It comes down to Metra generally being given leeway to operate as a business, in very stark contrast to the political plaything that is CTA. The substantial inequity in funding (with CTA providing 80% of regional transit rides but getting about 50% of the public subsidy).

I've gotta say I'm getting pissed off with the train conductors who sit & idle at Belmont and especially Fullerton. The CTA has extra crew up on the southbound platforms and just about every time we pull into one of those stations, a crew member on the platform comes up to the front car & chats with the conductor. I was sitting in the front car today and observed the train conductor chatting with a platform worker for a minute before we finally continued on. That's ridiculous! I know it's only a minute, but we should have only been there for about 10 seconds. No one was still getting on the train. Everyone that was waiting to get on it had already boarded. And believe me we weren't being delayed because crews were "working on the track ahead." We freely went on our way once the chat was finished. If CTA employees want to chat, they should do it off the clock when they won't be delaying 200 - 300 riders. I was F*CKING FURIOUS. CTA already has enough delays as it is. I don't want train conductors making it worse. I think it would be great if one of the tv stations brought some undercover cameras on the trains to catch the conductors idling at platform stations while chatting with workers there.

-OhioGuy (trying to step down off his soap box)

^ Next time, bring a camcorder and record it.

Then, contact the CTA with your complaint and tell them that you have evidence on your personal video :D

I completely agree. There are numerous times I've had to skip taking Metra downtown on a Saturday night because 12:30am is the last train home, and who wants to rush a good time?

I didn't think the off-peak and weekend service expansions required extra rolling stock, just for Metra to keep running trains that otherwise only ran at rush hour.

Therefore, the cost is just the incremental - fuel and an engineer. Ticket sales should be able to cover that...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel...,7532255.story

...I think I'm completely confused by this ???!!! ..is the CTA saying that the track work on the ENTIRE (Northside) Brown and Red (to Howard) will be done by December ?? (this sound far fetched) ...or just the Brown ? ...or just the Brown from the Mart to Belmont ? ...or something else entirely ?? :shrug: :shrug: :koko: :koko:

that they'll be done with the 3-track work at fullerton and belmont

....so if the Brown Line has its' track fixed by this December......and assuming the Blue Line to O'hare is fixed by the end of the year as well......where will the remaining slow zones be in 2009 ??

There will likely be some remaining on North Main (Red Line north of Belmont) and certainly some on the Purple Line in Evanston. And there will always be a few here and there always popping up.

Speaking of which, has a new slow zone popped up on the red line northside tracks in the subway between Chicago and Clark & Division? I know I've been on trains that have flown through that area in the past, yet lately I've noticed that we've been going much more slowly. It seems to be happening during the first half of the distance between those two stations. It's not slow enough that it indicates crews are working in the tunnel, but at the same time it's definitely slower than the remainder of the trip north through the subway. I thought all of that track work was finished several months ago? It's already bad again?

(or maybe I'm getting it mixed up and it's actually the first half of the distance between Clark & Division and North & Clybourn?... for some reason I'm now having trouble remembering where exactly it's occurring)

http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel...,7532255.story

This is why I don't buy the tribune anymore. We have a reporter reporting on the CTA and being so lazy as to not start the story out with a declaration in the first line of his subject matter. To read the first sentence we would assume that the Brownline and Slow zone work will all be done by the end of the year. Point is....with crappy reporting like this we will never have a serious discussion in this city about mass transit....which we all know is what the right/slant Tribune owners/editors desire....no real discussion about our need for a vastly improved system.

....yes, I was thinking the same thing ! that stretch between Addison and Sheridan and Wilson in particular......but this is still VERY ENCOURAGING news !! you're saying that for all practical purposes, the slow zone problem is going away by the end of the year !! (assuming good future maintenance) :notacrook: :notacrook:

According to the most recent slow zone map (May 14) there is no slow zone indicated in the subway between Chicago and Clark/Division.

The northbound tube is still slow zoned (25 and 35mph) between Clark/Division and the portal due to track condition and is part of the remaining work to be done.

Excellent points. The trib's reporting continues to go down hill, especially on transit issues. Even John Hilkevitch is often off the mark, IMO, but at least he tries...

