“WE NEED TO DO BETTER.” The 15-year struggle to build Metra’s Peterson/Ridge station
Metra’s Peterson/Ridge station. Photo: John Greenfield
This piece by Richard initially ran yesterday in Streetsblog. Editor John Greenfield generously allowed us to republish it here. It provides a window into some of the state capacity challenges that hamstring government, and that we plan write more about at A City That Works.
In June, Metra and local elected leaders celebrated the opening of a new station on the Union Pacific North Line at Peterson and Ridge. It’s already a success, with up to 300 daily riders during rush hours on peak days. But as Streetsblog noted, the project took much longer than expected. At the ribbon-cutting, Metra officials cited budget holdups during the Rauner Administration, and challenges getting permits from the Water Department.
But the full story is more complicated. This simple infill station took 15 years to build and ended up costing taxpayers almost $28 million dollars. I conducted a detailed review of the project, which included Metra board documents, Freedom of Information Act requests, and a lot of detail from Metra Spokesperson Michael Gillis. The 15-year history of the project reveals a range of causes – including a glacial procurement process, difficulty managing outside contractors, and burdensome city, state and federal requirements.
This isn’t the most exciting subject, but the stakes are high. The Chicago region’s transit agencies are facing a $730 million fiscal cliff in 2026. Metra has significant capital investment needs just to keep the system in a state of good repair. If we want to protect and strengthen our transit system, we need to figure out how to build faster and cheaper.
Anatomy of a 15-year delay
Metra first announced a plan to build the station in December 2009. It took two years to run a procurement process to select a firm to design the station (2010-2012). Then Metra spent three years going through the design process (2012-2015), a two-year delay thanks to the Rauner-era budget fights (2015-2017), and then took another two and a half years on the back end to finalize designs and review more comments (2017- June 2019). Then Metra took another year to run the procurement process to select a contractor for the construction phase, and four years to complete the construction work.
So what caused a relatively straightforward project to stretch out to 15 years?
Design Delays
Lengthy design process: Metra spent roughly five years designing the station, not counting the pause triggered by the state funding freeze. A number of factors contributed to those delays – many of which were outside of Metra’s control:
Traffic analysis: Metras’s team spent six months studying the station’s impact on traffic patterns, according to initial project plans. That appears to have been a requirement of the Illinois Department of Transportation. Metra’s traffic study submission ended up running 140 pages.
National Environmental Policy Act: Gillis noted that Metra spent 2013-2015 securing the necessary approvals to navigate the National Environmental Policy Act. In the end, the agency had to prepare a 246-page document (with support from an outside consultant) to qualify for a Documented Categorical Exclusion, to prove that a train station was unlikely to harm the environment. One highlight of the document is an extended back and forth with the State Historic Preservation Officer to confirm that no historic properties would be affected by the construction. If you can explain to me why NEPA includes historic preservation, or how a train station on tracks that already exist could pose a risk to existing historic buildings, I’m all ears.
Delayed partner input: Metra struggled to get input as the design process went from 30 percent to 100 percent. Union Pacific, which controls right of way along the line, was particularly slow to provide input. According to Gillis, Union Pacific didn’t submit design comments on the 90 percent version until early 2015—at which point the funding freeze hit.
Slow-moving procurement: It took Metra two years to secure the approvals and select an outside firm to do the design work. After the funding freeze, it took another year to wrap up the design and prepare contracting documents, and another year after that to manage the procurement. Bids were supposed to be due in April, but got pushed back to June as Metra wrestled with a series of questions and revisions to the 1900 page contracting document. Finally, in July 2020, Metra announced that John Burns Construction had won the bid to build the station, with an expected cost of $15M, and a timeline of 18 months to get the job done.
In total, Metra spent roughly four years on procurement, between the design phase and the construction phase. That might have been worth it if it sped up the construction. But instead, other problems emerged.
Construction Delays
Many of these problems weren’t new, but dated back to challenges that hadn’t been fully resolved in the design phase. As Metra attempted to start construction in 2020, they cropped back up.
Union Pacific: Back in 2015, Metra had accepted Union Pacific’s comments on the final design drawings. But when it was time for construction, the railroad had more issues. These included complaints about an underground glycol-heating element that Metra was using to address snow and ice on the platform, and changes to the bridges at the stations.
