[ardecila]

It's funny, CTA has the exact same problem with a crumbling garage at our Cumberland station. Imagine a smaller Alewife, with the station in an expressway median.

CTA and MBTA come from a very similar history, except MBTA devoted huge resources in the 1960s-1980s to modernizing the rail system and Chicago didn't. We had a plan similar to Boston's where all the downtown el tracks would be moved underground, with big new transfer stations, but it never got built. When Daley Jr became mayor in the 90s he did start rehabbing/modernizing the elevated lines one-by-one, but we're still not done. We also never got the downtown transfer stations that we needed except one at Clark/Lake (it is spatially difficult to build transfers between elevated and subway platforms downtown). Boston's five downtown transfer stations are key to making the whole thing work - Downtown Crossing, Haymarket, Park St, State, and Government Center, with Charles-MGH being the only missing link.

The result is what I mentioned above - people don't change trains very much because it's not very convenient to do that. As for bus-rail transfers, those have declined year over year as the bus system bleeds ridership. High-income Chicagoans never got comfortable with buses outside of a thin strip along the lakefront, and low-income Chicagoans have been fleeing the city in droves.