Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
^Yes, but the main problem resulting from lack of the Crosstown is that truck traffic is either forced through downtown or all the way out to the Tri-State. A transit line does nothing to fix that problem.
An expressway that could help lure skilled manufacturing and logistics back from Elk Grove Village and Des Plaines to Franklin Park, Cicero, and Bedford Park would do a lot more for South Side workers stranded far from good jobs than building a new train line they could spend 75 minutes riding.
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Cocktail napkin calculations put an elevated 2-lane each way truck expressway with CTA train tracks underneath running more or less along the that train line paralleling Cicero from Jefferson Park to 79th, and curving over to the Dan Ryan, with transit stations at every transfer point and approximately every mile in between and access ramps to the expressway only at interchanges and once in each stretch between interchanges at somewhere between $5 and $6 billion. That's a lot of money, but I'm willing to bet a case could be made for it, especially if the truck expressway were a tollroad. The time to do it would be now, while vast stretches of the route are heavily depopulated.