Not only did Union Pacific throw wrenches in the works – they also took their sweet time doing so. In a letter sent January 2021, Metra Construction Director Joe Ott pointed out that Metra had been waiting between 70 and 83 days for Union Pacific to weigh in on key structural materials, with long lead times. At the time Ott threatened to "hold UPRR responsible for any cost related to delay claims resulting from the excessive review times." It’s not clear if that ever happened, but Union Pacific’s last-minute requests certainly raised costs: subsequent change orders indicate Metra spent $540K alone for a redesigned glycol heating system.
I asked Union Pacific for comment. Spokesperson Robynn Tysver noted that the 12-year gap between design review and construction made it more challenging for Union Pacific to sign off on the final product, but "we were able to review and sign off on the glycol design within 45 days." Tsyver did not offer a response when asked about other construction elements, such as the bridges.
City of Chicago: When Metra wasn’t wrestling with Union Pacific, it was held up by the City government. The biggest issue was with the Department of Water Management. Metra wanted to use permeable pavers for the parking lot, and informed DWM of the plan during the design phase 2013, according to Gillis. But it wasn’t until 2019 that the Water Department raised objections, citing a water main located under the lot. Metra’s redesign in 2020 also wasn’t good enough for DWM. In March 2021, the Office of Underground Construction (which coordinates underground projects across City departments) and the Department of Buildings refused to issue the necessary permits to proceed with construction. That forced construction to grind to a halt in March 2021.
Metra’s Senior Director of Capital Projects, Glen Peters, pushed the City hard to move more quickly. In a June 3 email to the Water Department, he noted that Metra had shared updated plans. Referencing "the amount of public pressure both Metra and the alderman’s office have received concerning the start of construction, he promised to tell local Alderman Andre Vasquez (40th) that the city was back on the clock. But June came and went without a permit. By August 12th, Peters was desperate – concerned that a failure to secure this city permit would imperil other permits at risk of expiration: "I am pleading with you and Mr. McFarland to please give us your required signoff by tomorrow… I am willing to pay for messengers to hand-deliver the packages or whatever is necessary to expedite this process."
When asked for comment, Department of Water Management spokesperson Megan Vidis noted the importance of the water main that serves much of Rogers Park and pointed out that "the safety and reliability of the drinking water system is our main responsibility." She did not respond to Gillis’s claim that DWM first saw the plans in 2020 and offered no explanation for the lengthy delay.
Project Management: Metra also struggled to manage the mushrooming set of contractors brought on to deliver the project. On September 9, 2021, the team was still trying to complete the updated designs for the necessary permits. In response to a query from a John Burns Construction project manager, a staffer at the Office of Underground Construction wrote that the revised submission would be rejected, writing that "there is a design issue, and the numbers appear to be forced to work… the major issue here is that the applicant design engineers are not complying with our guidelines. So if you wish to restart the process your team will need to carefully and thoroughly read all the documents prior to submission."
That afternoon, Peters put his team on notice. In an email addressed to Metra staff and the six different contractors now supporting the project, he let rip:
"You were all hired for your knowledge and expertise in engineering and construction… I am DEMANDING that everyone associated with this project step up and begin to provide the accuracy and quality expected from highly paid professionals… I want everyone to expedite a QUALITY resubmittal of the documents that exceed the city’s requirements. We have been working on this permit for ten months. WE NEED TO DO BETTER." [Caps in original.]
That might have helped. Email records between Metra and the City indicate that Metra’s team began flipping updated designs back on an almost-daily basis. Peters was still at the mercy of the City – on October 6, he wrote to DWM Commissioner Andrea Cheng "imploring you to please help me get approval on the two outstanding permits shown below." But later that month, Metra had the necessary permits, and announced that it would finish construction in 18 months.
It took longer than that, thanks to the design changes and pandemic-related supply chain delays. A flurry of change orders, totaling $6.2M, were issued between December 2021, and January 2024. These changes were mostly driven by the delays noted above: excavation and re-work costs associated with the water main and foundation changes, revisions to the split glycol heating system, and overhead costs associated with the lengthier project. Construction wasn’t complete until June 2024, at a total cost of $27.8M.
A recipe for dysfunction
The Peterson and Ridge station isn’t a one-off. Metra is currently working on construction on another infill station in Auburn Gresham. That one has been 18 years in the making, and Metra recently announced that it would be delayed until 2026, at a total cost of $42.6M. Guess who’s leading the construction? John Burns Construction – the same contractor that struggled to deliver the Peterson and Ridge station.
