Why Chicago still hasn't fixed the Loop

Comments · 1.4K

• TH

  @TheFlyingMooseCA · 2 years ago (edited) · pinned

  If you want better transit in your city: <a href="https://forms.gle/VDADCMabA13qiTL37">https://forms.gle/VDADCMabA13qiTL37</a><br><br>EDIT #2: at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMX2nPALphQ&amp;t=828">13:48</a>, Steve is actually referring to the service cuts of 1980-83, not those in the 90s. It&apos;s a bit out of order as a result - sorry for the error :/<br><br>EDIT #1: this topic (and all of transit) is very nuanced! The goal of this video is not to put Chicago down or make definitive claims on what’s right vs wrong; it’s to explore the history of 3 proposals that didn’t happen - naturally a complicated story that requires far more than 25 mins to cover fully. You’re ofc welcome to disagree about any views shared - please just be respectful about it to others :)

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• TH

  @thebravegallade731 · 1 year ago

  the funny part is if they actually built the projects 30 years ago, you could have had both the crosstown AND the loop at HALF the cost.

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• JU

  @justinleemiller · 2 years ago

  Fun fact: in the 60s Chicago ripped out 100 stops. That’s about the size of the entire system in Montreal…which they started to build in the 60s.

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• PA

  @pasu129 · 2 years ago

  I think you hit the mark here “the issue is never a lack of money, just that it’s spend very inefficiently” that speaks to overall North American public infrastructure spending scheme

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• EU

  @eugeneking1462 · 2 years ago (edited)

  I am a native Chicagoan who loves transit. I enjoyed your video. Here are my &apos;pipe dreams&apos; for transit in our region:<br>1. Convert Metra to a fully electrified [EMUs] system that is ADA compliant with 15 to 20 minute headways (ie, regional rail). <br>2. Connect all Metra downtown Chicago terminals via electric rail transit.<br>3. Build the circular Metra rail line [with EMUs] connecting Metra lines in the suburbs<br>4. Extend CTA rapid transit lines so their terminals connect with Metra<br>5. Build a CTA Crosstown line connecting the Green, Blue, Pink. Orange and Brown lines.<br>Too bad I don&apos;t have the trillions of dollars to do it.

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• TY

  @tyleralberico · 2 years ago

  Nothing hooks me into your videos more than when you talk about funding and I mean that sincerely

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• LU

  @LukeHoersten · 2 years ago

  Awesome video. As a Chicagoan, I usually cringe when some of the non-Chicago based channels make content with constructive criticism about the city. You nailed it though. You captured what us locals want out of transit and brought a lot of new info to light. Thanks!

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• TD

  @TDSP9981 · 2 years ago

  As an Illinois resident who used to work for IDOT, I loved your video. I did think you missed out by not mentioning or exploring the movement to combine the CTA, Metra and PACE.

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• TH

  @TheSpecialJ11 · 1 year ago

  Hey it&apos;s Austin! We had class together in UIC&apos;s urban planning program. I swear he knows everything there is to know about Chicago transit, so he&apos;s perfect for this video.

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• JA

  @JasperGilley · 2 years ago

  FINALLY a video that breaks down how bad Chicago transit is outside of the Loop. As a native Chicagoan, it infuriates me when people who aren&apos;t from the area think that Chicago has good transit because they visited the Loop once. So much of Chicago&apos;s inequality, crime, and failure to live up to its potential is due to a lack of density/transit/TOD and it&apos;s infuriating how incompetent the CTA/government is relative to other similar US metros

