CTA Tattler

The new Howard station entrance is typical CTA incompetent station design!
If you enter at street level, you have to go up & over the tracks & then go down, thus taking a longer time to get to your train.
And if you're stupid enough to exit that way, you go up to go down.
A lot like the bizarrely designed old IC station at 12th St. that was torn down without a single protest years ago.

Brown Line question: On the Sedgwick and Armitage stations, they have put up really ugly wooden things blocking off the former auxiliary entrances (Hudson and the other side of Armitage, respectively). Are there plans for the contractor to go back in and make those into functioning auxiliary entrances or exits once they finish the main work on all the stations?

I looked at the construction schedule and it had a line for "Station construction (Hudson)," but no work scheduled, so I didn't know if that line was just left over from previous work.

Actually, the CTA mentions only elevators at Howard, not escalators.

I took the escalators.
They're there!

UCC,
I would guess the odd design for handicap-accessible access from the new entrance has more to do with the difficulty (cost) in excavating the embankment for direct stairs/escalators/elevators, so up-and-over was the only feasible design given an already expensive and long-overdue project. I don't think idiocy/incompetence plays into it except inasmuch as you disagree with spending priorities.

Wrong, anonymous!
The idiots at the CTA did the same thing with a number of L stations on Lake St.
To go westbound, you enter the eastbound side & have to go up & over.

And this is where I expand on the incompetence of the CTA in both the Fullerton & Howard station reconstructions.

At Fullerton, there used to be a library & tennis courts just west of the tracks.
The library was moved west to Racine & DePaul built a new building there.
Since the CTA knew for years that it was going to have to rebuild Fullerton to make it ADA compliant, a sensible agency would have notified DePaul that it was taking 10 feet of their property by eminent domain so that track 1 could be moved west for a wider SB platform.
But the CTA never did this & has had to spend far more money to move three tracks over [tracks 2,3,4] rather than two tracks outward [tracks 1& 4].

Now to Howard.
This is even worse as the CTA owned all the land & still let the parking & retail be built right up to the embankment.
As for the cost of excavating the embankment out, just look at the cost of the rehabs of the subway stations.
Again, they should have reserved space to move tracks outward.

The cost of running the extra escalators comes from operating funds, not a matched capital grant from the feds who don't fund operations.

No, the CTA is incompetent at station design.

And the bus layout at Howard is a disaster, you walk & walk & walk to change buses.

"...a sensible agency would have notified DePaul that it was taking 10 feet of their property by eminent domain so that track 1 could be moved west for a wider SB platform."

In a magical world where the legal fees needed to challenge DePaul's inevitable lawsuit didn't need to be paid, you might have a point.

"...And the bus layout at Howard is a disaster,"

Please, I use the Howard terminal on a frequent basis myself, and it's nowhere near a "disaster." It's never occurred to me that it's even inconvenient. It's a slightly (emphasis on 'slightly') awkward design due to the limitations on available space, that's all. And even that only really comes into place if you're transferring from the 147 or 206 to the 22.

And I'd rather have that slightly awkward design instead of bulldozing the Gateway center and/or the parking garage in order to make room to sit all the bus stops side by side.

Big, big fan of the completed Armitage Station - a vast improvement over the old one.

What's this I hear about escalators at Fullerton and at Belmont? On both platforms? Where are they going to let out?

All that was necessary at Howard was to have the buses go under the Gateway Center & the parking garage.
It's incredibly inconvenient for those changing buses.
Plus there's no roof over the #22 stops area.
Stupid, stupid design.

As for the need for lots of expensive lawyers to fight DePaul.
DePaul let the CTA tear down the Hayes-Healy gym without a whimper.
All that was necessary would have been to let DePaul build out over the rebuilt L tracks, just like Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital has built over the Douglas L from Harrison St. south to almost Polk St.

What's needed at the CTA are executives with foresight, architects with talent & the one thing missing for all CTA projects, plain old common sense!

"It's incredibly inconvenient for those changing buses."

There you go again with the hyperbole. "Incredibly" inconvenient? In what way is it so incredible? I agree that the #22 and #215 stops should have a roof, but I still fail to see how that's any more than garden-variety inconvenient. I just don't see the ungodly hardship that you apparently do. You act like it's two miles between buses, but it's really just a couple hundred feet at most.

"DePaul let the CTA tear down the Hayes-Healy gym without a whimper."

