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Old Posted Feb 15, 2022, 3:14 AM
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Doady Doady is offline
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Note that Concord and Antioch urban areas are part of the San Francisco-Oakland MSA but they are considered separate urban areas.

Chicago built a big system, but hasn't expanded upon it in the post-war era. Pace bus system serves a population of over 5 million, but ridership is less than 40 million. Seriously. Think about that. Compare that to other suburban networks and you can see why Chicago's ridership per capita has declined so much. Imagine if Pace carried 160 million riders annually, similar per capita ridership as Bee-Line Bus, and what all those buses feeding into all those stations would do for CTA and Metra and all those trains.

I also think Chicago has the opposite problem of transit here in Toronto. Chicago network is too much hub-and-spoke, Toronto network is too much grid: people on the east-west line transfer to the north-south line to get downtown, so the north-south line is way overcrowded, so now Toronto needs a "downtown relief line". Yet the rail lines in Chicago are all "downtown relief lines", and how many DRLs do you really need, especially from CTA on top of Metra? Chicago has a big system, but it doesn't necessarily provide more options.

Big place like Chicago needs a plethora of many different types of routes to really complete the system. The Chicago system just hasn't been updated in a long time, and so now it is way incomplete, way too many gaps in the network. Systems like San Francisco-Oakland and Seattle are much newer, kept much more up-to-date, not so stuck in the past, not afraid to continually fill in the gaps with buses to complete the system, and so it shouldn't be surprising they have overtaken Chicago over the years.
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