, wouldn't you say?

I hear this criticism of the newer townhomes all the time, but I think cities are just developing differently, that's all. The old days of common brick, obsessive detailing, and total lack of garages are over. That doesn't mean that everything built henceforth must forever be maligned as cheap suburban rubbish.

^ TUP, you don't hear me complaining about all townhouse developments. Some of them are actually quite nice and manage to be good urban neighbors. I'll have to take some pictures of these things on the SW side, and I can explain what I'm talking about. I'll post them in the Gen. Dev thread if I get a chance.

I want to apologize to everyone for starting all of this in the transit thread. I thought for some reason that we were discussing it in the General Developments Thread.

Ha, took the #11 bus to work today. Once again it was pouring down rain inside the bus the whole way downtown. Some people on the bus were talking about how it was doing that for their Friday night ride home as well. So that's at least Thursday, Friday and Monday they ran that same bus at rush hour with an obviously extreme problem.

Does anyone know the timeline for starting up the beefed up bus service? Today our bus was at capacity by the time we reached Webster going downtown. We had to pass dozens of people waiting on the sidewalk because we couldn't fit anymore people on. I naturally assumed this week would see much higher ridership on the busses as people test the waters and prepare for next week. I figured CTA would understand this and start increasing the number of busses this week as well in anticipation - does anyone know what their schedule is?

^ Mayor,

#1: I'd advise research alternate routes for the way home, rather than on the way to work; AM inbound service will only see minor cuts and will still be functional. Focus more on the PM for the first phase of 3-track

#2: When a bus is so obviously defective, write down or remember the 4-digit bus number and call in a complaint.

Too bad CTA couldn't have come up with the idea for a bus #11 Express. Nope...would have made too much sense.

And this come Friday at the "special" board meeting Krusie should be a man and when he says thumbs up to the 3 track approach and to the signals working....if they don't and there is a total melt down he should offer to step down.

Also, since we have so many stations closed are those people who we are paying going to be at Fullerton and Belmont assisting? I am concerned about people holding the doors open and I am concerned about people stuffing the trains so the doors will not close and all this causes delays. How are they going to police the people?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/26/us...hp&oref=slogin

A Rail System (and Patience) Are Stretched Thin in Chicago

By LIBBY SANDER
Published: March 26, 2007

The century-old elevated train system here is as much a city fixture as the towering skyline and the piercing blue waters of Lake Michigan.

But deteriorating tracks and trains, chronic budget shortfalls and a region ever more dependent on rail service are forcing Chicagoans to confront the possibility that the system, commonly known as the El or the L, may be at a breaking point.

“We’re living on borrowed time,” said Frank Kruesi, the president of the Chicago Transit Authority, which runs the rail service. “The fact is, there’s no magic wand when we’re looking at modernizing a system that’s 100 years old in a very dense urban environment.”

The El, with its 1,190 rail cars and 222 miles of track, is the rail component of the transit authority, the second-largest public transit system in the country after New York’s. The C.T.A.’s trains and buses serve the city and 40 suburbs, logging 1.55 million rides daily. The El alone accounted for more than 195 million rides last year.

Many neighborhoods have thrived in recent years in part because they attracted residents eager to take advantage of the easy access to downtown that the trains afforded, some riders say. But the rail system is splitting at the seams, having carried 31 million more riders in 2005 than in 1985 on a fleet of cars with an average age of 27 years.

“I’ve been riding the El pretty much all my life, and I’ve never seen performance anywhere near this bad,” Alexander Facklis, 37, a rider on the Blue Line, said during a recent morning commute when a stalled train slowed most service. “There are delays every single day.”

For years, the story of the El has been one of too little money and costly patchwork maintenance, transit experts say.

Along with two other transit systems, Metra and Pace, which link Chicago to the suburbs by bus and by rail, the C.T.A. depends on a financing formula of fares and sales taxes that has not changed since 1983. The state auditor general has called the system’s financial condition “precarious.”

The Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees the three transit agencies, is trying to persuade state lawmakers to approve a $10 billion infusion of state and local money over the next five years. The C.T.A. needs $5.8 billion to bring its system, including buses, into a state of good repair, officials say.

“We call this ‘the year of decision,’ ” said Stephen E. Schlickman, the executive director of the regional authority. The choice, Mr. Schlickman said, is between a “world-class transit system” and an economic downturn that, he predicted, a hobbled transit system would most likely bring about.

The combination of slow zones, construction projects and packed rail cars has unleashed complaints from riders at community meetings and on blogs like C.T.A. Tattler, which refers to one of the most troubled routes, the Blue Line, as the “Blues Line.”

