If only buildings of this height and density were encouraged to be the minimum standard within 2 blocks of all "L" stations. That would be 16 square blocks per station, or 1/4 of a square mile.
There are 144 stations, but even if we account for stations that are closer than 4 blocks apart, there must be about 120 stations that could reasonably be surrounded by dense buildings. If they were strongly encouraged and enabled to be surrounded with densities similar to the *average* density of a mid-sized European central city (for this example, let's just say 48,000 per square mile, or about 12,000 people within 2 blocks of each station), leaving plenty of space for lower-density areas in the city. If we just did that, we'd have a minimum of 1.5 million people within an easy walk of existing train stations. Currently, I believe that number is only about 450,000. Imagine how much healthier the CTA would be if it could triple it's train ridership base population. And that could be done without skyscrapers, just with buildings a lot like this one.
Add a few infill stations, end up with two, even three times as many people near some of the stations, and you could easily end up with over 2 million people being within walking distance of existing rails. With that much more ridership, the CTA could add a line or two in dense areas to relieve congestion, and ridership would probably increase more than in just a linear fashion. Densities like that would probably result in overall ridership along the lines of six times what it is now in the long run. You're probably thinking: The brown line and Red Line are already too crowded, how the hell will we manage that?
But that's the point - the Brown and Red Line already have a lot of stations with about 12,000 people within an easy walk. The real growth would be on lines that don't currently have high ridership. The Pink Line, the Green Line, the Orange Line all have enough capacity to absorb significant ridership increases. I've seen 4-car trains running on the Pink Line at rush hour. We'd need more train cars, and maybe new signals to enable 90-second headways on some lines and probably 30-second headways on the Loop, but it's not like they'll all show up overnight - we'd have time to work it out.
Much more money for operations, as trains would run fuller, more often, and we'd get a big boost in population - the city would be able to absorb something on the order of a million people in just 30 square miles of area, without bothering all those 2-flat, single-family-home NIMBY types in the balance of the 200 square miles (okay, so we'd have to work out something with Oak Park and Evanston, etc).
As an example, Toronto's city density is about 50% higher than Chicago's, yet it's subway ridership on a per-station basis is nearly 100% higher than Chicago's. There are other, more complex reasons for that, but a big part of it is that Toronto encourages density near its subway stations.
Where Metra stations and "L" stations are in close proximity, this would benefit Metra, too. And keeping density confined to islands helps keep cars off the road, and helps keep buses flowing nicely in the rest of the city.
Where would be get all these extra urbanites? If we're smart, we'd get most of the new Chicagoans from foreign immigration - people from places where people already know how to live in high densites. We could continue to attract Americans of course, but we're about 600,000 immigrants shy of being as internationally diverse as New York and LA are, so if we managed to get to parity there and continue to attract more Americans, we'd be there.
As a 40-year plan, I think it could work. A million new residents by "L" stations, maybe a a couple hundred thousand more filling in the empty spots in the bungalow belt, and we could be over 4 million just in the city proper by 2050, and arranged in a completely sustainable, livable way.
When is it my turn to be King? ;-)
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Originally Posted by spyguy
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