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Let me show two examples of walkable areas in two different parts of the country.

Here is 2nd avenue in Nashville: https://maps.app.goo.gl/cBh2Qi1vSDniVXMq8And . It's an old historic street. You'll notice the narrow street, good building height to street width ratio which creates a sense of enclosure and "cozyness". Sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both pedestrian traffic and trees, frequent entry points, historic buildings. Also buildings are close together with no gaps between them and of comparable height creating a "canyon" feel when walking down the street. Good building facades which vary enough to be visually interesting yet are similar enough to create architectural harmony and a sense of place. This is about as good as aesthetic urbanism gets in America. This street is tourist destination and beloved by locals.

Now here is Colorado St in Pasadena, California. https://maps.app.goo.gl/CUFrn9Xmmkd28ovG7 . This is pretty typical of S. California pedestrian areas. Lots of stores and businesses, frequent entry points, a center of nightlife in Pasadena, lots of pedestrians(mainly at night). But what ruins the experience is the wide street running through it with lots of traffic, the poor building height to street width ratio giving it feel very "exposed". Go down the street and you'll find a lot of architectural mismatch like faux mediterranean and then modern and then art deco. Building heights are not uniform. I've been here many times and till recently could not put my finger on why I didn't like this place very much(and this is a problem throughout much of Southern California).

So many of our post car cities are build on the gride pattern incorporating wide streets and I don't really know what you do about this. It completely ruins the aesthetic of cities and creates car clogged places which aren't pleasant to be in. But once that street has been laid wide, you can't just pick up the buildings and move them closer to each other. We have inherted this grid pattern with wide streets. I dont know how you undo this to make these places pleasant.

I'm a journalism student and I have to expose about counter hegemonic stuff so I decided to go with urbanism, my point of start are how the United States got so much car dependency and then talk about how it affects the social life of people. Like how highways can be make to segregate people from their needs, about how people who don't have a car are seen as second class citizens in carcentric cities.

Then I will talk about nimbys and how they oppose to change, how much the hegemonic culture affected the nimbys to the point they stop projects, and finally...

I will talk about how the walkable city's are counter hegemonic, how they make people get closer to services and society, mainly how they affect people on the positive side, talking about the names behind it too and examples in Mexico and Europe. Also we will talk about how mexico solved the lack of public transport with their own busses.

Buuuutttt I feel that I'm lacking info ¿Any videos or books you would recommend me?

Introduction

Hello r/Urbanism! I’m TransChiberianBus, an enthusiast of urbanism and a resident of Chicago. Like so many others, I was introduced to urbanism during the pandemic by way of the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel. This of course led me deep into the urbanist YouTube rabbit hole (shout out to City Nerd) and other urbanist media like Strong Towns and Jane Jacobs books. I'm as stereotypical as I can be, I know. Gotta start with the classics though!

Chicago’s urbanism is a major part of my love for this city and it’s one of the main reasons I wouldn’t live anywhere else in the US. Aside from my desire to live in an urbanist utopia like all good walkability degenerates, I believe Chicago is poised for an extremely prosperous future due to climate change fueled migration. While other parts of the country look to experience increasing heat, water scarcity and extreme weather events, Chicago enjoys an abundance of fresh water, low natural disaster risk and is North enough to remain relatively temperate. Of course, nowhere will be completely immune to climate change and the entire Great lakes region enjoys the same benefits as Chicago. But nowhere else in the US Great Lakes region can you find a city as large, world class and globally connected as Chicago. Given our existing infrastructure is built for a million more people than our current population, we have an incredible foundation for widespread infill development. All of these factors combined show the amazing potential for the future of Chicago, but it isn’t guaranteed. Without further reducing our car dependency, we will struggle to scale with an influx of population and could squander the full extent of the opportunity.

I’ve greatly enjoyed learning about and dwelling on urbanism in a general sense and have recently begun to ponder how it all applies to Chicago specifically. We’re incredibly lucky to inherit an almost entirely grade-separated heavy rail system and an extensive bus network which urbanists in most cities would be ecstatic to accomplish in their lifetime. But it doesn’t take an urbanist nerd to see that there’s still ample opportunity for improvement and that the existing system could be a trap in some ways.

In part one of this paper, I will analyze the current state of Chicago’s transit system and make recommendations to improve scalability and resilience.

DISCLAIMER

I am not an urban planner. I have no real world experience with urban/transit/zoning planning. I’m simply passionate about seeing a positive change in the world and would like to do my part to combat climate change. There may be ideas in here that aren’t actually feasible or politically popular presently. That’s OK and I’d love to hear your feedback.

Also note that my focus is on Chicago city proper, the area with the most potential to absorb a population influx.

Transit Observations

Chicago’s mass transit system is managed by the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) which operates a network of buses and heavy rail.

