Gold Line would upgrade existing commuter rail service to frequent operation, with new trains and stations.
The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that a community organization on the South Side of Chicago was pushing for the improvement of a commuter rail line along the south lakefront in preparation for the city’s planned 2016 Olympics and for the benefit of a transit-deprived community. The project would improve service most dramatically by providing for a full fare integration between the city’s inner city rapid transit system and its region-wide commuter operations. If implemented, the project’s successful completion would provide a model for the improvement of commuter rail systems around the nation.
Like most American cities, one of Chicago’s biggest transit problems is that its Metra commuter rail network is not joined with its CTA local buses and rapid transit trains. This means that commuters riding from south Chicago do not have the option of a free transfer between the two networks; they have no incentive to ride a bus to a Metra station to get downtown when taking a bus all the way downtown is far cheaper, but takes much longer. Riding Metra alone is typically more expensive than comparable CTA options, even though the two often serve the same neighborhoods.
The Gold Line plan would attempt to solve some of those problems by converting parts of the Metra Electric line, which runs from Millenium Station downtown south along the waterfront, to CTA operation at a cost of $160 million. This would require new faregates, 26 more train cars, and several track and station upgrades. The project would also include the creation of a new station at 35th Street in Bronzeville. While the service would continue to be operated by Metra, customers would ride the trains as if they were CTA-owned, and they would be able to transfer without extra cost to CTA buses and rapid transit.
Most importantly for people living along the lakefront, trains would now run at maximum 10-minute frequencies from 6 am to midnight, ensuring that the system is reliable at most hours. Trains on the Electric Line currently run once an hour during off-peak times, making it hardly an option for people who need to get around the city during the day. The same service options are offered on most of the Metra network.
The plan has been proposed by Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), which is a community group that appears to be interested in virtually all matters of public policy. Their proposal has a strong resemblance to the “Gray Line” plan proposed in 2006.
In addition to serving many of the areas being considered for use if Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Olympics is picked, the service would expand options for the South Side, which is also likely to receive new rapid transit service in the form of a Red Line extension in the coming years. Much of the area is impoverished, minority, and losing population relatively quickly, unlike communities in and around the Loop, which have seen rapid development in recent years.
Any implementation of this project would lead to substantial benefits for the city, but it shouldn’t be seen as a direct expansion of the rapid transit network, which is what the Gold Line name implies. Rather, the project should serve as the first step for a reevaluation of the role of commuter rail in inner-city areas. Chicago should be planning to fully incorporate Metra services into the CTA system within the city, making it possible for local commuters to move between the two networks fare-free and with few logistical problems. This would require a long-term implementation program, including the installation of fare gates, equalization of ticket prices, and the construction of improved connections between the lines. Metra would become something of a faster version of CTA that could offer better, convenient services to neighborhoods around the city that are close to train lines but lack efficient, all-day operation on them.
Image above: Gold Line plan, from Chicago Weekly
Yonah Freemark | 
July 8th, 2009, 04:47 EST | 
Filed Under: 
I think Americans are particularly blind on this issue for reasons I’ve never been able to figure out. When I lived in Berlin, I could use my transit pass to ride intercity trains as a shortcut across the city. But people seem to think that commuter trains are commuter trains and local transit is local transit and never the twain shall meet. It results in bizarre proposals like the one to extend the Washington Metro’s Green Line to BWI Airport, even though the MARC Penn Line already follows the same route and could be brought up to transit-level headways much more cheaply.
jfruh, good point. There’s also often talk of extending the PATH train to Newark airport, when New Jersey Transit already offers such a service from Manhattan, and the Port Authority itself spent money to build an AirTrain to connect with NJT’s commuter rail. The inefficiencies and duplications between different services are astounding.
If Chicago wants to have any hope of getting the 2016 Olympics they have to show that they are putting money into their transit system.
For a variety of purely political reasons, it’s been very hard to upgrade commuter rail lines to rapid transit. There seem to be a range of barriers mostly having to do with labor-relations (since rapid transit needs to run with fewer employees per vehicle) and staff culture (a tendency for commuter-rail and rapid-transit to see themselves as different fields of professional expertise.) The fact that commuter rail often mixes with freight, while rapid transit never does, is often an issue.
