CHICAGO: ORD & MDW discussion

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by ardecila

but you can't say there aren't good alternatives to driving in the corridor.

Sure I can. I mean we are talking about reverse commute traffic. Metra is great for commuting INTO the LOOP from a suburban parking lot that people drive to get to in the first place. It is horrible for the opposite, and for obvious reasons. If you live in the city and have to work in the suburbs, forget it, you are driving 99% of the time. Just think about it. Most people first of all don't live in the Loop or near a Metra station. In fact I don't even no a single person that lives in the Loop, everyone I know lives in some neighborhood nowhere near a Metra station. So in order to even leave the city they have to somehow get to a Metra station on the exact right line, which 9 times out of 10 probably means they need to get their ass to Union Station. This means a commute to the Loop to begin with, just to begin to leave the city. Once they reach the Loop, they better be on time for the train leaving for the suburbs. After that, forget it. What percent of jobs are centered around suburban Metra stations and are walkable, or near a Pace bus station. In fact, even if it is near a Pace bus station I don't expect any human being to take the L to the Loop, which doesn't even have a stop at Union Station, so they have to get out and walk several blocks to get to Union Station, then transfer to Metra, then transfer to Pace, and do the whole thing over again back home. Unless they don't mind commuting half the day. Even if someone has an apartment in Union Station, if that were possible, you are still 9 times out of 10 stuck once you get out to the suburbs unless you have a car waiting for you.

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).

Most people who are driving on the Edens or Kennedy at this point are people who obviously can AFFORD to spend so much time sitting in traffic in exchange for the comforts and convenience of an auto.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe they have no choice. Getting to Union Station and getting dropped off at a Metra station in the burbs where you bought an extra car that is parked out there, just to get to work, may be asking way too much of your average commuter. Either way rationalizing it that they can "afford" to just sit in hours of traffic every day does nothing to solve the actual problem.

Highway engineers would blame the severe congestion on the city's decision not to build the Crosstown back in the 70s.

Yes. Is this on the table at all?

Turning the reversible lanes into HOV has been tossed around, but IDOT is resistant to the whole idea of HOV, so they've always dismissed it. Design-wise, it would be challenging to turn the reversible lanes into regular lanes, because of the Blue Line tracks. The configuration of inbound-reversible-tracks-outbound means that there are more lanes on the inbound side than the outbound, or vice versa; they can't be split evenly between the travel directions without completely rebuilding the Blue Line.

I've noticed this. But there is no such thing as "can't" in my book. It is always said by people who have given up it seems (not saying this is you personally). I have been told I can't do certain things my whole life and I always at least look for a solution and am able to find ways. When I've seen what they've done creatively with highways in Texas and California, building up rather than just out, I just can't take "can't" seriously when I come back here and none of the highways are three dimensional save for interchanges, and there are so many bottlenecks that are clearly outdated.

North of the junction, I don't think it's a good idea to widen the Kennedy or Edens. Both highways are 3 lanes deliberately, to reduce traffic volume to capacity levels that the junction, and the Kennedy south of it, can handle.

Why can't they widen the northbound only then? Northbound is backed up consistently at all hours of the day on the Kennedy (but rarely the Edens). So free up capacity there. It would keep 90/94 moving better, and the Kennedy widens to 4 lanes at Cumberland anyways. Clearly there is a disharmony in capacity demand and the highway demand for each is no longer equal. Is there some law that states you have to have equal lanes on both sides? Curious. I would think they could adjust for modern demand.

[ardecila]

Originally Posted by whyhuhwhy

In fact I don't even no a single person that lives in the Loop, everyone I know lives in some neighborhood nowhere near a Metra station. So in order to even leave the city they have to somehow get to a Metra station on the exact right line, which 9 times out of 10 probably means they need to get their ass to Union Station.

The Clinton Street Subway is designed to provide a direct connection to Union Station or Ogilvie for North, Northwest, and West Side residents.

What percent of jobs are centered around suburban Metra stations and are walkable, or near a Pace bus station.

Not many major employers are clustered near Metra stations, I will admit. However, I think people ought to pay a penalty if they choose a job that is too far from their home. Regardless of whether that person takes transit or drives, they are still doing something unsustainable. I realize that reverse-commuting has allowed for far more growth in the city than would be possible if everybody worked downtown, but there has to be a price.

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.

Since when does "moving to the suburbs" equal "encouraging sprawl"? If your friends have jobs on the urban frontier in Hampshire or Huntley or something, they REALLY shouldn't be living in the city. If they are moving to established suburbs like, say, Arlington Heights, then I don't see how that is encouraging sprawl. It's bringing new residents and money into towns that are increasingly making progressive choices about parks, bike trails, etc

Yes. Is this on the table at all?

Only as an exclusively-truck highway, to remove the fumes of trucks passing through from the Central Area.

