CTA Tattler

"The gray line has become the gold line, Jake?"

The Gold line proposal is a partial implementation of the entire Gray line conversion proposal. It does not include the far south side of the city and the Blue Island branch, only the South Shore branch. It has the advantage of having a higher level of public support than the rest of the conversion.

It would serve a number of important Olympic locations with rapid transist service, including McCormic Place and the proposed Olympic Village, and therefore help Chicago get the Olympics. And it could be quickly implemented and therefore would qualify as a "shovel ready" infrastructure project for the stimulus. Kenwood resident Barak Obama would undoubtedly be favorably inclined toward this particular stimulus project.

If one is attempting to make an argument, it generally is not a good idea to incorrectly spell the first name of the President of the United States. In any case, I'm completely confused by what you are trying to say. There already is mass transit service in the area you are mentioning. If they want to add service for the olympics they easilly can do so by borrowing a few trainsets. It is not neccessary to permanently convert an entire portion of a train line from one system to another simply to increase capacity for a two week event. Furthermore, this is not remotely shovel-ready. Do you even know what shovel-ready means? There are tons of planning steps that would need to occur before their would be any ability to begin construction. The purpose of the stimulas plan is to stimulate the economy in the short term (hence the word stimulus). This would not come close to doing that. Even Jake says there must first be a feasibility study on the project. That would take at minimum around a year. And, of course, the biggest problem is that the money would be spent on something that wouldn't substantually improve transit service for anybody. There already is a rail line there, after all.

You also should notice that Barack Obama is not a "Kenwood resident" anymore. He lives in the White House in Washington D.C. So I wouldn't really agree with you that he would neccessarally be likely to support this. If anything, he would probably want to make sure it doesn't look like he is favoring projects that are so close to his former home.

"Even tho it's configured for rapid transit service, Metra runs it as commuter rail - which is what requires so many CTA buses to duplicate the service."

Jake. Jake. Jake. I'm sure you have been reading the discussions here about the possibility of combining the #36 and the #151. I think you can figure out that any effort to remove any bus routes deemed duplicative is going to be met by angry protests. In fact, given the area there will no doubt be charges of racism. The transit agencies just are not going to elimanate bus routes or cut any service. At least not unless something extreame forces them to. At the time that the 3-tracking project bagan on the brown line, Metra added some service to the UP North in order allow for more rush hour travel capacity for the area during the project. As you know, the project has now been completed for months. But guess what? That added Metra service still exists and there is no sign that they plan to end it. This despite the fact that it makes no sense in normal times. Most Metra trains on the line now make all or nearly all stops on the north side and in Evanston. And despite this, there are other trains operating within a few minutes of these that travel only a few suburbs outside of the city. This made sense during the brown line project. It doesn't now. But it isn't going away because transit officials don't ever have the courage to stop service, only to start it. And when they run out of money they just complain that there is a structural funding problem and they place their hands out begging the politicians to give them something, as if they were homeless people on the street. Not to mention that worthwhile new service doesn't get started because decisions are never made to get rid of routes that may have made sense at one time but don't now.

So that is why it is naive of you to believe that money could be saved by elimanating the bus routes even if they were duplicative. But another problem with your idea is the fact that the routes actually wouldn't be duplicative. We discussed this before at length, I'm sure you recall. Heck, I'll link you to the exact post: http://www.ctatattler.com/2008/08/radiohead-repre.html?cid=125560246#comment-125560246 So it is not persuasive to argue that there is any chance that any efficiancies will be created or any money will be saved from the grey line (or the "gold line").

Do you have any actual data on the UP North Line? The expansion of the timetables happened at a time when the Edens expressway was under major construction and gas prices where sky high.

Anyways, elimination of some buses wouldn't be such a bad thing. It's a heck of a lot better than having private cars on the road, but buses still clog up streets. We've talked about the possibility of a subway on the north side, to serve the area east of the red line.

[If one is attempting to make an argument, it generally is not a good idea to incorrectly spell the first name of the President of the United States.]

Why do you persist in pointing out others' spelling and grammar mistakes? Here are some of your misspellings just in the two comments above:

Post 1: easilly, their, stimulas, substantually, neccessarally

Post 2: elimanate, extreame, bagan, elimanating, efficiancies

But you spelled "Barack" correctly, at least. You're the man!

[I'm sure you have been reading the discussions here about the possibility of combining the #36 and the #151. I think you can figure out that any effort to remove any bus routes deemed duplicative is going to be met by angry protests.]

Why do you persist in acting like a child about this? No one "angrily protested" your proposal. We argued against it because it was poorly reasoned, likely counter-productive, had ill-defined goals, was generally thoughtless and made no sense at all.