Reading your recent posts, I have to say our stances on transit are pretty dang similar. Weren't we ferociously arguing about the CTA a few months back? Amazing how that crap happens on the interweb. :)

Taft

Speaking of the Trib, anyone read the editorial Firday, "The $153 million traffic jam" (section 1, page 24)? They basically summed up the BRT project as a ploy to make driving worse for commuters in order to boost ridership of mass transit:

"If Chicago wants to migrate drivers to mass transit, it should concentrate on making the buses and trains a better option, not making the car a worse one."

While I partially agree with this statement taken as is, I just simply don't agree with it in the context of the transit situation, personal and mass, in Chicago right now. The editorial criticized the CTA for being underfunded, but doesn't the CTA's share of federal funding depend on ridership statistics? And isn't the fact that it's so (relatively) easy to drive a car in Chicago one of the main reasons that CTA ridership isn't the maximum of what it could potentially be? So, in reality, couldn't making it more difficult for people to commute by car could potentially help break the cycle and help the CTA get the funds it needs to improve the ridership experience that so many potential riders have been clamoring for?

To its credit, the Tribune editorial did applaud Huberman for his recent efforts, but then in the same paragraph they followed up with this:

"But Chicago would be foolish to make life miserable for motorists before it can assure them a more attractive alternative. When the CTA is on track, drivers will be more inclined to park their cars and climb aboard."

So is my aforementioned reasoning about breaking the transit cycle flawed, or is the Tribune totally uninformed here?

^ Well put.

What you're talking about is a sickly disease in American society that is older than the CTA itself. It's the disease of extremely cheap automobile subsidation at the expense of well-established transit systems that have long been at the brink of bankruptcy. It's about time that real market forces are finally allowed to express themselves.

Reporters who feel otherwise are simply ignorant. I say lets bring back the true value of transit sooner rather than later, and the higher the cost of driving & parking, the better. If you want to drive, PAY for the priviledge--period.

"Real" market forces? What real market forces? Removing lanes from openly-traveled roads at rush hour is yet another, more complicated government control on market forces. I'm behind transit as much as you are, but I can't possibly see how you can put a free-market spin on this.

Also, transit systems were on the brink of bankruptcy long before cars became popular and suburbanization began. Only in Japan, and possibly other Asian countries, can transit systems meet their expenses through ticket sales. In all other developed parts of the world, transit systems require heavy subsidies, just as highway systems do.

If we really were to put a free market spin on driving, for example, a pure libertarian "pay for only what you use", no one could afford to drive. The only way we could achieve this is to have a toll booth every block.

It's kind of weird, i don't think anyone has actually figured out what it costs to have cars drive. We know what it costs to own a car and we know what road projects cost, but it is much more difficult to figure out what it really costs to allow people to drive.

Transit, because the routes and ridership is trackable and funding is contained to specific agencies, is much easier to figure out costs. When people see the high cost of transit per mile they freak out, but if we could accurately state the costs of local roads, highways, maintenance and all the things it takes to drive (including opportunity costs) people would pass out.

Market forces matter very little when you're talking about something that has to be funded by a group of people and has wide reaching effects. And market forces definitely don't apply to publicly funded amenities. If we were to privatize our entire transportation system (roads and all), transit systems would have a leg up because they are much more efficient to run.

Driving should be made more difficult and costly because it is difficult and costly to provide. Anyone from lincoln park who drives to the loop should be taxed, charged, ticketed, through the nose. Transportation is (hopefully) about smarter people telling less smart people how the should live their lives. Otherwise less smart people will make less smart transportation decisions. (like whoever decided to make north avenue 6 lanes across from the tristate on west, just plain stupid)

^^^^^Also, bankruptcy bears no indication of an industry's effectiveness. All our airlines are going bankrupt, but flight is still the most effective means to travel long distances. Conversely, oil companies are raking in the dough but i don't think anyone can make any reasonable argument that oil is an effective energy solution.

^ One can easily turn this into a chicken versus egg argument.

People "fled" transit systems because of cheap gasoline, Federally subsidized sprawl that allowed for very cheap housing in extremely low density areas with ready accessibility to resources due to a spaghetti-like array of high capacity road networks, cheap gasoline, etc...all Federally built & subsidized.

The original railroads and transit systems, however, were built by PRIVATE companies. So Govt intervention, while not starting this mess (people were moving to suburbs and buying cars long before that, true), certainly accelerated the process.

My "free market" spin is an old argument, and one which you've already heard. Make driving cost what it really should cost, and we'll see how many people will choose (or not choose) to take transit instead.

And this brings about a much deeper issue: should representative Govt really give people what they "want", as opposed to what is in their collective "best interests"? I think too many Americans believe the former, but not I.

