CTA Tattler

What do they mean not easy to get to UIC from the pink line? Just hop off at Polk and grab a campus bus to the east campus - it stops (or stopped) right in front of the station. If you are a student or staff it's free.

UIC Grad...

"If you are a student or staff it's free."

And if you're not?...

Yea, coming from a user of said commuter bus, it comes twice an hour if that, and the harrison bus is even worse. It was much easier with the blue on 54/cermak

It's not a "commuter" bus, but a campus shuttle and it's more than every 1/2 hour. If you aren't staff or student, there's no real reason to go to UIC on a regular basis is there? The place where people need to get would be the UIC hospital which is served by the pink line and the blue line.

It's not a "commuter" bus, but a campus shuttle and it's more than every 1/2 hour. If you aren't staff or student, there's no real reason to go to UIC on a regular basis is there? The place where people need to get would be the UIC hospital which is served by the pink line and the blue line.

I think, frankly, that the UIC access claim just an excuse to try to keep an under-utilized service in place.

Ooops, sorry for the double-post, my browser in all it's wisdom crashed as I posted.

It might well be a good idea to eliminate this branch of the blue line, but the CTA is playing fast and loose with statistics to justify it.

For example, they told the Tribune that there are only 10 riders per car on these blue line trains, compared to 30 riders per car on pink line trains at the same time of day.

But, uh, don't the blue line trains have 8 cars while the pink line trains have only 4? Correcting for this, that means the disparity is really more like 20 riders vs. 30 riders.

Now, take into account that the CTA crippled the line's usefulness by having it only run every 30 minutes. 30! Other than the owl buses that run in the wee hours of the morning, I don't think there's any transit line in the CTA that operates so infrequently. The pink line, by contrast, runs like every 12 seconds. That huge headway means you need to build a tremendous amount of extra time into your commute in order to take the blue line.

If the CTA truly wanted to know which route was more useful to people, they would have run them at equivalent headways for a time. Then, after people adjust to having both options, you could make a meaningful assessment of which was preferable.

Instead, the CTA decided to get rid of this line years ago but didn't have the balls to just say whatever their reasons were. So instead they concocted this silly reduced service idea on the blue line to make it look like "ridership" justifies eliminating the route.

If they wanted to eliminate the blue line, they should have just said so an not wasted resources providing a blue line service that was *designed* to be underutilized.

Irk is absolutely right that CTA has been looking to eliminate the Cermak Blue Line from the start. Adding the Pink Line has always been about laying the groundwork for the Circle Line (rehabilitating the Paulina connector was "phase one" of the Circle Line). Meanwhile the CTA ignores or puts off projects like the Mid-City Transitway http://razetheladder.blogspot.com/2007/02/paving-over-mid-city-transitway.html and extensions to the Red, Orange, and Yellow Lines, which should be a much bigger priorities than the Circle Line.

But making the Cermak branch its own line also made it easier to increase service since more runs didn't have to come at the expense of the Forest Park branch, and as a result the Cermak branch has seen a big ridership gain. I guess the question is whether this was really the only way to increase service.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were trains running from everywhere to everywhere? Yeah. Why not have some Lake trains head out to Midway. Or some trains from the Green line's south branches out to Ravenswood, or even to Evanston?

Why? Because it's a waste of resources.

Once the Pink started, Blue service to 54-Cermak should have been discontinued. Allowing token service to the Blue line was nothing more than a compromise in which no one won.

It's not like we're talking about abandoning service. There's more service on the 54-Cermak branch now than there was when it was only Blue.

Just because there's now a destination that is no longer a single-seat ride away doesn't mean the change isn't a good change overall. Any change is going to inconvienience someone. And those few people are just going to have to deal with it that their sacrafice is for the overall good.

Those are some awesome ideas in your first paragraph. How about routing Yellow Line trains to Midway? That would be very convenient for people trying to get to Midway from Skokie!

It'll just end up being Brown anyway, it's sitting in a plan, where Brown runs from Kimball to 54/Cermak via inner loop SB and outer loop NB. Also, Orange line Midway to Kimball runs via Van Buren/Wells. Yes, this means every other train out of Kimball will head in different directions after Merchandise Mart. Oh yeah, the same plan places the Purple Express in the State street subway, too.

Wait for the finish of the Brown line rehab, (pretty much Belmont and Fullerton SB stations) for this scenario to play out. The biggest benefit is a reduction of train traffic on the loop by having green on one side, orange on the other, and brown/(former)pink through routed.

As long as you're catching up, when are you going to post about the big proposal for Cook-Dupage transit expansion that came out last month?