I SAY THIS AGAIN: NO ONE DISAGREES WITH YOU BECAUSE OF A REFLEXIVE AVERSION TO SERVICE CUTS. PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH YOU BECAUSE THEY THINK *THIS PARTICULAR PROPOSAL* IS IDIOTIC.

I have seen no evidence that anyone who comments here is militaristically against service cuts. And I've seen no evidence that anyone at the CTA or other levels of authority are lacking "courage" to cut service if need be. In fact, you may notice the ongoing threats to institute drastic service cuts due to funding shortfalls.

What I have noticed, however, is a reluctance to cut service through areas that are densely populated and heavily traveled. The reasons for this reluctance are perfectly understandable, and even obvious, to seemingly all persons other than you.

MK, I enjoyed arguing with you at first, in much the same way that I've enjoyed the back-and-forth with KevinB. As time has gone on, however, I've come to see you as reactionary, supercilious, and even dishonest. You seem incapable of having an argument in good faith.

And now that you've begun constantly restarting old arguments in new threads, you exhibit all the hallmarks of being a troll, and a particularly tiresome troll at that. I wish that you would modify your behavior and be more reasonable, but failing that, I hope you get bored soon and move on.

FWIW, there's a bus company that runs tourist buses and, I think, regional transportation, here and in many other cities, called Gray Line. So it wasn't a good idea to call any proposal that to begin with.

"It ought to be fairly straightforward to upgrade Metra Electric to CTA levels of frequency. The authorities can take a trip over to London and see how they've done it on South side commuter services there (most lines south of the Thames are regular commuter rail but on 'el type frequency, and they all have turnstiles now)."

You've obviously never been there either; they are ALL grade separated, which allow rapid transit frequency, which the S. Chicago branch would not do. Did I just read you want a conversion to LIGHT rail, which has even lower capacity too?

"Why do you persist in pointing out others' spelling and grammar mistakes? Here are some of your misspellings just in the two comments above:"

Obviously, some of those were typos (like "bagan") and others simply resulted from the fact that I am probably not as careful as I should be with my spelling. In the latter instances, the spelling mistakes are not really on the same level as misspelling the first name of the President of the United States. I noticed the "bagan" typo directly after I posted and had a feeling you were going to bring it up. I suppose I should proofread my posts more. The reason I don't is because after typing something for several minutes I tend to be worried there is going to be some sort of computer malfunctan (yes, probably spelled that wrong) that will erase everything I typed. So I have a tendency to press the post button as soon as possible.

I really don't know why the notion keeps coming up that I am the one who overreacted to an opinion simply because I disagreed with it. In that thread, I expressed my opinion that it might make sense to combine those two routes. I did so basically as an aside to another point I was making. And I certainly din't state the opinion in an arrogant manner. I expected that if there was going to be any reaction to the suggestion that it would be about the merits. Something like "That doesn't make sense for such and such reasons" or "yes, I see how that would provide for better travel options" or "a better idea might be to do b".

But that is not what occured. Instead, you immedietely called the idea "lunacy" without stating anything about why the specific route change wouldn't make sense. This was your first post on the thread before I had said anything to you. Later, Kiel (also before I said anything to him) instead of attacking the merits of my suggestion called my reasoning "bizarre" and/or "strange". Later, after I stated that, in my opinion, "roughly" a certain percentage of people would have better travel options as a result of the change you accused me of "pulling a stat out of my ass". We then had a lengthy argument where every time I tried to use reasoning I was attacked personally and told I was stating things I wasn't. You guys spent a great deal of time arguing things that were completely beside the point, such as the definition of busy and the total ridership a route receives without taking into account the length of the route and where people get on and off. Only after more than a dozen posts about the topic did one of you finally start to argue with my suggestion on the merits.

I will point out that most of that was Keil, not you. Keil also explicitly stated that any restrucuring of bus service that would result in any reduction should never occur unless it was underperforming. So I suppose it might not neccessarally be correct to lump you in with Keil in my opinion about the tendancy of people to be averse to these types of changes.

Again, THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT ONE CAN BE AGAINST MY SUGGESTION WITHOUT HAVING A REFLEXIVE AVERSION TO SERVICE CUTS. There are legitimate reasons to be opposed to it. But you guys didn't argue about the merits, at least not until around three-querters of the way through the discussion. So that is what caused me to form my opinion about your reasoning for being against it. I could be wrong . I am more likely to be wrong about you than Keil. But I very well could be wrong about what caused both of you to have that reaction. Interpreting peoples views about something based on internet posts is not a perfect science. But after you called my idea "lunacy" while only using general reasoning about crowded buses without being specific about my proposal I was more likely to assume you were not really reacting to my specific proposal. You stated you argued against it because "it was poorly reasoned, likely counter-productive, had ill-defined goals, was generally thoughtless and made no sense at all". Well, you spent very little if any time arguing specifically why you belived those things. And I'm not sure that saying my idea was "generally thoughtless" is the best idea when you are attempting to put yourself on higher ground in terms of the ability to tolerate other people's opinions.

