Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias
Your proposal duplicates existing service (with the exception of the Tri-Taylor stop, your stations are less than 1/2 mile from existing Blue or Pink Line stations), and most of the Circle Line is just routing changes. The Tri-Taylor stop is hemmed in on three sides by industrial uses and freight train tracks - the ridership potential for a station like that wouldn't even come close to justifying the cost.
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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.