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.
Brown Line to O'Hare? The CTA could just add an isolated bus route between the Kimball and Jefferson Park terminals. The turnaround at Jefferson Park would be easy, but the Kimball end would need to be worked out.
You can already take a bus from many Brown Line stations to many Blue Line stations, the issue is transfers add time and unpredictability. It's a lot nicer to take a direct route!
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.
All great points, and all things that would be considered and studied further in a proper planning and engineering study. We do have much to learn from Philadelphia, and SEPTA is currently undergoing a "Reimagining Regional Rail" study to modernize its operations through the CCCC and region-wide. However, it's worth noting that some of the constraints that may depress ridership there -- still relying largely on a commuter rail-style scheduling model, premium pricing for intracity trips compared to MFL/BSL/trolleys, inconsistent matching of the branches in some cases -- are not necessarily tunnel-oriented constraints.
It's unfortunate station-to-station level ridership on the 'L' is not public information as far as I know, but anecdotally speaking there's a decent amount of through-riding on the three 'L' lines that pass through downtown. It's also important to separate out high-level through trips -- e.g., O'Hare to Forest Park on the Blue Line is a very small number, but Wicker Park-UIC is almost definitely more robust. It's also not unreasonable to believe that the State Street Subway contributed to the renaissance of both River North and Printer's Row back in the 1990s-2000s (with a non-zero number of riders making that specific trip between both neighborhoods) as well as more recently connecting the booming South Loop and Fulton Market neighborhoods with single-seat Green Line trips between Roosevelt and Morgan.
While it's also harder to quantify without a full MPO-level transportation study, I personally believe the latent demand is out there for non-downtown rail transit trips. Chicago's performance in oft-cited studies saying we have some of the worst congestion in the nation isn't only because someone was smoking on the Blue Line or because buses were bunched on Ashland Avenue this morning; there's a structural deficiency in how our transit network serves places that people want to go, and that shows up as car traffic.
As far as development trends go, development follows infrastructure. While demand in the region as a whole is sluggish, it's also not universally stagnant: there will always be hot neighborhoods for growth, and some neighborhoods in decline, but those are fluid phenomena that change over time. What we do know is that the region is becoming more multipolar in terms of commerce centers, and some of them (e.g. around the airports) will almost certainly continue to be resilient even as markets shift, but our rail infrastructure continues to put all of its eggs into the Loop's basket. Since we don't have sunbelt growth -- but we still want to modernize our network to better serve the region holistically -- it's imperative that we identify infrastructure improvements that are both transformative and cost-effective.
A final note on Amtrak: the 2034sight Plan was explicitly designed to generally avoid the Union Station trainshed as much as possible, with only modest improvements (the Blue Island-Elmhurst line and extending North Central Service trains to McCormick Place for airport service) within the station itself, specifically to give Amtrak space to build out their Midwest network and preserve capacity for state-supported/long distance service. The CrossTowner network would still have connections to Amtrak service, but one level removed from Union Station: for instance, transfers to Hiawatha trains could happen at the Fulton Market station, Illini/Saluki transfers could happen at McCormick Place, etc. Keeping our Chicagoland regional trains connected but out of the way of Amtrak is an important consideration.
I appreciate your thoughtful comment and I hope this helps to explain some of the similar thought processes that went into drafting this concept.
Keep in mind the value of through-running is more about the increased frequency it enables rather than meeting demand for a train that'll take people from terminus to terminus. It's less about attracting riders who will go from Palatine to Burr Oak and more about achieving high enough frequency (15 minutes) that someone in Palatine doesn't even need to bother with checking a train schedule, comparing that schedule with traffic estimates on Google Maps, thinking about how to get from Ogilvie to their final destination, looking at Spot Hero to estimate the cost of parking, etc. If Ms. Palatine knows there are short headways she can merely show up to the station and know she'll soon be on a train. She also will not be limited to disembarking at Ogilvie if she has a downtown destination. 2034sight won't eliminate all last-mile transfers to other modes, but it'll make a big difference, even for someone just headed a little bit further than the current terminus of a line.
