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Originally Posted by ardecila
You can't ride the Pink Line to Naperville. The goal is to bring the entire region to the doorstep of important destinations that are scattered around the city.
Ignore the Tri-Taylor stop... it's just a random idea to serve the far west end of the IMD, which may eventually reach some seriously high employment density, especially with improved transit access. With an alignment shift, it could be built above-ground anyway.
Partially, the network serves my long-standing goal of decentralizing the Loop into a handful of office nodes in the central area. This isn't fantasyland - it's already happening, as major institutions look outside the Loop for large areas of land and the private sector seeks out an ever-larger supply of cheap loft space. Who would have thought even 20 years ago that Chicago/Larrabee would be a huge center of white-collar jobs? In the same vein, who would have thought that the Central Loop would be going residential at an astonishing rate? The Loop shouldn't necessarily be the center of all things in 21st-century Chicago.
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You can't ride UP-N to Naperville either. You can't provide one-seat rides to everyone - transfers are part of a good system. You could ride BNSF to the Pink Line and transfer, though, for a lot less than moving all that rail over 1/2 mile or tunnelling. That's my point. Fantasy maps are nice, but if you're actually trying to present something that is more than just fantasy relative costs have to play a factor. So what if the Central Loop goes heavily residential? They'll still need access to other places - perhaps one of your other nodes. Whatever takes hold in the central Loop is going to be dense, and worth of a station serving at least a couple different commuter lines. Ignoring the Loop would be like ignoring Midtown in New York. Sure, you need other things going on, but the Loop is still the economic nexus of the City and it would be unnecessarily risky to just ignore it and emphasize other parts of the city. We do need to have more than just the Loop, but we do still also need the Loop - it's a unique feature that partially defines Chicago
Almost 30 years ago, it was thought that the area around Larrabee and Chicago would become something similar to what it has become. It might be news to you, but you should check out some of what the City has published over the years (most of it prior to 2000 isn't online, though, so you'll have to put in some effort). 45 years ago, people expected Streeterville to explode, and the main thing that kept it from happening sooner, faster was the lack of good transit in that area connecting it to the West Loop commuter rail stations.
Central Paris plus La Defense, the areas best served by a mesh of RER and Metro, is about 45 square miles. That's like Irving Park to Pershing, the Lake to Kedzie. And, more or less, that's the area most strongly gentrifying right now.