Purposely vague references to “shuttle bus” service, and “closed roadway lanes” is all that was offered by the 2016 bid committee.

Yet even after the IOC visited Chicago to check out all the venues and facilities (and had to have seen with their own eyes the 4 track Metra Electric Division commuter rail line interlacing all the Lakefront sites; and probably wondered why the bid committee made little or no reference to it, when it should have been one of the most promoted features), the bid committee continued to promote a purposely undefined “shuttle bus” / “closed lane” transportation system.

Proposed Red, Yellow, and Orange Line extensions are all many, many miles from the Lakefront and would have done nothing for inter-venue transit.

Many South Side individuals and Community Organizations have lobbied the 2016 bid committee for years to include the CTA Gold Line/Gray Line plans to convert the Electric line to operate as part of the CTA in the bid proposals; but from personal experience they were largely ignored.

I now believe the idea of a “legacy of transit improvements” for the SE Side was the old donkey-stick-carrot trick by da’ mayor, and the 2016 bid committee.

There will NEVER be any (rail) transit improvements to the SE Lakefront Corridor now, as CTA and Metra would rather DIE and BURN IN HELL FOREVER to protect their fiefdoms, rather then work together to improve transit conditions for the people there.

Hyde Park will have [Star Trek Transporter] service before there is a Gold/Gray Line.

So sad…

As opposed to Chicago, a first-world has been city in a country working hard to get back to the third world.

Sorry, but when I think about experiences going through Atlanta and Chicago, I can’t help but think about how little our country wishes to spend on building infrastructure that works. Your reminder about the fleet of yellow school buses brought a chuckle however, and all I could think was about how insulting it must be to put international visitors in a wold class event into yellow prison buses designed for children. Reeks of saying, welcome to our cheap country. We won’t build greatness for our citizens, so why should be build it for you foreign infidels.

Sorry about the rant, but we in Amerika have problems.

Even the IOC noted that there were no
concrete plans for rail service between the venues by the 2016 committee, just vague references to using “existing infrastructure”.

The Electric District runs within footsteps of all the South Lakefront venues, and it is a 4-track Class I Railroad; not a miniature train like CTA’s el (able to carry a much higher per hour passenger load).

When the IOC say’s Metra will carry 2/3 of the rail passengers during the event,
do they mean carrying large numbers of people from the suburbs into the city; or do they mean the Electric District carrying event participants along the Lakefront between venues?

To construct a new CTA type rail line along the Metra Lakefront alignment would cost 1 to 2 billion dollars, which no one is going to spend for a 2 week event; even with leaving a legacy for the South Side communities.

Using the Metra Electric to provide service between the Lakefront Olympic venues will NOT work without fare and service integration with adjacent CTA rail and bus services.

Due to FRA/FTA regulations, new rail lines using CTA type trains cannot operate in common or on adjacent ROW to Class I trains; so CTA type trains could not run on the 2 center Electric District tracks (even with conversion to 3rd rail) right next to Metra trains.

If the IOC was looking among other things for real rail plans, than we’ve already blown it.

It would cost less than $200 MILLION (not billion) to convert part of the Electric District to operate as the Gold line/Gray Line (the Gold Line utilizes only the Metra South Chicago Branch, the Gray Line uses the entire South Side in-city Metra service).

Subway ridership consists of all passengers (other than NYC Transit employees) who enter the subway system, including passengers who transfer from buses. Ridership does not include passengers who exit the subway or passengers who transfer from other subway lines, with the exception of out-of-system transfers; e.g., between the Lexington Avenue/63rd Street station and the Lexington Avenue/59th Street station, where customers use their MetroCard to make the transfer.

There are only two such out-of-system transfers – the one given in the quote, and one between Court Square on the G and Court House Square on the 7.

I’m not sure how APTA’s methodology got a ridership level of 1.9 billion for New York. You’d have to ask them, but I’m guessing that they either extrapolated some transfer ratio, or surveyed ridership on each train to get a total ridership for each line and then added all the totals together.

As for rail — where as you note TfL’s ridership is by trip, not per train (adding up the lines separately yields about 1.3 billion, rather than the slightly over 1.1 billion that’s quoted systemwide) — I have a question for you with regard to US data, that I want you to answer complete with source:

I had always understood measurement by boarding to be each pass through a fare barrier. For buses, that of course produces an unlinked trip. For any fare-barrier-equipped heavy rail system, however, it does not unless passengers must go through barriers to change trains. Even a system that records exits like Washington DC can’t automatically see the middle segment of a rail-rail-rail trip. So what’s going on here? Measurement by boarding, in which case fare-barrier controlled journeys on heavy rail aren’t strictly “unlinked”? Or extrapolation of barrier-controlled journeys on an arbitrary ratio (APTA estimates about 10 to 30 percent of transit riders transfer en route, depending on the agency).