As noted, Metra weekend ridership has rebounded: suburbanites are comfortable with Metra and would like to take it. 2034sight would make those services more frequent and dramatically reduce trip times from the further-flung suburban rail lines due to electrification, level boarding, and the removal of many stops (which would be served by cross towners instead). Faster, more frequent service that is more likely to take passengers closer to their ultimate destination is especially valuable given Chicago's weather.
The impact of hybrid and remote work is difficult to assess as the pendulum swings. More and more employers, especially in tech, are dramatically reducing if not eliminating work from home options. Moreover, traffic is bad enough that it's hard to imagine ridership would not increase with more convenient train options.
These proposals are utter insanity. Never forget, that the C&NW was supposed to go to Union Station, but because the railroad was so poor in the 1920s & 30s, they couldn't afford to buy the two blocks of old buildings between their old terminal & Union Station. Now that's impossible with a number of huge new buildings on those two blocks.
As far as I'm concerned, what should be done is move the Wells Street leg of the Loop L to Clinton, with stations at Madison/Washington & at Adams/Jackson, with direct entrances to the two rail terminals. That would also mean two high lever bridges of the Chicago River, meaning no more delays for the L when the Wells & Lake Street bridges open.
The $12B price tag seems to never pay for itself, and would cost regional taxpayers increased taxes for the foreseeable future. And all-electric transport is expensive and risky unless the grid is addressed at the same time. And let’s not even talk about renewable power, as Spain/Portugal taught us yesterday…
How do you measure whether the price "pays for itself"? How do we do so with other infrastructure, such as roads and highways? Projects like this should be evaluated with a cost-benefit analysis comparing them to similar investments in roads.
All-electric transport is the standard in most other advanced economies, from Europe to Asia. And IL is very fortunate that about half our baseload comes from nuclear, which is both renewable and not destabilizing to the grid in the way that solar and wind are. Spain only has about 11% nuclear....on the day of the blackout, combined solar & wind generation was roughly 70%. Even if IL swapped all its fossil fuel generation for PV & wind, it would still be less than half of the grid's mix.
That’s why people don’t support these types of projects. You cannot justify them to people based on personal benefits, and unlike schools where most people move their kids through them (thereby supporting schools when their kids have graduated and moved on), mass transit is heavily subsidized by people who may never set foot on a bus or train. It’s up to supporters of mass transit to explain its benefits to an individual taxpayer. Until a compelling argument can be made, expect pushback…
You can justify them based on personal benefits. NYC transit has 5 million users a day. Transit improvements thus personally help people who live there, whether they use it daily or occasionally.
A far lower percentage of Chicagoans use public transit, so communicating and persuading the personal benefits is more difficult because it is a hypothetical future benefit in most cases. However, it is still a personal benefit.
Pushback is always good, even in response to compelling arguments. Much more work would need to be done as a cost benefit analysis. And not analysis by the usual US consultants who typically struggle to understand transit best practices, but by internationally-informed experts such as Alon Levy.
How long would this investment take to generate $12 billion in local economic activity? How about $12 billion in tax revenue? What would the ROI per dollar of transit spending be versus dollar of highway spending? What possibilities for additional revenue could this unlock (such as Japanese railway companies that generate substantial revenue through real-estate development)?
It's a shame such questions are rarely, if ever, asked about expanding our interstates and adding lanes. Rail is at a disadvantage. But it's still worth advocating for: most people who have experienced proper trains in East Asia or France would prefer robust transit over the US's traffic clogged expressways.
Renewable power had nothing to do with the Spain & Portugal outages. No matter what they tell the public, I have zero doubt that Russian hackers brought down the systems!
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.
Brown Line to O'Hare? The CTA could just add an isolated bus route between the Kimball and Jefferson Park terminals. The turnaround at Jefferson Park would be easy, but the Kimball end would need to be worked out.
