Most of the issues you talk about, though, aren’t really addressed by improved airport service—airport travelers are a marginal market compared to the ~33000 people (counted as 66,000 riders) who use the Blue Line for their everyday business (I got that by substracting O’Hare ridership from the
2011 CTA Annual Ridership Report (pdf), and any Blue Line improvements should be done with Blue Line riders in mind. Passing sidings don’t help them, better rolling stock only does if it goes onto the Blue Line, and a flat junction to the empty Block 37 station on a line that has runs at three minute headways during peak periods can only make things worse (not to mention the amount of line capacity they take up when running express). If you think constructing new elevated track around, say, Damen and Milwaukee (as proposed by the old
Express Airport Train Service Business Plan (pdf)) would be cheap or easy you haven’t met many people from Bucktown/Wicker Park.
The business plan only gives 2030 ridership figures for Express Service (with passing loops), so I can’t compare it with CTA figures since I don’t have comparable estimates for the time. It’s around 6600 a day—around 3000 fewer people than currently using the O’Hare station at the Blue Line. And around 20% of passengers are supposed to be diverted from existing Blue Line service, which gives us ~5300 new passengers. That’s pretty pathetic for your half a billion dollar range, Hayward—the report gives a total cost of in, $2006, of $1.4 billion (subtracting their estimated cost of the State Street station—$94 million, less than half of what it ended up costing). In $2009, that’s around $1.5 billion. In $2009, the Red Line Extension is $1.1 billion ($1.5 billion is in year-of-expenditure dollars, see the
pdf—the Airport Express Business Plan doesn’t have YOE figures, and even if it did they would probably not be for the same years). That’s for an extension whose daily ridership in 2030 is expected to be 42,000 (i. e. 21,000 boardings at the new stations). Now, most of those certainly won’t be new riders (I don’t think the Red Line AA even attempts to parse that out), but those riders will have an average travel time saving of around 20 minutes compared to a no-build alternative, as opposed to the ~15 minutes saved on trips from O’Hare.
Now, this isn’t an endorsement of a Red Line expansion plan—it could be under $900 million in $2009 if the CTA didn’t insist on adding unnecessary new yard and shops, and the minimum operating segment to 115th (likewise with no new yards and shops), which scored better with the FTA than the full plan, would be even less expensive; we also haven’t even taken Mike Payne’s Gray Line to take into consideration here. But even a project that’s certainly suffering from scope creep, probably overlong, and possibly not even necessary, we get better results than an Airport Express along the Blue Line. Scanning the Business Plan I got the impression that it was just informed mental masturbation, full of various
idée fixes from various figures of late Daley-era Chicago. It gets a lot of support for people because it seems intuitive:
why not just make the Blue Line quicker? How expensive can it be? Surely everyone will use it—I go to O’Hare, my friends come in from O’Hare, it will be a great success! If we bother to look up a few numbers, conveniently already crunched for us, we see that a project with so little benefit relative to cost that it never should have had much priority at all in any list of Chicago-area transit improvements. But it sounds like such a good idea
in concept that people just can’t seem to let this justifiably-dead idea go! (The
sunk cost fallacy is also worth mentioning for anyone who remembers Block 37.)