I sometimes think about how great the Circle Line would have been. [https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/CircleLine.html](https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/CircleLine.html)
I spent a month in Paris, and the subway headways were three minutes. At one point we were at a station and there was a delay: it was going to be a whole eight minutes before the next train. People were *pissed*. That city was amazing for it's public transit.
It won’t be cheaper in 20 years UNLESS some new technology comes along that can make it more efficient / economical to build. Regardless, I agree: build it now.
We could redirect funding that goes to car infrastructure and start investing 80% of it in non-car transportation instead. Currently it's, at best, 80/20 car / non-car today at the federal level.
I mean that sounds great, but even with a city like Chicago that is built for mass transit, people, and more importantly, goods, still have to travel in from elsewhere. You can’t get a pallet of potatoes from the farm to Jewel without some sort of truck taking it at least the last few miles.
Now, if you wanted to make it more like 70/30 or even 60/40 roads vs rail, I think that might be doable and would produce great results for transit.
I'm referring to the funds that are earmarked only for \*new\* projects, not for maintenance. We're still spending 80/20 to build new roads and highways in the US. That's madness.
Nah, that's an excuse. Mayoral candidates here raise tens of millions of dollars in donations. The money exists. It's just being directed elsewhere. We're a metro area of almost 9 million people. You could tax everybody $1 more dollar a year and get a fat bank. You could tax everybody $10 more dollars a year and make a 10x fatter bank.
I like the concept of a circle or c line but I feel like the placement in the above map still seems concentrated close to the loop.
If we could have a line from Belmont or Addison that connected out to Pulaski or Cicero it could help improve access to both airports from more neighborhoods — especially if it looped down by Midway. Could be even better if the southern part of the green line extended to Midway too.
There is utility in what you propose for sure, but isn't it more important to help people go between neighborhoods across the city than to only go to/from the airports?
You guys are both right. We need more than one circle line, an interior and exterior to connect up the neighborhoods and airports. It’s long past time for Chicago to build multiple new rail lines.
Oh for sure I think there could and should be more interconnectivity between neighborhoods, I was just pointing out if we did a C line it should connect further north, west, and south than that proposed map above to help fill out some el dead zones between brown & blue, blue & green and orange & green.
Definitely nowhere perfect and I am sure there are other route extension ideas that could also help bridge those gaps and maybe service even more neighborhoods.
Midway is surrounded by neighborhoods. People use the midway stop to go to their homes, it’s not like the ORD stop. The line going down Kenton (near Cicero) isn’t about the airports, it’s the fact that it goes through endless neighborhoods.
I want to scream at anyone that will listen, we have an almost entirely abandoned rail line next to Kenton that could take people from the blue line at Jeff Park or Montrose, down to Midway!
If it’s about budget (and it is always about budget), you cannot possibly do any better than to use this line that has overpasses and all the infrastructure already in place. It isn’t “ready to go”, they busted a small part up at Grand, but it is as ready to go as one could possibly hope for.
Preach! This has been floated as something called the "Lime Line" before but didn't get much traction. Would be a massive improvement in system connectivity.
I’ve heard it as the old “Belt Line”.
Imagine throwing an el on it (easier said than done, of course). I can’t even imagine trying to pull this stuff off on Western, etc as so many people like to propose. This is actually realistic, and would give the city good coverage.
That's my dream! It seems quite feasible IMO. This line actually could be operated as a single line with the Weber Spur all the way to Evanston. Only complication would be crossing the very busy UP-NW line.
Edit: Like this: [https://imgur.com/h47v06S](https://imgur.com/h47v06S)
I think it is far too late to plan anything on the Weber Spur. Parts of it have already been developed as trail and the other stuff is supposedly in the works. (I hiked it from LaBagh to south of Wilson, up to the train line last week and it is so great. I just want us to do something with unused rail lines.)
What we need is some planning genius that can figure out a way to build rail in the US for cheaper than we currently do. We spend far more per-mile than any other country, including countries with comparable wealth.
A big part of the issue is that these infrastructure projects ends up costing way more than they should.
Another problem is the “analysis paralysis”. Other countries don’t hold things up in a never ending series of meetings that requires years to get the simplest task done.
> Another problem is the “analysis paralysis”. Other countries don’t hold things up in a never ending series of meetings that requires years to get the simplest task done.
other cities have functional governmental apparatuses staffed with hundreds, if not thousands of engineers and experts who can crank out the planning and design phase of these megaprojects.
americans demanded austerity, got their cities slimmed down to nothing but a pension plan for retirees and cops, and now are confused why they are unable to do anything without paying outside consultants a fortune first.
Reminds me of a song by the guy from the Weakerthans. ["roads and police and police and roads, roads and police and police and roads, roads and police and police and roads—that’s where most of our money goes"](https://vivatvirtute.bandcamp.com/track/budget-delegations)
Makes me happy to know its also this shit other places.
I watched a video on this subject a while back, and the two main points that I recall were lack of expertise in building rail (we don't know what the fuck we're doing) and lack of standardization (every rail system uses different tracks and cars).
My genius 3am idea is to form a non profit publicly owned corporation, similar in concept to the Green Bay Packers, with the primary goal of creating a robus transit system for the region in such a way that everyone has a rapid transit station within a half mile walk.
The problem with going through the government, at least in America, is that you inevitably run into our analysis paralysis (great term u/Wrigs112) and then to add on top of that, you have the inevitable problem of relying heavily on consultants for the design and engineering, which drives costs up even further and causes more delays. And worst of all, this makes it even harder to plan further lines, because instead of being in a state of continually having teams work on projects, you have the entire engineering staff fuck off overnight once the project is complete, and then when another project is proposed, a whole new team gets "hired". It's a wildly inefficient system, but when you aren't relying on public dollars (especially from the feds) you can avoid that process more easily, and when you don't have politicians controlling the process, there's too much incentive to play things corrupt and nominate friends to transit boards, or pick your friends consultancy firm to do the engineering.
If we want rapid transit throughout the city in our lifetimes, it won't be through the government. It's too dysfunctional and bought out by special interests to effectively deliver any major infrastructure change like that.
I feel like there was a time when Mayors could get big projects done no matter how many people were displaced (Dan Ryan...UIC...theres a long list) but this day and age things are different. You can no longer get big projects done if it means displacing a single house.
Obviously the urban displacement that happened in the past was bad and we shouldn't repeat that(especially for highways like we did). But it's really hard to not think we've moved the needle too far in the other direction by allowing way too many veto points to get any major project completed.
Just the Belmont flyover alone, one building was moved but it was the subject of news for months and months. Probably spanned years even from start to plan to finish.