You can already take a bus from many Brown Line stations to many Blue Line stations, the issue is transfers add time and unpredictability. It's a lot nicer to take a direct route!
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.
All great points, and all things that would be considered and studied further in a proper planning and engineering study. We do have much to learn from Philadelphia, and SEPTA is currently undergoing a "Reimagining Regional Rail" study to modernize its operations through the CCCC and region-wide. However, it's worth noting that some of the constraints that may depress ridership there -- still relying largely on a commuter rail-style scheduling model, premium pricing for intracity trips compared to MFL/BSL/trolleys, inconsistent matching of the branches in some cases -- are not necessarily tunnel-oriented constraints.
It's unfortunate station-to-station level ridership on the 'L' is not public information as far as I know, but anecdotally speaking there's a decent amount of through-riding on the three 'L' lines that pass through downtown. It's also important to separate out high-level through trips -- e.g., O'Hare to Forest Park on the Blue Line is a very small number, but Wicker Park-UIC is almost definitely more robust. It's also not unreasonable to believe that the State Street Subway contributed to the renaissance of both River North and Printer's Row back in the 1990s-2000s (with a non-zero number of riders making that specific trip between both neighborhoods) as well as more recently connecting the booming South Loop and Fulton Market neighborhoods with single-seat Green Line trips between Roosevelt and Morgan.
While it's also harder to quantify without a full MPO-level transportation study, I personally believe the latent demand is out there for non-downtown rail transit trips. Chicago's performance in oft-cited studies saying we have some of the worst congestion in the nation isn't only because someone was smoking on the Blue Line or because buses were bunched on Ashland Avenue this morning; there's a structural deficiency in how our transit network serves places that people want to go, and that shows up as car traffic.
As far as development trends go, development follows infrastructure. While demand in the region as a whole is sluggish, it's also not universally stagnant: there will always be hot neighborhoods for growth, and some neighborhoods in decline, but those are fluid phenomena that change over time. What we do know is that the region is becoming more multipolar in terms of commerce centers, and some of them (e.g. around the airports) will almost certainly continue to be resilient even as markets shift, but our rail infrastructure continues to put all of its eggs into the Loop's basket. Since we don't have sunbelt growth -- but we still want to modernize our network to better serve the region holistically -- it's imperative that we identify infrastructure improvements that are both transformative and cost-effective.
A final note on Amtrak: the 2034sight Plan was explicitly designed to generally avoid the Union Station trainshed as much as possible, with only modest improvements (the Blue Island-Elmhurst line and extending North Central Service trains to McCormick Place for airport service) within the station itself, specifically to give Amtrak space to build out their Midwest network and preserve capacity for state-supported/long distance service. The CrossTowner network would still have connections to Amtrak service, but one level removed from Union Station: for instance, transfers to Hiawatha trains could happen at the Fulton Market station, Illini/Saluki transfers could happen at McCormick Place, etc. Keeping our Chicagoland regional trains connected but out of the way of Amtrak is an important consideration.
I appreciate your thoughtful comment and I hope this helps to explain some of the similar thought processes that went into drafting this concept.
Keep in mind the value of through-running is more about the increased frequency it enables rather than meeting demand for a train that'll take people from terminus to terminus. It's less about attracting riders who will go from Palatine to Burr Oak and more about achieving high enough frequency (15 minutes) that someone in Palatine doesn't even need to bother with checking a train schedule, comparing that schedule with traffic estimates on Google Maps, thinking about how to get from Ogilvie to their final destination, looking at Spot Hero to estimate the cost of parking, etc. If Ms. Palatine knows there are short headways she can merely show up to the station and know she'll soon be on a train. She also will not be limited to disembarking at Ogilvie if she has a downtown destination. 2034sight won't eliminate all last-mile transfers to other modes, but it'll make a big difference, even for someone just headed a little bit further than the current terminus of a line.
