Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
^ One other point I'd like to make--again, this is weak anecdotal crap, but I want to bounce it off you to see what you think.
Currently I own a car here in Queens. I live within a 5 minute walk of the subway. There is a shopping mall about 2 miles away with a huge garage that fits plenty of cars (for a small charge), but it's also near a subway stop. I drove there twice, but now I've decided it will probably be more convenient to just take transit. Plus, I already have a paid for parking space at my job (which is NOT in Manhattan), but I've chosen to take the subway there every day instead.
That's just me, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other people would make such a choice. In Chicago, for example, even with car ownership in place, I can imagine that at least some people living in the WLCO-fied west loop would consider taking a train to North/Clybourn instead of driving if they had a quicker option, such as the Circle Line, no?
In other words, transit is about density, but it's also about selling itself as an alternative to driving. Even when parking is abundant, driving can still be a hassle--traffic congestion, rude drivers, the fear of getting into an accident (especially in a big city), the cost of parking in a garage, etc. We talk about "free parking", but I think that eventually the market will force property owners to charge money to use their garage. I'm betting that the underground garage in the Roosevelt Collection won't be entirely free (although it may be so in the beginning)
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You raise some valuable points. Of course, a significant aspect of transit utilization is cultural, which is quickly evident to anyone who has visited any of the Canadian metropolises, which are built similarly to American cities but have much better transit utilization. That culture comes into play when people like you or I will generally default to making a trip by transit, and using a car only when it's really absolutely necessary. But I still feel economics is the driver, in aggregate, in determining mode choice. Even with similar auto ownership rates as the US, Canada has greater taxes on driving, increasing the cost of not only auto ownership, but auto
use (through higher gasoline taxes). People can argue all day about what the appropriate tax would be, but most people who've reseached the topic feel that driving is undertaxed in the US, meaning that each marginal auto trip costs the user a perceived amount less than that trip is actually costing the system, thus driving, in aggregate, is overconsumed. We can even express your and my love for transit-use in economic terms, in that we get a certain utility from taking a train or bus as opposed to driving; but of course that's hardly the norm.
What all that mumbo-jumbo means is that transit in the US is at a disadvantage as a mode choice right off the bat. Further, your situation (where there is a very equal mode choice equation between driving and transit for your shopping and work trips, each with pros and cons) is a situation that is much more common in NYC than it is in Chicago. You're right that some people would use the Circle Line for trips to North/Clybourn. But with ample cheap/free parking, the vast majority of trips to North/Clybourn arrive by car (and a majority are coming from the Northside anyhow), unlike the shopping districts of the Loop or Mag Mile, where parking is basically impossible for less than $15-20. And of course, those areas get great transit mode share.
I never bought that the Circle line would be useful as a crosstown route to save travel time, since it involves adding an extra transfer into those trips when you're only a few minutes outside of downtown anyway (assume no slow zones and frequent service). However, the Circle Line could be an incredible project if it not only became a new locus of trip generation (with two-way traffic during both peak periods), but also had
regional buy-in, by which I mean the RTA forcing Metra to co-operate: It would provide a distribution system, directly linking up with every Metra Line, to most major downtown destinations.
The current course of events seems to suggest neither of those will happen, so I can't say a project that will only increase the burden on CTA's paltry operating and capital budgets is a good idea. Hopefully the New Starts process could be guided to provide some basic accessibiliy improvements to the existing system: rather than $1-2 billion on a whole new line, add some infill stations in key locations (18th/Cermak Green, United Center, Division/Brown), improve the transfer connections (State/Lake, Jackson/Library, Medical Center?), and improve the bus facilities along Ashland and Western to implement some features of BRT (signal priority, next-bus LED signs, large information boards, landmark/pylons etc.) for the X49 and X9.
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