Of course....I would hope I never agree with everyone all the time. Some of the time is great though.

Well, the system we've had for the last 50 years, having a tollbooth on every gas pump, has worked reasonably well. User fees paid by motorists—and only by motorists—pay for all highways and roughly half the cost of local streets. But remember that we've always had local streets, even before there were autos to help pay for them.

The direct, actual costs of streets and highways are totaled up every year.



http://www.lafn.org/~dave/trans/econ...ubsidy.html#s7

^^^ to compare streets before autos and streets after autos is absurd. There are roads in rome that were built hundreds of years ago and have never needed repair because they don't see heavy automobile traffic yet they full supported a city of a million people and cost nothing to maintain.

So called "user fees" at pumps do not accurately price car travel as it is location non-specific. All a user fee at a pump can tax is the actually amount of driving that is done. This hasn't worked very well, if you notice the highway trust fund, you'll find that this is headed to insolvency in the next year to two. And there is the little ongoing war with the middle east that we're engaged in to try to secure oil supplies so people in decatur can drive on their nice 4 lane concrete highway to pick up their miller lite.

One problem(of many) with the automobile system is that the road that is built out to a town of 60 people is the same road that is built out to a town of 6000 people. The same goes for water service, storm water treatment, waste water,... most infrastructure. If we were to actually price road usage appropriately, you would need a toll booth every block and the most used roads would have the cheapest tolls and the least used roads would have the highest tolls. (i.e. a $20 road used by 100 people costs each user 20 cents, a $10 road used by 10 people costs each user a dollar)

Obviously, that town of 60 people could not get close to supporting their roads because the simply do not use them as intensely enough to justify their existence. Because having toll booths every block is impractical, we end up building all our roads from the same pool of money and large, urban areas end up paying more than their share to make sure people in Yorkville can drive 10 miles to the grocery store.

Again for example, the suburbs gain a ton from being near I90 or 290 or whatever, yet the benefit to the city is very minimal. A town the size of antioch could not afford to build the tri-state tollway by itself, it had to be "subsidized" by dense, concentrations of wealth (a.k.a. cities). In return , the suburbs provide very little to the city that gave it a reason for existing.

To restate my first point, we don't know what it really costs to provide roads everywhere. The costs are not contained nor calculable. If we, as a society, would use logic more than stupid rules of thumb and misleading statistics, we'd realize that transit gives you a real, predictable return on investment whereas automobiles are unpredictable, inefficient drains on our economy.

The value of a network is in its completeness, not in its perfect matching of cost with pricing for each individual segment. We don't price water service by how many people are on the main. We don't price postage by how remote the delivery destination is. A highway through Utah might have very little traffic compared to the Edens, but it's no less important to the network. We in the city benefit from the ability of suburbanites to easily get here. Would you make the same argument about the Metra network, that "the suburbs gain a ton from being near the BNSF, yet the benefit to the city is very minimal?"

Your argument about Antioch is particularly funny, since the Tri-State was built as a tollway--and still is. It was funded entirely by its users, people who wanted to avoid the congestion of Chicago streets.

Does this include funding via the occasional Federal transportation/infrastructure and state capital bills?

Highways aren't paid for only by motorists at the gas pump. Only 56% of funding for the freeways and highways comes from the gas pump. And everything that is trucked in is paid for by the consumers.....the tax is passed along to us.

But I agree with you on the "network" concept and you are correct...it is about the completeness of a system that determines its value.

Yes. There are so many transfers among different levels of government that the only way to get a true accounting is to look at total funds collected and total funds expended by all governments. That's what Table HF-10 attempts to do.

Look more carefully. When BTS says "highway system," they mean all roads, even local streets. Given the history of transportation funding, I think it's fair to say that user fees pay the entire costs of everything laymen would call a "highway," and somewhere between half and two-thirds (it varies from year to year) of the cost of local streets.

As would be the cost of transporting it via backpack, covered wagon, sailing ship, steam train, dirigible, or genuine bona fide monorail.

The value of a network is not it's completeness, it is in making sure that resources are efficiently used according to their capacity.

For instance, a cell phone network. While it is valuable for us to have service in most places, it is more important to have enough service in areas that have the most number of cell phones to ensure smooth operation.