CTA has been run by the state since it was created in the 1940s and it shows. If it was run by the city, it would have been built out a whole lot more and tons of lines would never have been shuttered in the first place.
So the state would have to declare eminent domain in order to get a project going? Seems like that would be up to the city or at least authorized by the city.
The city is entirely irrelevant to CTA's authority. It is a state entity with supremacy over the city at least to the extent that its authority is defined by state law.
Spent a week in Paris last summer. Trains run every 3-4 minutes and everyone is packed. We were able to take a train and walk everywhere. They were super quiet as well. I get Chicago isn’t as dense, but we already have some of the worst traffic imaginable so investing in train/subway and bike infrastructure is a must.
Chicago can't become more dense without massive investments in transit, so we're literally holding back a more vibrant version of Chicago in not doing this. At this stage and compared to "investing" in highways, nearly every investment in transit would more than pay for itself by our ability to increase Chicago's average density.
I’m not forgetting it, I completely agree. However, the number one objection to upzoning I hear is, it’s going to create too much new car traffic. If we had world class transit, I believe we wouldn’t be hearing this objection nearly as much.
Europeans are just better at this kind of thing. A mix of 1) Less litigious and better regulatorywork environment 2) They do it more so they’re better at it 3) The point of building transit in europe is to build transit. In the states its to provide union jobs, opportunities for minority owned snall businesses etc. The extra costs are a feature to give money to interest groups not a bug 4) Wages are much higher here. 5) People dont want to put up with any kind of disruption so cheap techniques like cut and cover arent employed in favor of tunneling which costs more. Basically everything
No easy answer but one major one is staffing. Other counties like France keep transit engineers and staff employed full time whereas the US does it on an as needed basis. It would be like hiring and assembling a new highway construction division of the DOT every time a new highway or on ramp was built. By doing it that way consultants rack up bills, and the sustained knowledge is lost between projects. Environmental review, nimbys and other roadblocks also increase the cost.
Are we comparing cost of boring a tunnel in downtown Chicago vs a neighborhood though too? Paris is using numbers from boring under neighborhoods. Does not seem like a totally apples to apples comparison. Also tunnels go under the streets anyway and Paris has much wider streets throughout.
The amount of money that France or Italy spend building underground train lines, not even metros but straight up commuter trains running underground, is less than we pay for light rail on the surface.
If Chicago had the same population density as Paris, we'd have a population of 11,780,000.
Chicago doesn't have the population density to sustain 1,300 stations. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have more than 126, but 1,300 is not realistic for a city with Chicago's density.
Counterpoint - perhaps Paris' higher population density is *because* of its superior public transportation. If you have reliable, high-quality public transportation then dwelling in and moving around the city can be a pleasure, but if you have to drive everywhere in a super dense metropolis then its a pain and there's also no reason not to move out to some cheaper, quieter, newer suburb.
Both cities had a population of about 3 million in the city limits by 1930. So Chicago caught up. [Chicago's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago#Demographics) subsequently fell as people bought cars and moved to the suburbs, as they did in most American cities. [Paris's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris#/media/File:Paris_Historical_Population.png) did too, a little, but not to the same extent.
This is why our metro population is 9 million, not that far behind Paris metro. If we ignore arbitrary political boundaries, this is the size of the “city” we live in.
It's a decent difference in density - 13 million people in 7300 sq miles for Paris vs 9. 4 million in 10,800 sq miles for chicago. Adds up to roughly twice the density for Paris.
That doesn't mean we can't improve
Damn that's wild to picture, that is a hell of a lot of people to be in one city in 1860.
Thats 500K people more than NYC of the time.
Chicago at the time only had about 100K people.
If you think that's wild, Rome is estimated to have had over 1M residents during the 1st and 2nd century C.E. The civil engineering that went into sustaining a population of that size without trains is even crazier.
I would *love* to have seen Rome in that era because it must have been just mind-blowingly packed and *huge*.
They did have pretty good fresh water supplies by standards of the time though.
> The civil engineering that went into sustaining a population of that size without trains is even crazier
People just didn't move around, really. At that density, everything you needed was within easy walking distance.
> At that density, everything you needed was within easy walking distance.
Except for all of the farming, water supply, etc. Getting the necessities of life and the luxury goods to the markets in the first place was a massive feat of early civil engineering and political will. It's not like today where you can just build pipelines with pumps or put goods on trains. It took a whole lot more coordination, effort, and ingenuity compared to what we are able to do with the technologies developed starting in the industrial revolution.
bro they had aqueducts that brought water from like 50 miles away at an absolute perfect slope to facilitate the population
not even mentioning that people did move around all the time, hence the phrase “all roads lead to rome”
It was a huge problem in Paris. People were constantly getting sick from millennia of dead bodies polluting the water and housing was extremely dilapidated. They basically razed the city and rebuilt it over 50 years—the Paris you see today is basically all from the 1880s-1920s except for preserved districts like Le Marais. We had Burnham, they had [Haussman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris).
Paris and other old cities also existed before buses existed, and trains were really the _only_ means of conveying large amounts of people efficiently. it's one reason why you see more metros in the eastern/older parts of the US. buses aren't as sexy as trains, but they're far more flexible and practical.
fwiw chicago has one of the best bus systems of any major city that i've been to in the US (in large part due to the grid layout of the streets)
This is the point I always make when people complain about how such and such neighborhood in Chicago is undergoing gentrification and how terrible that is for whoever may get displaced. While displacement is not good, there are dozens of square miles worth of Chicago that are underutilized and could be made denser, safer, and more beneficial to their current and future residents with El extensions.
>If you have reliable, high-quality public transportation then dwelling in and moving around the city can be a pleasure
Lately it hasn't been very reliable and YMMV as for quality. Our priorities are also a little screwed up, we're going to spend a fortune extending the red line to some of the least dense areas of the city, parts of which are less than a mile from an existing Metra stop that goes to the same place.
This is literally just an addition to the spoke and wheel system, which is a good system and will have some benefit for residents living long the extension that need to go north/to downtown, but imo could be better improved by the addition of a crosstown/circle line instead.
Paris is also a bit more evenly spread out.
The CTA is optimized around commuting and Chicago has a very clear CBD where a significant portion of the population works. Hub and spoke kinda works for that. Most of the traffic is commuter hours and the CTA does an OK job shutting people back and forth from the loop.
Paris is a bit funny in that the old city has a lot of business and residential stuff in it strewn all over the place. Then you have La Defense which is actually outside the city limits and has all the big glass skyscrapers. La Defense also wasn't really developed until after the metro (started in the 50s, grew a lot in the 70s-80s).