As noted, Metra weekend ridership has rebounded: suburbanites are comfortable with Metra and would like to take it. 2034sight would make those services more frequent and dramatically reduce trip times from the further-flung suburban rail lines due to electrification, level boarding, and the removal of many stops (which would be served by cross towners instead). Faster, more frequent service that is more likely to take passengers closer to their ultimate destination is especially valuable given Chicago's weather.
The impact of hybrid and remote work is difficult to assess as the pendulum swings. More and more employers, especially in tech, are dramatically reducing if not eliminating work from home options. Moreover, traffic is bad enough that it's hard to imagine ridership would not increase with more convenient train options.
These proposals are utter insanity. Never forget, that the C&NW was supposed to go to Union Station, but because the railroad was so poor in the 1920s & 30s, they couldn't afford to buy the two blocks of old buildings between their old terminal & Union Station. Now that's impossible with a number of huge new buildings on those two blocks.
As far as I'm concerned, what should be done is move the Wells Street leg of the Loop L to Clinton, with stations at Madison/Washington & at Adams/Jackson, with direct entrances to the two rail terminals. That would also mean two high lever bridges of the Chicago River, meaning no more delays for the L when the Wells & Lake Street bridges open.
The $12B price tag seems to never pay for itself, and would cost regional taxpayers increased taxes for the foreseeable future. And all-electric transport is expensive and risky unless the grid is addressed at the same time. And let’s not even talk about renewable power, as Spain/Portugal taught us yesterday…
How do you measure whether the price "pays for itself"? How do we do so with other infrastructure, such as roads and highways? Projects like this should be evaluated with a cost-benefit analysis comparing them to similar investments in roads.
All-electric transport is the standard in most other advanced economies, from Europe to Asia. And IL is very fortunate that about half our baseload comes from nuclear, which is both renewable and not destabilizing to the grid in the way that solar and wind are. Spain only has about 11% nuclear....on the day of the blackout, combined solar & wind generation was roughly 70%. Even if IL swapped all its fossil fuel generation for PV & wind, it would still be less than half of the grid's mix.
That’s why people don’t support these types of projects. You cannot justify them to people based on personal benefits, and unlike schools where most people move their kids through them (thereby supporting schools when their kids have graduated and moved on), mass transit is heavily subsidized by people who may never set foot on a bus or train. It’s up to supporters of mass transit to explain its benefits to an individual taxpayer. Until a compelling argument can be made, expect pushback…
You can justify them based on personal benefits. NYC transit has 5 million users a day. Transit improvements thus personally help people who live there, whether they use it daily or occasionally.
A far lower percentage of Chicagoans use public transit, so communicating and persuading the personal benefits is more difficult because it is a hypothetical future benefit in most cases. However, it is still a personal benefit.
Pushback is always good, even in response to compelling arguments. Much more work would need to be done as a cost benefit analysis. And not analysis by the usual US consultants who typically struggle to understand transit best practices, but by internationally-informed experts such as Alon Levy.
How long would this investment take to generate $12 billion in local economic activity? How about $12 billion in tax revenue? What would the ROI per dollar of transit spending be versus dollar of highway spending? What possibilities for additional revenue could this unlock (such as Japanese railway companies that generate substantial revenue through real-estate development)?
It's a shame such questions are rarely, if ever, asked about expanding our interstates and adding lanes. Rail is at a disadvantage. But it's still worth advocating for: most people who have experienced proper trains in East Asia or France would prefer robust transit over the US's traffic clogged expressways.
Renewable power had nothing to do with the Spain & Portugal outages. No matter what they tell the public, I have zero doubt that Russian hackers brought down the systems!
Receipts?
HUH?
You authoritatively claim that renewables have nothing to do with the blackouts. I call bullshit on your claim…
Renewables can't cause a blackout! They supply power, not wreck power!
You must be a Big Oil nut!
You really don’t understand…