Bloomington, Illinois has 3 lane expressways surrounding it. The Eden’s Expressway is 3 lanes. I don’t have a statistics, but something tells me that that expressway is in Bloomington is underutilized or the Eden's is overutilized, or both. When you look at the interstate system, it has two lane, separated highways connecting major cities. While it is important that we connect our major economic centers, the automobile is a terribly inefficient way to do it. There is hardly an interstate where the road is used to capacity. This is where rail has a ton of efficiency. Low land usage, low maintenance, high volume, high fuel efficiency, cheap to build (relative to highways, on-ramps, excavation), all of which is sacrificed to gain the mobility and freedom you have with a personal vehicle. Like roads, rails are often not used to capacity, but the continuous investment needed to maintain it is vastly less.

Going back to my analogy, in the US, we have a transportation system that is akin to placing high capacity cell towers where few people live along with not having high enough capacity cell towers where everyone lives.

This concept of network utilization is true for almost all network types. In technology, why have a super-computer running Nintendo (answer: because Nintendo is awesome) and a graphing calculator mapping human DNA? This is the same reason why mainframe computing is making a comeback, it is a more efficient use of resources.

Also, you have to consider indirect costs because those are real costs. They are really difficult to figure out, but they are certainly there. Diminished environmental quality, less healthy life styles, … drivers may or may not pay for the cost of maintaining and building roads but they most certainly do not pay to cover secondary and tertiary effects of driving.

And we should price a water service on how many people are on a main. It is for this very reason we spend millions of dollars running water service to towns of 100 people at a tremendous loss. Politically though, it would not fly.

I would love to see stats that break down per capita spending based on location density for transportation, all forms of transportation. Because something tells me that we are spending an unbelievable amount for Hinsdalians, Buffalo Grovians, Orland Parkites to be able to drive around and spending next to nothing for Chicagoans to take the EL or drive down the street for groceries. I’d also like to see this for infrastructure. Anyone know any sources?

On a lighter note...

I've always wondered, do train tracks ever need to be plowed or anything?

I guess i've always assumed that trains are big and heavy enough to pretty much just push through whatever is in front of them.

Sure, if it gets deep enough. I've never seen one in Chicago, but they're common in Canada and the mountains, where 3 feet of snow can fall overnight.
http://www.northeast.railfan.net/plow2.html

That covers the initial cost of construction, but doesn't it ignore wear and tear? The road used by 10 people is going to last a lot longer than the road used by 100 people or 1000 people.
So when you factor in that you're replacing the high use roads a lot more often, the costs will balance out a bit more than your example.

^ Yeah, there are plows when necessary, but the trains themselves generally keep the tracks clear, especially most trackage is used 20 hours a day and some 24 hours a day. In some cases, CTA will run work trains during non-revenue hours (e.g. on the purple express tracks) just to keep them clear. All railcars also have "sleet scrapers" that can be deployed to brush snow aside from the third rail; these are small flaps on hinges that lower to scrape along the third rail, when needed.

Of course. One of the CTA's snowplow trains is generally stored at Rosemont Yard. CTA benefits from having some tracks on elevated structure that snow falls right through, but the median lines and the North Side Main north of Wilson have to be plowed.

Mainline railroads in mountainous areas use spreader plows or rotary snowplows that "tunnel" through deep drifts.

^^^ See i don't think that it balances out as much as you might think. Certainly local roads in small towns are never plowed or patched much, but their interstates require just as much work as any other road. My mom swears that 57 has been under construction since she went to Illinois in the late 70's.

But really, this is directed towards the suburbs more. Think of snow removal. A snow plow drives a half mile in the suburbs and clears road for 50 residences, lets say. A snow plow drives a half mile in the city and clears a street for 300 residences.

I think you'd find that the costs of maintaining a street in the city, suburbs, and small isolated town are not totally dissimilar but if you divide up transportation spending per capita, i'm guessing that city people are much more cost effective to transport than anyone else.

I also think that if you compare $1 spent on infrastructure in a city environment versus $1 spent on infrastructure in a less urban environment, the $1 in the city will generate more economic activity.

I think what i've come to realize over the past page or two of threads is that it's not that i'm against roads. I mean, how can you be? They are convenient and necessary whether you have cars or not. I’m not against interstate highways nor 6 lane expressways. I’d much rather have us spend $1 trillion dollars on building luxurious expressways to Joliet than luxurious fighter planes. I just think it is about time we start allocating our transportation dollars where urban planners want them and not politicians or departments of transportation want them. Then I think things like transit, special truck routes, freight trains would get an honest shot. In the meantime I watch projects like the I-355 expansion on down to the expansion of Route 22 (half day road, NW suburbs) get all the funding in the world, while the CTA can’t get enough money to have buses whose windows don’t fly open when the wind blows or to keep its trains on the tracks.

