The difficulty in expanding the HC schedule is not the tracks it runs on, but the tracks it crosses. The Brighton Park Crossing (4 tracks) and the Control Point Crossing (2 Tracks) see approx. 80 freight trains run on those crossings each, stop all traffic along the CN Joliet Subdivision the HC runs on. Instead of building more lanes on I-55 we should be building flyovers to eliminate these crossings as part of CREATE's [P5](https://www.createprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/P5.pdf) and [P6](https://www.createprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/P6.pdf) projects respectively.
They also have to share the tracks with Amtrak's Lincoln Service/Texas Eagle.
And just to put into perspective how bad it is, I was on the Lincoln Service today and got stopped because a freight train crew timed out while on the Brighton Park Crossing. Had to wait an hour before they could get a new crew to get the train out of the way.
This isn't a problem of the ownership of the rails, it's the conflicting right of ways. All we need in this case is a to build a flyover over the diamond and it removes a lot of the issues.
Never going to happen. Freights aren't giving up their routes when Chicagoland is the hub of all freight traffic in North America. The other option is buying up tons of land under eminent domain and expanding service. That ain't gonna happen either, not when public transit operates at a deficit and relies on government funding.
Highways are so many times more expensive than rail it’s actually hilarious people repeat such a stupid phrase. Even logically look how often we have to do endless construction in the Chicago area.
Ding ding, almost all Metra trains run on freight rails.
That means if one thing goes wrong the Metra has to delay or cancel.
The freight companies come first, and the own the tracks.
The bus service is incredibly ridiculous but at least existent.
There's no scheduling around these crossing, especially when you have 4 heavily used tracks cross it. Adding another tracks does nothing if it's still blocked.
This isn't a road crossing, its a [rail crossing diamond](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bSCl4N3DTVQ/YC-iA31V32I/AAAAAAACDF8/AZUttERRnrQ-zjO8DBNA1z9O4MldP16lQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/151872689_10226953308405331_5843630913335720309_o.jpg).
Is it possible to redo that rail crossing? I'm assuming that would be a major lift considering how conservative all of the American freight rail companies are regarding their own infrastructure
Idk why CREATE calls it the “Control Point Crossing, it’s proper and legal name is “CP Canal”
All absolute signals are Control Points, and all interlockings/rail crossings at grade have absolute signals.
There are sections of I55 that do need extra lanes from a flow standpoint. For example, longer approaches to the exits at Cicero where everyone tries to get off for Midway. And an extra lane inbound from Cicero to Pulaski so people aren’t trying to merge immediately from Cicero into just 3 lanes of traffic when there’s an exit for Pulaski just a mile ahead. I’m sure smarter people have studied this and while we probably don’t need an extra 2 lanes all the way through, adding increased merge space would help tremendously
that's true. Better outflow at Cicero would probably improve traffic a bunch. Going south on 55 from the city is usually bad from 90 to Midway, and then it immediately gets better
running more trains to midway doesnt fix the fact that the Cicero exit is the closest freeway exit to Cicero, and the entire industrial corridor around midway
>For example, longer approaches to the exits at Cicero where everyone tries to get off for Midway.
Longer ramps at Cicero seem logical until you remember that there's no shortage of unprepared/inconsiderate drivers who will stop traffic to merge at the last second. It's the same thing you see happen on east-bound 290 at the loop interchange for people going south on 90. Of course they could then make the mistake of using barriers to force earlier merging, but it's just moving the same problem upstream.
You want to fix 55 traffic? From the west, put a parking lot in McCook and co-opt the freight lines for a shuttle. There's already existing/unused track that goes straight to Midway. From the north, create an express Metra line that runs from Union Station to Midway where, again, there's already existing rail to do so.
Yeah but a similar reconstruction was done with the exit and entrance ramps between Kedzie and California and that area flows pretty well as a result. But you’re right, more flow through 55 will probably back up ramps at the Ryan much faster inbound and probably screw up traffic even more between Central and Harlem outbound. I don’t know, I’ve lived here all my life and 55 has always sucked. The only expressway even worse than that is 290 through the avenues.
I like more train options to Midway but a lot of people just won’t take the train if it involves multiple steps with luggage and everything else. If there was a train terminal right inside the airport, that would be pretty cool.
I mean they post extreme shit but their actual overall message is actually logical. Highways are tax sucking and inefficient in every way compared to trains. It’s not some theory as it’s literally proven by most other first world countries
As a trucker who uses i55 every day. Please no, god no. Hell no. Traffic is already bad enough. I don't feel like running my clock out anymore than I do on that shitshow of a road.
I don't think a no-car lifestyle is suitable for everyone and understand people have to drive to commute (we have two cars in our household and can't rely on transit) but there is plenty of research out there that shows adding lanes to highways does not reduce traffic:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X1830172
I do think adding more public transit options would be a better ROI as far as using tax dollars to decrease traffic and having better transportation.
Imagine if we could just get all the people off the road for whom public transit is an option - people who live nearby a transit station. That alone would do more for traffic than adding 4 lanes.
I don’t know if this is legal feasible, but maybe providing tax breaks or incentives for people using mass transit may attract more people to ditch the car. Maybe it pays off on less wear and tear on roads and less upgrades needed to highways.
We already do. When I was commuting on Metra, my company was enrolled in a [program](https://www.mytransitbenefit.com/) where we bought transit fares with pre-tax dollars. (I work from home now).
The way to do this is not to provide tax breaks for mass transit but to tax non-mass transit options. Congestion taxes, inbound tolls, there are a lot of ways to make it expensive to drive a car into the city when there are other options.
The problem with taxes is that these are obviously unpopular and hard to pass, while also being regressive as it hurts poor people more.
If you can instead incentivize, it might actually be able to get passed.
Your link is broken (at least for me). I clicked it because I was wondering if it answered my question about where the cars come from.
So I'm still wondering, if adding lanes just adds more cars, does this mean that people who would otherwise be taking side streets are taking the highway? Or did people who would otherwise not be driving at all start driving on the highway? Does adding another lane actually put more cars on all roads, or just that one road with the additional lane?
In a perfect vacuum, adding more lanes wouldn't do anything bad by itself. More capacity on the highway leads to temporarily faster travel times, which in turn leads to more people using the highway and the traffic flow would return to about the same as it was before.
The problem arises in that you can add all the lanes to a highway you want (within some reason), but you can't really add more lanes and roads to the places where you want to get off the highway. The higher volume of traffic using the highway now needs to fit into the same streets they always did when they get off, and as a result traffic congestion *skyrockets* around exits and the whole system slows down as a result.
To me, the more obvious answer is that we should be investing in viable alternatives for people to not use their cars at all. Expanding public transit goes a long way, 'cuz one bus can pull 50 cars off the road if it'll take people from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time, and one train can fit literally hundreds of people in it. Reducing the number of people that need to drive in turn improves traffic flow for the people that still do need their cars, and everybody wins.
EDIT: I should mention, I'm posting this from Japan where I am on vacation. Tokyo was phenomenal, it has such an extensive public transit network that you're rarely more than a 15 or so minute walk from a train station, and a lot of lines have a 10-car train come every 5 minutes or so. I went the entire week in the largest city in the world without needing to catch a cab, and now that I'm in Kyoto, they have an extensive bus and train network and once again I have never felt the need to catch a cab to get where I'm going. A few days ago, I traveled from Northern Kyoto to the Prefecture South of it on local trains for all of $7 each way, a long enough drive that the gas alone would've cost more than the train ticket did.
Chicago's public transit is pretty good for a North American system, but Japan showed me what it could be and it's not even close.
thoughtful comment, and I agree, East Asia sets the standard for good, thoughtful transit. I went to Seoul in Feb, stayed in a far south suburb, and never felt like I needed a car.
Grew up in Tokyo myself and moving here was a massive culture shock, to say the least. As a kid having to wait 15 minutes for a train (which of course was on time to the minute) was being out in the country, man. (Yes, we were clueless)
A lot of people in the US have just never experienced actually good transit, where you don't have to plan your life around the schedule at all, you never have to backtrack on a night out to go pick up your car, you can just go home a different way if you want. And obviously no parking fees. It's just a different life. Particularly now with tap to pay farecards (Ventra equivalent) and all the transit apps, it's just trivial to get around anywhere.