For example, most of the factors you describe also apply to the Caltrain commuter rail line along the San Francisco Peninsula, and particularly within southeast San Francisco. Few rail lines in North America have more perfect transit-oriented development: a long chain of dense small-city downtowns that all grew up around the rail line. Yet the perception that peak commuters are the only riders that matter continues to obstruct clear thinking about Caltrain’s potential.
The inefficiencies and duplications between different services are astounding.
PATH to Newark Airport wouldn’t be duplicating service, it would allow a one seat ride from Wall Street to the monorail. It would also make it much easier for people from Brooklyn to get to the airport.
The Port Authority may have ulterior motives. PATH is overcrowded. The LIRR has been talking about direct service to Wall Street for at least 40 years. Get enough traffic to and from Newark Airport it makes sense to build “PATH express” or “NJT Transit to Brooklyn and Jamaica”. Northeast corridor commuters could change to a train that serves Penn Station Newark, Fulton Transit Center, Flatbush Ave and Jamaica on the LIRR at Newark Airport. It would relieve the overcrowding on PATH. LIRR passengers could change at Jamaica for Fulton transit center instead of going to Flatbush Ave or Penn Station and transferring to the subway to get to Wall Street.
For a variety of purely political reasons, it’s been very hard to upgrade commuter rail lines to rapid transit.
Some people wouldn’t consider it an upgrade.
Metra Electric is much more like a subway system than it is commuter rail. Commuter rail more typically serves longer distances. . . I don’t want to take the D train to White Plains or the E train to Mineola… or PATH to Plainfield which was seriously discussed in the 60s and 70s. .. or the Red line to Waukegan or the Blue line to Elgin… or BART to San Jose…
Taking an E train that stops every kilometer to Mineola would be stupid, sure. But an E train that stops every 5 km could work. It’s all a question of how many infill stations the upgrade includes.
Wouldn’t 5km between stations make them kinda far apart?
I think the commuter rail/rapid transit distinction is fine, but better integration of the two kinds of systems is a worthy idea. Why not make sure that stations overlap as much as possible, to make the most of transfer opportunities, and increase frequencies on commuter rail? Why not make it possible to board the LIRR by swiping a MetroCard?
Making the E train or the Red Line stop every 5 km to better serve people in Mineola or Waukegan strikes me as a bad idea, but that doesn’t mean the services can’t be better integrated.
Wouldn’t 5km between stations make them kinda far apart?
In sprawling American cities (i.e. all of them), it’d be hard to achieve decent runtimes with shorter interstations. That, plus declining ridership, is why many commuter rail stations closed in the postwar era.
Alon, consider blending the subway with the LIRR. To keep the time of the ride reasonable they would have to express through western Queens… oh stopping at Jamaica and Woodside lets say…. Which is what they do now.
Blend Metro North and the Lexington Ave. Line. Ignore for a moment that there is no capacity on the Lexington Ave line to run more trains. . . They’d have to express through most of the Bronx and most of Manhattan…. just like they do how.
Metro North more or less fills four tracks at rush hours. Swap all that traffic over to the subway and you have to build the Second Ave Subway as a four track system and probably build a Third Ave subway as a four track system. . . How do you integrate the subway’s expresses with the suburban trains? Or does the subway run all local all the time…
One just has to think about the SNCF’s RER in Paris or the London Overground.
Adirondacker, sure, I can’t argue with that. We can even go further and have the LIRR and Metro-North use fare gates, sparing the need for multiple conductors, and allowing people to board more quickly. Long-term, we could extend the lines to serve more neighborhoods in New York than just Midtown, Downtown Brooklyn, and the parts of the Bronx and Queens that happen to be on the Harlem Line or the LIRR Main Line.
This plan does pop up repeatedly. It should have been done long ago. Unfortunately, for reasons I don’t fully understand, Metra has consistently underinvested in the Electric Line, which last I checked was still iits most popular, preferring to put money into lines with lower patronage — and diesel engines.
The University of Chicago stop is in a particularly disgraceful state, and in a particularly prime location. The Roosevelt Road stop used to be the worst of all, and finally got something approaching acceptability very recently.
This is an interesting idea to give over the Metra electric to the CTA, particularly if it is the case that Metra would prefer not to own this route in the first place. Having CTA own it and Metra operate it could also make good sense. This plan would make it much more convenient to travel to the loop and onward, with real benefits for people on the South Side.
I also like the idea of integrating the fare systems, although I think the original author’s suggestion of fare equalization is improbable; Metra covers much longer distances, making by-distance rates more logical than flat rates as with the CTA.
