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as's avatar

I'm a lifelong Chicagoan who has always lamented the lack of such often-proposed projects as the Circle Line or the Brown Line extension to O'Hare. So it's really exciting to see a possible transit project that would be more impactful than either of those, at a comparable cost, leveraging existing infrastructure that I hadn't even thought about. Consider me on board.

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Aaron M. Renn's avatar

Interesting proposals.

It would be important to study Philadelphia here. Philly already through runs its commuter trails via a downtown tunnel and is 100% electrified (though not entirely high platform). For a period of time, they even rebranded the lines to emphasize their through-running nature. My understanding is that this didn't really work to drive ridership.

Transit advocates have also done some visioning around a tunnel linking North and South Stations in Boston, along with electrifying the system. I'd engage with their proposals.

Through running sounds great in theory, and riding the RER in Paris is great. But I wonder how much demand there is for this kind of route in the near term. Commuter flows have been structured around the existing transportation network. Building infrastructure where there's little existing travel demand will require a multi-decade vision of how to reorient development to generate that demand. New York found this out the hard way with East Side Access, which appears to be a debacle. There are multiple reasons for this, but one of them is that people don't choose to live on Long Island if they work in Midtown East.

It's also worth calculating how much through traffic there is on the L. My impression from when I lived in Chicago: not much. But I could be wrong. If there's isn't a lot of through utilization on the L, which has been there for a very long time, then how much ridership would there be here?

And Chicago is in a declining demand market, where the office preferred office locations are shifting. It's hard to justify building when ridership is still way down and hybrid appears to be here to stay. And perhaps Northwestern Station will end up being the center of the action after all.

Another thing to consider is what such a system does for us with regards to Amtrak and potential high speed rail. Unfortunately, Alon Levy has demonstrated that Chicago isn't actually a great market for HSR. HSR works best when cities are laid out linearly, as in the NEC. We have a star topology here. But keeping an eye on the long term is important.

I don't want to be a Debbie Downer as I think this is a very interesting proposal. But we'd want to be sure to get it right, not end up like East Side Access or Richard M. Daley's high speed rail "superstation" under Block 37.

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