Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
The reason the RLE grinds my gears so much is that it's one of the most spectacularly bad transit projects ever conceived. At $3.4b, the cost per new rider will approach $100 ($8 was the traditional threshold for worthwhile projects). And I talked recently with one of the project engineers who hinted the cost, even at the beginning, will actually be $5b or more.
Boardings at 95th are 26% of what they were in 1993 (even in pre-pandemic 2019 they were only 56% of 1993). Intriguingly, 69th, 79th, and 87th are down only 8 to 25%. That doesn't suggest there'll be an overwhelming demand for RLE if the current terminus sees so few transfers from the feeder bus lines that currently serve Roseland and Riverdale. Altgeld Gardens has its own express bus line to 95th (the Pace 353); it sees about a dozen boardings a day at Altgeld.
Meanwhile, we're going to add thousands of hours each year running empty trains back and forth to the sewage treatment plant. So Red Line operating costs will increase, and not just a little.
Bottom line of all this grumbling? When RLE opens, attracting, um, dozens of riders each day, people will question—with good reason—why they should put scarce money into rail transit, especially in Chicago.
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To paraphrase a one-time planner who was involved circa 2014... it would be more cost effective to move Altgeld Gardens brick-by-brick and buy every resident a car and years worth of fuel and insurance.
I'd need to look in my various archives for the original source docs, but in the 1970s CTA managed to run 2.5-3 minute headways on the Dan Ryan branch and roughly 2 minute peak headways on the 34 Michigan route feeding it from Roseland and West Pullman. I mention this as a reference to what level of capacity, service, and total trip times are feasible in the absence of additional infrastructure.
As someone who actually lives in the far south area, the most
useful improvement would have been either a single or double branching down the medians - to the originally-planned major park-n-ride terminal at 103rd/Stony Island, and then perhaps to a large multi-modal parking and Rock Island connection at 107th and I-57 on the land that has since had some houses built.
Useful, because it would maximize the catchment area for the Dan Ryan branch which currently has a shocking lack of parking facilities to intercept inbound drivers as they approach the peak flow/congested parts of the expressway network (thereby offering a time-competitive trip option to save downtown parking costs), and would have managed to add at least one intermodal connection point to the network.
And as Mr Downtown showed in the map, by and large the far south area is pretty low density, so rapid transit will need to have a large catchment area to collect and distribute sufficient ridership. And anyone experienced in that area with peak commuting and expressway capacity/flow patterns would know that the optimal intercept points would be somewhere between 79th and 111th street, and ideally between 87th and 103rd. Any closer in, and people will just drive the rest of the way downtown as they make it through the worst congestion; any further out, they won't be saving enough time to switch modes.
The other
useful alternative - though somewhat less - would have been an elevated line down Halsted to 119th where there is also substational land for a potential yard/shop and an intermodal connection - and alternative which was screened out early, for reasons I don't understand. That could have been paired with an attempt to resurrect the 70s-era concepts for a large park-n-ride near 87th or 79th.
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