Why can't they widen the northbound only then? Northbound is backed up consistently at all hours of the day on the Kennedy (but rarely the Edens). So free up capacity there. It would keep 90/94 moving better, and the Kennedy widens to 4 lanes at Cumberland anyways. Clearly there is a disharmony in capacity demand and the highway demand for each is no longer equal. Is there some law that states you have to have equal lanes on both sides? Curious. I would think they could adjust for modern demand.

Equal lanes makes sense. Everybody commuting one way in the morning commutes in the opposite direction in the afternoon.

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.

[VivaLFuego]

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.

[nomarandlee]

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.

[Marcu]

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego

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.

It won't get any worse, since there is a steady stream of Chicago residents who are pushed out to the suburbs just to avoid spending 10-15 hours a week commuting.

Originally Posted by ardecila

Not many major employers are clustered near Metra stations, I will admit. However, I think people ought to pay a penalty if they choose a job that is too far from their home. Regardless of whether that person takes transit or drives, they are still doing something unsustainable. I realize that reverse-commuting has allowed for far more growth in the city than would be possible if everybody worked downtown, but there has to be a price.

Most people don't "choose" a job in the traditional way we define choice. Once out in the workforce, most people quickly learn that the mutual choice theory of employment is for the most part myth. People do, however, choose where they live. Chicago is fortunate enough to appeal to people that are forced to work elsewhere, but choose to live here. I am not sure how penalizing them accomplishes anything, besides pushes people out to the suburbs. I guess it also contributes to smog, pollution, aggrevation, and a massive waste of time and money. As for working where one lives, not everyone in a metro area of 10 million people can live in Oakbrook, Schaumburg, O'Hare, or the Loop, and we're really not at a point where we can start to subdivide metro areas to resemble small, self-contained towns of 10,000 people.

[VivaLFuego]

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.

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by ardecila

The Clinton Street Subway is designed to provide a direct connection to Union Station or Ogilvie for North, Northwest, and West Side residents.

Cool. Any place to get information on this?

However, I think people ought to pay a penalty if they choose a job that is too far from their home. Regardless of whether that person takes transit or drives, they are still doing something unsustainable. I realize that reverse-commuting has allowed for far more growth in the city than would be possible if everybody worked downtown, but there has to be a price.

I strongly disagree. In fact I don't think I've ever met anyone that has the liberty in their field to choose exactly where they work. If they do, more power to them, but I think this is the exception not the rule. I am a physician and Radiology is a high demand field, and even I can't do that, and there are hospitals scattered all over the place. I took what I could get, and luckily this happened to be at Rush. Especially with today's economy, people find the best or many times the ONLY job that they can and they should not "pay a penalty" if they happen to find a job in the suburbs and they have a home in the city.

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.

Equal lanes makes sense. Everybody commuting one way in the morning commutes in the opposite direction in the afternoon.

Equal lanes only make sense if there is equal congestion, right? In the case of the Kennedy this is not true. Which is why we have express lanes in the first place, no?

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by VivaLFuego

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.

Even if you build all of the suburban Chicago jobs within walking distance of a Metra station, which will never happen, you still face the problem that transit from city to suburb is not multi-modal and people have to either get themselves on the right Metra line at the right time, or much more likely they have to face a second commute to the Loop just to get to Union Station in the first place! et's be real here. It's easy to talk about this stuff as a planner but can you imagine how bad that would suck on a daily basis? This is why the vast majority of reverse commuters drive and will continue to do so.

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.

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by Marcu

It won't get any worse, since there is a steady stream of Chicago residents who are pushed out to the suburbs just to avoid spending 10-15 hours a week commuting.

I agree. I think right now it is about as worse as it can possibly get and any added commuters will not even deal with it. If you watch gcmtravel.com, the entire north/west inbound system on any given afternoon is red all the way from Lake Cook and/or O'Hare to the Edens/Kennedy junction. Red = 0-15 mph. (!) So yes, we have a highway system that inbound on Edens and Kennedy is literally a parking lot every afternoon. I don't see how it could get much worse. I know personally if I had a job on the west or north side, that is the day I will have to say goodbye to my beloved city unfortunately because I will never put up with that.

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.

[emathias]

Originally Posted by whyhuhwhy

...
I strongly disagree. In fact I don't think I've ever met anyone that has the liberty in their field to choose exactly where they work. If they do, more power to them, but I think this is the exception not the rule. I am a physician and Radiology is a high demand field, and even I can't do that, and there are hospitals scattered all over the place. I took what I could get, and luckily this happened to be at Rush. ...

I've see the income info for doctors of radiology - if you're not willing to hold out for a good location, it's because you've placed a higher value on things other than your commuting lifestyle.

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.

[FlashingLights]

Originally Posted by emathias

I've see the income info for doctors of radiology - if you're not willing to hold out for a good location, it's because you've placed a higher value on things other than your commuting lifestyle.

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.

