Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias
If you bothered to learn about the Gray Line, you'd realize that it suffers mainly from the fact that it is being advocated by an outsider and it doesn't neatly fit into existing ways of thinking of Chicago-area transit by the transit establishment and it would require two (needlessly) antagonistic agencies to actually coordinate and work together. It doesn't help matters when people don't look into what's been done for it and casually dismiss it as fringe. Again, probably because it doesn't neatly fit into the current paradigm of thinking, which scares some people.
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no, I dismiss it because its a waste of money and would essentially kill any thought of CTA expansion for the next two decades. It puts and underserved line into bureaucratic limbo (always a good way to improve service), it approximately doubles the labor costs irregardless of increasing service, creates a new department in both the CTA and Metra with associated full-time employees to manage oversite and contracting services, cuts existing ridership revenue in half thanks to cheaper fares (on an already money losing line), requires a complete rebuild of every station on the line, and puts huge strain on existing CTA capital and operating budgets. All of this without dealing with the cost of transfer/lease of the system from Metra to CTA (that ain't cheap). And for what? increased frequency without showing a potential increased ridership or service area. Tell me why the CTA would want that? Let's purchase a line we did not design, plan, or build, nor will we operate, train personnel, or maintain, that has historically shown to underperform to significantly increase our overhead and hollow out our capital and operating budgets, sounds good to me.
I have a better idea, take all of this time spent talking about creating an incredibly complicated and costly system, and show Metra a ridership study for increased service and fare integration. Metra doesn't care about these things because the majority of their ridership doesn't care either.