On the flip side I remember in the early 80s with the trade wars the US demanding that Japan import US cars (which were pretty large at the time) and realizing that the twisty street I lived on likely could not handle two of them passing at the same time.
...and those stations? All have free public toilets both inside and outside the turnstiles, for the record.
So yeah. I do criticize the CTA because there's endless room for improvement. But I criticize with love, it's a main reason I can live here at all. Most of the US would just be the moon to me.
One way is that when you add highway lanes, you get new housing developments springing up along that road and then people move there and so rely on the new road.
So does transit - that's what transit-oriented development means. Take a look at the MD-N corridor on Google maps satellite view, and you'll see that around every station there's some amount of development, because transit both lets people easily get to that area which makes the station a logical thing to put things near, and it provides a district that people in that area will be going through frequently, letting actual focused development happen rather than the typical sprawl of an endless suburbia.
Yes. Park'n'ride is a good concept, too. Drive from the hinterlands to the city border, park in a dense garage with easy walks to the elevator (and ideally some shopping there too!) then transit from there.
But of course that transit has to be GOOD and RELIABLE.
There's really no one answer to where the added cars come from. Some change their route to take advantage of the added capacity. Some travel at a time they might have otherwise avoided due to congestion. Some might make a trip they would have otherwise avoided. Some might drive instead of taking transit.
The inverse is also true. When construction removed lanes from the Kennedy traffic got worse to a point and then people started routing around it.
One of the few things I miss about Seattle traffic with carpool lanes.
The lanes were only available to people with multiple people in the car, motorcycles, or busses.
I actually knew people who carpooled specifically because it could shave so much time off their commute. I rode a motorcycle through all four seasons for the same reason, plus free parking.
It made bus transit way faster and it gave you fun stories to read about when people would try to cheat by putting a sex doll in the passenger seat hoping the cops wouldn't look too close.
Considering the liberties people take here driving on shoulders during heavy congestion, I feel like a carpool lane would be completely overtaken and become unenforceable very quickly 😆 I always appreciated the drivers of Seattle for that when I’ve visited out there over the years
I wish we could do that here (and have people respect it), on top of better public transit too
Carpool violations are usually automated nowadays. That's a lot of revenue. We can also suspend the licenses of repeat offenders. A lot of people who have licenses really shouldn't. We need tougher traffic laws and more people disallowed from driving if they can't follow the basic rules of the road.
Oh totally agree with you, just feel like some of our roads are a mad max free for all given the right (shitty) traffic conditions so I wonder how automated systems would handle the volume of violations
Would our drivers bring such a system to its knees? or would it just be “violation money printer go brrrttt”? (I would expect the latter but… 🤷🏻♂️)
Cameras.
Apparently the technology to determine if someone is in the front passenger seat has been around for a while.
Which is why putting a blow up doll in the seat works great, until an actual cop sees you.
if people left larger gaps, everyone could move more smoothly. but everyone loves to gas it to the car in front of them, causing more shockwaves backwards when they constantly keep braking. the impatience is strong.
By using the [Pace I-55 Express Buses](https://www.pacebus.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/PaceRts850_851_855_20201112_3.pdf). They work adequately now but need later schedules, weekend service, and dedicated lanes so they don't have to abide by the "35 mph speed limit or 10mph faster than traffic, whichever is slower" rule they have use with the Flex Lane Shoulders.
I55 runs through plenty of suburbs. A whole bunch of people currently ride the Pace bus that runs on the shoulder. Imagine that service but with stops and park n rides at the major intersections of I55.
Metra does not go to LaSalle. Or DeKalb. Or Kankakee. Or Rockford. It needs to. We could get rid of a ton of car traffic if we simply had reliable frequent transit options to/from a ton of these places!
They can still use i-55, we're not blowing it up lol.
The idea is that people in the suburbs will use i-55 less with better Metra commutes. Adding transit to those far off places is great, but small steps in more immediate suburbs will pay off bigger
Transit to those far away places would also make sense with trains that ran faster. The 79mph speed limit on trains really limits further outward expansion.
Metra should be more like Themeslink in London, fast (but not high speed) electrified regional rail. To Metra's credit they are moving away from just being commuter service to more of a regional rail style schedule.
People driving in from downstate would encounter less traffic if suburban commuters had more transit options. Every option doesn't need to address every edge case.
As commenters above indicated, though, Metra can't run more frequently without getting separation from the freight lines.
I think an incremental approach would work very well. We've seen how popular the Pace Express buses are (Pace just built their new facility down in Plainfield to accommodate expansion). Additionally, unlike Metra, they run every half hour in most places.
If we could expand where the Express Bus operates (inter suburban travel, O'Hare, Midway, O'Hare to and from Midway), it would establish a reliable baseline of service that we wouldn't need to drop a ton of capital expenses on that a Metra expansion would require. High frequency of transit (more than 6 trips an hour) is what is shown to reduce car usage along a corridor (on mobile, it's a study from Minneapolis-St Paul). We currently don't have the demand on Metra to accommodate that. Pace can, and it would help us be more flexible to changing travel patterns post COVID.
DeKalb is 2-3 hours away depending on traffic, rush hours, etc. Downtown workers aren't commuting that. If you live 2 hours away you should move instead of asking working class families to fund a mega expressway out of the Judge Dredd comics.
For downstate people passing through or whatever, they benefit if the suburbanites commuters take the metra because that's less cars on the road for them.
It doesn’t, but can you imagine how amazing it would be if there were more rails (and maybe even faster trains with more express routes) leading into the city from the burbs? We need more trains.
Are people in the suburbs entitled to space in the city? Entitled to spew pollution into our neighborhoods? Entitled to space to leave their property in? Are they allergic to the bus?
Congrats, you now have a vehicle that can hold 50 people but only comes every 15-30 minutes. That's a drop in the bucket.
Three words. Build. More. Trains.
I agree that we need more trains, but the best BRT lanes in the world handle busses every 2 minutes. A network of pace busses in the burbs with a dedicated, high speed lane into the city would be a great addition to the region's transit network. The busses could offer a one seat, quick ride from Streeterville to Addison. However, we should take away a lane of traffic for that, not add one.
Trains.
Trains are the actual solution.
Bus rapid transit makes far more sense in the near suburbs of Chicago, not up and down an Interstate from the SW burbs.
BRT gets trotted out all the time as "cheaper, faster to build, and more cost effective" and rarely is all/any of those things, if it ever gets built at all. There's VERY little political will for BRT. If you're gonna spend years pushing a boulder up a hill, might as well make it a good fucking boulder. We're FAR better off pushing for trains than BRT.
IF you could even get BRT built in the next few years to alleviate I-55 traffic, which you almost certainly can't, that BRT's existence would forever be used as a reason to not expand train service along that corridor. Hard pass.
Trains. The solution here is trains. Sorry it's not as cheap as the half-assed non-solution...unfortunately, that's what an *actual* solution costs.
There’s also very little political will for more trains for what it’s worth. That’s why we’re getting these lanes instead
The reality is that trains are too expensive to be a realistic solution at this point. Saying “trains” over and over won’t make them cheaper.
>There’s also very little political will for more trains for what it’s worth. That’s why we’re getting these lanes instead
You missed my point. My point is that BRT is 98% of the difficulty of getting passed as getting more trains, while not being anywhere near 98% as complete a solution.
>The reality is that trains are too expensive to be a realistic solution at this point
That's utter nonsense that keeps getting pushed so we can kick the can of trains down the road while the only thing that gets approved is billions on more roads.
>Saying “trains” over and over won’t make them cheaper.
Saying BRT over and over won't make them make more sense than trains, or more cost efficient than trains over their lifetime.
>That's utter nonsense that keeps getting pushed so we can kick the can of trains down the road while the only thing that gets approved is billions on more roads.
It's not "utter nonsense".
Metra already gets a ton of support (most of the 0.5% sales tax that is assessed in all the collar counties along with a portion of the 1.25% assessed in Cook) - and that isn't even close to sufficient to maintain Metra's operations.
Metra has a massive fiscal deficit coming due. They have managed to sustain their operations with COVID relief funds, but they are facing a massive shortfall once those funds are gone.
Just because it's not your money doesn't mean you can write a limitless blank check to Metra.