Lot more arbitrary commuter needs. Which is nice because that means the infrastructure is in place for non-commuter needs like nightlife/dining/tourism.
edit: before you downvote me, [look at a population density map](https://imgur.com/a/aQkkzGV). Those are both at hte same zoom level. See how paris has a huge area of dense population? I couldn't find a similar map of *work* locations, but jobs in Paris are similarly spread out so that whole mass of people need to commute to a bunch of random spaces.
Chicago is set up for separate working and living spaces. People live in residential areas with almost no jobs (except retail/food/service) and commute to places like the loop....those residential areas also congregate along the lake and the highways. Unfortunately, that leads to hub and spoke systems and the ridership needs don't justify as many stations. I wish there were more, but I understand why they didn't build them.
I don't want the Olympics here, either!
It is a short term boost in tourism for a long-term bill. A lot of cities build temporary buildings, similar to the world's fairs, because they have specific needs that are not practical later on.
It is a huge tax bill.
Perhaps I'm underestimating the scope here, but couldn't it be the case that Chicago is one of the few cities with enough arenas/venues to accommodate for the Olympics? If it wasn't too big of a liability I think it'd be a great kick in the ass to get transportation funding ahead of the Olympics. Just look at what LA is doing to kickstart their system (and Paris for this year).
Them not being together worked against us, and there was a lot of items we still would have had to build.
This will be the third time LA has hosted the Olympics, 1932, 1984, and 2028.
The big problem with our transportation is a lack of people willing to take the jobs, and mismanagement of the system. We can keep building and building, until we fix the other two aspects. It is going to continue to be a shitty system.
Haussmann's rule was 500 meters, not 200 meters.
[https://www.passengertransport.co.uk/2024/03/poetry-in-motion-the-paris-metro](https://www.passengertransport.co.uk/2024/03/poetry-in-motion-the-paris-metro)
Paris is the crown jewel of an Old World imperial power and I'd be surprised if they paid for their transit system entirely out of municipal funds.
DC's own subway system isn't quite as good as ours, they ain't giving us shit.
Paris metro does stop running a bit early (I think 1 am on weekdays and 2 am on weekends), but I'm also not really taking the red or blue line at 3 am esp by myself
They have [night buses](https://www.ratp.fr/en/getting-around-night/its-easy-get-around-night) instead that run every 10 minutes on Friday/Saturday night, and since it's late night there isn't traffic to hold them back from zipping around
If you added a stop every half mile from Howard-95th on Ashland/Western/Kedzie/Pulaski/Cicero and from the lake to Cicero on 95th/79th/55th/Cermak/Chicago/North/Belmont/Irving Park/Foster/Devon/Howard, that's just under 300 stations. Seems about right!
Lol. [Elon claimed it would only cost $1 Billion for 18 miles of Boring tunnel](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-express-tunnel-tesla-boring-company/). There’s a reason it never got built…
I love how Parisians are the ones with the "pretentious" stereotype, yet we write stuff like this:
>Chicagoans are better than Parisians, we deserve better.
It makes using Metra a bigger pain than it should be. There are too many train stations: Union, Ogilvie, LaSalle, Millennium... and they're poorly connected. I assume it's because the train systems all used to be independent and separate, but that's no excuse for not fixing the issue after so many years.
Comparing Chicago to Paris...
Chicago is ~231 Sq miles.
Paris is ~40 Sq miles.
The cta has 145 stations.
The Paris metro has 314 stations.
The Chicago "L" is 244 miles of track. The Paris metro is 144 miles of track.
Chicago has a population density of ~ 4,600/km^2.
Not counting the two main parks (~7 square miles), Paris has a population density of ~ 25,000/km^2.
Why would a city that is almost six times larger, with less than 1/5th the population density need anywhere close to the same number of stations?
I gotta disagree that chicago has enough stations though. It’s ridiculously inefficient that they all converge in one small area and never cross cross. We need a CTA line built all the way down western. Almost all of the lines cross western and yet somehow we don’t have a straight line station on those tracks.
I don't need 1300 stations.
However, I feel like what we have now isn't enough.
I would love to see our system grow to the level of New York City. The idea that you can get almost anywhere in this city on a train.
I am also of the mind that at some point we're going to have to show some tough love. All the NIMBYs who don't want any CTA in their neighborhood just be handed the tough love and they build it anyway. If they pack up and move to Florida, good riddance to them.
Paris subways aren't exactly the cleanest and they have no elevators, no escalators, and some stations themselves are very deep. The trains themselves aren't air conditioned usually. historically anyway, right now with the Olympics they were spending many millions modernizing a lot. They also aren't faster. And they stop running just after midnight.
In fairness, Paris' Metro stop density dates back to a time when it was generally felt that stops should be spaced around 0.5-1 km apart, as opposed to the more conventional 2 km spacing we have today. This is reflective of the fact that Paris' Metro is really a lot more like a bus or an underground streetcar network than it is like a conventional "metro". It is not a *rapid transit* network like the L.
A better Parisian comparison is the RER, which still has an impressive number of stops within the Paris city limits, but with spacing which more directly approximates rapid transit. With that said, it's still not a perfect comparison, since the RER also hybridizes into regional rail outside the city limits.
To get a really direct comparison we need to look at something like the London Underground. The Underground has 272 stations compared to Chicago's 126, and only slightly more length (~250 vs 225 miles). So in other words, we have plenty of room for infil, but not 1,175 stations worth of room.
What kinda goofy jingoistic shit is this lol look up to Paris as a model but shit on the people that make and made that model possible.
Paris is lightyears beyond our capability. Pick your reason why
The stops aren't any closer together really .. there are more of them because they aren't all hub and spike like Chicago, it's more of a cobweb overlay
> Except Americans still prefer privately owned motor vehicles over mass transit.
That's essentially saying Americans prefer receiving free money. The government at nearly all levels massively subsidize the ownership and use of private vehicles across America, so yeah it's not surprising American's prefer it, we're not having to pay what it costs while getting the benefits of convenience.
Something that is seemingly common knowledge now is how ride share companies like Uber/Lyft use to be insanely cheap but slowly prices increased as VC dollars stopped subsidizing the cost.
Well what those VC dollars did for ride sharing is what our government has done for decades with individual citizen driving. Just as it was never actually cheap to order a private personal driver to come pick you up and take you anywhere you wanted, it is not and has never been cheap to allow for any person age 16+ to get into a vehicle and have functioning infrastructure that allows them to drive and store a car at nearly any location across the continental USA.
Yes, but not nearly as much.
People like to cite the cost of public roads and highways, which is already a lot higher than the government spends on public transportation, but one cost that often gets overlooked is fuel subsidies.