The bus network has great coverage as it follows most arterial streets and it features higher ridership than the heavy rail network. However, it lacks the crucial features necessary for truly frequent and reliable service such as dedicated Right of Ways (ROWs) and signal priority. For that reason, Chicago’s buses get stuck in slow mixed traffic and tend to bunch. These are the primary factors that limit the bus system’s ability to scale, but it remains the quiet workhorse for transit in Chicago.

The heavy rail metro system, called the “L”, is globally renowned for its gritty aesthetics and the downtown elevated rail loop. It boasts 145 stations and 118 miles of nearly entirely grade separated tracks. The system features a hub-and-spoke layout meaning most lines radiate out from downtown and connect the central business district (CBD) to many city neighborhoods and both major airports. Like the bus network, the L is plagued by issues that will affect its ability to expand and scale but to an even greater extent.

To start, the existing footprint of the L has several deficiencies. Its coverage is limited leading to extensive sections of the city having no rapid transit access to the CBD. The hub-and-spoke model, while perfectly suited to serve the weekday commuter crowd, leaves the system underutilized on evenings and weekends. Rides across town are unnecessarily long due to all lines routing through downtown.

There are a substantial number of slow zones across the system that limit the L’s ability to be truly rapid. Some of the slow zones can and are being corrected, such as the underpowered blue line North branch. Others would be extremely financially and politically costly to fix, if they’re practically possible to fix at all, such as sharp turns and downtown loop congestion.

The L’s infrastructure is old with substantial sections needing replacement in the coming decades, which will be extremely expensive to complete system-wide and the process of which is just beginning on the North branch of the red line.

Both branches of the blue line and the south branch of the red line run predominantly in highway medians, leaving the ROI on those transit investments considerably lacking. The highway median stations generally have the lowest ridership on their respective lines and the immediate areas around them have failed to develop any density or economic vibrancy.

Aside from the bus and L specific issues, CTA leadership is problematic. Of the seven board members, not one appointee has transit experience in their resume, and only one has urban planning experience. Only one is known to regularly ride the buses and trains. Despite promises to the contrary from CTA president Dorval Carter, frequency and reliability have been declining system-wide which has slowly eroded public confidence in the system.

So where do we go from here?

Transit Plan

First and foremost, we need to restore public confidence in the existing system by addressing the reliability issues associated with declining frequency. Simply put, the CTA needs to hire more bus and train operators. Other peer US transit systems have properly restored or even exceeded their pre-pandemic operations staff, so there is little reason the CTA could not as well. All options have to be on the table, including but not limited to replacing CTA leadership, raising wages and adjusting training programs. Low confidence and therefore ridership will critically undercut any effort to improve the system going forward. The regularly occurring unplanned 20+ minute headways of today are completely unacceptable.

We should also require the CTA board and executives to take transit on a consistent basis to stay in tune with the rider experience. My suggestion is 5 rides/week, 20 rides/month or 260 rides/year.

Next, we can look at ways to grow and improve the system with an emphasis on scalability and cost effectiveness. The already expansive coverage of the bus system means adding new bus lines would net marginal benefits. It’s tempting to add new L lines and extend the existing lines, but I believe this to be folly. In addition to the issues discussed above that will hinder the L’s ability to scale, heavy rail projects are outrageously expensive when compared to bus projects.

The only L expansion currently in the works by the CTA is the Red Ahead, or Red Line Extension, project (https://www.transitchicago.com/rle/) which looks to extend the South branch of the red line by 5.6 miles and add four new stations. The new rail will run along US 57 and then turn south along existing Union Pacific rail ROW. The total construction cost is estimated to be $3.6 billion.

$3.6 billion. For four new stations.

Is that really the most responsible and impactful use of those funds? Let’s put it into context.

In 2013, the CTA released a report on possible Western Ave and Ashland Ave BRT projects, which you can find here.

Here are the important figures to consider from the report, converted into 2023 dollars and rounded:

That Western BRT project, a project of arguably greater value than the red line extension, which would create a true North/South rapid transit corridor and an effective loop line over the L system, is estimated to cost 5.8% as much.

Aside from the capital expenditure viewpoint, the added infrastructure of the red line extension creates new maintenance liabilities and the CTA will incur higher operational costs linked to staffing more stations and running more trains (if the existing frequencies are to be maintained).

In contrast, the Western BRT project creates relatively little new maintenance liabilities since it runs on existing surface streets. Operational costs would decrease because fewer buses/operators would be needed to maintain the same frequencies.

Stated more simply, L expansion means spending large sums of money up front and increased operational spending. BRT conversion means spending a relatively small sum up front and substantially reduced operational spending.

To do some quick napkin math, if we conservatively round up to $13 million per mile, the $3.6 billion being spent on the red line extension could buy us 277 miles of BRT. For reference, that would be 12% of all existing bus coverage and more than double the 118 miles of the existing L system.

The financial component is crucial and cannot be ignored. Chicago is not in a financially strong position. Illinois isn’t either, though it is improving. The city has a paradoxical need to expand service and lower costs simultaneously.

