The city plans to spend $2 billion+ on the red line extension to the far south side nether region. The Morgan cta station cost $40 million. So do the math on how many additional stations could be added to dense neighborhoods

The Red Line extension price tag includes 4 new stations and 5.5 miles of new track. The CTA extends beyond the city boundaries in all directions, except one direction where it stops 5.5 miles before the city ends. It seems reasonable to fix that before adding a Blue Line stop at Diversey for people who already have a CTA running through their neighborhood.

There already is a Blue Line Station at Diversey... The Logan Square Spaulding exit is literally one block from the Milwaukee/Diversey/Kimball intersection.

Also remember that the city limits carry on much further to the south than they do North. Howard is only 7600 North, the 95/Dan Ryan station is 20 blocks further South than Howard is North. Davis is roughly where 95/Dan Ryan is relative to downtown.

The Red Line Extension is a total waste of money. It would be much more practical to reopen closed Oak Park Blue Line stations, Pink Line Stations, and Green Line stops. Literally the California station is just sitting there rusting away in the middle of the Eisenhower.

Hell for $2 billion we could probably have connected the Brown Line to the Blue Line along Ashland. At least get Sterling Bay to match the $2 billion to make LY not a transit desert.

Why you say that? The Red Line south route stops pretty early on when there's a whole bunch of city left.

Think of it as opening up vasts new pools of low skill workers. It's much easier to work for minimum wage ( and show up ) when you take the El.

No. One. Lives. There.

Thanks buddy ^ for calling many of my tax paying, law abiding, hardworking relatives - "no one".

This is the kind of subliminally racist view that continues to plague Chicago and has led to rising crime rates pretty much all over the city. When you view whole swaths of people as "non-existent" inevitably there will be pushback and frustration which results in rising crime... bringing all of Chicago down.

When will this city ever learn that we are all connected. That disinvestment, red-lining and isolation of whole areas.... will be felt in other areas.

.

Was at the dmv down there recently and took the red down to 95th. I guess I must have imagined all the people getting off from buses coming from Roseland at the 95th Street station.

Holy dog whistle, batman!

Aaron (Glowrock)

There's also this thing called induced demand. Build it and they will come.

Of course, there are already a lot of people there that would benefit from the extension.

Seems like you are forgetting how the Purple and Yellow lines extend beyond the city limits to the north and northwest. Our fellow citizens to the south could use similar connectivity. Maybe it will even make those places more prosperous, which was supposed to be the goal.

Not to say that getting consultants from Lincoln Park to O’Hare isn’t important, just doesn’t seem like a priority when the Red Line stops 6 miles before the city ends.

The ZBA can grant a variation (aka variance) to reduce parking requirements by up to 20%. If the developer needs to reduce parking by more than that, there are only specific circumstances where that can happen.

Most of us know about the TOD parking reduction, the other ones are:
-reuse of City Landmark or otherwise historic building
-change of use for old building (>50 years) that is otherwise not historic
-underground parking, for D zones only
-efficiency units less than 800sf
-minimal parking (i.e. if the total parking spaces needed are below a certain threshold, you don't need to provide it at all)

In Sterling Bay's case, they could have done underground parking and reduced their requirement from 680 spaces down to 340. But underground parking is expensive, and even a 340 space underground garage is massively costly to build given Chicago's soft soils and high water table. Or they could have agreed to do only small apartments, but then they probably can't get the rents they need to make the project pencil.

Plenty of people live there and they deserve good service. IMO the tragedy is they could have gotten that a long time ago via improved ME service + fare integration if metra and cta could just get along better.

This might enlighten the conversation:
https://chicagoflaneur.com/2016/06/2...ty-in-chicago/

That’s a great blog post and it bears reposting every so often. But Roseland and West Pullman score low both in terms of unit density and people density, so I’m not sure anything in that blog post supports the case for the Red Line extension.

Lol the city limits are totally irrelevant. The other parts of the metro served by Heavy Rail like Evanston and Berwyn and Skokie and Oak Park are multiple times denser than the 100's....

What a joke, where your relatives live couldn't be less relevant to this conversation. This is about urban planning and it makes ZERO sense to spend billions providing rail service to the least dense sector of the city.

Maybe you are right, we need to extend Metra to Oskosh or you are calling MY relatives "no one"!

What a stupid comment, this is why our country is failing. Every conversation needs to be about race or who is being "disadvantaged". We wouldn't want to let facts get in the way of partisan shrieking!

https://chicagoflaneurcom.files.word...ensitymap4.png


It's a fact, no one lives there relative to just about anywhere else in the city. It would be far more useful to extend the blue line to Woodfield or Oakbrook than serving a bunch of SFHs 15 miles from downtown. Notice how much more dense the Howard Redline is than the last four or five stops on the Dan Ryan.

Pretty sure you could just Uber every potential new rider for a century and still spend less than $2b.

It's actually hard to come up with a worse way to spend transit dollars in the city.

