Quote:
Originally Posted by DHamp
You're right. And I wasn't changing the terms of my argument there, just responding to Viva's anecdote that didn't really correspond exactly to the issue at hand. I've lived in Douglas, Park Manor, and now South Shore. I am a proud south sider. When I was younger I used to take the #4 bus downtown and it would take FOREVER. I thought that's just how it was. Then when I got to high school I would visit northside friends and who lived blocks from the relatively speedy Brown Line. I hate that there is such a black and white difference between transit on the north and south sides. I started to look at transit maps and see that the CTA even left city limits to the north while the Red Line stops 5 miles short of the south boundary of the city. And I know there are population differences, I never said there weren't. But you can't tell me that socio-political influences haven't been involved because you can look back on the history of this city and race and class politics are all over where money gets invested in this city.
But I'm about moving forward, not looking back. And I think in the ideal situation, transit is out in front, anticipating demand and improving places by providing transit. I know it's not necessarily practical given the fact that we can barely get our stupid state politicians to send minimal funding to the RTA. But I think about it anyway.
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For what it's worth, I lived over 20 years on the south side and variously used the Metra Electric, #6, #2, #1, Green Line, and Red Line to commute. I don't think the south side is underserved by transit per se, but rather that the service that is there is not optimally located. The current geographic transit layout, throughout the entire metropolitan region, is routed as was appropriate circa 100 years ago (note how many obvious locations like the I-90 and I-88 corridors aren't really directly served, nor is the north lake shore). But the south side situation is very pronounced, with the two rapid transit lines less than a mile apart, and an oddly-functioning electric commuter rail line running at grade-level. To the extent that this imbalance is the result of 'socio-political influences', I think it has to do with the general lack of capital investment in south side real estate development for the past 40 years (South Shore last saw significant development around the 1960s, but other than Hyde Park there has been very little since then). This real estate stagnation, beyond simply not providing a critical mass of ridership to support a major re-work of transit service, also means that the existing services are perpetually underutilized with a few exceptions; the south side continues to depopulate, and hopefully the 2010 census will show the first leveling-off of this trend..
FWIW, the original plan for the Dan Ryan branch was to branch at 95th, running in the medians of I-57 and I-94 to 127th and 130th respectively, but there simply wasn't enough money to complete these at the time. There were alot of grand aspects to the project (for example: think massive multi-story park n ride facilities suspended across the Dan Ryan expressway) that didn't come to be because of the lack of funds. During the freeway building era, there were always ample federal funds available for road construction, but transit was trickier; in fact, Daley was adamant about the construction of the Dan Ryan rapid transit, making a personal call to Lyndon Johnson to make sure it got built before the Kennedy rapid transit line.
Had the original plan been built out, it would have meant
even more expressway median rapid transit, which has since shown to be a very poor right of way to support transit, with low passengers-per-route-mile (to wit: The CTA maintained overall solvency, requiring no subsidy, until the opening of the Dan Ryan and Kennedy transit lines, which massively increased the car-miles on rail cars without a commensurate ridership increase to support the additional maintenance). So in the end, it may have been best to have waited all these years to get a Red Line extension that actually serves communities, rather than expressways.