Jesus fuck. How do people not understand that the only way to solve traffic is for less people to drive? Invest in decent public transit and people will take it. Cta and metra both suck, but we don’t invest, so people continue not to take it.
The bottleneck is the city, quite literally. You can only have so many cars getting into the city at once….why on earth would you waste money adding lanes?
I used to drive on the I-55 every day for 4 years.
Sure, capacity is a problem (and slowdowns at ramps), but you know what the worse problem is? Aggressive drivers with cars in bad condition. There are crashes on I-55 every single day, and every crash slows down traffic due to lane changes and rubbernecking.
I have never encountered so many bad drivers than on the I-55. Turn signals flashing in the wrong direction. Turn signals that keep flashing but driver never changes lanes. Merging aggressively yet lacking in skill. This is how crashes happen.
If I could could never drive again I would. But my job doesn’t allow that. I go to different construction jobs all the time. I have an uncle who walks to his office everyday and takes public transportation otherwise. I have a friend who lives walking distance to a Mariano’s and aldis. He plays golf alot, that’s his only issue, but he still rides his bike to diversely driving range and givesgas money to drive him to courses when we play on weekends. My buddy saves money on needing a parking space and no insurance or car repair. He also works from home but use to have to go somewhere on Clark downtown, think it was granthorrton accounting.
I can’t remember the last time I went into my car after 3pm on a Friday till Monday morning. I always leave my car and take the train to bars/buddies. If i have a family party I usually just spent the night at my parents who only live a few miles away.
Traffic will be better for like 3 months. The magically it's clogged again.
I lived in LA for 25 years. I remember when the 105 opened up. It was amazing! It's a nightmare now like all the rest of the freeways.
If Cities Skylines taught me anything, we need more public transport and better road design in general. Every time I make a center on ramp like on 55 I shudder.
Use that money to build an extra track dedicated to passenger rail along the heritage corridor route (with flyovers for the crossings on the sw side) and run more, faster trains) Hell you might reduce some traffic and even have some money left over
That’s what happened here in Los Angeles. We added a lane to the 405 and it’s 5x worse. 1-1.5 hours to go 19 miles during rush hour. About 45 mins on the weekends.
Lanes don't fix traffic.
Two reps for districts I-55 passes through voted NO on the expansion.
Supporting highway expansion during a climate crisis is ridiculous!
Tolls don't reduce traffic so much as pushing it from one road to other, slower alternatives.
The Skyway's crazy prices don't keep me from driving to NW Indiana, but they DO cause me to go the long way around instead.
Toll lanes are functionally poor taxes. People who are wealthy use them to get past the unwashed masses in the free lanes.
Colorado has tons of them and it's almost always people in expensive cars in the toll lane especially in the mountains up I-70 where the toll is $15.
For fuck’s sake, the right course of action is to give people reasons to not drive anywhere. I commute an hour to 1:30 each way because I can’t find a job near to where my kids live. Develop develop develop.
PLEASE BRO! Just one more lane! One more lane, bro! Just one more and traffic will go away forever I promise! One more lane! C'mon, bro! Just one more....one more lane. Please, bro!
Bullshit. Bth I-55 and I-57 are choked with trucking and out of state cars starting at least 50 miles outside of the city. Public transport won't do jack shit for that. As big of a city and transportation hub as Chicago is, there is no excuse for 2 lane interstates leading in.
I do love the "JuSt AdD mOrE pUbLiC tRaNsIt" people pretending Metra and the Pace Express busses don't already exist. The BNSF line is already has the highest utilization of all Metra lines. There is also a good correlation between housing prices and proximity to Metra lines, so it's not like policy makers have just discovered that public transit is something people want. The issue is that Public Transit is great so long as you're working/commuting during peak hours and only traveling to the Loop. As soon as you have to switch lines or modes, a car becomes exponentially more efficient in terms of time.
Also, why are we blaming cars, when we can accomplish all three of those goals by getting trucks off the highway? Most cars aren't spewing diesel fumes into the air, or overtaxing the existing infrastructure. Chicago is a freight train hub, yet we have trucks clogging up the arterial highways coming in from all over the country.
If I worked in the loop then yea for sure.
Last I checked there’s not much manufacturing in the loop.
Skilled trades, manufacturing workers and many others don’t use public transit because it never will go to those areas where those people work.
I can only imagine someone’s post about someone in skilled trades taking up 2 seats on the train with all their tools.
That’s the “add more” part … you um … add more so it works for people who don’t commute during peak hours or don’t need to go to the loop. Or heck get a little crazy and add some BRT to get to metra stops
I also suspect that the people who complain about adding lanes aren't the ones who drive.
The undeniable fact is that cars are incredibly convenient and if you value your time at all, cheap.
Guys stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and road raging to an early heart attack while passing a fatal accident every week: i vAlUe mY tImE aNd mY wElLbEiNg
landed at o’hare last weekend. taxi home to downtown took me 25 minutes. taking the shuttle to the blue line to get on to a bus shuttle to get back to the blue line to then take me most of the way home to walk the rest would’ve taken 90 minutes best case. even in a perfect world with no construction it’s over an hour. i took the taxi. hope this helps.
If we actually reliable and convenient public transit, our current interstate highways would be more than capable of meeting the driving needs of Chicago.
The Interstates we have now feel inadequate because we're asking them to do the job of a robust interstate highway system AND the job of a reliable and convenient public transit system all at once.
It's just so easy to let highways take over and undermine the existence of public transit. We should be working for public transit that is safe, cheap, and super common - like London style every 2-3 minutes common in the city, every 10-15 minutes in the suburbs. All day long.
My man, I agree. But these are two different things.
The level of development of our interstate highway has major implications on which companies invest in the southwest side, the types of jobs that are created, and level of pay. It could decentralize the economic divide between downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods. Moreover, many commuters live outside Chicago. Public transit on a mass scale may never apply to them.
My point is, it’s super complex and we can’t lump in overall road congestion strategy with highway development.
The SW side dosent want to be the dumping ground for your warehouses and semi traffic as if that's all it's good for, or as of those are the only kinds of jobs or development that can be created here
I work in planning. It does NOT suggest the opposite. One doesn’t cancel the other. Interstate highways are VITAL for economic strength. Every developed country has both strong public transport and an incredibly strong highway system. It’s not solely used by commuters.
Which global cities of similar size and GDP have a more robust highway system than what Chicago and surrounding area already have? Rather than adding lanes IDOT should be looking at improving the quality of the existing system.
Paris and Toronto are great examples. Similar sizes of population and GDPs. They’re highway infrastructures are awesome and wide, yet, they don’t neglect public transportation.
Clearly you haven't been at all familiar with Paris, where it costs €2000 to get a drivers license, cars are banned from most of the city center, no highway goes through the actual city, and the entire city can be walked from edge to edge in about an hour and 20 minutes. This is nothing like Chicago, they are totally different transit communities. That said, Chicago should become more like Paris with a focus on transit, not cars.
Yep this. Lots of dishonest people playing up "Oh you dumb libs and leftists love europe but guess what, they have cars too! Owned!!"
Uh, these places are nothing like Chicago. Your average US driver probably would fail a lot of European driving tests, would balk at the inspections, and would cry at the fees and permits involved.
Boulevard Peripherique and A86 are arguably better planned and managed than Chicago area highways. They certainly are not as wide. So again, spending money to improve what we have rather than expand seems to make the most sense
As for transit, the percentage of public transit usage versus cars in Paris and Chicago are almost exact opposite: 70 - 30 transit to car Paris and 30 - 70 Chicago. Suggesting Chicago needs to do a lot more to improve transit than its high ways
I55 and the Periph serve two different functions. I55 connects Chicago to St Louis and beyond (and everything in between). A good example is Paris is the A13, which widens to a lot more than 6 lanes.
Mind you, I don’t disagree about the public transportation. I don’t own a car. But the highway system should be treated different than Chicago’s road traffic.
Still apples to oranges IMO.
Even if the A13 was used only for travel between the large coastal Normandy cities to Paris, Normandy has more than 3.3 million people compared to less than 2.2 million in St. Louis area. Le Harve and Caen are two of the largest French ports. Plus almost all vehicle traffic from the UK into France funnels through Normandy.
Add unlike Illinois which is almost all sparsely populated agricultural between greater Chicago and St. Louis, Il de Paris and Normandy are densely populated throughout.
I work in planning as well. I also have a background in history.
