Quote:
Originally Posted by twister244
Light rail / streetcars sounds sexy, but CTA has no modern experience with this, so would that be a hindrance?
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Neither did Milwaukee, or Cincinnati, or Kansas City. It's well established technology and CTA can turn to outside companies for expertise if they don't want to build it in-house.
Apart from higher capacity and a better ride quality, the main difference in my mind is that a streetcar system would require a maintenance building and yard near the North Branch corridor, so CTA would need to buy a decent size chunk of land. They can get creative, though - Portland put their streetcar shop
under an expressway, so basically free land that's not competing with private development. Chicago has a similar area under the Kennedy by the end of the 606, but if IDOT won't cooperate there are plenty of other open sites. They would also need maybe 2 or 3 electric substations on smaller sites for the overhead power.
The downside is that the North Branch corridor is mostly old rail ROW or side streets, but if they want to extend the system beyond the North Branch (I think extensions to Fullerton Red/Purple, and Western Blue are warranted) there is limited space on arterial streets and there will be a big temptation to run them as mixed-traffic instead of dedicated lanes. This would be slow and vulnerable to disruption.