Jeff Gonzales, 40, sitting across the aisle from Mr. Facklis, said it used to take him 35 minutes to travel from his home in the Logan Square neighborhood to his job in the Loop. “Now, it takes an hour and 10 minutes,” he said.

Not far from where Mr. Facklis’s and Mr. Gonzales’s train had ground to a halt, a derailment in a tunnel last July caused a smoky fire and forced passengers on a packed rush-hour train to evacuate below ground and crawl to safety. The derailment sent 152 people to the hospital and snarled commutes on trains and buses around the city for hours.

Commute times have since doubled along that line, riders say, as deteriorating ties on many stretches of track have forced trains to travel as slowly as 15 miles per hour in some spots. The El’s slower trains prevent it from carrying as many passengers per hour as transit systems in Atlanta, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area, according to a state performance audit released this month.

Next month, work is set to begin on a $529.9 million expansion of the system’s third-busiest rail line, the Brown Line, which winds through some of the city’s most congested neighborhoods. Ridership on that line is up 83 percent since 1979, according to recent figures, and officials at the Chicago Transit Authority predict the overhaul will increase capacity by 33 percent.

In the meantime, though, riders are bracing for more than two and a half years of track closings that could reduce the capacity of already packed trains by as much as 40 percent at peak travel times.

But transit officials say the work is a necessary evil. Without it, the system would almost certainly fall into a chronic state of disrepair.

Helen Harrison, an administrative assistant who says the El is her only mode of transportation, faults Mayor Richard M. Daley for not paying enough attention to the problems. Ms. Harrison, 50, said she wondered how the transit system would handle an influx of tourists should Chicago win a bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics, a dream of Mr. Daley’s. (The city is currently competing with Los Angeles to become the United States’ bidder for the Games.)

“Mayor Daley should concentrate his efforts on this rather than on the Olympics,” Ms. Harrison said.

Mr. Daley, who by law appoints several members of the C.T.A.’s oversight board, has said that luring the Olympics to Chicago could draw more federal money to assist with long-term upgrades to the system.

But for some, coping with the immediate future is more pressing.

“The notion that we’re supposed to prepare for a doubling of our commute time for the next two and a half years is so laughable to me I haven’t been able to get my arms around it,” said Peter Skosey, a transit expert with the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit advocacy group. “I’m going to make sure my bike tires are inflated.”

http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/2...nsit600ku2.jpg
Chicagoans are confronting the possibility that the city's century-old, and deteriorating, elevated train system may be at a breaking point.

http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/4...sit2650sl4.jpg
Riders of the El system in Chicago transferring between the Red Line and the Brown Line, which serves some of the city’s most congested areas.

http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/5...sit3650ki6.jpg
The El has been undergoing patchwork maintenance as ridership has risen, tracks have deteriorated and financing has been limited.

^^^It's one thing for this to appear in the Tribune or the Sun-Times, but it's now an embarrassement at the national level, for everyone to see on the front page of the online NYTimes. This really makes me ashamed to be an Illinoisian, the fact that Springfield has the final say on how the RTA operates, where their money comes from and contributing the most to decadence of the CTA - it's a complete embarrassement and I hope that Blago is detroyed because of this.

yeah, my sister fw'd that article to me, and i thought, 'oh nice, now everybody knows ...'

i love chicago to death, and i am still glad i moved back after living in europe for 3.5 years, but the cta is always in the back of my mind, clouding that civic pride.

i apologize in advance if this has been brought up, but is there a date (or time period) when the assembly votes on any possible new funding? (when the movingbeyondcongestion.org 'year of decision' lobbying effort sinks or swims?) secondly, and i don't think i want to know the answer as i believe viva' has already alluded to it, but what are the chances of getting new funding beyond the $110 mil the cta needs this year? will they even get that $110 mil??

and on and on ...

Generally, the "X" express routes only operate on 4-lane or wider arterials (Ashland, Western, Irving Park, Garfield, Cicero, King drive...or for example, the 53A Pulaski Limited only operates in the south where Pulaski is 4-lanes), since there is barely more than zero running time savings by having expresses operate on 2 lane urban streets. This is why there aren't express routes on many heavily-trafficked streets like Halsted, 79th, Belmont, etc.

Of course, streets like Lincoln could have dedicated bus lanes and not have parking, but that's an aldermanic and CDOT issue, not CTA.

I actually have already abandoned my morning usage of the train over the past few months. I use to just take the bus if it was already at the light waiting near my house, but I finally gave up and just started waiting for it myself. I hadn't been able to board a Brown Line train for weeks at Diversey because they were all at capacity. I was only able to get downtown by getting on a Purple Line (which almost always had room for people at Diversey) and then either waitinig for a Brown Line or just walking from Merch. Mart.