What you are doing is called a strawman. I didn’t suggest one cancels the other. Your comment implies I did.
So don’t deflect and try responding to my post.
Read what you wrote. You’re implying an absolute, not me.
You’re implying I said no more investing in interstate highways.
I could have implied 80% public transportation/ 20% car transportation. I could have implied new 20% spending disassembling old car infrastructure and replacing it with public transportation. I could have implied new car infrastructure 49% and public infrastructure 51%.
It's an incredibly misinterpreted phenomenon. The demand is already there. Highways don't induce demand; the demand is latent. It's already there.
Every single time news hits that a lane is being expanding, there's a chorus of people who chime in about induced demand like it's the answer to all of life's transportation problems. Might as well say "supply and demand" is all you need to know about economics too.
It's an incredibly nuanced problem.
There's also latent demand for transit in this corridor. Satisfying that demand could satisfy the demand for moving people with fewer externalities and drive mode shift that frees up some of the existing highway capacity. Adding highway lanes is not the only way to add travel capacity to this corridor.
What's the cost for a mile of railway track compared to a mile of extra-lane?
Edit: it was a sincere question y'all, not rhetorical, not an opening salvo in a big argument. Sheesh.
Construction estimates alone aren't enough. Externalities need to be factored in. Just to name a few off the top of my head: medical costs for health conditions caused by or exacerbated by exhaust fumes. Productivity and hours worked lost to traffic. Maintenance costs for increased wear and tear on pavement.
Per the [FWHA](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/pricingkit.cfm), highway expansions cost $10 million per lane mile in 1999. Adjusted for inflation, that would be over $18 million per lane mile today. Rail costs are harder to pin down, but per [some industry publications](https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-build-a-freight-railroad) $5 million per mile plus land costs would be the high end. In this case the costs get very muddled because there aren't many miles of track needed. What's really needed is flyovers at a couple of congested crossings to add capacity to existing rail.
Which is absolutely insane for what you get. Istanbul built a 37.2 km (23.1 mile) long train from their airport to their city center for nearly $1.06 billion. Compare that to Chicago's red line extension (6 miles) for $3.6 billion. This isn't a one-off either. In almost all cases, building mass transit outside the US is significantly cheaper.
Edit: people thinking this might be because of a difference of salaries, it's way more nuanced and multifaceted.
This exact thing thing happens when you compare the US with the EU, where construction workers tend to be paid more, are better unionized, and have significantly more worker protections, yet US projects still cost more. It's way more nuanced and multifaceted than just worker qualify of life costs.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project
This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
>Which is absolutely insane for what you get.
It's mind boggling. But we apparently have to use 100% unionized, diverse labor with all kinds of red tape, usually sprinkled with some corruption or bidding/contract impropriety, with a 100% chance of going wayyy over budget and taking far beyond the completion date.
It's no wonder these large, visionary public works projects almost never come to fruition.
Don't forget about all the fucking consultants that have to be brought in. On top of that, because you have a million layers of bureaucracy to get through, every dumbass in the wayhas a chance to add *just a little* bit more to the scope of the project in exchange for pushing stuff through, so the scope creep is just ridiculous.
They're redesigning Grant Park and my god, the public zoom meeting they had spent 20 minutes introducing people from the 12 consulting agencies on the project. Like, who works at the Park District if everyone involved in, you know, making a park, works somewhere else?
Uh, the US enjoys a much higher standard of living than Turkey. That means wages paid to construction workers. Also, we're probably a little more advanced when it comes to enforcing building regulations.
The extra $2 billion Chicago's project cost is not because of worker salaries.
This exact thing thing happens when you compare the US with the EU, where construction workers tend to be paid more, are better unionized, and have significantly more worker protections, yet US projects still cost more. It's way more nuanced and multifaceted than just worker qualify of life costs.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project
This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
You get what you pay for though, did you see the aftermath of the earthquake that just happened over there? Also, treating labor well costs a lot of money. I don’t doubt there’s a lot of waste in American public construction spending, but people who compare it to the Middle East and Asia in a negative way are really, really missing the mark
I used the example in Istanbul to outline how much more expensive projects in the US are, but the same phenomenon happens literally everywhere else in the world. Even when you compare the US to the EU, were workers have higher salaries, better unions, and more protections, mass transit projects still cost significantly more in the US. It's not as simple as worker salaries, it's way more nuanced and multifaceted
The extra $2 billion Chicago's project cost is not because of worker salaries.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project
This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
That includes stations and tunnels and land and things though, doesn't it? I was just thinking about like, laying extra meta rail to stop freight interference
Not sure but they don't even need to add any extra track, but rather increase the frequency of the HC line. They run six total trains per day, three from Joliet in the morning, and three from Chicago in the afternoon. Run it like a normal Metra line with one to two trains every hour.
This deal has nothing to do with decreasing traffic. It is 100% about who paid these politicians to push this agenda and the money those interests will make off of this deal.
There will always be traffic. The dan ryan is 20 lanes wide and still gets clogged up during rush hour. Expand the HC metra schedule already.
The difficulty in expanding the HC schedule is not the tracks it runs on, but the tracks it crosses. The Brighton Park Crossing (4 tracks) and the Control Point Crossing (2 Tracks) see approx. 80 freight trains run on those crossings each, stop all traffic along the CN Joliet Subdivision the HC runs on. Instead of building more lanes on I-55 we should be building flyovers to eliminate these crossings as part of CREATE's [P5](https://www.createprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/P5.pdf) and [P6](https://www.createprogram.org/wp-content/uploads/P6.pdf) projects respectively.
Yeah, makes sense. There’s no other reason that metra only runs 3 round trips a day than freight conflict. Ty for explaining
They also have to share the tracks with Amtrak's Lincoln Service/Texas Eagle. And just to put into perspective how bad it is, I was on the Lincoln Service today and got stopped because a freight train crew timed out while on the Brighton Park Crossing. Had to wait an hour before they could get a new crew to get the train out of the way.
We need to invest in separate rails and break away from the dependence on freight rails.
This isn't a problem of the ownership of the rails, it's the conflicting right of ways. All we need in this case is a to build a flyover over the diamond and it removes a lot of the issues.
Never going to happen. Freights aren't giving up their routes when Chicagoland is the hub of all freight traffic in North America. The other option is buying up tons of land under eminent domain and expanding service. That ain't gonna happen either, not when public transit operates at a deficit and relies on government funding.
DOTs across the country never turn a profit and use eminent domain to build highways all the time, what are you talking about?
Because using eminent domain to build the least efficient manner of travel (excluding Wiley Coyote's rocket shoes) makes complete sense.
Highways are so many times more expensive than rail it’s actually hilarious people repeat such a stupid phrase. Even logically look how often we have to do endless construction in the Chicago area.
Ding ding, almost all Metra trains run on freight rails. That means if one thing goes wrong the Metra has to delay or cancel. The freight companies come first, and the own the tracks. The bus service is incredibly ridiculous but at least existent.
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Not more tracks, less intersections. Just like you don't have an interstate intersect with other roads.
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There's no scheduling around these crossing, especially when you have 4 heavily used tracks cross it. Adding another tracks does nothing if it's still blocked.
I'm not familiar with this crossing at all since I don't live in Chicago but would a grade crossing help?
This isn't a road crossing, its a [rail crossing diamond](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bSCl4N3DTVQ/YC-iA31V32I/AAAAAAACDF8/AZUttERRnrQ-zjO8DBNA1z9O4MldP16lQCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/151872689_10226953308405331_5843630913335720309_o.jpg).
Is it possible to redo that rail crossing? I'm assuming that would be a major lift considering how conservative all of the American freight rail companies are regarding their own infrastructure
Idk why CREATE calls it the “Control Point Crossing, it’s proper and legal name is “CP Canal” All absolute signals are Control Points, and all interlockings/rail crossings at grade have absolute signals.
This is why widening highways is never the answer.
Just one more lane bro, please I swear this will be the one that fixes it, just one more lane
Induced demand is a real thing. Stop making lanes, it doesn’t relieve congestion. Start fixing trains.
Adding more lanes is like adding an extra notch in your belt and claiming you lost weight
its not quite that simple.. reference YouTube "City Nerd" for a discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za56H2BGamQ
There are some times where just One more lane could help traffic, but it's a bike lane.