However, I think it would be logical to integrate Metra with the touch and go Chicago card, which carries a draw-down balance. For example, riders could touch in for CTA service, then do a touch-in & touch-out for the Metra operated service. Perhaps we could have a mobile device for the conductors on other Metra lines, as it is convenient to be able to pay on the train. (Admittedly, monthly prices could be a pain to coordinate.) This system could even be outsourced to improve buy-in, as in the case of the Hong Kong Octopus card, where you can even use the card to buy a chocolate in a train-station 7-11 or pay for parking, or the London Oyster card, which can also be used in many places for the National Rail long distance commuter service (similar to Metra). Now that would be a real Chicago card, and very convenient for hoards of Olympic tourists.
Further, thinking about the distances vs. time costs vs. fares is important. I think it would be entirely reasonable to charge more for gold line service, given it would provide faster trips. But this is a more general question- I have always wondered why CTA doesn’t allow the bus prices to stay lower while raising train fares. This maintains the social good of cheap bus transportation–and in Chicago, buses serve almost all the same areas as rail–and the extra charge helps to provide more money to the more expensive rail service. This happens in other places. Some cities charge more for rail trips at peak times, and this additional money helps to pay for more frequent service at those times. Seattle charges more for express bus service. With the Chicago Card and newer ticket machines, these differentials are much easier to charge, and the seamless transfer system already in place is doing similar work.
More on #4
Caltrain gets its upgrades in dribs and drabs. One barrier to its running more often is that it is diesel powered – with electrification it could run smaller, cheaper consists during off-peak periods. As it is the upgrades keep trickling in : Santa Clara County light-rail joint stns.; more light-rail service at Fourth + King (SF Muni); grade separations and track upgrades; etc. The golden carrots Caltrain is hoping for are (1) electrification and (2) the Trans-Bay Terminal extension. If both carrots were realized that would open the door for standard LA-SF service with a future upgrade to HSR.
P.S. Check your routes – do you have spare tunnel capacity ? I’ve seen in San Francisco at least one unused tunnel bore next to the in-service, double-track bore. That can save a bundle in construction costs.
Just saw this in the Chicago Sun Times: http://www.suntimes.com/sports/olympics/1748593,olympic-report-2016-finalists-090209.stng
Metra might do best listening to this proposal! It could be an easy and cheap way to upgrade capacity on the line.
I’m thinking about looking at the Metra lines on google streetview and seeing were the electric ones end and were the oil powered ones begin to see how they link into one another. Then I’m going to photo chop them to see witch railroad lines were eletric lines could be extended to the suburb stations that don’t have eletric powered trains.
On Metra, there is no place “where the electric ones end and where the oil powered ones begin.” It’s not like the Long Island Railroad or New Jersey Transit where lines are electrified closer to Manhattan but the wires end at some distance from Manhattan.
The Metra Electric line (originally Illinois Central) is entirely electric from Millenium Station downtown to its outer terminals. All the other Metra lines are entirely diesel from their city terminals at Union, Ogilvie, or LaSalle Street Station to the end.
On a related note, the Metra Electric uses high platforms with level-floor boarding and multiple-unit trains, like a metro except with larger gallery cars. The other Metra lines are more like a traditional railroad: diesel engines push or pull non-powered passenger cars, the stations have low platforms, and passengers must take four steps (including three steps inside the train) or a lift between the platform and the floor of the car. Thus, if Metra was to electrify a route, they would likely have to electrify the entire line all at once with high platforms at every station, or have new electric engines pull the existing non-powered cars.
Metra could rebuild the train statons as they extend the wires to the diesel powered statons or at least do it at one major line at a time based off which carried the most traffic first and then work there way down.
The IC (Metra Electric) used to be even more metro-like when it had turnstyles and electronic ticketing, which was removed because it “confused” people (more like it cost a lot and had high fare evasion, requiring conductors to check tickets on the trains anyway).
It would be hard to convert the metra to electric running since most of them share the tracks with freight, etc.
Freight can run under a catenary.
Metra Electric does not share tracks with freight. There are six tracks on the line, all grade separated from the road network and from each other. Four are for Metra Electric and South Shore trains, and two — without catenary at the moment — are for freight. And once the mayor’s Grand Crossing scheme is built, those two extra tracks won’t be used at all, although high speed rail advocates see it, appropriately enough, as an ideal access to the city for high speed rail.