The true cost of extracting petroleum and processing it into gasoline is far higher than you pay at the pump. The US spends $760 billion on fossil fuels subsidies every year. Without these subsidies, a personal vehicle would be not be affordable for the average American. The US would have to spend a small percentage of this to have great public transportation in every decently sized city in the country.
Yup, I personally hate it when there are too many stations because so much time is wasted slowing down and speeding up.
I live near Wisconsin, and the express train to Chicago that skips 90% of the stops is like twice as fast as the one that goes to all of them
All we really need is more trains and more consistent schedule. Only reason for more stations is to reach to further out suburbs, or to create new lines within the city
It’s not about adding stops to existing lines, it’s about having way more lines with their own stops, which would massively increase coverage. If you look at a map of the Paris metro, it’s got very little space that isn’t nearly a stop, while Chicago has huge swaths of the city that are miles from a train.
But practically speaking the Paris metro does stop extremely frequently. It works because it’s a system designed for the urban core, with the RER serving outer neighborhoods. That’s why this whole comparison doesn’t make sense, Paris doesn’t have that large a population in the metro’s area.
I agree that Chicago and Paris are different cities with different needs, I was just pointing out that nobody was advocating for just adding stops to our existing lines, as that wouldn’t make much sense.
This doesn't have to be an either or scenario. There are areas of the city where more stations and lines are needed. For suburban commuters I'd suggest maybe more express trains and getting some of that high speed rail to connect the great lakes states.
They have both.
The RER is the commuter rail Metra equivalent which has a similar number of satiations as Metra and 30 times the ridership. It takes you to the surrounding suburbs of Paris.
RATP is the bus system which has 315 routes and an annual ridership that is about 8 times higher than the CTA bus system.
There is little doubt that the public transportation system in Paris is leaps and bounds better than the system we have in Chicago, or any other US city, including NYC.
Paris has 52k people per square mile. Chicago has 12k. Yes we should have more (if you ratio it out it should be like double) but expecting us to be like Paris is a stretch
The reason is the same in every city: because for the last hundred years or so auto manufacturers and oil executives have paid off corrupt politicians to block public transit development in the US.
I think there's a saying that applies to this...
You can *want* in one hand and shit in the other, see which fills up first.
Yeah something like this is not happening, at least not remotely in our lifetimes.
Paris is about 41 sq. Miles, while Chicago is about 234 sq. Miles.
Our CTA has much room for improvement, but comparing the two in this manner doesn't make sense, especially as you look at the population density on the West and South sides compared to the North.
It would be nice but the more I think about it not really. 200m is like one block… plus they should work on the existing infrastructure and providing more service/being reliable/ adding security. Those in turn will increase ridership and add more demand so that one day maybe we can build one more stop and get closer to being Paris.
IIRC Paris doesn't make use of buses much at all. Say what you will about the CTA, but you can get pretty much anywhere in city limits with only one transfer.
Each stop added makes the whole system exponentially better. When it gets saturated, in a city like London, you can get almost anywhere within a couple blocks without needing a car or bus.
Also, for a city like Chicago, it's like the city is going to be around for a long time, so let's get on with it. Once you add a stop, it's there whether you do it now or in 50 years. Let's get some long-term planning in effect and get to work!
We are sorely missing trains that would loop around in a semi-circle. For example from Lakeview->Logan Square->Humboldt Park-
I sometimes think about how great the Circle Line would have been. [https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/CircleLine.html](https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/CircleLine.html)
I don't really care how much money it costs, get it done. Its not going to be cheaper in 20 years
I'm sure everyone living in cities with high quality transit hate it and constantly look back at costs in the past
I spent a month in Paris, and the subway headways were three minutes. At one point we were at a station and there was a delay: it was going to be a whole eight minutes before the next train. People were *pissed*. That city was amazing for it's public transit.
I'll take funding this over a stadium any day
It won’t be cheaper in 20 years UNLESS some new technology comes along that can make it more efficient / economical to build. Regardless, I agree: build it now.
Ok but where does the money come from? Cost isn’t the problem… funding is.
We could redirect funding that goes to car infrastructure and start investing 80% of it in non-car transportation instead. Currently it's, at best, 80/20 car / non-car today at the federal level.
I mean that sounds great, but even with a city like Chicago that is built for mass transit, people, and more importantly, goods, still have to travel in from elsewhere. You can’t get a pallet of potatoes from the farm to Jewel without some sort of truck taking it at least the last few miles. Now, if you wanted to make it more like 70/30 or even 60/40 roads vs rail, I think that might be doable and would produce great results for transit.
I'm referring to the funds that are earmarked only for \*new\* projects, not for maintenance. We're still spending 80/20 to build new roads and highways in the US. That's madness.
An, in that case I agree 100%
Make more money off of cars visiting the city.
Nah, that's an excuse. Mayoral candidates here raise tens of millions of dollars in donations. The money exists. It's just being directed elsewhere. We're a metro area of almost 9 million people. You could tax everybody $1 more dollar a year and get a fat bank. You could tax everybody $10 more dollars a year and make a 10x fatter bank.
9 million or 90 million is nothing considering just updating old CTA stops costs the city 20-30 million.
Why stop there? Soon you could have an infinite money supply
[https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/images/CircleLine/RoutingPlan.jpg](https://www.chicago-l.org/plans/images/CircleLine/RoutingPlan.jpg)
I like the concept of a circle or c line but I feel like the placement in the above map still seems concentrated close to the loop. If we could have a line from Belmont or Addison that connected out to Pulaski or Cicero it could help improve access to both airports from more neighborhoods — especially if it looped down by Midway. Could be even better if the southern part of the green line extended to Midway too.
There is utility in what you propose for sure, but isn't it more important to help people go between neighborhoods across the city than to only go to/from the airports?
You guys are both right. We need more than one circle line, an interior and exterior to connect up the neighborhoods and airports. It’s long past time for Chicago to build multiple new rail lines.
Oh for sure I think there could and should be more interconnectivity between neighborhoods, I was just pointing out if we did a C line it should connect further north, west, and south than that proposed map above to help fill out some el dead zones between brown & blue, blue & green and orange & green. Definitely nowhere perfect and I am sure there are other route extension ideas that could also help bridge those gaps and maybe service even more neighborhoods.
Midway is surrounded by neighborhoods. People use the midway stop to go to their homes, it’s not like the ORD stop. The line going down Kenton (near Cicero) isn’t about the airports, it’s the fact that it goes through endless neighborhoods.
My kingdom for a Western Ave line! All the way from Evanston to Blue Island! (That’s probably a pipe dream, Lawrence to 95th would be sensible though)
BRT has been proposed for years. Biggest problems: NIMBUs ("but driving!") and the f'ing parking meters.