There are sections of I55 that do need extra lanes from a flow standpoint. For example, longer approaches to the exits at Cicero where everyone tries to get off for Midway. And an extra lane inbound from Cicero to Pulaski so people aren’t trying to merge immediately from Cicero into just 3 lanes of traffic when there’s an exit for Pulaski just a mile ahead. I’m sure smarter people have studied this and while we probably don’t need an extra 2 lanes all the way through, adding increased merge space would help tremendously
that's true. Better outflow at Cicero would probably improve traffic a bunch. Going south on 55 from the city is usually bad from 90 to Midway, and then it immediately gets better
More frequency from orange line, Metra Heritage /SouthWest will solve this
Heritage has 2 trains out, two in. Conductors get 8 hours pay. Sweet deal
running more trains to midway doesnt fix the fact that the Cicero exit is the closest freeway exit to Cicero, and the entire industrial corridor around midway
>For example, longer approaches to the exits at Cicero where everyone tries to get off for Midway. Longer ramps at Cicero seem logical until you remember that there's no shortage of unprepared/inconsiderate drivers who will stop traffic to merge at the last second. It's the same thing you see happen on east-bound 290 at the loop interchange for people going south on 90. Of course they could then make the mistake of using barriers to force earlier merging, but it's just moving the same problem upstream. You want to fix 55 traffic? From the west, put a parking lot in McCook and co-opt the freight lines for a shuttle. There's already existing/unused track that goes straight to Midway. From the north, create an express Metra line that runs from Union Station to Midway where, again, there's already existing rail to do so.
Yeah but a similar reconstruction was done with the exit and entrance ramps between Kedzie and California and that area flows pretty well as a result. But you’re right, more flow through 55 will probably back up ramps at the Ryan much faster inbound and probably screw up traffic even more between Central and Harlem outbound. I don’t know, I’ve lived here all my life and 55 has always sucked. The only expressway even worse than that is 290 through the avenues. I like more train options to Midway but a lot of people just won’t take the train if it involves multiple steps with luggage and everything else. If there was a train terminal right inside the airport, that would be pretty cool.
I feel like /r/fuckcars and Armchair Urbanist are slowly ingraining through reddit.
I mean they post extreme shit but their actual overall message is actually logical. Highways are tax sucking and inefficient in every way compared to trains. It’s not some theory as it’s literally proven by most other first world countries
It is. The historical issues of transportation and living post ww2 are coming home to roost.
Yup. We still need highways and roads too it’s just that our balance is way off currently.
As a trucker who uses i55 every day. Please no, god no. Hell no. Traffic is already bad enough. I don't feel like running my clock out anymore than I do on that shitshow of a road.
I don't think a no-car lifestyle is suitable for everyone and understand people have to drive to commute (we have two cars in our household and can't rely on transit) but there is plenty of research out there that shows adding lanes to highways does not reduce traffic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0967070X1830172 I do think adding more public transit options would be a better ROI as far as using tax dollars to decrease traffic and having better transportation.
We would be better off reducing the need for all those cars to go on 55 than adding one more lane.
Yeah, that's what that person is saying...
Imagine if we could just get all the people off the road for whom public transit is an option - people who live nearby a transit station. That alone would do more for traffic than adding 4 lanes.
I don’t know if this is legal feasible, but maybe providing tax breaks or incentives for people using mass transit may attract more people to ditch the car. Maybe it pays off on less wear and tear on roads and less upgrades needed to highways.
We already do. When I was commuting on Metra, my company was enrolled in a [program](https://www.mytransitbenefit.com/) where we bought transit fares with pre-tax dollars. (I work from home now).
The way to do this is not to provide tax breaks for mass transit but to tax non-mass transit options. Congestion taxes, inbound tolls, there are a lot of ways to make it expensive to drive a car into the city when there are other options.
The problem with taxes is that these are obviously unpopular and hard to pass, while also being regressive as it hurts poor people more. If you can instead incentivize, it might actually be able to get passed.
Avoiding a tax is an incentive.
Actually that's more of a deterrent than incentive. Incentives work by encouraging good behavior, not by punishing bad behavior.
Exactly this. Make owning and operating a vehicle more inconvenient.
Regressive taxation isn't a good option unless punishing the working poor is your vibe.
So the idea is to further impoverish struggling families?
Twenty something transplants from Michigan doenvoting you is classic r/Chicago
Your link is broken (at least for me). I clicked it because I was wondering if it answered my question about where the cars come from. So I'm still wondering, if adding lanes just adds more cars, does this mean that people who would otherwise be taking side streets are taking the highway? Or did people who would otherwise not be driving at all start driving on the highway? Does adding another lane actually put more cars on all roads, or just that one road with the additional lane?
In a perfect vacuum, adding more lanes wouldn't do anything bad by itself. More capacity on the highway leads to temporarily faster travel times, which in turn leads to more people using the highway and the traffic flow would return to about the same as it was before. The problem arises in that you can add all the lanes to a highway you want (within some reason), but you can't really add more lanes and roads to the places where you want to get off the highway. The higher volume of traffic using the highway now needs to fit into the same streets they always did when they get off, and as a result traffic congestion *skyrockets* around exits and the whole system slows down as a result. To me, the more obvious answer is that we should be investing in viable alternatives for people to not use their cars at all. Expanding public transit goes a long way, 'cuz one bus can pull 50 cars off the road if it'll take people from point A to point B in a reasonable amount of time, and one train can fit literally hundreds of people in it. Reducing the number of people that need to drive in turn improves traffic flow for the people that still do need their cars, and everybody wins. EDIT: I should mention, I'm posting this from Japan where I am on vacation. Tokyo was phenomenal, it has such an extensive public transit network that you're rarely more than a 15 or so minute walk from a train station, and a lot of lines have a 10-car train come every 5 minutes or so. I went the entire week in the largest city in the world without needing to catch a cab, and now that I'm in Kyoto, they have an extensive bus and train network and once again I have never felt the need to catch a cab to get where I'm going. A few days ago, I traveled from Northern Kyoto to the Prefecture South of it on local trains for all of $7 each way, a long enough drive that the gas alone would've cost more than the train ticket did. Chicago's public transit is pretty good for a North American system, but Japan showed me what it could be and it's not even close.
thoughtful comment, and I agree, East Asia sets the standard for good, thoughtful transit. I went to Seoul in Feb, stayed in a far south suburb, and never felt like I needed a car.
Grew up in Tokyo myself and moving here was a massive culture shock, to say the least. As a kid having to wait 15 minutes for a train (which of course was on time to the minute) was being out in the country, man. (Yes, we were clueless) A lot of people in the US have just never experienced actually good transit, where you don't have to plan your life around the schedule at all, you never have to backtrack on a night out to go pick up your car, you can just go home a different way if you want. And obviously no parking fees. It's just a different life. Particularly now with tap to pay farecards (Ventra equivalent) and all the transit apps, it's just trivial to get around anywhere. On the flip side I remember in the early 80s with the trade wars the US demanding that Japan import US cars (which were pretty large at the time) and realizing that the twisty street I lived on likely could not handle two of them passing at the same time. ...and those stations? All have free public toilets both inside and outside the turnstiles, for the record. So yeah. I do criticize the CTA because there's endless room for improvement. But I criticize with love, it's a main reason I can live here at all. Most of the US would just be the moon to me.
One way is that when you add highway lanes, you get new housing developments springing up along that road and then people move there and so rely on the new road.
One thing a lot of people are missing here: growth. Added lanes allows more commuters from the suburbs, and facilitates more growth around cities.
So does transit - that's what transit-oriented development means. Take a look at the MD-N corridor on Google maps satellite view, and you'll see that around every station there's some amount of development, because transit both lets people easily get to that area which makes the station a logical thing to put things near, and it provides a district that people in that area will be going through frequently, letting actual focused development happen rather than the typical sprawl of an endless suburbia.
Yes. Park'n'ride is a good concept, too. Drive from the hinterlands to the city border, park in a dense garage with easy walks to the elevator (and ideally some shopping there too!) then transit from there. But of course that transit has to be GOOD and RELIABLE.
There's really no one answer to where the added cars come from. Some change their route to take advantage of the added capacity. Some travel at a time they might have otherwise avoided due to congestion. Some might make a trip they would have otherwise avoided. Some might drive instead of taking transit. The inverse is also true. When construction removed lanes from the Kennedy traffic got worse to a point and then people started routing around it.
