Quote:
Originally Posted by ardecila
...
What's totally unclear to me is how the study authors plan to squeeze a light metro system along much of the alignment. Carroll Street makes sense, but are they proposing to dig a tunnel under Clinton St? Or put some ugly aerial structure? DLR is mostly elevated and terribly ugly, but it was built through totally vacant areas in advance of development. The northern and southern extensions raise similar questions about alignment.
|
It's a little odd to me that they want to use Carroll. I kind of get why, but if the rest of the system is going to be grade-separated, why not just bite the bullet and keep it all grade separated and run this under Ohio or even Chicago Ave. Carroll probably won't even save all that much money if it's done right. First, you can't really be at grade west of the river because of the Metra tracks really messing with scheduling right during the most important times of the day (rush hour). Second, you would have to be way too high to be elevated, again because of Metra tracks. Third, assuming it's a subway under Clinton, you have a pretty narrow route between those townhomes at Kinzie and Riverbend - that's probably not a dealbreaker, but it is a little extra complexity. Then if you're saving money with Carroll that means it's coming up to Carroll's street level just after crossing under the river, so you have a portal there somewhere under the Merchandise Mart, which hardly sounds like a cheap thing to construct under an operational building. Then it goes up an actual street - Wabash - and then onto a heavily-used, major street used by traffic to avoid surface crossing of Michigan Avenue with no decent transfer to the Red Line (2 blocks away - 1 north, 1 west). Not to mention that Carroll Street is less than 1/4 mile from Lake Street, hardly ideal spacing between transit features.
So, basically, they're "saving" having to make about 1.5 miles of tunnel and maybe 5 underground stations, but dramatically decreasing the usefulness of it and also negatively impacting traffic between Carroll/Wabash and Navy Pier.
In my opinion, if you're going to run it at street level on Carroll it would make a lot more sense to have it take Carroll until it turns into North Water Street and then have a swing-bridge over Ogden Slip under LSD to get it to Navy Pier or decide that within 1/4 mile is "good enough" and put stairs and elevators to cross Ogden Slip on foot for pedestrians going to Navy Pier. That should be even cheaper, would provide improved rail connections for Navy Pier, for the Spire site, and even for Lakeshore East because it'd be literally just across the river on Columbus Drive, and if Field Dr and McClurg Place ever got a linking pedestrian bridge, it'd be even better for the thousands of people who live in Lakeshore East. That would even cut the walking distance from Ogilvy to Millennium Park by about half if people could take a new train to North Water and Columbus or Michigan.
Alternately, I'd also be quite happy to see it just stay as a subway under Clinton, crossing the river at Grand then curving up to Ohio, running east with stops at Franklin (possibly with a new Grand/Ohio Brown Line station), State Street, St. Clair, McClurg and Navy Pier. The reason for Ohio is to avoid the mezzanine of the Grand Red Line station while still being close enough to have a direct transfer - Grand used to have an Ohio exit, actually.
They estimate that the cost of their "minimum operable segment" from Union Station to around Columbus, going at-grade on Carroll is in the neighborhood of $750 million, for a little under 2 miles of route.
For slightly over 2 miles of subway with 8 stations (Clinton/Adams, Clinton/Madison, Clinton/Lake, Clinton/Grand, Ohio/Franklin, Ohio/State, Ohio/St. Clair, Ohio/McClurg). If the entire route were done cut-and-cover, it would probably cost somewhere on the order of $950 million to make it a subway, and it would result in faster travel times, better connectivity to other rail lines, and better proximity to sites north of the river. I get $950 million by estimating that a cut-and-cover tunnel would run $175 million per mile, plus each station would add $75 million.
I think the biggest drawback is that an all-subway MOS would still need a portal and a place to store the trainsets, so it would probably be necessary to build it to Navy Pier and create a yard somewhere near the existing bus turn-around or water filtration plant, and adding maybe $125 million for the tunneling, $25 million for the portal, $75 million for a terminal station and $200 million for the yard, so another $425 million or so. The grade-level only extension from Columbus to Navy Pier probably adds $200 million to their $750 million but I don't know what their yards idea would be - perhaps on the surface lots near Columbus and Illinois - so an apples-to-apples comparison for cost is probably more like $950mm for surface along Carroll Street vs. $1.375 billion for the subway version, roughly 40% more expensive. But it would be a better line in a lot of ways.
Prev
Linear Mode
