View Single Post
  #10088  
Old Posted Mar 1, 2013, 4:26 PM
emathias emathias is offline
Adoptive Chicagoan
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Location: River North, Chicago, Illinois
Posts: 5,157
Quote:
Originally Posted by Vlajos View Post
How is that possible? Unless they have to walk 30 minutes to get to Kimball.
If you lived at Kimball and Foster and worked in the AON building, Google maps puts a Brown Line commute at 1 hour 8 minutes. It actually suggests that taking the Kimball bus to Belmont Blue Line station would result in a faster commute by 13 minutes in that scenario. The Brown Line is painfully slow, particularly when it's at ground level. it wasn't on my original list, but putting a subway under Lawrence between the Red Line and the Blue Line and running the Brown Line into it would result in much faster Brown Line times from Kimball as well as connect the North Lakefront to O'Hare and the jobs center around Cumberland. 5 miles of subway with 6 new subway stations (Ravenswood, Western, Francisco, Kimball, Pulaski, Elston, plus transfer stations at Jefferson Park and Wilson) would probably cost about $2.5 billion. Pretty spendy and in order to justify that, there would have to be a push for considerable new construction in Uptown and in Jefferson Park and in Cumberland, as well as around the new subway stations in between. It would probably make a Kimball-State/Lake trip if connected to the existing Red Line a 30 minute trip. If you combined it with a lakefront subway, my guess is that to Randolph in the East Loop it would be more like 25 minutes, depending on the number of stations, etc. Coupled with TOD, it could double the ridership of the "L" in a decade after full build-out and continue healthy increases after that. Altogether, we could be talking about ridership increases system-wide that pushed "L" ridership to 800 million annual rides. Bus ridership would take a hit, but if better rail induced more overall transit riders my guess is that overall bus ridership wouldn't actually fall in direct proportion, if at all, except on specific, directly-competitive routes.
Reply With Quote