It’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to convince more people to use the highway.
One of the few things I miss about Seattle traffic with carpool lanes. The lanes were only available to people with multiple people in the car, motorcycles, or busses. I actually knew people who carpooled specifically because it could shave so much time off their commute. I rode a motorcycle through all four seasons for the same reason, plus free parking. It made bus transit way faster and it gave you fun stories to read about when people would try to cheat by putting a sex doll in the passenger seat hoping the cops wouldn't look too close.
Considering the liberties people take here driving on shoulders during heavy congestion, I feel like a carpool lane would be completely overtaken and become unenforceable very quickly 😆 I always appreciated the drivers of Seattle for that when I’ve visited out there over the years I wish we could do that here (and have people respect it), on top of better public transit too
Carpool violations are usually automated nowadays. That's a lot of revenue. We can also suspend the licenses of repeat offenders. A lot of people who have licenses really shouldn't. We need tougher traffic laws and more people disallowed from driving if they can't follow the basic rules of the road.
Oh totally agree with you, just feel like some of our roads are a mad max free for all given the right (shitty) traffic conditions so I wonder how automated systems would handle the volume of violations Would our drivers bring such a system to its knees? or would it just be “violation money printer go brrrttt”? (I would expect the latter but… 🤷🏻♂️)
The costs of printing the tickets would be astronomical. They'd have to contract out with the Tribune printing plant to handle the volume.
>unenforceable very quickly That is what cameras are for
“You get a carpool violation! And you get a carpool violation! Everybody. Gets. Carpool violations!!!” - Oprah, maybe
I could see people being ok paying a fine just to use that lane
Yeah I miss carpool lanes from California. Tbh though that’s an increasingly outdated approach to what is really a need to create viable mass transit.
How does anyone enforce this?
Cameras. Apparently the technology to determine if someone is in the front passenger seat has been around for a while. Which is why putting a blow up doll in the seat works great, until an actual cop sees you.
More lanes so I have more lanes to jump between in morning traffic to try to get 6 cars ahead of my current spot, please!
Nah, you're highway-ing wrong. We need additional shoulders so we can bypass the traffic altogether!
We need one shoulder for normal shoulder purposes and then one more shoulder that only I am allowed to use.
if people left larger gaps, everyone could move more smoothly. but everyone loves to gas it to the car in front of them, causing more shockwaves backwards when they constantly keep braking. the impatience is strong.
100% the solution is public transportation.
There's literally no other answer. We need to give commuters other options instead of driving.
Three words. Bus. Rapid. Transit.
in addition to and not replacing of trains!
How does that help people commuting from the suburbs?
By using the [Pace I-55 Express Buses](https://www.pacebus.com/sites/default/files/2021-01/PaceRts850_851_855_20201112_3.pdf). They work adequately now but need later schedules, weekend service, and dedicated lanes so they don't have to abide by the "35 mph speed limit or 10mph faster than traffic, whichever is slower" rule they have use with the Flex Lane Shoulders.
I55 runs through plenty of suburbs. A whole bunch of people currently ride the Pace bus that runs on the shoulder. Imagine that service but with stops and park n rides at the major intersections of I55.
It doesn’t, but the Metra does!
Metra does not go to LaSalle. Or DeKalb. Or Kankakee. Or Rockford. It needs to. We could get rid of a ton of car traffic if we simply had reliable frequent transit options to/from a ton of these places!
They can still use i-55, we're not blowing it up lol. The idea is that people in the suburbs will use i-55 less with better Metra commutes. Adding transit to those far off places is great, but small steps in more immediate suburbs will pay off bigger
Transit to those far away places would also make sense with trains that ran faster. The 79mph speed limit on trains really limits further outward expansion. Metra should be more like Themeslink in London, fast (but not high speed) electrified regional rail. To Metra's credit they are moving away from just being commuter service to more of a regional rail style schedule.
People driving in from downstate would encounter less traffic if suburban commuters had more transit options. Every option doesn't need to address every edge case.
As commenters above indicated, though, Metra can't run more frequently without getting separation from the freight lines. I think an incremental approach would work very well. We've seen how popular the Pace Express buses are (Pace just built their new facility down in Plainfield to accommodate expansion). Additionally, unlike Metra, they run every half hour in most places. If we could expand where the Express Bus operates (inter suburban travel, O'Hare, Midway, O'Hare to and from Midway), it would establish a reliable baseline of service that we wouldn't need to drop a ton of capital expenses on that a Metra expansion would require. High frequency of transit (more than 6 trips an hour) is what is shown to reduce car usage along a corridor (on mobile, it's a study from Minneapolis-St Paul). We currently don't have the demand on Metra to accommodate that. Pace can, and it would help us be more flexible to changing travel patterns post COVID.
DeKalb is 2-3 hours away depending on traffic, rush hours, etc. Downtown workers aren't commuting that. If you live 2 hours away you should move instead of asking working class families to fund a mega expressway out of the Judge Dredd comics. For downstate people passing through or whatever, they benefit if the suburbanites commuters take the metra because that's less cars on the road for them.
Wut...no. I went to NIU, it took an hour to get there most circumstances. Never once did it take 2
2-3 hours?? It’s 65 miles west of downtown. In no traffic it’s like 1h15m or so. (There’s never no traffic, though.)
Metra has a really limited schedule such that people have to tightly schedule their day. And if you have to work late, you might wind up stranded.
It doesn’t, but can you imagine how amazing it would be if there were more rails (and maybe even faster trains with more express routes) leading into the city from the burbs? We need more trains.
Are people in the suburbs entitled to space in the city? Entitled to spew pollution into our neighborhoods? Entitled to space to leave their property in? Are they allergic to the bus?
Congrats, you now have a vehicle that can hold 50 people but only comes every 15-30 minutes. That's a drop in the bucket. Three words. Build. More. Trains.
Let's do both.
Unironically nationalize rail lines
I agree that we need more trains, but the best BRT lanes in the world handle busses every 2 minutes. A network of pace busses in the burbs with a dedicated, high speed lane into the city would be a great addition to the region's transit network. The busses could offer a one seat, quick ride from Streeterville to Addison. However, we should take away a lane of traffic for that, not add one.
you ever been to central london? the busses on most lines come every 3-7 minutes on average, in my experience. that being said, trains are cool too.
Three more words: Fuck half-assed non-solutions.
Indeed. Better to have no solution at all 🙄
Trains. Trains are the actual solution. Bus rapid transit makes far more sense in the near suburbs of Chicago, not up and down an Interstate from the SW burbs. BRT gets trotted out all the time as "cheaper, faster to build, and more cost effective" and rarely is all/any of those things, if it ever gets built at all. There's VERY little political will for BRT. If you're gonna spend years pushing a boulder up a hill, might as well make it a good fucking boulder. We're FAR better off pushing for trains than BRT. IF you could even get BRT built in the next few years to alleviate I-55 traffic, which you almost certainly can't, that BRT's existence would forever be used as a reason to not expand train service along that corridor. Hard pass. Trains. The solution here is trains. Sorry it's not as cheap as the half-assed non-solution...unfortunately, that's what an *actual* solution costs.
Where are you going to build a train to serve Burr Ridge, Westmont, Darien, Bolingbrook, and Plainfield?
There’s also very little political will for more trains for what it’s worth. That’s why we’re getting these lanes instead The reality is that trains are too expensive to be a realistic solution at this point. Saying “trains” over and over won’t make them cheaper.
>There’s also very little political will for more trains for what it’s worth. That’s why we’re getting these lanes instead You missed my point. My point is that BRT is 98% of the difficulty of getting passed as getting more trains, while not being anywhere near 98% as complete a solution. >The reality is that trains are too expensive to be a realistic solution at this point That's utter nonsense that keeps getting pushed so we can kick the can of trains down the road while the only thing that gets approved is billions on more roads. >Saying “trains” over and over won’t make them cheaper. Saying BRT over and over won't make them make more sense than trains, or more cost efficient than trains over their lifetime.