Residential density may be less useful as a way of evaluating transit need these days.

Dense areas tend to have higher incomes and people who are willing to pay for parking, work from home now or could in the future, and who make heavy use of delivery services and ridesharing to make trips that 10 years ago would be in transit.

In Dallas, rail adjacent TOD has not increased ridership while the most demand is in less dense low income areas. The people who use transit are getting on buses in aging 1960s era sprawlburbs, and transferring to a train to go to the downtown community college campus (that’s going to close eventually) or to another bus to some McDonald’s to start their shift. The white collar transit rider went the way of cat videos, bacon mayo, hipster glasses and 1337. Chicago is obviously different but trends like this tend to converge in time.

Lol..... the 95th Street Red Line stop had 2.8+ million paid station entries in 2019 and over 3 million in 2018. That was more than the Addison Red Line stop had, next to Wrigley Field, in the same years and also more than Clark/Division. Idk - someone want to explain how the 95th street station has more paid station in a year than the stop right next to Wrigley Field and some downtown?

Just a look at the most boarded stations in 2019 in the entirety of Chicago:

Lake: 6,450,839
Clark/Lake Brown/Orange/Pink/Purple: 5,830,767
Chicago Red Line: 4,501,851
Washington Blue Line:, 4,176,948
O'Hare Blue Line: 3,811,167
State/Lake Brown/Orange/Pink/Purple Line: 3,783,187
Grand Red Line: 3,780,031
Belmont Red/Brown/Purple Line: 3,745,165
Fullerton: 3,719,544
Roosevelt: 3,466,910
Washington/Wabash: 3,126,070
Monroe Red Line: 2,900,809
95th St Red Line: 2,818,826
Jackson: 2,601,587
Addison Red Line: 2,597,371
Midway Orange Line: 2,477,340
Clark/Division Red Line: 2,452,981
Logan Square Blue Line: 2,261,714
Merchandise Mart: 2,237,817
Washington/Wells: 2,214,522
Quincy/Wells: 2,188,354
Adams/Wabash: 2,087,483
Wilson Red Line: 2,043,387
Damen Blue Line: 2,023,150
Chicago Brown Line: 1,993,375
79th St Red Line: 1,975,866
Jefferson Park Blue Line: 1,896,402
North/Clybourn Red Line: 1,780,616
Division Blue Line: 1,735,843
UIC-Halsted Blue Line:, 1,729,039
California Blue Line: 1,702,462
Diversey Brown Line: 1,651,007
Western Blue Line: 1,649,428
Pulaski Orange Line: 1,465,594
Chinatown Red Line: 1,456,259
69th St Red Line: 1,423,925
Sox-35th Red Line: 1,391,119
Clinton Green/Pink Line: 1,271,865
Western Brown Line:, 1,258,060
Armitage Brown Line: 1,243,651
87th St Red Line: 1,186,724
Sedgwick Brown Line: 1,160,257
Morgan Green/Pink Line: 1,105,090
Harlem Green Line: 1,101,813
Southport Brown Line: 1,084,936
Harold Washington Library: 1,077,009
Polk Pink Line: 869,191

Just the 79th, 87th, and 95th St Red Line stops combined in 2019 saw 5,981,416 paid boardings. That is more than 1 million more boardings than the entire Pink Line between Polk and 54th/Cermak saw in the same year. That is also 367,812 more boardings than Logan Square, California, and Western stops combined saw in the same year.

For "nobody living down there" that's quite a bit of demand even relative to other parts of the city for the last 3 stops of the red line. They must be coming from somewhere, especially given the fact that the 95th line stop has around 3 million boardings per year but the next 2 stops (87th and 79th) each have over 1 million with 79th having nearly 2 million. So where are they coming from if 87th and 79th are also busy?


The fact is that yes people live down there and there's some people who are actually more reliant on public transit to get around than others. You have to realize this is actually an investment for the overall city considering the fact that a lot of the people who are working downtown jobs whether doorman jobs or at restaurants may be coming from areas on the south side with adequate public transit. Extending it south in areas gives people better access to this and perhaps may even ease up companies being able to find people for work in other parts of the city. Kind of hard to take a job when you don't have a car and it's not worth it taking 4 buses just to get to your not-so-high paying job.

Interesting too when you look at where people in these communities work - just take some of the areas that may make up the downtown area and others outside of their neighborhood along or near the red line:

* Roseland: The Loop, Near North+West, and Hyde Park = 34.9% of workers
* Pullman: The Loop, Near North+West, and Hyde Park = 34.1% of workers
* West Pullman: The Loop and Near North+West+South = 31.9% of workers

They only list the top 5 so I'm sure it's much more. Also consider the fact that this type of development could actually spur on new development around those stations and for down there, I wouldn't doubt it at all.

We should be open to the possibility that it isn’t a coincidence that the area of the city with the worst CTA coverage also has the least density. Infrastructure like the CTA is the exact type of amenity that make an area more desirable and ultimately denser.