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Originally Posted by VivaLFuego
Yeah that distributor was almost the Central Area Circulator, a light rail project of the late 90s that more or less stalled and fizzled when Daley freaked at the size of the Light Rail vehicles (or thats my understanding at least). But the distributor is the best way to connect the West loop Metra stations to the rest of downtown.
I'm pretty sure the State Street subway can theoretically operate with headways as low as about 90 seconds, and the red line at its peak has headways of 3-4 minutes, so theres some capacity left. Rerouting the purple down there would ease the rush hour crush the red line currently has (not to mention act as a more traditional "red line express"), and let the CTA play with the loop routing some, eventually running 2 lines out to Kimball on what is now Brown (possibly through-routing some Orange line trains), which would also give the flexibility of coming in and out of the loop in different directions to extend all day.
I mean, its not a necessary switch (purple->subway), but its doable operationally especially if CTA has something specific in mind with the added loop capacity.
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Thanks for breaking it down. Its not like I got some greedy aversion to sharing the State tunnel with Purple Line riders lol. It's not like I'm never in the Loop structure stations or anything, where of course we do share. I just didn't get the rationale of even proposing it if what's being done now seems well enough. And I can see how, as you noted, the State tunnel has the capacity. But I forgot about the talk of thru-routing the Ravenswood and Midway routes; there's something that would be cool if its shown to work better than what's going on now.
I don't recall Daley's attitude toward the LRT vehicles being a factor in killing the Circulator Plan...that's an interesting nugget. What little I remember from it all I can sorta recall the Anti-Chicagoan GOP Coalition of the time in Springfield (Jim Edgar, Pate Phillip, Lee Daniels) being assholes about funding, like they almost always were about things this town wanted/needed. That's too bad.