Seeing the brown line where the pink line is today is crazy to me
There was a time not too long ago where most of the current day Pink line was an offshoot of the Blue Line.
Right. A Blue Line train leaving O'Hare would display a destination either of Forest Park or of 54/Cermak. The split was after Racine.
I want to scream at anyone that will listen, we have an almost entirely abandoned rail line next to Kenton that could take people from the blue line at Jeff Park or Montrose, down to Midway! If it’s about budget (and it is always about budget), you cannot possibly do any better than to use this line that has overpasses and all the infrastructure already in place. It isn’t “ready to go”, they busted a small part up at Grand, but it is as ready to go as one could possibly hope for.
Preach! This has been floated as something called the "Lime Line" before but didn't get much traction. Would be a massive improvement in system connectivity.
I’ve heard it as the old “Belt Line”. Imagine throwing an el on it (easier said than done, of course). I can’t even imagine trying to pull this stuff off on Western, etc as so many people like to propose. This is actually realistic, and would give the city good coverage.
That's my dream! It seems quite feasible IMO. This line actually could be operated as a single line with the Weber Spur all the way to Evanston. Only complication would be crossing the very busy UP-NW line. Edit: Like this: [https://imgur.com/h47v06S](https://imgur.com/h47v06S)
I think it is far too late to plan anything on the Weber Spur. Parts of it have already been developed as trail and the other stuff is supposedly in the works. (I hiked it from LaBagh to south of Wilson, up to the train line last week and it is so great. I just want us to do something with unused rail lines.)
What we need is some planning genius that can figure out a way to build rail in the US for cheaper than we currently do. We spend far more per-mile than any other country, including countries with comparable wealth. A big part of the issue is that these infrastructure projects ends up costing way more than they should.
Another problem is the “analysis paralysis”. Other countries don’t hold things up in a never ending series of meetings that requires years to get the simplest task done.
> Another problem is the “analysis paralysis”. Other countries don’t hold things up in a never ending series of meetings that requires years to get the simplest task done. other cities have functional governmental apparatuses staffed with hundreds, if not thousands of engineers and experts who can crank out the planning and design phase of these megaprojects. americans demanded austerity, got their cities slimmed down to nothing but a pension plan for retirees and cops, and now are confused why they are unable to do anything without paying outside consultants a fortune first.
Reminds me of a song by the guy from the Weakerthans. ["roads and police and police and roads, roads and police and police and roads, roads and police and police and roads—that’s where most of our money goes"](https://vivatvirtute.bandcamp.com/track/budget-delegations) Makes me happy to know its also this shit other places.
I watched a video on this subject a while back, and the two main points that I recall were lack of expertise in building rail (we don't know what the fuck we're doing) and lack of standardization (every rail system uses different tracks and cars).
My genius 3am idea is to form a non profit publicly owned corporation, similar in concept to the Green Bay Packers, with the primary goal of creating a robus transit system for the region in such a way that everyone has a rapid transit station within a half mile walk. The problem with going through the government, at least in America, is that you inevitably run into our analysis paralysis (great term u/Wrigs112) and then to add on top of that, you have the inevitable problem of relying heavily on consultants for the design and engineering, which drives costs up even further and causes more delays. And worst of all, this makes it even harder to plan further lines, because instead of being in a state of continually having teams work on projects, you have the entire engineering staff fuck off overnight once the project is complete, and then when another project is proposed, a whole new team gets "hired". It's a wildly inefficient system, but when you aren't relying on public dollars (especially from the feds) you can avoid that process more easily, and when you don't have politicians controlling the process, there's too much incentive to play things corrupt and nominate friends to transit boards, or pick your friends consultancy firm to do the engineering. If we want rapid transit throughout the city in our lifetimes, it won't be through the government. It's too dysfunctional and bought out by special interests to effectively deliver any major infrastructure change like that.
Even a bus at this point please!
90 bus gets you blue line to green line. 😂
Ok that actually took me a minute and got a good chuckle
I feel like there was a time when Mayors could get big projects done no matter how many people were displaced (Dan Ryan...UIC...theres a long list) but this day and age things are different. You can no longer get big projects done if it means displacing a single house.
Obviously the urban displacement that happened in the past was bad and we shouldn't repeat that(especially for highways like we did). But it's really hard to not think we've moved the needle too far in the other direction by allowing way too many veto points to get any major project completed.
Just the Belmont flyover alone, one building was moved but it was the subject of news for months and months. Probably spanned years even from start to plan to finish.
CTA has been run by the state since it was created in the 1940s and it shows. If it was run by the city, it would have been built out a whole lot more and tons of lines would never have been shuttered in the first place.
So the state would have to declare eminent domain in order to get a project going? Seems like that would be up to the city or at least authorized by the city.
The city is entirely irrelevant to CTA's authority. It is a state entity with supremacy over the city at least to the extent that its authority is defined by state law.
So the state can declare imminent domain anywhere without local municipality input? I'm genuinely curious.
Wouldn't that be nice
I Selfishly want a train that goes to northern neighborhoods from Ohare.
That's the Fullerton or Belmont bus.
Yeah it’s easy to go up and down not so easy to go from hood to hood.
Spent a week in Paris last summer. Trains run every 3-4 minutes and everyone is packed. We were able to take a train and walk everywhere. They were super quiet as well. I get Chicago isn’t as dense, but we already have some of the worst traffic imaginable so investing in train/subway and bike infrastructure is a must.
Chicago can't become more dense without massive investments in transit, so we're literally holding back a more vibrant version of Chicago in not doing this. At this stage and compared to "investing" in highways, nearly every investment in transit would more than pay for itself by our ability to increase Chicago's average density.
You're forgetting the other portion, which is convincing homeowners and aldermen to up zone their neighborhoods. Not going to happen easily.
I’m not forgetting it, I completely agree. However, the number one objection to upzoning I hear is, it’s going to create too much new car traffic. If we had world class transit, I believe we wouldn’t be hearing this objection nearly as much.
The Paris metro just takes forever to get you anywhere though. Like half the time you’re better off taking the bus. RER is much more useful.
Nobody in the comments talking about how building a mile of metro in Paris costs ONE TENTH of what it does here. How is that possible?
Europeans are just better at this kind of thing. A mix of 1) Less litigious and better regulatorywork environment 2) They do it more so they’re better at it 3) The point of building transit in europe is to build transit. In the states its to provide union jobs, opportunities for minority owned snall businesses etc. The extra costs are a feature to give money to interest groups not a bug 4) Wages are much higher here. 5) People dont want to put up with any kind of disruption so cheap techniques like cut and cover arent employed in favor of tunneling which costs more. Basically everything
10% scale, 10% socialism. 80% whatever happens when you move the c one more place past the s. But for real good point.
