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Personally speaking, I have two friends who live in the city and work in the suburbs. And I know that it is not uncommon. These are young, able bodied men who are well aware of the alternatives to driving, and have TRIED THEM. I doubt there is a single soul who reverse commutes every day who, sitting with nothing but brake lights in front of them as far as the eye can see, has not thought of every alternative way to NOT be in the hellhole situation that they are currently sitting in. And saying that they should just move out of the city and to the suburbs is not a solution we should encourage. Saying they should get another job would also be ridiculous. Saying that they should buy a car and have it parked out in the suburbs at the Metra lots and move near to Union Station is even moreso. I'm not saying that you're saying these things but I have heard these "alternatives" brought up before. IMO these aren't real "alternatives" and they do nothing to solve the big picture problem. In fact, what this impossibly horrible inbound traffic for reverse commuters does is encourage sprawl, because yes, the easiest (and cheapest) alternative to all this is just plain and simply move out of the city, and get a place out in the suburbs. In fact that is what my friends will be doing, and they feel almost forced to. We are forcing people out of the city by effectively making it very difficult to get back into it for anyone that lives here. I'm not sure why this is being dismissed by IDOT. Perhaps once the Tollway constructions projects are all complete it will free up so many construction workers that we may see a solution proposed though. So yeah, I hope that they start looking at solutions to the problem of bottlenecks that Chicago has. Especially when we are talking about city dwelling folks. Having 6 lanes go into 4 lanes is a bottleneck and backs up the entire Kennedy and Edens every afternoon here. It's basically a giant finger from IDOT every afternoon for people that live in the city or want to get into it. Perhaps this is why it isn't pressing though to them, because they figure these are city folks who "can take transit." There are multiple reasons they aren't, not the least of which is how there is no real mass transit once they get out to the suburbs where they work (nor should there have to be with such low density). Quote:
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Also, I wouldn't say that there is unequal demand. It's hard to assess that just by looking at it. The inbound may be moving smoothly while the outbound grinds to a halt, but the express lanes have a hand in the smooth flow of the inbound. Finally, the Kennedy only widens to 8 lanes to provide a merging lane for the cloverleaf at Cumberland and the ramps to 190 towards O'Hare. After 190 splits off, it's back to 6 lanes. |
If land use in the suburbs weren't so crappy it wouldn't be necessary to compound bad decisions by building ever more infrastructure that would be underutilized most hours of the week. Employment centers shouldn't be in locations inaccessibly to transit to begin with. I don't see why ever more urban fabric should be replaced with pavement because the suburbs can't pull their heads out of their ass when it comes to land use planning. Locate jobs where they'll be accessible, and not necessitate ever more infrastructure. Highways are relatively unscalable and achieve diminishing marginal returns from additional lanes after the 3rd lane. You can always increase frequencies on rail lines, which take up much less real estate anyway. Just wait until the reverse commute congestion gets so bad that suburban employers and village councils start thinking differently about the geographic nature of their jobs and transportation investments.
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I agree with Viva's theme. Long term the problem is largely in that suburbs are not building much of their commercial buildings near Metra stations. A recent case in point is that in the last year in Glenview in the Glen they built two five story's office buildings facing Willow Road leading into the new Glen development. Those buildings are only about a half mile from he Glen station are on the same road and there is no perceptible reason why they wouldn't have worked nearly as well if built by the station. The development it is just far enough so that anyone who works there will not dream of walking to their office everyday. Potentially there could have be a 10 story office building across from the Metra station that would have been an anchor but instead it is surrounded by cheep two story buildings. Alas, anyone living south of Glenview (including some reverse commuters from the city) will be driving. The fact that suburbs still today engage in such blatant disregard of zoning and don't attempt to make their Metra stations anything other then park and rides to downtown Chicago is a complete waste.