I'm sorry that you think that I am "acting like a child". I brought this up here because I felt it illustrated something worthwhile in terms of the discussion in this thread. Jake made a suggestion and I felt that the argument we had provided support that his idea is is more likely to hit roadblocks than he apparently believes. I was not trying to rub your face in anything. I've brought this up a couple of other times in the past week because I also thought it was relevant to the topic on hand. For example, I believe this is something that absolutely should be considered to save neccessary money with the discovery that the CTA has a huge deficit. I think the more things that could be done in a quick manner the worse the pain there might be later on. It is not a matter of "contantly resarting old arguments".

I probably did overstate it a bit when I said that transit officials can never make cuts for the purpose of increasing efficiancy. That does sometimes happen. When the CTA restarted weekend service on the 54th Cermack Blue Line (now the Pink Line) they elimanated a bus intended for the time that there was no rail service. There were some protests but this was able to occur. My point is that there is a tendency for people to have an averse reaction to any change (again, I don't know 100% for sure whether that describes you) even when the positives dramatically outweigh the negatives. Because transit leaders dislike bad publicitly this reduces the amount of times they are able restructure routes in order to make improvements. And I think this is unfortunate.

Rueben,

Metra made two expansions of the UP North line in the past few years. The one you mentioned occured last summer and only affected the weekend. The changes I mentioned occured at the time the three-tracking began and generally affected rush-hour service. Here is the schedule: http://metrarail.com/Sched/cnw_n/cnwn.shtml

Trains were added that served the purpose of mostly providing more service to those in the area served by the brown line, red line, and purple line. And stops were added to other trains in those places. There is too much service there compared with express service to the farther suburbs. There needs to be more of that both in the peak direction and, even more so, with reverse commute trains. But, as I indicated, transit agencies have a tendancy not to increase service by reducing it at times it is less needed. Instead, they complain that they don't have enough money. So it takes years, if at all, for them to add something that clearly makes sense. It is ridiculous, for example, that there are no reverse commute express trains to and from places such as Lake Forest and Highland Park (except very early in the morning).

"You also should notice that Barack Obama is not a "Kenwood resident" anymore. He lives in the White House in Washington D.C."

Obama still owns the house in Kenwood, visited it recently and has indicated that he intends to return from time to time. In addition that is still his legal residence and in the next election the precinct in which his Kenwood house is located is where he will cast his vote, not at the White House location.

I most passionately repent of the mortal sin of having misspelled his name.

"they are ALL grade separated, which allow rapid transit frequency, which the S. Chicago branch would not do."

The final segments of the brown and pink line both run at street level and so does much of the yellow line.
For decades the old Garfield Park line ran at street level beyond Larmie avenue. So the fact that the last part of the proposed Gold line runs at street level does not prevent rapid transit frequently.

"There already is mass transit service in the area you are mentioning."

Not rail-based rapid transit.
The Metra right of way goes directly below McCormick Place. Even the Green Line, if a station were built at 22nd, requires people to walk several blocks. Kenwood and Hyde Park has no rapid transit service, and neither does the South Shore. The Gold line would bring Rapid Transit service to these areas. Both Alderman Preckwinkle and Alderman Hairston (may include spelling errors, I apologize to anyone who I offend with this) support the Gold Line.

Also see the following article in the Chicago Maroon:

http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/2/20/proposed-gold-line-could-bring-el-to-hyde-park-improve-olympic-shot

"And, of course, the biggest problem is that the money would be spent on something that wouldn't substantually improve transit service for anybody. There already is a rail line there, after all."

But the rail line is currently not being efficiently utilized because it is only being used to provide suburban commuter type service, which, except during rush hours, is infrequent. Converting this to rapid transit would greatly improve transit service at a MUCH lower cost than building a new rapid transit extension, like the proposed red line extension, from scratch.

The very first remark on this thread was

"There *are* no train lines along the #6 route, at least on the South Side. Getting out of Hyde Park is about to suck a lot more."

The Gold line would solve this problem.

Here is more information about community support for the Gold Line in the Hyde Park-Kenwood area:

http://alwaysintransit.typepad.com/hyde_park_urbanist/2008/11/gray-gold.html

"By the way, completely off-topic, but from the Olympic thread where the CTA talked of one extra station then they had, it was probably the new Morgan Green/Pink line stop or the downtown skokie stop (which construction has started for, yippi)"

Nope, not yet, ComEd hasn't signed off on it, BUT it is happening, according to Skokie officials.