Metra seems to be exploring proof-of-payment and fare integration with CTA and Pace with their new ticket machines. This, coupled with the recent frequency increases, would truly be transformational

Metra approves major ticket vending machine contract
https://metra.com/newsroom/metra-app...chine-contract

I've achieved fare integration by moving my ventra card to my phone and using ventra balance to purchase metra tickets on the App. It's... ok, but if my phone runs out of batteries I'm SOL.

Not on the Altenheim Sub, they don't. It's been out of service, if not technically abandoned, since roughly 2018. Many of the bridges and the retaining walls would need to be replaced for it to be used by rail traffic again.

I thought the Altenheim Sub is still active west of the Belt junction? I see trains parked in the trench frequently and CSX has several active customers with sidings on that stretch as well. Maybe it's only local switching?

Also, I assume if the Altenheim was in any way "up for grabs" then IDOT would be grabbing it, but they're not so clearly CSX has a reason to hold onto it.

Sorry; I thought you meant they were still taking trains through the West Side. Yes, I think it's still useable west of the Belt, but there are some capacity constraints:

https://i.imgur.com/F7uRY8Q.jpg

David Wilson photo from 2004

I think about all that moves down there nowadays is sugar going to Ferrara Pan Candy. Of course, CSX will want to be paid the maximum possible by IDOT to give the line up, so they'll be characterizing it as the essential link tying together all North American rail operations.

^So that's what happened to my scratch & dent Vizio...

Yeah the city's been doing workshops to turn the Altenheim west of the Belt junction into a trail from California to Kostner. Interestingly it looks like only half the line would become a trail, and 2 trackways for rail would remain (not sure if this is a CSX requirement or if it's reserved for future transit). Between that, the new Eisenhower path, and the Illinois Prairie Path you could get a regional trail pretty deep into the city although there are a few tricky missing links there.

Rosen's Bread has an active siding too. Lemonheads and poppyseed buns!

I'm usually happy to see old rail corridors proposed for transit or trails, but every rail line we remove from the map is another set of businesses that have to turn to trucking to meet their needs. The railroads already unload a bunch of shipping containers and congest the expressways and local streets with thousands of drayage trucks, only to put the containers back onto trains at a different yard across town. CREATE will help this to some extent but there will still be plenty of "rubber tire interchange" after CREATE is finished.

That image reminded me of the 60 Minutes segment last night explaining the current global supply chain shortages. It was mentioned how a lot of rail freight is currently trapped in Chicago train yards, and the rail owners are charging massive premiums even for containers that have no where else to go due to bottlenecks everywhere, and merchants who are waiting for goods all around the country are being gouged in fees alone (one guy who was interviewed is spending $1 million alone this year just in fees to have his stuff sit in a rail yard).

There was a lot of fascinating stuff in the segment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7jSsyQKIfE

Not only that, but once a rail line in a densely built urban environment like Chicago is removed, its gone forever. There's no way residents would allow the construction of any new freight lines in their backyards. While adaptive reuse as parks (ala the 606) are great, it would seem really prudent for the city/county/state to preserve as much remaining freight rail ROWs in the Chicago area as possible for the possibility of use in the years down the line.

My post got deleted/relocated with the supply-chain stuff, but it looks like the section of the Altenheim Sub where a trail is proposed will also keep two trackways for rail. Not sure if this is for CSX to continue local freight service or if it's being banked for passenger service in the future. Or maybe this is one of those situations like the Carroll Ave line in River North where CSX will roll 2 freight cars down the tracks once a year so the government can't declare the line abandoned.

Either way this seems like a prudent decision. I've always thought the Altenheim Sub would be an ideal corridor for O'Hare Express if you can figure out where it would stop downtown.

https://i.ibb.co/hmbnxWH/altenheim.jpg
https://www.chicago.gov/content/dam/...g_1_boards.pdf

Brown Line Flyover is done and will be open for service starting tomorrow AM - https://blockclubchicago.org/2021/11...riday-morning/

^ I think it turned out okay. I think many were nervous it was going to be absolutely hidous and overpowering at that height. Im looking forward to the new trackway being hemmed in by the new replacement infill development. And needless to say the flyover is a major improvement that will speed service and that can never be a bad thing.

The existing elevated trackage will remain, right? I assume its needed for Loop-bound Brown line trains?

