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Old Posted Dec 23, 2007, 8:13 AM
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VivaLFuego VivaLFuego is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Blue Island
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Quote:
Originally Posted by lalucedm View Post
Sorry, had to weigh in on this. I realize people tend to exaggerate their own plight, but really...

I ride the Red Line north from the southside to Harrison everyday. It is most usually as crush-loaded as the brown line in from the north. In theory, its headways make it only a standing load, but in reality, those headways are rarely realized.

The green line in from the southside is actually pretty much a seated load, agreed. It's a very pleasant riding experience, if not the best use of CTA money to operate.

I might also note that the busiest bus route in the system, by a margin of 1.5:1 over the next highest, is the 79th Street bus on the southside.
Having lived on the southside and commuted to downtown for several years, then moving to the northside.....southsiders really don't appreciate what a "crush load" is on an L car. The way people cram on the Blue, Brown, and occasionally Red in the AM peak is ungodly and worthy of other continents.

#79 is of course the highest ridership route, but the 1.5:1 ratio is misleading if you bundle the 49+X49 and 9+X9 routes serving the same streets; doing so makes Western and Ashland both comparable to 79th, though 79th is probably tops in terms of passengers-per-route-mile. That said, ridership doesn't necessarily correlate to the average load on each bus. Many of the high-ridership but local routes, such as the 79 , have very short average trip lengths, so the load factors aren't particularly absurd, unlike the lake shore express routes. In contrast the #49 has high ridership and high trip lengths. Obviously, each of these services aren't quite directly comparable. If you look at the CTA ridership reports (http://www.transitchicago.com/downlo...6200710bus.pdf) the "Passengers per platform hour" gives a decent sense of how packed the buses would be as averaged across the whole day, but it doesn't really encapsulate the peaking effect of many routes (or routes with unusually high K and D factors, to use transportation engineering lingo).

Quote:
Originally Posted by dhamp
Viva said "note: as an anecdote, if you take 3600 N vs 4300S (equivalent distance from the Loop), the population in a one-mile radius is 3 times higher on the northside." He didn't specify a western boundary. So let's just say the south branch of the river is the western boundary. There is plenty of former CHA and industrial land within those boundaries.
Give or take, this was calculated using a 1 mile buffer around:
3600N - 800W
and
4300S - 400E
The numbers came out to approximately 120,000 vs. 45,000, but I don't remember precisely, I don't have the calculations on this computer.

Last edited by VivaLFuego; Dec 23, 2007 at 8:26 AM.
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