Happy 125th, Chicago’s L

True enough — the simple el structure with wood platforms worked just fine. It’s only when you spend other people’s money that you choose to install oversized stations, unnecessarily deep tunnels, ADA-this, ADA-that, management by cronies, and an indifferent unionized workforce selected on racial criteria instead of competence.

Also, transit (like anything else) will tend to be far more efficient when there is a motive to make money — instead of being guided by social causes and political patronage.

One thing for sure: If an “el” system was built today from scratch, it would not look like the present system. Maybe there would be trains operating closer to the lakefront neighborhoods, and there would certainly be no “Green Line” — especially its southern end. Couldn’t that be replaced by a small fleet of buses?

They are planning to build a circle line, which would go around the central area connecting the different lines. They will build it elevated if they can, since the costs are much less, but NIMBYs are trying to force it underground. The elevated trains are very noisy, but an engineer friend of mine always says that if someone could invent a quieter rail/wheel system that is cost effective, they’d make a lot of money selling the idea.

I think the more recent tracks on the pink line are on concrete bents.

The green line was originally extended south for the Worlds Fair, but back then that was a more affluent community.

I used the bus when I lived on the south side. The service was horible because the buses came all the way from the far south side, making the timing unreliable by the time the made it by me. The green line went right by my place, but I didn’t use it much because the nearest stop was 8 blocks away.

1) I wonder if you are acquainted with the website of the Monorail society? (The website is easily found by typing “monorail” into a search engine. I’ll try posting a link to this website in a separate post, so as not to delay the posting of this post.)

According to their VERY impressive, detailed and factual website (if this is indeed the same website I visited in depth a year or two ago), monorails as public transportation (not just as amusement rides) are much more common throughout the world and much more practical than most Americans imagine. From a “Market Urbanism” standpoint, they are realively inexpensive to build and operate and well thought-out ones can even turn a profit.

Plus as Adam (the proprietor of Market Urbanism) notes, one of the worst things (in my opinon THE worst thing) is their noise — which tends to be EAR SPLITTING (although this can be dealt with to various degress of success by exacting maintenance or special construction, like the concrete viaduct for the Sunnyside portion of NYC’s No. 7 train). As I understand it — and it seems extremely plausible — monorails are pretty noise free.

Plus, some of the monorails illustrated on their webiste (or at least they were a few years ago) are very unobtrusive and attractive.

I bring this up with regard to this Chicago “L” post, because Adam mentions a possible circle line connecting the various spokes, I assume, of the Chicago “el.” It seems to me that a monorail might be especially useful as circle or loop line, where it could connect via transfer stations to the spoke lines. (The monorail platforms would be one story higher than the el stations.)

2) I think Stephen Smith meant to write that the Chicago “el” (1883?) was the first electric elevated line (if it indeed was), as I believe NYC’s Ninth Avenue elevated was the first elevated as it goes back to around 1868. (It originally started out as cable operated system, like today’s San Francisco cable cars, but this proved impractical and a few years later the trains were pulled by steam engines.)

Here’s the link:

http://www.monorails.org/