Quote:
Originally Posted by left of center
allowing the Forest Park and O'Hare branches to split into 2 separate lines (which would loop around the Congess/Dearborn/Lake/Clinton 'superloop', much like the Orange, Brown, Purple and Pink lines currently do on the elevated Loop).
This will allow the CTA to balance out the two lines. Currently, the O'Hare branch has packed trains while the Forest Park branch runs a bunch of empty trains. The CTA can then focus more train service for the Northwest Side and the airport, as opposed to the underused west side line, which has duplicate service with the Green line half a mile to the north.
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The blue line O'hare's problem isn't that they don't have enough train cars.
It's butting up against capacity for three reasons. Electricity, headways and train length.
They don't have enough electricty to move any more cars or trains even if they wanted to. The headways are down to 3 minutes now. I doubt that they could ever get below 2 1/2 and 2 3/4 is probably where they will end up. Which will get two more trains an hour.
CTA rail already has the capacity to give every resident of the city their typical 6 mile trip every hour. The problem is they all want to ride the same six miles of the same three rails in the same direction.