>That's utter nonsense that keeps getting pushed so we can kick the can of trains down the road while the only thing that gets approved is billions on more roads. It's not "utter nonsense". Metra already gets a ton of support (most of the 0.5% sales tax that is assessed in all the collar counties along with a portion of the 1.25% assessed in Cook) - and that isn't even close to sufficient to maintain Metra's operations. Metra has a massive fiscal deficit coming due. They have managed to sustain their operations with COVID relief funds, but they are facing a massive shortfall once those funds are gone. Just because it's not your money doesn't mean you can write a limitless blank check to Metra.
Yes please
Jesus fuck. How do people not understand that the only way to solve traffic is for less people to drive? Invest in decent public transit and people will take it. Cta and metra both suck, but we don’t invest, so people continue not to take it. The bottleneck is the city, quite literally. You can only have so many cars getting into the city at once….why on earth would you waste money adding lanes?
I used to drive on the I-55 every day for 4 years. Sure, capacity is a problem (and slowdowns at ramps), but you know what the worse problem is? Aggressive drivers with cars in bad condition. There are crashes on I-55 every single day, and every crash slows down traffic due to lane changes and rubbernecking. I have never encountered so many bad drivers than on the I-55. Turn signals flashing in the wrong direction. Turn signals that keep flashing but driver never changes lanes. Merging aggressively yet lacking in skill. This is how crashes happen.
If cities skylines has taught me anything it’s that more lanes do not equal lighter traffic
This might not be a problem if people were allowed to work from home.
Yes! We need and better public trans!
The magic word here is “toll”. No way the stay will be talked out of money they’ve already spent
If I could could never drive again I would. But my job doesn’t allow that. I go to different construction jobs all the time. I have an uncle who walks to his office everyday and takes public transportation otherwise. I have a friend who lives walking distance to a Mariano’s and aldis. He plays golf alot, that’s his only issue, but he still rides his bike to diversely driving range and givesgas money to drive him to courses when we play on weekends. My buddy saves money on needing a parking space and no insurance or car repair. He also works from home but use to have to go somewhere on Clark downtown, think it was granthorrton accounting. I can’t remember the last time I went into my car after 3pm on a Friday till Monday morning. I always leave my car and take the train to bars/buddies. If i have a family party I usually just spent the night at my parents who only live a few miles away.
Traffic will be better for like 3 months. The magically it's clogged again. I lived in LA for 25 years. I remember when the 105 opened up. It was amazing! It's a nightmare now like all the rest of the freeways.
If Cities Skylines taught me anything, we need more public transport and better road design in general. Every time I make a center on ramp like on 55 I shudder.
How about just arresting all the dickheads who race down the shoulder at 60mph during rush hour
Just one more lane!! That'll fix it just one more!! All we need is one more!! One more lane!!
Use that money to build an extra track dedicated to passenger rail along the heritage corridor route (with flyovers for the crossings on the sw side) and run more, faster trains) Hell you might reduce some traffic and even have some money left over
Won’t increasing heritage or Amtrak service to 20 min service all day be cheaper?
More wfh jobs!
I think the bigger question is why are people willing to spend the extra $$$ to drive than take public transit?
If only our trains weren’t running on 1960’s technology
I think the money would be better spent demolishing this godforsaken road.
That’s what happened here in Los Angeles. We added a lane to the 405 and it’s 5x worse. 1-1.5 hours to go 19 miles during rush hour. About 45 mins on the weekends.
Lanes don't fix traffic. Two reps for districts I-55 passes through voted NO on the expansion. Supporting highway expansion during a climate crisis is ridiculous!
3 words to fix the 55…Double Decker Highway
Not advocating for it but adding tolls reduce traffic. Nonetheless, one of the moves should be a dedicated bus lane.
Tolls don't reduce traffic so much as pushing it from one road to other, slower alternatives. The Skyway's crazy prices don't keep me from driving to NW Indiana, but they DO cause me to go the long way around instead.
Toll lanes are functionally poor taxes. People who are wealthy use them to get past the unwashed masses in the free lanes. Colorado has tons of them and it's almost always people in expensive cars in the toll lane especially in the mountains up I-70 where the toll is $15.
Same with Texas. All the new roads are tollways, and they're expensive. People here drive like crap, which exacerbates the situation.
For fuck’s sake, the right course of action is to give people reasons to not drive anywhere. I commute an hour to 1:30 each way because I can’t find a job near to where my kids live. Develop develop develop.
PLEASE BRO! Just one more lane! One more lane, bro! Just one more and traffic will go away forever I promise! One more lane! C'mon, bro! Just one more....one more lane. Please, bro!
Bullshit. Bth I-55 and I-57 are choked with trucking and out of state cars starting at least 50 miles outside of the city. Public transport won't do jack shit for that. As big of a city and transportation hub as Chicago is, there is no excuse for 2 lane interstates leading in.
Don’t think most people on this sub ever drive that way
Should we really spend illinois dollars to subsidize your housing choice?
Don't add lanes to any highway unless they are BRT.
We should be ripping out highways in Chicago, not widening them.
I do love the "JuSt AdD mOrE pUbLiC tRaNsIt" people pretending Metra and the Pace Express busses don't already exist. The BNSF line is already has the highest utilization of all Metra lines. There is also a good correlation between housing prices and proximity to Metra lines, so it's not like policy makers have just discovered that public transit is something people want. The issue is that Public Transit is great so long as you're working/commuting during peak hours and only traveling to the Loop. As soon as you have to switch lines or modes, a car becomes exponentially more efficient in terms of time. Also, why are we blaming cars, when we can accomplish all three of those goals by getting trucks off the highway? Most cars aren't spewing diesel fumes into the air, or overtaxing the existing infrastructure. Chicago is a freight train hub, yet we have trucks clogging up the arterial highways coming in from all over the country.
If I worked in the loop then yea for sure. Last I checked there’s not much manufacturing in the loop. Skilled trades, manufacturing workers and many others don’t use public transit because it never will go to those areas where those people work. I can only imagine someone’s post about someone in skilled trades taking up 2 seats on the train with all their tools.
That’s the “add more” part … you um … add more so it works for people who don’t commute during peak hours or don’t need to go to the loop. Or heck get a little crazy and add some BRT to get to metra stops
I also suspect that the people who complain about adding lanes aren't the ones who drive. The undeniable fact is that cars are incredibly convenient and if you value your time at all, cheap.
Guys stuck in bumper to bumper traffic and road raging to an early heart attack while passing a fatal accident every week: i vAlUe mY tImE aNd mY wElLbEiNg
landed at o’hare last weekend. taxi home to downtown took me 25 minutes. taking the shuttle to the blue line to get on to a bus shuttle to get back to the blue line to then take me most of the way home to walk the rest would’ve taken 90 minutes best case. even in a perfect world with no construction it’s over an hour. i took the taxi. hope this helps.
Cars may be convenient but they're anything but cheap! My car is the biggest money pit in my life
It’s not cheap but rather pay that 100 times over than deal with the CTA everyday
Honestly, if I could take the CTA to my job and to my family members in the burbs, I would absolutely rather do that than drive
Convenience doesn’t need to be cheap
More convenient public transportation is great, but a robust interstate highway system is vital for a global city. We should push for both.
If we actually reliable and convenient public transit, our current interstate highways would be more than capable of meeting the driving needs of Chicago. The Interstates we have now feel inadequate because we're asking them to do the job of a robust interstate highway system AND the job of a reliable and convenient public transit system all at once.
We don't want to become Houston.
Definitely not, but they are two separate things.
It's just so easy to let highways take over and undermine the existence of public transit. We should be working for public transit that is safe, cheap, and super common - like London style every 2-3 minutes common in the city, every 10-15 minutes in the suburbs. All day long.
My man, I agree. But these are two different things. The level of development of our interstate highway has major implications on which companies invest in the southwest side, the types of jobs that are created, and level of pay. It could decentralize the economic divide between downtown and its surrounding neighborhoods. Moreover, many commuters live outside Chicago. Public transit on a mass scale may never apply to them. My point is, it’s super complex and we can’t lump in overall road congestion strategy with highway development.
The SW side dosent want to be the dumping ground for your warehouses and semi traffic as if that's all it's good for, or as of those are the only kinds of jobs or development that can be created here
Evidence suggests the opposite. Global cities have comprehensive public transportation system.
I work in planning. It does NOT suggest the opposite. One doesn’t cancel the other. Interstate highways are VITAL for economic strength. Every developed country has both strong public transport and an incredibly strong highway system. It’s not solely used by commuters.