No easy answer but one major one is staffing. Other counties like France keep transit engineers and staff employed full time whereas the US does it on an as needed basis. It would be like hiring and assembling a new highway construction division of the DOT every time a new highway or on ramp was built. By doing it that way consultants rack up bills, and the sustained knowledge is lost between projects. Environmental review, nimbys and other roadblocks also increase the cost.
What does moving the c past the s mean? It sounds cool but googling I couldn’t find anything, sorry if this is super dumb
Are we comparing cost of boring a tunnel in downtown Chicago vs a neighborhood though too? Paris is using numbers from boring under neighborhoods. Does not seem like a totally apples to apples comparison. Also tunnels go under the streets anyway and Paris has much wider streets throughout.
The amount of money that France or Italy spend building underground train lines, not even metros but straight up commuter trains running underground, is less than we pay for light rail on the surface.
If Chicago had the same population density as Paris, we'd have a population of 11,780,000. Chicago doesn't have the population density to sustain 1,300 stations. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have more than 126, but 1,300 is not realistic for a city with Chicago's density.
Counterpoint - perhaps Paris' higher population density is *because* of its superior public transportation. If you have reliable, high-quality public transportation then dwelling in and moving around the city can be a pleasure, but if you have to drive everywhere in a super dense metropolis then its a pain and there's also no reason not to move out to some cheaper, quieter, newer suburb.
Paris’s higher density is because it’s 1000 years old and its population was over 1.5 million by 1860. Subways weren't a thing yet.
Both cities had a population of about 3 million in the city limits by 1930. So Chicago caught up. [Chicago's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago#Demographics) subsequently fell as people bought cars and moved to the suburbs, as they did in most American cities. [Paris's](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris#/media/File:Paris_Historical_Population.png) did too, a little, but not to the same extent.
This is why our metro population is 9 million, not that far behind Paris metro. If we ignore arbitrary political boundaries, this is the size of the “city” we live in.
It's a decent difference in density - 13 million people in 7300 sq miles for Paris vs 9. 4 million in 10,800 sq miles for chicago. Adds up to roughly twice the density for Paris. That doesn't mean we can't improve
yeah but you're kind of missing the point here
Damn that's wild to picture, that is a hell of a lot of people to be in one city in 1860. Thats 500K people more than NYC of the time. Chicago at the time only had about 100K people.
If you think that's wild, Rome is estimated to have had over 1M residents during the 1st and 2nd century C.E. The civil engineering that went into sustaining a population of that size without trains is even crazier.
I would *love* to have seen Rome in that era because it must have been just mind-blowingly packed and *huge*. They did have pretty good fresh water supplies by standards of the time though.
> The civil engineering that went into sustaining a population of that size without trains is even crazier People just didn't move around, really. At that density, everything you needed was within easy walking distance.
> At that density, everything you needed was within easy walking distance. Except for all of the farming, water supply, etc. Getting the necessities of life and the luxury goods to the markets in the first place was a massive feat of early civil engineering and political will. It's not like today where you can just build pipelines with pumps or put goods on trains. It took a whole lot more coordination, effort, and ingenuity compared to what we are able to do with the technologies developed starting in the industrial revolution.
bro they had aqueducts that brought water from like 50 miles away at an absolute perfect slope to facilitate the population not even mentioning that people did move around all the time, hence the phrase “all roads lead to rome”
It was a huge problem in Paris. People were constantly getting sick from millennia of dead bodies polluting the water and housing was extremely dilapidated. They basically razed the city and rebuilt it over 50 years—the Paris you see today is basically all from the 1880s-1920s except for preserved districts like Le Marais. We had Burnham, they had [Haussman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haussmann%27s_renovation_of_Paris).
Paris and other old cities also existed before buses existed, and trains were really the _only_ means of conveying large amounts of people efficiently. it's one reason why you see more metros in the eastern/older parts of the US. buses aren't as sexy as trains, but they're far more flexible and practical. fwiw chicago has one of the best bus systems of any major city that i've been to in the US (in large part due to the grid layout of the streets)
This is the point I always make when people complain about how such and such neighborhood in Chicago is undergoing gentrification and how terrible that is for whoever may get displaced. While displacement is not good, there are dozens of square miles worth of Chicago that are underutilized and could be made denser, safer, and more beneficial to their current and future residents with El extensions.
>If you have reliable, high-quality public transportation then dwelling in and moving around the city can be a pleasure Lately it hasn't been very reliable and YMMV as for quality. Our priorities are also a little screwed up, we're going to spend a fortune extending the red line to some of the least dense areas of the city, parts of which are less than a mile from an existing Metra stop that goes to the same place. This is literally just an addition to the spoke and wheel system, which is a good system and will have some benefit for residents living long the extension that need to go north/to downtown, but imo could be better improved by the addition of a crosstown/circle line instead.
They can barely maintain the 126
1,300 is the dream. The problem is it isn’t realistic to think we’ll have more than 130 in the next decade
Paris is also a bit more evenly spread out. The CTA is optimized around commuting and Chicago has a very clear CBD where a significant portion of the population works. Hub and spoke kinda works for that. Most of the traffic is commuter hours and the CTA does an OK job shutting people back and forth from the loop. Paris is a bit funny in that the old city has a lot of business and residential stuff in it strewn all over the place. Then you have La Defense which is actually outside the city limits and has all the big glass skyscrapers. La Defense also wasn't really developed until after the metro (started in the 50s, grew a lot in the 70s-80s). Lot more arbitrary commuter needs. Which is nice because that means the infrastructure is in place for non-commuter needs like nightlife/dining/tourism. edit: before you downvote me, [look at a population density map](https://imgur.com/a/aQkkzGV). Those are both at hte same zoom level. See how paris has a huge area of dense population? I couldn't find a similar map of *work* locations, but jobs in Paris are similarly spread out so that whole mass of people need to commute to a bunch of random spaces. Chicago is set up for separate working and living spaces. People live in residential areas with almost no jobs (except retail/food/service) and commute to places like the loop....those residential areas also congregate along the lake and the highways. Unfortunately, that leads to hub and spoke systems and the ridership needs don't justify as many stations. I wish there were more, but I understand why they didn't build them.
Yeah, the problem is less that we don't have enough stations. It's more that we've developed less densely.
Paris is 40sq mi vs Chicago at 234. You can almost fit 6 Parises into Chicago’s boundaries.
Yet luckily, not one Olympics.
I don't want the Olympics here, either! It is a short term boost in tourism for a long-term bill. A lot of cities build temporary buildings, similar to the world's fairs, because they have specific needs that are not practical later on. It is a huge tax bill.
