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Originally Posted by VivaLFuego
The Ike is a known and obvious bottlebeck. It's unclear a rapid transit extension is warranted - depending on the exact alignment and operating plan (e.g. if the extension had BART-style headways and fares in the furthest stretches) perhaps a west extension could be successful, but it's tough to imagine or locate a viable alignment to Oak Brook/Lombard.
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Local from Lombard-Forest Park, express to UIC-Halsted with a few transfer stations at Cicero, Western, etc. Alignment would use the Illinois Prairie Path and then subway or elevated down Butterfield, with a jog on 83 and 22nd to serve Oak Brook Mall. Realistically, it would only be justified if Lombard and Oakbrook Terrace were to mount a massive, Tysons Corner-style refashioning into a series of walkable destinations.
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Getting it to 4-lanes each direction through Oak Park and the Avenues is probably a necessary project, but I fear what the traffic engineers will try to do to the area around Oak Park avenue, which is a surprisingly thriving and dense piece of urbanity (served by a transit stop but no highway access, and the built form and mode choice patterns show it).
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The obvious choice is to use the CTA's extra right-of-way, rather than any sort of taking of private property. It's got to be cheaper than ripping down 5 blocks' worth of apartment buildings and installing a huge new retaining wall. If express tracks are ever warranted on the Blue Line, then Oak Park would just have to be a bottleneck.
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The Brown Line extension to Jefferson Park is probably the only hope for any sort of E-W rapid transit in the city, which is also a marginal project that has good ridership potential but exorbitant cost.
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I've never seen any serious discussion of this. IDOT includes it as a "supporting transit planned project" in highway analyses but I've never seen it mentioned by CTA, RTA, or CMAP.
Crosstown corridors may not support rail rapid transit, but what about intermediary technologies like light rail/tram or trolleybus, where the traffic benefit might jibe better with the capital cost?