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Originally Posted by Baronvonellis
Ok, yea I suppose that's what they want to do. But the museum would be alot more visited if it was downtown. The Oriental Institute is a FREE museum with world class artifacts and the museums get very few visitors. Compared to the MOSI or the Field Museum there's barely a trickle of mostly local people that go there now. It just seems underutilized in Hyde Park. Lots of people that live in Chicago don't even know about it. It doesn't seem like they are doing a good job marketing it.
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I think part of it is that many tourists are skeptical of buses and resistant to take a $20 each way cab ride. Uber/Lyft have reduced that cost a bit, but it's still more than many people want to tack onto their budget for a specialty museum when there are great museums downtown. A South Lakefront 'L' line or a repurposing of Metra Electric combined with a bit of marketing would do wonders for the treasures in Hyde Park. A line that also served the North Lakefront to serve the Zoo and the Nature Museum would really help tourism and some commuters.
Alternatively, making the express buses a "real" type of BRT mimicking rail service would also probably accomplish 75% of the benefit, have more flexibility and cost maybe only 20% as much to implement. The South part would also really speed up the gentrification in Bronzeville, Douglas, and adjacent areas, which helps keep housing costs under control while increasing the tax base.
The South Lakefront express bus routes are already pretty good, but as buses they really only attract existing residents and are less attractive to tourists or new residents moving in from leases urban areas. I've always been a big transit fan, even in high school growing up in a town of 560 in rural Oregon, but most people who move to Chicago who didn't grow up in New York or the few other places with ubiquitous transit may buy into using trains from the get-go, but it'll take a few years, if every, for them to start buying into the utility of even commuter-style express buses. But make BRT feel more like trains and I think buy-in would happen a lot faster