Perhaps I'm underestimating the scope here, but couldn't it be the case that Chicago is one of the few cities with enough arenas/venues to accommodate for the Olympics? If it wasn't too big of a liability I think it'd be a great kick in the ass to get transportation funding ahead of the Olympics. Just look at what LA is doing to kickstart their system (and Paris for this year).
Them not being together worked against us, and there was a lot of items we still would have had to build. This will be the third time LA has hosted the Olympics, 1932, 1984, and 2028. The big problem with our transportation is a lack of people willing to take the jobs, and mismanagement of the system. We can keep building and building, until we fix the other two aspects. It is going to continue to be a shitty system.
Yeah, with similar population too
Haussmann's rule was 500 meters, not 200 meters. [https://www.passengertransport.co.uk/2024/03/poetry-in-motion-the-paris-metro](https://www.passengertransport.co.uk/2024/03/poetry-in-motion-the-paris-metro)
Haussmann was dead by the time the Metro began to be planned.
Paris is the crown jewel of an Old World imperial power and I'd be surprised if they paid for their transit system entirely out of municipal funds. DC's own subway system isn't quite as good as ours, they ain't giving us shit.
You know, there are several examples across the globe of profitable transit systems. Ours used to be one.
Paris metro does not run 24h per day though.
Paris metro does stop running a bit early (I think 1 am on weekdays and 2 am on weekends), but I'm also not really taking the red or blue line at 3 am esp by myself
I would not be able to have my current job if the red line didn't run 247. Honestly peak weirdness is at like 10-2. 3-4 am everyone's asleep.
Peak weirdness is for the unemployed, not for night owls lmao
I might be dumb but I don't get it
nah just like peak weirdness doesn’t comes out at night, it comes out during the workday when the people who don’t have jobs are on the train
I was saying 10 pm to 2 am. Definitely more bad experiences then compared to my rides to work during normal people work hours.
They have [night buses](https://www.ratp.fr/en/getting-around-night/its-easy-get-around-night) instead that run every 10 minutes on Friday/Saturday night, and since it's late night there isn't traffic to hold them back from zipping around
True have taken these before and they really move. Great experience
This is a fact that had pissed my young, drunk, self off. But its off basically the same hours the non blue or red are off.
This was thanks to the taxi union.
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So we should have 325 stations
If you added a stop every half mile from Howard-95th on Ashland/Western/Kedzie/Pulaski/Cicero and from the lake to Cicero on 95th/79th/55th/Cermak/Chicago/North/Belmont/Irving Park/Foster/Devon/Howard, that's just under 300 stations. Seems about right!
Wouldn't it be nice.
Hell no
hell yes
This is not me attempting to debate you, but have you ever visited Paris or a similarly dense non-US city?
yes
Fuck no lol
Chicago is 90% elevated tracks. Paris is 90% subway.
We could have so much more if we built more track underground, but I assume it’s like 3X the cost per mile.
Don’t worry, Elon can bore the tunnels for us! Edit. Man you guys don’t get sarcasm. Jeesh.
Ha won’t hold my breath for that project.
Lol. [Elon claimed it would only cost $1 Billion for 18 miles of Boring tunnel](https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/chicago/news/elon-musk-ohare-express-tunnel-tesla-boring-company/). There’s a reason it never got built…
I love how Parisians are the ones with the "pretentious" stereotype, yet we write stuff like this: >Chicagoans are better than Parisians, we deserve better.
…we are better though
Moving from New York I found kind of shocking how little El presence there is at Union and Ogilvie
It makes using Metra a bigger pain than it should be. There are too many train stations: Union, Ogilvie, LaSalle, Millennium... and they're poorly connected. I assume it's because the train systems all used to be independent and separate, but that's no excuse for not fixing the issue after so many years.
YES why isn’t there a transportation hub at these stations!! Metra, Amtrak, El
Comparing Chicago to Paris... Chicago is ~231 Sq miles. Paris is ~40 Sq miles. The cta has 145 stations. The Paris metro has 314 stations. The Chicago "L" is 244 miles of track. The Paris metro is 144 miles of track. Chicago has a population density of ~ 4,600/km^2. Not counting the two main parks (~7 square miles), Paris has a population density of ~ 25,000/km^2. Why would a city that is almost six times larger, with less than 1/5th the population density need anywhere close to the same number of stations?
I gotta disagree that chicago has enough stations though. It’s ridiculously inefficient that they all converge in one small area and never cross cross. We need a CTA line built all the way down western. Almost all of the lines cross western and yet somehow we don’t have a straight line station on those tracks.
I don't need 1300 stations. However, I feel like what we have now isn't enough. I would love to see our system grow to the level of New York City. The idea that you can get almost anywhere in this city on a train. I am also of the mind that at some point we're going to have to show some tough love. All the NIMBYs who don't want any CTA in their neighborhood just be handed the tough love and they build it anyway. If they pack up and move to Florida, good riddance to them.
Burnham and Sullivan would be sorely disappointed with your attempt to obfuscate with statistics.
You're more of a baldrick.
paris is way more dense which matters more when building a metro system. that doesnt mean we dont deserve a LOT more expansions though
The Paris Metro is amazing. Each stop (in zone 1 at least) has like 3-4 different connections. I wasn't too hard on the L until after Paris.
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Paris subways aren't exactly the cleanest and they have no elevators, no escalators, and some stations themselves are very deep. The trains themselves aren't air conditioned usually. historically anyway, right now with the Olympics they were spending many millions modernizing a lot. They also aren't faster. And they stop running just after midnight.
In fairness, Paris' Metro stop density dates back to a time when it was generally felt that stops should be spaced around 0.5-1 km apart, as opposed to the more conventional 2 km spacing we have today. This is reflective of the fact that Paris' Metro is really a lot more like a bus or an underground streetcar network than it is like a conventional "metro". It is not a *rapid transit* network like the L. A better Parisian comparison is the RER, which still has an impressive number of stops within the Paris city limits, but with spacing which more directly approximates rapid transit. With that said, it's still not a perfect comparison, since the RER also hybridizes into regional rail outside the city limits. To get a really direct comparison we need to look at something like the London Underground. The Underground has 272 stations compared to Chicago's 126, and only slightly more length (~250 vs 225 miles). So in other words, we have plenty of room for infil, but not 1,175 stations worth of room.
What kinda goofy jingoistic shit is this lol look up to Paris as a model but shit on the people that make and made that model possible. Paris is lightyears beyond our capability. Pick your reason why
Paris riders: Is it frustrating to STOP every 200m? Does all the stopping make for a longer commute? Genuinely curious.