I question your facts here. From Chicago-L.org:

"the Hayes-Healy gym was named one of Chicago's "Seven Most Endangered Buildings" by the Preservation Chicago advocacy group. DePaul, meanwhile, did not seem to particularly care to keep the building, but did have trouble agreeing to a sale price with the CTA®. After four years of negotiation and litigation between CTA® and DePaul University, a condemnation verdict was issued by the court arbitrator on November 9, 2005 requiring CTA® to pay DePaul $3.85 million for the buildings. In the end, DePaul had lost out: the CTA® had initially offered $7 million for the buildings; DePaul had sought $11 million."

Four years of negotiation and litigation? That's "without a whimper" to you?

"All that was necessary would have been to let DePaul build out over the rebuilt L tracks"

You do not have the first clue whether DePaul would have been interested in this arrangement or not.

All of your arguments are garbage.
The lack of a roof for the Clark & 215 buses at Howard is insanity & shows a basic lack of common sense in design & lack of consideration to those passengers.
And a couple of hundred feet is a burden for those that can only walk with difficulty!

The fact that DePaul negotiated & sued over 4 years is irrelevant when you consider that DePaul didn't challenge the $3.85 million award in the appellate courts, which I consider "without a whimper".
It was the preservation community that screamed over Hayes-Healy, not DePaul. DePaul just wanted money, not the land.
Lengthy negotiations involving eminent domain are nothing new, they're very common, as the first offer is usually a low-ball joke. In this case, the joke was on DePaul for turning down an offer 40% higher than the court award.
And 4 years of negotiations proves that both the CTA & DePaul knew that Fullerton was going to be rebuilt & needed a larger footprint for years earlier, certainly before the current Centennial Hall & Sullivan Athletic Center were designed & built on the former public library & tennis court properties.

The CTA is burdened with managers who don't have any brains & board members that never ride the trains or buses & have no idea what a mess the system is. The CTA is now stuck with yet another idiotic kink in the North Side Mainline tracks for another 100 years, as that fool Kreusi refused to get rid of the Diversey kink during the Brown Line reconstruction. He said the $25 million to eliminate it was absurd.
Not so absurd when you see all the money down the Block 37 station toilet.

"The lack of a roof for the Clark & 215 buses at Howard is insanity"

Insanity? You just can't stop with the hyperbole, can you?

"The fact that DePaul negotiated & sued over 4 years is irrelevant when you consider that DePaul didn't challenge the $3.85 million award in the appellate courts, which I consider "without a whimper"."

I'm calling b.s. on you here. This is just about the weakest rationalization to your original statement you could have come up with. Why do I get the feeling that you had no idea they spent four years haggling over this before I pointed it out?

"The CTA is now stuck with yet another idiotic kink in the North Side Mainline tracks for another 100 years, as that fool Kreusi refused to get rid of the Diversey kink during the Brown Line reconstruction. He said the $25 million to eliminate it was absurd."

This is just ranting and raving. The Diversey kink and Block 37 have nothing to do with the topics at hand.

Besides, I'd agree that $25 million to fix that IS absurd. Of all the things that need fixing in the system, why on earth would that be a $25 million priority?

strannix, I appreciate your reality-based perspective, but UC is the Bill O'Reilly of this site, happy to shout you down with whatever he makes up because being loud is more fun (and more visible) than being right. You didn't even call him out on "All that was necessary at Howard was to have the buses go under the Gateway Center & the parking garage," which is one of the stupidest things I've ever read here, and he still took his club out and started swinging.

[You didn't even call him out on "All that was necessary at Howard was to have the buses go under the Gateway Center & the parking garage,"]

Because I had no earthly idea what that even meant. An underground bus terminal, maybe? Or maybe building the retail and parking above the terminal, like the hospitals built over the L track in his example above? Who knows?

Yes I meant a bus terminal with the parking garage over it.
It's everywhere in Europe & Asia & a few places in this country.

Do you really want, I mean REEEEAALLLY want a dank, dark, enclosed bus terminal at....Howard Street?

Why does a covered bus terminal have to be dark & dank?
It doesn't if a talented architect does the job.
Just like the rehabbed subway stations that aren't dark or dank.
Or the subway stations in many other cities.

There are plenty of kinks, some of them Kruesi's fault, that are far more serious than Diversey, where the trains barely have to slow down. For example, the following all require serious slow down:

1. North and south of Addison Red Line.
2. The Brown Line slalom from Chicago to Armitage
3. The planning disaster that is Sheridan Red Line. Just how many rehabbed buildings will they have to demolish when that station is redone, or will they just close it?
4. The nasty little instant change in direction on the Montrose bridge just south of Wilson Red Line.
5. Most inexcusable of all, the kink on the Ogden Bridge on the Paulina Connector, which was left as it was despite total reconstruction a few years ago.

Dishonorable mention:

Why, at Midway Airport, did the put the railyard close to the airport and the station inconveniently far away? Any chance of reversing the two?