Here's my own comments, with the relevant links:
http://razetheladder.blogspot.com/2008/03/expanding-to-west.html

The public comment period ends March 31.

John T., is this speculation, or is this fact? Where can I find that information?

Actually, although it's kind of pie-in-the-sky to hope that the CTA would do anything so creative, I think John T's post raises an interesting kind of idea. One of the irritating drawbacks to Chicago's train system is that several of the lines (brown, pink, orange) stop in the dead center of the city and then turn around and retrace their steps. Instead of an orange line, why not have alternate brown and pink line trips head to midway? This might entail switching which trains travel along which legs of the Loop in which directions, in order to keep Loop service balanced. But overall, the increase in connectivity would be substantial.

Of course any innovation comes with some downsides (just like the pink line entailed a reduction in service for some people), but on balance trains covering more ground would be a significant improvement.

Or at a minimum, some sort of combined, longer route late at night could be a reasonably economical way of providing late night service.

It is speculation based on this article and a map listed below:

"CTA officials envision inbound trains--starting in this initial phase--traveling on the Douglas Branch over the connector and along the Green Line. When they reached downtown, trains could turn south on Wells rather than go straight along Lake. They would start acting like Brown Line trains.

Another possibility: Purple Line trains south of Fullerton could be moved into the State Street subway, so they would share the tunnel with the Red Line. Also, the Orange Line could continue north from downtown following the current Brown Line route all the way to Kimball."

Article:
http://www.chicago-l.org/articles/CircleLine.html

Map:
http://www.transitchicago.com/news/newspostdescs/120700.gif
(click on map to enlarge)

Interesting to note that the Diversey stop(and assumed Wellington-off map) gets served by Orange and Brown lines, but not by Purple and Red. Seems like Purple would then go on tracks 2 and 3 from Belmont South through the State Street Subway.

Of course none of this could possibly work unless all Brown line stations could handle 8 cars and Belmont and Fullerton were back to 4 tracks. Again, just speculation.

Interesting, John. Thanks for the links. This would seem to streamline things, but I am sure it would anger others because they may have to make an additional transfer somewhere.

From a revenue point of view, I've always wondered if the CTA has fully explored the potential for special train routes that might charge a higher fare and generate much-needed farebox revenue.

For example, would people pay $5 or $10 for a single-seat express ride from Skokie to Midway? During non-rush periods, a train could go nonstop from Skokie to Howard to Belmont to Fullerton, and then run local to Midway. (Depending on the means for collecting the higher fare, it might make sense to just run nonstop to Midway at some point after Fullerton, even though it wouldn't consistently save time due to the lack of express tracks beyond that point.) If this were offered as a scheduled hourly service, that might concentrate demand sufficiently.

I don't know how much in fare a two-car train would have to collect to break even, but even simply doing better than the average farebox recovery will be helpful to the CTA at some point in the near future, once the farebox recovery requirements start going up. (As part of the new transit funding law, I believe there's a temporary, and diminishing, exemption of a certain amount of state funding that the CTA does not need to match with revenue. At some point, if fare revenues don't start increasing substantially, this will make fare increases necessary in order to continue collecting the same amount of state funding.)

Just a thought.

If you ran the purple express through the state street subway, where would you have it turn around? inside the subway? after roosevelt? that time of day there is no way the driver can hustle fast enough to the other end of the train to go backwards without messing with everyone

Although merging the brown and pink would make sense I don't see the orange line extending being anything more than a pain.

What I want to see next is the Yellow Line extended to the mall. Then I might take it. And (pipe dream) some way to get from say Howard to O'Hare without having to go downtown. It is quicker to get to midway than o'hare (although MDW tends to be much better at keeping planes on time)

Merging the brown and pink lines would actually make a good deal of sense. It would eliminate a transfer in the Loop for people traveling from points on the pink line to points on the brown line (or vice versa). For everyone else, the train would be indistinguishable from the existing brown/pink line route they currently travel.

From Kimball, the train would follow the current brown line route to and around the Loop, but then rather than heading north to Merchandise Mart, it would continue west on Lake to Clinton and the rest of the current Pink Line route. From 54/Cermak, it would do the reverse.

This would not require any change in the number of trains in service at any one time. (The combined route would cover the same distance and the same stations.) The only potential downside is that the CTA might not have enough equipment to have 8-car trains throughout the existing brown and pink lines. Right now they just use 4-car trains on the pink line, I think.

During rush periods, since the frequency on the brown line is almost double that on the pink line, perhaps only every other train from Kimball would proceed to 54/Cermak. The other half could just operate as the current brown line does.