A bit of encouraging news from the burbs. One of my co-workers got fed up with gas prices and is now using Pace to make his Hoffman Estates to Schaumburg commute. He's officially the first person I know to take the bus to work. He said the bus was half full, which is a major improvement.
There's no bus route that works for me, so I'll stick to biking 7 months of the year.

Ridership at Roosevelt station must be up a ton, it looks packed.

Any new news about the future of the CTA? I just recently heard that they are planning on getting the new trains starting new year, and I saw a few different layouts of what expansions they are planning to make and I was wondering if anyone had heard anything about it this as well!

I know it's a daunting assignment, but read this whole thread, you'll find alot of discussion about all these things. :cool: You can use the search tool at the top of the page to search for keywords to maybe help narrow it down (e.g. "Circle Line", "BRT", "slow zone", etc.)

^^^ Someone should put some basic future projects one the CTA on the front page like the rundown. You know, put possible future lines, slow line eliminations, and station rennovations on the front page along with their expected dates, that would be handy!

I echo your sentiment. People i know who would never take public transit are now learning to incorporate into their life and enjoying it quite a bit. Especially event specific service like the pace comiskey park express from woodfield.

And it seems like every few days i'm on my usual metra and i overhear someone saying "yeah, i'm actually on the train, it's much easier than dealing with traffic and paying for parking and it drops me off a few blocks from where i need to be."

I also here them saying "the sox are totally going to beat the cubs in the world series this year!" ;)

There is like 150 pages of comments the go back over a year. I am not really interested in finding out info I already know. I know they were planning the circle line eventually and I have a map of what they expect the CTA to look like in 2055. I will try to post it. I was wondering if there is any info on the gray line? I had heard they were going to try and build a line to run from McCormick Place through museum campus, past Buckingham fountain, and then on towards Navy Pier. I would love to see if this is ever going to come to life because I think it would be a highly beneficial addition to our system. And I know about the new trains I was just wondering if they released any photos of what the trains may look like?

http://www.gapersblock.com/detour/gf...p_for_2055.pdf

If you think that "map" is what the CTA thinks the CTA will look like in 50 years, then you don't know much since that map is just the imagination of someone not even affiliated with the CTA or RTA.

The "Gray Line" was a proposal by a private citizen (Mike Payne, if I recall correctly) that was presented (in very preliminary form with no studies or serious research attached) to the CATS crowd.

The Circle Line is partway through the public comment process, but no funding source is identified, and, at best, it's been sidetracked until the slowzones are resolved and, at worst, perhaps just abandoned since it was really a pet project of the previous CTA president, Frank Kruesi's, more than it was a solution resulting from a studied analysis of the needs of the city.

Yes I know that map isnt an official map for the CTA, but it was put together based on what many different people said they would want to see happen in the next 30 to 40 years. And I believe the Gray Line was a legit proposal because when I first heard about it I read about it on the CTA's website. There plan was to use the tracks that the Metra and South Shore lines run on I think? I just thought that map would be interesting to post on here, no need to get all defensive.

The new railcars will be somewhat similar to the new cars on the IRT lines in New York, though with 2 doors on either side. The exterior will be roughly similar to the 3200-series, with maybe something more interesting on the endcaps. The interiors will have longitudinal seating, with the same seated capacity of existing cars but much more standing capacity. There has been some back and forth on the actual seat materials, whether they will simply be benches a la New York or seats a la the current L cars; I'm not sure if this has been decided for sure yet. For the most part, the interior aesthetic will probably look more modern than the current cars. They will have LCD screens to display advertising and information (don't worry, the ads won't have sound), as well as digital route map displays like in the New York railcars.

Delivery of the prototype trainset should occur either Q4 '08 or Q1 '09, with about 9 months of testing to follow before the full order begins delivery. I don't know all the electrical engineering specifics, but it's a pretty big deal to integrate the new AC propulsion system with the existing DC traction power and cab signaling systems; lots of issues with electromagnetic interference, etc. The "next" order of railcars was planned to be another batch of DC which would have already arrived (I think procurement was to take place around 2001/2002 if memory serves), but the whole procurement was canceled and restarted when the decision was made to move to AC propulsion, so between creating the specifications and bidding/negotiating contracts, the contract wasn't awarded to Bombardier 'til 2006 - hence the major gap in railcar deliveries and the presence of the ancient 2200s.