That is total bs most people people don't get to choose where they work. I can list a million scenarios that would force workers to work in the I-90 or 88 corridors in the suburbs. This thought that people (especially in the current economy) can be picky about where they work is insanity.

[ardecila]

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... ) 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.

[jpIllInoIs]

This thread is ridiculusly off topic since post #637.

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by emathias

I've see the income info for doctors of radiology - if you're not willing to hold out for a good location, it's because you've placed a higher value on things other than your commuting lifestyle.

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.

Excuse me? Income has nothing to do with job availability in my field. Some people in my field can't even get a job in ChicagoLAND period. And income has little to do with sitting in traffic. I can't buy my way out of the Edens and Kennedy junction mess so yes, if the only Radiology job in Chicagoland was in the suburbs, which many years is the case, I will have to move out of the city. And I think you forget how much debt doctors have. My medical education alone was over $200,000 on top of college debt, cost of living debt all those years making absolutely nothing, plus a residency that lasted 5 years where I made less than $50K/yr. I can't afford to "hold out" for anything. Maybe when I'm 50 years old.

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.

I am just amazed at some people on this forum who act like job location is a choice in the same vein as what brand of cereal to buy at the grocery store. If you can choose the location of your job that easily than consider yourself very lucky and the exception. I have many friends that have jobs in the suburbs that would love to have that "problem" of choosing between city and suburban locations. I have a friend who has been in insurance for 10 years now and just recently the only job he could find was in Tinley Park. Luckily for him he can live in the city because commuting on the Dan Ryan/I-57 is a breeze for reverse commuting.

[whyhuhwhy]

Originally Posted by ardecila

No it's not.

Yes, it is. I am curious how old you are and what field you are in where you can choose exactly where you work. Why do I get the feeling I am talking to college students.

It simply depends on what field you work in.

Yes, now we are getting somewhere. And it also depends on job availability too obviously. Which right now is horrible.

So Certain industries are comprised of hundreds of small firms.

...who are not always hiring. How many times have you applied for a job? I've applied for many over the years and have watched my friends apply for many. I haven't really seen anyone with multiple job offers and they got to choose exactly where they work.

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.

No you see healthcare choices have the widest variety of location, not the opposite. Technically I should have more choice than anyone because I work in a high demand field that has locations, like you said, geographically dispersed everywhere as is the nature of hospitals. Not sure where the word "limited" came in. Hospital locations are probably the most diverse group of employment centers we have in society.

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.

I think what it really comes down to is the people who are arguing to just choose where they work, like we live in some utopia, are just anti-highways. What else is new on this forum. I'm not even calling for widening though, I'm calling for a fix of a bottleneck of the junction and a reconfiguration of the express lanes. You can reconfigure things and come up with some creative solutions so that 6 lanes doesn't go into 4 every afternoon, especially when we have 4 shoulders to work with that aren't being used at the moment. I am one of those people that lives along that corridor BTW.

Now imagine instead a reliable Blue Line (we're almost there... ) 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.

Certainly won't work for my job when I have to be there on call in the middle of the night. And there are no "lightly traveled roads" in the suburbs of Chicago. We can already imagine a fantastic commuter rail and bus feeder system because that is what we have today relative to 99% of other metro areas. It's not like Chicago doesn't have a good commuter rail, transit, and bus feeder system already ardecila. What we do know is Chicago has the 2nd worst freeway-lane-per-capita ranking in the country (only Vegas is worst), has 3 of the top 10 bottlenecks by the TTI, and has a highway system specifically designed for bedroom suburban commuters only in a society that is no longer just that. It's not like Chicago lacks a good transit and bus feeder system. It is easily one of the best in the country and everyone I know that lives here has at least tried it.

[the urban politician]

^ Guys, wanna start a new thread to discuss this?

[Marcu]

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 )

[VivaLFuego]

Originally Posted by whyhuhwhy

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.

I just think it's incorrect to lay blame on the region's transit system, which was largely laid out in the latter half of the 19th century, for the issue of poor accessibility of suburban jobs. Of course a higher proportion of trips in lower-density areas such as suburbs will be made by automobile. The problem is decades of land use policies that made automobile trips the only attractive option in such areas. Transit is only cost-effective to build and operate (and, importantly, only environmentally-friendly) when it serves corridors with a high enough trip density to fill vehicles. Suburban land use policies have made trips so decentralized that cost-effective transit service just isn't an option. There's a certain point in the construction of an urbanized area where overall density is low enough and trip patterns so widely dispersed that the most efficient option is for everyone to drive - unfortunately many of Chicago's suburbs fit that description. For the cost of building and operating a transit network like you propose you could probably just buy everyone a new car instead, and probably pump fewer pollutants into the air than having empty buses running every which way.

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.

[hoosier]

With a decent HSR rail network, Chicago wouldn't need to expand O'Hare.

[arenn]

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.