If suburbs planned well and built new employment centers around Metra stations then ideally Chicago could do its part and also zone for a variety of residential TOD's around its primary Metra stations near Jefferson Park, Clybourn station, Western Ave, Ravenswood etc. for people who city residents who want to reverse commute but given that relatively little commercial space is built around most Metra lines the demand is likely not even there for developers to build for such people. The circle line also would help with such theoretical reverse commuting but again until the burbs do their part in building a good chunk of their employment base near their stations all other efforts are wasted. edit: just realized this is the O'Hare and not transit thread and we are getting a bit off topic. |
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http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sour...75016&t=k&z=14
Silver Spring, MD. Employment District concentrated around the multimodal Metro/MARC stop (serving employees who live to the south or north), with two 6-lane arterials connecting it to adjacent expressway (each serving inbound employees from the west and east, respectively). Bethesda is similar, as are Ballston and Rosslyn in VA. Not rocket science. Similar planning could have been done in the I-90, I-294, and I-88 corridors. |
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Now if they have to move closer to work, so be it, even though moving is a huge pain I don't expect people to do lightly, but most of the jobs are in the suburbs, so you are just really encouraging people to not live in the city especially as the suburban job base continues to grow and the problem of getting back into the city in the afternoons continues to get worse. Quote:
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A traditional commute from suburb to Loop is a different story, if someone is lucky enough to have that combination of home and employment. Consider themselves very very lucky. Take the Metra then, it works. It does what it is designed to do (go figure!). But having private suburban businesses who may not even have that much money to begin with build near a Metra station may not just be impractical, it may not even be possible. Encourage it, yes, but don't blame them if they don't comply. Not ever company is Motorolla and has an unlimited pocketbook, most people work for a small businesses on a tight budget. Plus you trade accesibility to commuter rail for less parking, in general. Since most people drive, this tradeoff wouldn't make sense for most business owners. Either way, this is a collection of some of the most diverse people and businesses on the planet. This is still a free market economy so what you will see happen, rather than suburban employers "starting to think differently about the geographic nature of their investments," whatever that means no offense (I'm sure just about every suburban business has thought more than thoroughly about issues such as access, parking, location, and cost--if they haven't then they shouldn't be in business!), you will instead just see the suburbs and exurbs continue to boom with housing stock. The easiest solution on an individual level is for me to pick up my bags and get one of those shiny new houses in the exurbs. After all, they aren't going to fix the inbound junction anytime soon, right? Maybe that's what you want though? Not really sure. But right now every policy we have encourages sprawl including this one. We have a commuter rail system that is good only if you live in the suburbs and have a car (AND a job downtown), and you have a highway system that is designed specifically to discourage living in the city if you, like most people, have a job in the suburbs. So no, I don't agree that we should just continue to keep the Kennedy and Edens inbound a bright red slow zone every afternoon on purpose when the problem is clearly not a limited amount of lanes, but instead is due to a severe junctional bottleneck secondary to archaic design. |
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This seems to be a Chicago-only problem BTW. No other system that I know of, and I have lived in Manhattan and reverse commuted to Jersey back when I was in my early 20's, has something that is setup so specifically for bedroom community AM commuters at the specific and stark expense of city dwellers in a city the size of Chicago. Chicago is designed like Minneapolis yet it is not Minneapolis, it is Chicago. It may have made sense 30 years ago but it makes no sense today. Just my 2 cents. |
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With the exception of some factory workers, most middle class and above people whose jobs are typically located in a fixed location could arrange their lives to support a city life. Those who feel they have no choice but to take suburban job simply value something higher than a city lifestyle. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, just be honest with yourself and others that you made that choice and weren't forced into it. |
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No it's not. It simply depends on what field you work in. Certain industries are comprised of hundreds of small firms. Because their real estate needs are small and their cost of moving is small, they can afford to locate in places with maximum accessibility. Law firms, financial firms, foundations, architecture firms, etc.