The bus wasn't bad until very recently, when everyone else started trying it out as an alternative. I'm a huge transit nut, so I know every route and possibility for getting downtown. At Racine and Diversey, the #11 is the only one that makes sense in the morning.

With capacity reduced by 13% in the mornings, I can't imagine getting on any trains when I have been waiting for between 1 to up to 3 full trains to pass through Diversey every single morning before being able to board. Then of course you have to feel the wrath of people at Armitage and Sedgwick who always have to wait longer. Those people at Sedgwick can be pretty vicious in the mornings, their patience with it all completely gone now. I don't know why they don't just take a bus or walk downtown. So much faster if you think about it.

I'm actually walking home tonight after work :) Figured with warmer weather I can just ditch the $75 monthly pass and walk to and from work. It'll take around an hour and 15 minutes, but the bus takes an hour anyway. Exercise, here I come :twoguns:

All CTA bus stops have a clear space for any bus loading or unloading to pull completely into. They took away the parking from the streets so that this "could" occure. The idea about taking parking spaces away from those of us who live in the neighborhoods was to ensure that automobiles and "express" buses can pass by a bus that is stopped at a bus stop. It is hard to believe CTA doesn't believe it takes any time to load passengers. Shaving off time could make the trips a lot shorter for those traveling the greatest distances. (P.S. we all have seen buses can pass each other on 2 lanes only....like when they are bunched up and stuff).

Another idea is that the Lake Shore Drive "X" buses that terminate at Foster should actually start picking people up from the North Garage to Lake Shore Drive.

^ my bus on Friday:

1) Blew through every stop sign

2) Drove through red lights if no one was coming

3) Didn't stop at multiple stops when the cord was pulled because people didn't pull it "soon enough"

We passed TWO busses on the way downtown that were ahead of us, and I ended up getting to work in 30 minutes instead of an hour. It was amazing. I think they could very readily do express on a 2 lane road, and it certainly saves more time than zero!!! It's a LOT of stopping and a LOOOOT of time missed at stoplights when you have to pull the bus over every two blocks and pick people up.

It is no joke about walking often being almost as fast as taking the CTA.

I can remember 3 or 4 years ago when the system was in much better shape that rollerblades or a bike on the lakefront path was faster (or at worst the same amount of time) as the rush hour busses (to/from east Lakeview).

I know a number of people that skipped the busses any time the weather was nice enough. I'd say it's even more important this summer. And I fear that the lakefront path is going to become hopelessly congested.

Walked home tonight. Hour and 25 minutes to go 4.3 miles compared to one hour on the bus. Not too bad! I walk pretty slow as well, and having to stop and what seemed like every damn red light going north on Wells.

Bring Back Streetcars!

I second that emotion.

Does anyone have a good map of the former streetcar system? My grandfather, who grew up in the Austin neighborhood, has described it and it sounded quite extensive.

NOT my maps...from a transitfan's AOL page...streetcar maps from 1914, the network generally even grew a bit through about the 1940s.

http://hometown.aol.com/ctapacefan/map1914n.gif
http://hometown.aol.com/ctapacefan/map1914s.gif

^ How freaking handy would that be!!!!

I'm always fascinated when they repave a street, Fullerton, Halsted, whatever - and you can see the old tracks still embedded in the road when they scrape up the asphalt. They just threw down a new street over the old bricks and rails. I swear there were some on Sheffield when I lived over there last year. It really made me stop and look when I walked by those old bricks and the rails - right there in front of my apartment. What a fast paced and busy life the city must have had back then.

What fascinates me is how such a system could be built 100 years ago and we cannot even get a feeder system downtown between the west loop and Streeterville (even though smaller cities do....Portland created its StreetCar outside their Transit Agency).

Holy smokes! That streetcar map makes Toronto's current 11-line streetcar system look like peanuts. Do you guys know how many people per day it carried? And did they use buses back then as well, or was surface transport entirely streetcars? Up here, almost all surface transit downtown is streetcars. Only a few streets like Bay, Sherbourne, and Wellesley use buses instead of streetcars.

http://www.chicagobus.org/history

Great website with pictures of the old streetcars. I also highly, highly recommend watching the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car?" because it touches at one point about the history of the electric streetcars and how Standard Oil, the precursor to Exxon Mobil (?) bought many streetcars en masse in the 40's-50's throughout many cities in the country and let them rust away in wreckage yards to make way for the explosion of their gas-consuming automobiles (also discussed at lenght on a recent PBS documentary).