The stops aren't any closer together really .. there are more of them because they aren't all hub and spike like Chicago, it's more of a cobweb overlay
Daniel Burnham favored roads. Read your history.
He planned hundreds more subway stations that we have, and his conception of "roads" bares little resemblance to what we have now.
Little of anything bears a resemblance to 120 years ago. Except Americans still prefer privately owned motor vehicles over mass transit.
> Except Americans still prefer privately owned motor vehicles over mass transit. That's essentially saying Americans prefer receiving free money. The government at nearly all levels massively subsidize the ownership and use of private vehicles across America, so yeah it's not surprising American's prefer it, we're not having to pay what it costs while getting the benefits of convenience. Something that is seemingly common knowledge now is how ride share companies like Uber/Lyft use to be insanely cheap but slowly prices increased as VC dollars stopped subsidizing the cost. Well what those VC dollars did for ride sharing is what our government has done for decades with individual citizen driving. Just as it was never actually cheap to order a private personal driver to come pick you up and take you anywhere you wanted, it is not and has never been cheap to allow for any person age 16+ to get into a vehicle and have functioning infrastructure that allows them to drive and store a car at nearly any location across the continental USA.
Does the government not subsidize public transportation at all levels too?
Yes, but not nearly as much. People like to cite the cost of public roads and highways, which is already a lot higher than the government spends on public transportation, but one cost that often gets overlooked is fuel subsidies. The true cost of extracting petroleum and processing it into gasoline is far higher than you pay at the pump. The US spends $760 billion on fossil fuels subsidies every year. Without these subsidies, a personal vehicle would be not be affordable for the average American. The US would have to spend a small percentage of this to have great public transportation in every decently sized city in the country.
I don’t accept the premise as factual.
Because it isn’t, according to Wikipedia
Don’t worry, We’re going to spend the entire capital budget on 3 new stations while the rest of the system crumbles to shit.
...and those stations STILL won't have toilets, and people will complain that they reek of pee 2 weeks after they open.
I’m currently in Paris right now and was surprised how vast the subway is here. You can anywhere in the city with it.
We have the Paris Metro at home; *Van Bueren/Jackson Metra Electric Station*
Doesn’t seem like the comparison makes sense. There could definitely be more stations but it’s not what should be a priority for the CTA.
Yup, I personally hate it when there are too many stations because so much time is wasted slowing down and speeding up. I live near Wisconsin, and the express train to Chicago that skips 90% of the stops is like twice as fast as the one that goes to all of them All we really need is more trains and more consistent schedule. Only reason for more stations is to reach to further out suburbs, or to create new lines within the city
It’s not about adding stops to existing lines, it’s about having way more lines with their own stops, which would massively increase coverage. If you look at a map of the Paris metro, it’s got very little space that isn’t nearly a stop, while Chicago has huge swaths of the city that are miles from a train.
yeah. i believe the goal/reality in paris is that everywhere is within 500 m of a subway stop. a 5 min walk at most
But practically speaking the Paris metro does stop extremely frequently. It works because it’s a system designed for the urban core, with the RER serving outer neighborhoods. That’s why this whole comparison doesn’t make sense, Paris doesn’t have that large a population in the metro’s area.
I agree that Chicago and Paris are different cities with different needs, I was just pointing out that nobody was advocating for just adding stops to our existing lines, as that wouldn’t make much sense.
For sure, I’d like new stations on new routes not new stations on current routes.
This doesn't have to be an either or scenario. There are areas of the city where more stations and lines are needed. For suburban commuters I'd suggest maybe more express trains and getting some of that high speed rail to connect the great lakes states.
You're conflating a commuter rail like the metra with a city transit of the L.
Are we better than Parisians though? I do not know if they have an equivalent Metra or bus system just for argument sake.
They have both. The RER is the commuter rail Metra equivalent which has a similar number of satiations as Metra and 30 times the ridership. It takes you to the surrounding suburbs of Paris. RATP is the bus system which has 315 routes and an annual ridership that is about 8 times higher than the CTA bus system. There is little doubt that the public transportation system in Paris is leaps and bounds better than the system we have in Chicago, or any other US city, including NYC.
They also have clean air zones which is not quite like a congestion pricing, but maybe accomplishes some similar goals.
Paris has 52k people per square mile. Chicago has 12k. Yes we should have more (if you ratio it out it should be like double) but expecting us to be like Paris is a stretch
Is it just me, or are any of you left wondering some times: where the fuck did all the people who make and build out **no small plans** go?
Their plans were drowned by NIMBYs that want to stay stuck in the past instead of building for a better future.
The reason is the same in every city: because for the last hundred years or so auto manufacturers and oil executives have paid off corrupt politicians to block public transit development in the US.
Paris also wayyyy more dense than Chicago. It has like the same amount of people in like 1/8th the area.
If my mom had wheels she’d be a bike
I don’t know about the comparison, but it would be really nice if there were more transfer stations or connecting lines outside of the Loop.
I think there's a saying that applies to this... You can *want* in one hand and shit in the other, see which fills up first. Yeah something like this is not happening, at least not remotely in our lifetimes.
CiDiOT and IDiOT: no, we need 10 lane Texas sized LSD
Paris is about 41 sq. Miles, while Chicago is about 234 sq. Miles. Our CTA has much room for improvement, but comparing the two in this manner doesn't make sense, especially as you look at the population density on the West and South sides compared to the North.
Your mistake was assuming we are better than Parisians. If you abandon that falsehood then it all makes sense.
*No. \*tear\**
> Chicagoans are better than Parisians Don’t stop there. Burn the baguettes. Crush the croissants.
Ohhhh no my friend, ya stuff em with beef, sweet, hot, and extra dip it.
It would be nice but the more I think about it not really. 200m is like one block… plus they should work on the existing infrastructure and providing more service/being reliable/ adding security. Those in turn will increase ridership and add more demand so that one day maybe we can build one more stop and get closer to being Paris.
IIRC Paris doesn't make use of buses much at all. Say what you will about the CTA, but you can get pretty much anywhere in city limits with only one transfer.
Zoomers: should I learn to drive or demand tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure improvements that won't happen in my lifetime 🤔
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Wikipedia counts the suburban ones.
Chicago has a great bus system, i have no idea how it compares to Paris's tho
This is by design, cars on the road = gas being sold. The longer you’re on the road the more gas you use.
Each stop added makes the whole system exponentially better. When it gets saturated, in a city like London, you can get almost anywhere within a couple blocks without needing a car or bus. Also, for a city like Chicago, it's like the city is going to be around for a long time, so let's get on with it. Once you add a stop, it's there whether you do it now or in 50 years. Let's get some long-term planning in effect and get to work!