You work in healthcare, whyhuhwhy. I'm not familiar with the specifics of radiology, but if you are searching for a hospital-based job, that restricts your choices to a limited number of places that, by their very nature, must be geographically dispersed around Chicagoland. I'm just not convinced that highway widening is the appropriate solution to congestion on the Kennedy. It is an extremely dense corridor that runs through stable, middle-class neighborhoods with decent property values. Any takings here would get into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Complicating any sort of widening is the presence of the Blue Line and the UP-NW line in the exact same corridor, which pose huge design constraints at Jefferson Park and at the junction. Now imagine instead a reliable Blue Line (we're almost there... :rolleyes:) with a dense network of feeder buses that use the left and right shoulders of the Northwest Tollway. They then exit the highway using either existing ramps or special bus-only ones and break off to serve major employment centers, using existing and lightly-traveled roads. The costs of such a system are orders of magnitude less than a highway widening. The system can be branded and operated separately from Pace, with sleek new buses and shelters. I admit that many people who currently drive do so out of necessity, but a convenient bus network should be able to take employees of major companies off of the roads, freeing road space for people with smaller and more dispersed suburban workplaces. |
Hello Mods
This thread is ridiculusly off topic since post #637.
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^ Guys, wanna start a new thread to discuss this?
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I am not sure anyone proposed outright widening the Kennedy, but having some sort of capacity increase from O'Hare to the Loop in conjunction with the massive expansion would have been nice. Perhaps double decking the highway to add an express path from O'Hare to the CBD, or at the very least getting rid of the Cumberland merger mess. Most large cities in this country have double decked highways already, let alone highways without 33% lane reduction bottlenecks through their most congested parts.
(There. I just got the thread back on topic;) ) |
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Trip density is more important than built density for supporting transit. For example, in Canada, where employment is more heavily concentrated in central business districts and planned manufacturing/distribution districts, semi-frequent bus service is economically viable even in low-density cul-de-sac suburbs because of the trip density of people going to/from the same location. Contrast to Los Angeles, where built density is quite high but employment so dispersed that very few corridors have a critical mass of trip density to support transit (yeah yeah LA gets a million bus trips a day and a decently used subway line, but for a megalopolis of its size, transit usage is tiny). What's frustrating about Chicago's suburbs is that there actually are some concentrations of employment - manufacturing/distribution west of O'Hare, and of course Offices and Retail around Schaumburg, Oak Brook, and Naperville. But all were built to preclude access by existing transit infrastructure. Rather than transit obtaining a ¬10% mode share of commute traffic (as the employment district around Cumberland/Rosemont does), these areas see but a tiny fraction. That's not the fault of the transit network - it's the fault of land use policies that guided such development. Note that I don't blame the workers for taking jobs in the burbs - people work where they can, and very few have the luxury to say outright they won't work for Company X in Industry Y because they don't want to work in office park, though on the margins people can have a preference for one type of employment location or another depending on their personal preferences. HOLD ON I'LL FIGURE OUT A WAY TO RELATE THIS TO O'HARE... Umm... Well, basically, trips from the west to O'Hare will be made by car by the same logic above. Building transit lines to feed people from the west would be incredibly wasteful. Some sort of road improvements could well be warranted, but frankly with the exception of the Cumberland bottleneck traffic generally flows relatively smoothly around there (I consider anything aside from total gridlock LOS F to be 'smooth') so I'm not sure there's a justification for two new full limited access highways with accompanying land acquisition and so forth. |
With a decent HSR rail network, Chicago wouldn't need to expand O'Hare.
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I reverse commuted from the city to the northern burbs for years. It was hell on earth. My solutions:
- Add an auxiliary lane on the Edens between Willow and Skokie - Make the Kennedy Express lanes inbound at all times There is a service called the "Shuttle Bug" that does collection/distribution from Lake-Cook Rd on the Milwaukee-North line. I think there might be service to Braeside as well. Metra doesn't understand the concept of feeder bus service. If they did - and did some other interesting things like reverse commute express trains on more lines - it might be more palatable to reverse commute if you were in proximity to a station. One challenge is that the most convenient lines to most city professionals, the CNW-N and NW, don't service the suburban employment centers most conveniently, and Clinton subway or not, going to Union Station won't cut it. |
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