This is a disaster for transit advocates. An infill station is one of the easiest projects to execute—the land is already available, and a nearby station is a political winner. But if infill projects are taking decades and tens of millions of dollars, what are the odds Metra can execute anything more ambitious?
This puts the whole system at risk. Metra’s 2024 Budget Proposal notes that current capital funding is "inadequate to preserve, let alone enhance the regional passenger rail system… Simply put, Metra’s critical infrastructure continues to age at a rate faster than we can afford to repair and replace it." Plus, the goal shouldn’t be to simply tread water. If we want to add new service, let alone Build the Tunnel to transform regional rail in Chicagoland, we have to get a handle on construction costs.
A path to faster, cheaper projects
But I have some confidence that we can make some progress here. In the past, Metra has been willing to take a fresh look at big challenges. The railway was quick to adopt the Fair Transit South Cook pilot program that supported ridership during the pandemic and has been a leader on fare and schedule reforms to lure back off-peak ridership since. And even on simpler projects, CEO Jim Derwinski has been unwilling to accept the status quo as an acceptable answer: The railway recently raised speed limits on the Metra Electric Line after determining that prior restrictions were a function of long-replaced technical hurdles.
There’s also a lot to learn from the rest of the world. Researchers at the Marron Institute’s Transit Costs Project find that the United States transit construction costs are far higher than peer countries. The vast majority of the world, including high-income countries with strong labor standards like France and Scandinavian nations, build new transit infrastructure at much lower costs than the US does.
So, in that spirit, here are a few changes that might help Metra deliver faster projects at lower costs:
Add in-house capacity: Heavy outsourcing has real costs. In-house Metra staff fought tenaciously to get this project across the finish line, but clearly struggled to keep the design and construction teams in-line. A larger, better-resourced team inside Metra’s Capital Projects Division could do a better job overseeing the process. We’ve seen this elsewhere: In July, Bay Area Rapid Transit completed a fleet modernization program ahead of schedule and $394M under budget, thanks in large part due to doing engineering work in-house, and hiring engineers with experience on similar projects at other agencies. The Transit Costs Project researchers also find that stronger in-house capacity is a key piece of the reason other countries build transit more effectively.
Metra may already be trying to make progress here. Gillis noted that in 2022, the agency created a Capital Delivery Team, consisting of Metra staff and an outside Project Management Oversight team to provide "the necessary staffing capacity and expertise to effectively oversee and manage contracted consultants." I don’t think having one set of outside consultants manage another is the solution, but if Metra’s adding more skilled internal staff to this team, that could be an improvement.
Focus procurement on technical skill: Metra’s procurement process involves a lengthy packet development, advertisement, and bidding process, and then picked John Burns Construction because it was the "lowest responsive and responsible bidder." But a contractor is not a commodity – quality matters, and while John Burns started out at $15M, the price rose by more than a third during the change order process. The Transit Costs Project researchers find that international best practice is to weight 50 percent or more of the bid on the technical quality of the contractors. And by evaluating quality directly, Metra could cut out some of the lengthy box-checking process that drags down the procurement process.
Build simple, cookie-cutter stations: It should not take two years to design two platforms and a couple of warming shelters. It’s notable that the Peterson and Ridge station looks nothing like the new station going in in Auburn Park. Metra should start with a simple, no-frills template for all new stations, and then focus on necessary adjustments. That will not only reduce design timelines and shorten procurement cycles, but also give Metra the opportunity to implement learnings from prior projects and reduce purchases of one-off materials.
A broader challenge
Metra can get a lot better. But as the timeline above notes, many of the delays on the project were beyond its control. We also need to remove some of the constraints on Metra that make it so hard to build. Transit investments shouldn’t be subject to NEPA or be required to conduct pointless traffic studies. Grants directed to the City should come with expectations for timely permit approvals—if the City wants state money, it should make it easy to build state-funded projects. And if partners sign off on designs upfront, they should be held accountable for cost overruns stemming from late-breaking objections.
Most importantly, we need to start paying attention. The problems I’ve laid out here are fundamentally political. If transit advocates and political leaders make faster construction and lower costs a priority, Metra, IDOT, and City agencies will too. We’ll get more stations and service for the money we spend and have a stronger case for additional state and federal funds. But if we don’t fix this problem, Metra is on track for a trickle of overpriced, glittering new stations as the rest of the system slowly crumbles.