That is very exciting. I heard they were leaning towards actual seats with stain resistant materials. Also I know trains will start coming in 2010, but they are only ordering enough to cover half of their fleet that they have. Do you know which lines might get first dibs on the new train cars as opposed to others that wont get the new train cars yet?

I wish it was possible to get the cars that they have on the barcelona system.

There are no dividers for each car (meaning you have a special front/back car) This allows you, on a strait track, to see from the front of the train to the end and walk from end to end without going through doors. I think it really makes someone feel alot safer on the train. Especially at night when its just you and one creepy guy who keeps yelling and running back and forth. I think it would be more efficient for big rushes too as it would allow people to equally disperse themselves among the train. I'm not sure how it handles tight curver though...


Other topic... There's no plans to add a stop between cermak and roosevelt, are there? Like something to serve the growing south loop on the green or orange line.

It would be cool to get better-integrated trains like in modern systems (Barcelona is but one example). The common reason given/excuse is that it would require a total redesign of the maintenance facilities, which is a reason but I'm not sure it should put the cars totally out of reach - we have to eventually get modern designs, don't we?

It makes perfect sense to add a stop between Roosevelt and Cermak, but if you look at the area it's a harder project that it at first appears. 16th Street would be an obvious candidate but if you look at the existing tracks there, and the existing buildings there, it become a very difficult, expensive project. There are a lot of tall buildings in the area, and there are four tracks and tracks merge in from the old subway connection when the State Street subway used to come up to what is now the Green Line (interesting note that once the tracks under Block 37 are done, if they finished the west-bound portal from the Blue Line tot he Lake Street "L", you could run the Green Line through the subways instead of over the Loop, possibly freeing up capacity on teh Loop structure). Then there is the split, where the Wabash alley "L" splits to the Orange Line and the Green Line at about 18th. Putting something at 14th woudl be too close to Roosevelt, at 16th is probably too expensive, and at 18th is the split so you'd kinda need two stations - one Orange, one Green, or have to choose which line gets the station and if you chose Green, you might as well put the station at Cermak if you're adding one south of 18th anyway. So basically, the only place it could be added reasonably would be along 18th on the Orange Line, but then again that "L" is about 2-3 times as high as a normal "L" track, making a station there really tricky, too.

So I'm sure they've thought about it, but jeez is it ever a hard question to answer. :-)

With apologies (seriously), but it wasn't defensiveness - it was condescension.

Anyway, just watch your use of the unspecific "their" because I'd hate to see people get the impression that the CTA failed to do something it wasn't even on their planning radar to do. :-)

This is the most significant reason. Curves on the CTA system are much too tight. The Red Line could theoretically handle some mild level of articulation in the cars, but there's alot of value in having completely interchangeable railcars. Which leads to the next point, which is the wildly differing passenger volume levels between lines, by time of day, and type of day. CTA ridership is so packed in the peak, and on some lines extremely light in the off-peak, so it makes more sense to have married pairs that can be joined to provide an appropriate level of service, rather than the fixed articulated trainsets of European cities.

Articulated cars were actually prototyped on the CTA way back in the day, they were called the 5000 series; each carset, which could be combined into multiple trains, was actually 3 short cars with articulated portions between, and I believe the trucks were actually at the pivot points of the cars. This allowed it to navigate the tight curves.

I think it basically ended up being too much hassle for something that could be better acheived with married pairs.

Every now and then there is talk of a Cermak- Green Line stop to serve McCormick Place, which could theoretically have a north entrance at 21st or Cullerton. This would almost definitely happen if Chicago wins the Olympics. The Circle Line concept also involves making Chinatown a transfer point, with an Orange Line platform and an Archer entrance, but (1) Circle Line is still barely more than a pipe dream and (2) this seems superfluous given Roosevelt transfer is mere blocks away.

Failing the above, a #3 BRT line would do some serious good, too.

In all, a Cermak Green Line and maybe an auxiliary farecard-only entrance at Archer at the north end of the Chinatown stop, and that would be adequate and reasonably affordable. Cermak/State also has some potent TOD possibilities.

So then is the Grey Line not going to happen? I had heard alot about it and I figured that would definitely get more attention because it would be a very beneficial new transit line!