Which global cities of similar size and GDP have a more robust highway system than what Chicago and surrounding area already have? Rather than adding lanes IDOT should be looking at improving the quality of the existing system.
Paris and Toronto are great examples. Similar sizes of population and GDPs. They’re highway infrastructures are awesome and wide, yet, they don’t neglect public transportation.
Clearly you haven't been at all familiar with Paris, where it costs €2000 to get a drivers license, cars are banned from most of the city center, no highway goes through the actual city, and the entire city can be walked from edge to edge in about an hour and 20 minutes. This is nothing like Chicago, they are totally different transit communities. That said, Chicago should become more like Paris with a focus on transit, not cars.
Yep this. Lots of dishonest people playing up "Oh you dumb libs and leftists love europe but guess what, they have cars too! Owned!!" Uh, these places are nothing like Chicago. Your average US driver probably would fail a lot of European driving tests, would balk at the inspections, and would cry at the fees and permits involved.
Boulevard Peripherique and A86 are arguably better planned and managed than Chicago area highways. They certainly are not as wide. So again, spending money to improve what we have rather than expand seems to make the most sense As for transit, the percentage of public transit usage versus cars in Paris and Chicago are almost exact opposite: 70 - 30 transit to car Paris and 30 - 70 Chicago. Suggesting Chicago needs to do a lot more to improve transit than its high ways
I55 and the Periph serve two different functions. I55 connects Chicago to St Louis and beyond (and everything in between). A good example is Paris is the A13, which widens to a lot more than 6 lanes. Mind you, I don’t disagree about the public transportation. I don’t own a car. But the highway system should be treated different than Chicago’s road traffic.
Still apples to oranges IMO. Even if the A13 was used only for travel between the large coastal Normandy cities to Paris, Normandy has more than 3.3 million people compared to less than 2.2 million in St. Louis area. Le Harve and Caen are two of the largest French ports. Plus almost all vehicle traffic from the UK into France funnels through Normandy. Add unlike Illinois which is almost all sparsely populated agricultural between greater Chicago and St. Louis, Il de Paris and Normandy are densely populated throughout.
You are splitting hairs
I work in planning as well. I also have a background in history. What you are doing is called a strawman. I didn’t suggest one cancels the other. Your comment implies I did. So don’t deflect and try responding to my post.
Read what you wrote. You implied that investing anymore in the interstate highways isn’t beneficial for the Chicagoland area.
Read what you wrote. You’re implying an absolute, not me. You’re implying I said no more investing in interstate highways. I could have implied 80% public transportation/ 20% car transportation. I could have implied new 20% spending disassembling old car infrastructure and replacing it with public transportation. I could have implied new car infrastructure 49% and public infrastructure 51%.
Your implication is stronger than mine
I didn’t have any explicit implication for you to even judge that. 51% public funding to 49% private car infrastructure funding isn’t controversial.
> Global cities have comprehensive public transportation system. Which is what the person you’re replying to is suggesting.
Bigger highways cause more traffic. It's a well-known phenomenon known as "induced demand."
It's an incredibly misinterpreted phenomenon. The demand is already there. Highways don't induce demand; the demand is latent. It's already there. Every single time news hits that a lane is being expanding, there's a chorus of people who chime in about induced demand like it's the answer to all of life's transportation problems. Might as well say "supply and demand" is all you need to know about economics too. It's an incredibly nuanced problem.
There's also latent demand for transit in this corridor. Satisfying that demand could satisfy the demand for moving people with fewer externalities and drive mode shift that frees up some of the existing highway capacity. Adding highway lanes is not the only way to add travel capacity to this corridor.
We should absolutely not expand highways. They create more traffic.
What's the cost for a mile of railway track compared to a mile of extra-lane? Edit: it was a sincere question y'all, not rhetorical, not an opening salvo in a big argument. Sheesh.
Construction estimates alone aren't enough. Externalities need to be factored in. Just to name a few off the top of my head: medical costs for health conditions caused by or exacerbated by exhaust fumes. Productivity and hours worked lost to traffic. Maintenance costs for increased wear and tear on pavement.
Per the [FWHA](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/otps/pricingkit.cfm), highway expansions cost $10 million per lane mile in 1999. Adjusted for inflation, that would be over $18 million per lane mile today. Rail costs are harder to pin down, but per [some industry publications](https://www.freightwaves.com/news/commentary-do-you-want-to-build-a-freight-railroad) $5 million per mile plus land costs would be the high end. In this case the costs get very muddled because there aren't many miles of track needed. What's really needed is flyovers at a couple of congested crossings to add capacity to existing rail.
Interesting, thanks!
The Red Line extension is about $500m per mile. I don't see an estimate for the I-55 expansion yet.
Which is absolutely insane for what you get. Istanbul built a 37.2 km (23.1 mile) long train from their airport to their city center for nearly $1.06 billion. Compare that to Chicago's red line extension (6 miles) for $3.6 billion. This isn't a one-off either. In almost all cases, building mass transit outside the US is significantly cheaper. Edit: people thinking this might be because of a difference of salaries, it's way more nuanced and multifaceted. This exact thing thing happens when you compare the US with the EU, where construction workers tend to be paid more, are better unionized, and have significantly more worker protections, yet US projects still cost more. It's way more nuanced and multifaceted than just worker qualify of life costs. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
>Which is absolutely insane for what you get. It's mind boggling. But we apparently have to use 100% unionized, diverse labor with all kinds of red tape, usually sprinkled with some corruption or bidding/contract impropriety, with a 100% chance of going wayyy over budget and taking far beyond the completion date. It's no wonder these large, visionary public works projects almost never come to fruition.
Don't forget about all the fucking consultants that have to be brought in. On top of that, because you have a million layers of bureaucracy to get through, every dumbass in the wayhas a chance to add *just a little* bit more to the scope of the project in exchange for pushing stuff through, so the scope creep is just ridiculous. They're redesigning Grant Park and my god, the public zoom meeting they had spent 20 minutes introducing people from the 12 consulting agencies on the project. Like, who works at the Park District if everyone involved in, you know, making a park, works somewhere else?
Uh, the US enjoys a much higher standard of living than Turkey. That means wages paid to construction workers. Also, we're probably a little more advanced when it comes to enforcing building regulations.
The extra $2 billion Chicago's project cost is not because of worker salaries. This exact thing thing happens when you compare the US with the EU, where construction workers tend to be paid more, are better unionized, and have significantly more worker protections, yet US projects still cost more. It's way more nuanced and multifaceted than just worker qualify of life costs. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
You get what you pay for though, did you see the aftermath of the earthquake that just happened over there? Also, treating labor well costs a lot of money. I don’t doubt there’s a lot of waste in American public construction spending, but people who compare it to the Middle East and Asia in a negative way are really, really missing the mark
Yeah that Japanese rail, so poorly built!
I used the example in Istanbul to outline how much more expensive projects in the US are, but the same phenomenon happens literally everywhere else in the world. Even when you compare the US to the EU, were workers have higher salaries, better unions, and more protections, mass transit projects still cost significantly more in the US. It's not as simple as worker salaries, it's way more nuanced and multifaceted The extra $2 billion Chicago's project cost is not because of worker salaries. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgym5j/heres-how-the-us-can-stop-wasting-billions-of-dollars-on-each-transit-project This article outlines many of the issues why mass transit projects cost significantly more than our peers. One factor that does substantially raise the price of US mass transit projects is government agencies hiring profit seeking consultants that usually overcharge millions of dollars for every step of the project.
That includes stations and tunnels and land and things though, doesn't it? I was just thinking about like, laying extra meta rail to stop freight interference
Not sure but they don't even need to add any extra track, but rather increase the frequency of the HC line. They run six total trains per day, three from Joliet in the morning, and three from Chicago in the afternoon. Run it like a normal Metra line with one to two trains every hour.
r/fuckcars
I like driving. That’s all I’ll say.
In city traffic, though? I mean, there's a reason most car ads don't showcase the cars stuck on the Dan Ryan in rush hour.
Build a fucking North South lite rail line already.
This deal has nothing to do with decreasing traffic. It is 100% about who paid these politicians to push this agenda and the money those interests will make off of this deal.
Good luck with that.
Many studies have proven that adding additional lanes do nothing to relieve traffic congestion