I wasn't planning to ride an early train over it this morning until a drained smoke detector battery woke me at 4am. Irritated, I decided to ride it this morning. It's very smooth and if you weren't paying attention you could totally miss it, so I think they did a great job. I'd post photos except it doesn't go high enough to see much at 5am.

No, for Kimball-bound trains. Loop ones just turn right /south into the nearest track. Kimball-bound ones used to have to turn left/west across the tracks for both directions of the Red Line and the Purple Line.

Only the southbound track will be used in revenue service. Whether they physically remove the northbound track I don't know. It may be kept for redundancy, equipment movements or temporary storage but is unlikely to ever be used again for Kimball trains with passengers.

I've been there. My sympathies. Chirp... Chirp...

Flyover porn.

https://twitter.com/keenan_mccarthy/...443798023?s=21

Oh yeah that's the good stuff.

I would imagine they keep it for redundancy. If they ever need to take Track 4 out of service (i.e. 3-tracking at Belmont) then northbound Brown Line trains won't be able to access the flyover.

But they will probably replace/upgrade all the trackwork at Clark Junction as they rebuild the Main Line structure between Belmont/Addison in phase 2.

^ agreed

The piece they slid in to make the connection also maintains the old route across the junction as an option. It's not connected now AFAIK but once they do the rebuild north of there I'm sure it will be.

Correct. They don't qualify for TOD but they are changing the underlying zoning to a DX-7 which comes with a requirement of 0.7 spaces per dwelling unit, and no required parking for office.

Since the site is planned for 971 dwelling units across both subareas, that means SB must provide at least 680 parking spots on site for the residential only. They are providing 715 parking spots total, so the extra 35 spaces are probably token parking for the office space (guest parking or reserved for execs, etc).

Really you can't blame SB for the high parking here, they are providing what they are legally required to provide. Blame the city for both a TOD ordinance that is too restrictive, and their utter failure to provide adequate transit to the fastest growing part of the city. Transit access here is even worse than Austin or Englewood, since the West Loop has no north-south bus in the entire mile between Halsted and Ashland, and because the rapid development adds traffic that slows down the buses more and more each year.

Racine would be a natural for a N/S bus route, if only it weren't so disjointed and discontinuous everywhere.

i mean, how'd it get south of cermak? jog over to loomis, cross the south branch, and then pick racine back up at 31st?

and going north, the kennedy, the river, and goose island would make for all kinds of wacky twists and turns to get a bus route back up to where racine is continuous again at armitage.

There's different ways you could do it; personally I would focus on a route that only covers between the north and south branches of the river at first, running Ashland Orange Line to Grand Blue Line (Archer-Loomis-Blue Island-Racine-Ogden). You could cover Racine thru Pilsen with a jog at Cermak, but I think it makes more sense to overlap with the #60 so they can share bus stops.

Hooking it into the existing #44 Racine bus would be difficult, but that should be the ultimate goal to fill in the missing link in the bus grid. Some planned projects like the North Branch Transitway might help extend it north in the future, ideally to Fullerton station where Red/Brown/Purple transfer is possible.

Question for those who know better: Have parking minimum exceptions been granted before? If there were a situation that warranted it, this seems to be the one. Can't be more than 100 feet away from TOD. SB has to the have the relationships with at least a few alderman to make it happen, one would think. Just don't know if that's ever been a thing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if an ada/Elizabeth cta station is proposed by some of these developers to help unlock the TOD, I mean the price of building this one 700 spot garage has to be approaching the cost of a station. A few buildings’ savings would more than pay for it…

160 N. Elizabeth got construction permits yesterday


The Fulton Market Metra station will certainly help full the gaps. The bigger and easier change that can be done is simply expanding the TOD boundaries in the city from 1/4 a mile to 1/2 a mile.

It's 0.8 miles between the Ashland and Morgan stops. I think we would have to see a ton more density in the overall area for both residential and office for them to spend all that money to build a stop there. Don't think that's about to happen anytime soon. At most you have a 0.4 mile walk to anywhere in between depending on which stop you get off at. Not a long walk at all..under 10 minutes.

A much better spot to build a station would be Madison Pink in conjunction with DX zoning for everything out to Damen...

I’ve long thought the Pink line station there should be called Arcade Place (one block south of Madison). Play up the name, turn those parking lots along the tracks (and the space underneath) into a big entertainment area for United Center. Bars, live music, etc.

Something cool, like Fremont St in Vegas.

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.