As much as it cuts deep down to the very center of my urbanist Chicagoan soul, the bus is the future of transit in Chicago. The L’s systemic issues and high cost of expansion render it an unrealistic future as the centerpiece of Chicago’s transit system. That isn’t to say we should do away with it entirely though and I’ll return to this later in the paper.

In the near term, I would strongly advocate for the red line extension project to be canceled with the funds instead allocated to bus-to-BRT conversions starting with Western Ave. I understand that there’s a strong equity component in the justification for the red line extension project, so I would strongly advocate for Halstead and/or MLK/Cermak as a priority for BRT conversion as well. However, I also understand that it’s not as simple as transferring the money for one project, including $1.6B in federal grants, to another. And given construction is scheduled to start in 2025, the red line extension is likely to happen.

That doesn’t mean we should give up on the cost effective nature of improved bus service. There is already a Western BRT effort underway by Aldermen Matt Martin (47th ward) and Andre Vasquez (40th ward) that we’d do well to rally behind. BRT expansion needs to be the priority for transit investments for the foreseeable future. See here regarding the ongoing Western BRT effort.

We should prioritize bus routes for BRT conversion in two ways. Particularly in the near term, ridership should be the determining factor. Long term, as frequent and reliable BRT service fills the L’s coverage deficiencies, most L lines should be deprecated as their infrastructure reaches end-of-life and bus routes along those lines should be prioritized as those deprecations approach.

The only L lines that should be spared deprecation are the orange line and the north branch of the blue line. Both lines should have most of their stations removed, with the exception of a few that sit along the highest ridership bus lines. In effect, these lines should become airport express trains. I also think the North branch of the red line is a likely exception, given the currently ongoing track/station rebuilds on the North branch and likely extension of the South branch.

Another major benefit of buses over heavy rail is the ability to incrementally improve service and capacity. BRT conversion doesn’t necessarily have to be completed as part of big bang projects. BRT features like dedicated ROWs and signal priority can be rolled out over time. The purchase of higher capacity buses could be justified if frequency and ridership improve to the point of consistently crowded buses. Alternatively, crowded BRT lines could be considered for light rail conversion and Chicago could reintroduce the streetcar/light rail/tram.

Even though my incremental, financially smart approach to rapid transit coverage expansion should be the most viable approach in my amateur opinion, I want to quickly touch on a couple of the counter arguments that are likely to arise. First, implementing a dedicated ROW in place of a mixed traffic lane was the most prominent reason the Western/Ashland BRT project I referenced above failed to garner approval. That’s the most politically challenging aspect of my plan and it needs to be emphasized that bus-to-BRT conversion, while removing a lane of traffic in each direction reduces the throughput of vehicles, it substantially increases the throughput of people.

The other counter argument likely to arise is the infamous parking meter deal. In 2008, Mayor Richard M. Daley sold the city’s parking spots and meters for 75 years and $1.15 billion. The deal places several onerous restrictions on Chicago’s ability to develop and change its own streets; it will drag on the city’s efforts to respond to climate change for decades. Most relevant to my plan, the deal requires the city to pay a lump sum of cash for each parking spot it wishes to remove. The parking spots in question primarily line the city’s arterial streets and their removal would be commonly required for BRT conversion. This is a real hitch in the incremental approach and for that reason, I’m putting forth a brief alternative approach.

Western BRT should still be our initial focus and is practically unaffected by the parking meter deal due to the wide ROW that leaves room for a lane of BRT, mixed traffic and parking in each direction. I would prefer to have a bike lane instead of a parking lane in each direction, but this may be a needed compromise. Ideally this project will show the city how valuable BRT can be and lower the political barrier to further projects. Past that, instead of incremental BRT roll out, perhaps we should consider a wide-scale roll out plan that would include parking spot removal costs in the Capex and we could seek a single, large federal grant for. I’m merely throwing ideas out and would love to hear how others think we can best politically maneuver.

In Conclusion

In my opinion, buses present the most viable opportunity for incrementally improved frequency, reliability, coverage expansion and scale Chicago.

If you’re still reading at this point, I want to thank you for taking the time and consideration to give my ideas a chance. I look forward to hearing any thoughts you have and delving further into this space!

In part 2, I will take a similar look at Chicago’s land use and zoning.

View Poll

View Poll

I would like in order to be a better citizen, and not be alienated from decisions that concern my city and its urbanism.

I am thinking about books, understand how cities works etc or anything useful and general.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1c7yhxy/im_the_founder_of_strong_towns_a_national/

I'm writing something about the racist history of highway construction and was wondering if anyone knows of direct quotes from planners, engineers, etc that exemplify the segregationist agenda of highways.

For example: "In 1961, planners told the Daily Oklahoman that the purpose of a new freeway was not only to speed up traffic, but also "wipe out a considerable portion of the city's blighted area."

Thanks in advance!

Hey folks! Have there been any studies attempting to quantify how density improves QOL or creates more opportunities for residents or increases prosperity?