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• AV

  @AverytheCubanAmerican · 1 year ago

  It&apos;s worth mentioning that the reason Chicago ended up with a downtown Loop in the first place is because of Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was also later involved with the London Underground. He created the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to take control of the District Railway and the partly built Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, and Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and he helped electrify what&apos;s now the District line and open Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines and the Charing Cross section of what&apos;s now the Northern line though he died before they opened. Prior to construction of the Loop, Chicago&apos;s three elevated railway lines, the South Side Elevated Railroad, the Lake Street Elevated Railroad, and the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad, each had their own terminal on the edges of downtown, where it was considered too expensive and politically inexpedient to build rapid transit. With Yerkes, the Union Elevated Railroad Company was created in 1894, whose purpose was to construct the loop. The Loop is the result of Yerkes aggregating the competing rapid transit lines and built a loop connecting them, which was constructed and opened between 1895 and 1897, finally completing its last connection in 1900 with the Northwestern Elevated Railroad. Upon completion, all the rail lines running downtown had to pay Yerkes&apos;s operation a fee, which raised fares for commuters. After bribery of the state legislature, where he secured legislation by which he claimed a fifty-year franchise, the resulting furor drove him out of town. &nbsp;Its steel structure was designed by bridge designer John Alexander Low Waddell. John Alexander Low Waddell is notable for the &quot;A&quot; Truss bridge, which allowed for cheap and rapid construction and contributed to the rapid expansion of several railway companies, as well as being the first to invent a modern vertical-lift bridge design. Besides the Loop, he also worked on the original Goethals Bridge, Outerbridge Crossing, Cleveland&apos;s Detroit–Superior Bridge, and the Lower Hack Lift used by NJ Transit. <br> <br>Yes, the Blue and Red Lines have subway sections, the Milwaukee-Dearborn and State Street Subways respectively. On the two lines, there are three stations that share a continuous platform, with the State Street Subway having the longest subway platform in the world at approximately 3,500 ft long (which includes a closed fourth station, Washington). As shown, the Yellow Line doesn&apos;t enter the Loop. The Yellow Line aka the Skokie Swift is quite unique. It&apos;s a two-car train that goes to Skokie, a suburb. It used to operate by switching between third-rail and catenary, as in half of it was third-rail while the other-half was catenary left over from the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad. It switched between these while in motion, just like New Haven Line trains do. This unique operation stopped in 2004 when third-rail replaced the catenary portion. The line was once the Niles Center Branch of the old Chicago Rapid Transit Company. The rapid transit service began as part of the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad&apos;s high-speed Skokie Valley interurban line between Howard Terminal and Dempster Street, Niles Center (wasn&apos;t renamed Skokie until 1940 to avoid confusion with nearby Niles). It was placed in operation in March 1925. The route included several intermediate stops through Evanston and Skokie at Ridge, Asbury, Dodge, Crawford/East Prairie, Kostner, Oakton and Main. In 1948, after purchasing the CRT in 1947, the CTA discontinued Niles Center Branch service and replaced it with a bus. When the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad ceased operations in 1963, that&apos;s when CTA purchased the tracks on the line. When it re-opened in 1964, they wanted to present it as a &quot;revolutionary&quot; idea, a park-and-ride with a quick train ride from Dempster-Skokie to Howard, hence Skokie Swift. It reopened as a federally-aided mass transit demonstration project. Initially, none of the intermediate stations reopened, however there was interest in Skokie to reopen one of the stations, with Oakton selected because of its downtown location. Thus, Oakton-Skokie reopened in 2012. On its first day of service in 1964, it carried nearly 4K passengers in a 16-hour period compared to approximately 1,600 passengers carried by the North Shore Line from the Dempster Terminal in a 12-hour period before the railroad terminated. At the end of the two-year experimental period, 3.5 million people had used the new service and so it was made a permanent part of its system.

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• ST

  @Stanf954 · 2 years ago (edited)

  Most of the North American city rail and transit systems are a radial design and were effective at the time of conception. The designers were short-sighted about the future expansion of a system, and so most older North American cities like NYC,Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Toronto suffer from the design failure and the correction is difficult and expensive to do. The necessity for urban areas to revive the surface transit systems with light rail is a viable alternative to fill &nbsp;on the gaps of the transit deserts that exist after the trolley systems were abandoned and replace with buses.

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