While the Bears continue to suck most of the political oxygen out of the room with their current will-they-or-won’t-they soap opera between Arlington Heights and Indiana, thankfully the city still has a few major irons in the fire regardless of wherever the McCaskeys end up deciding to exploit build.
All eyes might be on Soldier Field, but just across DuSable Lake Shore Drive lies another potential megaproject site: ONE Central. A true megaproject, ONE Central was first pitched back in 2019 to add a bunch of skyscrapers over the Metra Electric tracks between McCormick Place and the Field Museum. With a site spitting distance from the Lake and adjacent to the burgeoning South Loop neighborhood, a megaproject to add thousands of commercial, office, and residential tenants on railroad air rights seems to make a lot of sense… unless the pedestal to build it on ends up costing $6.5 billion.
Of course, any rational developer would try their hardest to get the state to pay for that instead of having it come out against their bottom line, and the best way for a developer to make a case for state support to build that sandbox for them to play in is to play up the public benefits of the project. In this case, ONE Central’s pedestal wasn’t simply the base for supertall skyscrapers, but rather it would actually be a world-class transit center for CTA, Metra, NICTD, Amtrak, and anyone else the developer could think of. As a result, the General Assembly passed the Public-Private Partnership for Civic and Transit Infrastructure Act, authorizing the State of Illinois to contribute nearly $6.5 billion for the project.
Unfortunately for the project, transit and transportation advocates were extremely skeptical of ONE Central’s transit-oriented claims, and many of the initial transit projects themselves were dubious: the project would include an ‘L’ branch from somewhere in the vicinity of 17th Junction (where Midway-bound Orange Line trains currently split off from the Green Line), but with no clear indication of how the service would actually operate: is it a new line? Are we adding a branch to the Orange Line or Green Line or Red Line or something totally different? Would these trains go to the Loop or to Midway? Is anything actually constructable over — or under — Canadian National’s freight tracks? Would additional properties beyond the project envelope be needed to tie into the existing network?
On the commuter rail side, the project called for reverse-branching Metra’s busiest line (BNSF), meaning half of Metra’s busiest trains would now miss downtown entirely, cutting across the St. Charles Air Line and terminating at ONE Central rather than Union Station. This would almost certainly be a non-starter for Metra (to say nothing of the significant additional amounts of operating funding, logistics, and additional infrastructure needed to turn and/or lay over rush hour trains somewhere near McCormick Place, also not included within ONE Central’s footprint), and for the suburban communities along the BNSF.
Many readers may also remember that in 2020, there was a global pandemic that dramatically upended day-to-day lifestyles and work patterns in urban cores around the world. Additionally, with the Bears announcing their intent to vacate Soldier Field, the fundamentals of the ONE Central project became even shakier. As part of the state’s due diligence, Illinois commissioned a feasibility study on the project, which was completed in 2025. The results of the study convinced Gov. JB Pritzker to pull the plug on public support for the project entirely. Today, the OneCentralChicago.com website is still live but only consists of a static “coming soon” page that appears to have not been updated since 2023.
Alas, today ONE Central remains a megaproject in search of a megaproject.
A Brief Post-Mortem
Let’s dive back into the latest transit proposal for ONE Central. Prior to the feasibility study’s initialization, ONE Central modified their proposal to drastically lower the public-facing cost to an estimated $2.75 billion, or a 58% decrease from the previous $6.5B price tag. The modified proposal relies on far less decking over the Metra tracks, with more of the key vertical infrastructure on terra firma rather than a bridge deck by shoving the Metra tracks and the McCormick Busway1 as far west as possible within the site envelope.
“Civic Build” ONE Central proposal as published in the 2025 Feasibility Study (that is publicly available online).
In addition to reducing the amount of decking required, the latest ONE Central proposal also gives up any direct CTA ‘L’ connection, now relying on a “CHI-Line Rail Shuttle”, a train that would connect ONE Central to the Red Line (a new transfer station in the southern portion of The 78 is proposed, but not included in the cost) and to Union Station.
“CHI-Line Shuttle” concept, with trains connecting ONE Central to the Michael Reese Hospital site, The 78 (with a Red Line connection at a future infill station), and Union Station. (Source: Feasibility Study)
The feasibility study notes some potential impacts that could negatively impact the potential success of the CHI-Line Shuttle: namely, the concept relies upon Amtrak’s completion of CHIP, being able to use the St. Charles Air Line bridge, and negating potential conflicts with Metra at the Rock Island crossing as well as freight traffic on the Canadian National line.
Not mentioned in the feasibility study but also a concern: whether a Red Line station at The 78 is financially (and physically) feasible. Where the CHI-Line Shuttle would cross the Red Line, the Red Line is on a downward curving slope between the subway portal near 16th Street and the Roosevelt subway station. Notably, some local neighborhood groups have shifted towards advocating for an infill Orange Line elevated station rather than a Red Line subway station.
Can’t help but wonder if there’s an alternative to the CHI-Line Shuttle that could avoid those potential pitfalls…
Zooming Out
Let’s quickly take a look at some of the other megaprojects discussed in this post:
Strategically investing in infrastructure to support and leverage private investment is a smart move for the public sector, especially if those infrastructure investments are proactively coordinated, seamlessly integrated with the regional network, and will provide all-day, seven-days-a-week, year-round benefits to Chicagoland residents, workers, shoppers, and visitors.
ONE Central’s transportation proposals didn’t pencil out at least partially because they largely failed to account for regional benefits. But, if the CHI-Line Shuttle instead looked something like this…
…and if these trains connected not only ONE Central and Union Station but also:
Foundry Park (Clybourn)
and The 78 (Roosevelt)
and the Quantum Park (87th/Baltimore)
and The 1901 Project (Ashland-Ogden)
and Soldier Field (18th)
and Arlington Park (Arlington Park)
(and Northwestern University)
(and O’Hare)
(and the University of Chicago)
(and Sox Park)
(and… well, you get the idea.)
Regional rail is the megaproject’s megaproject: with a handful of strategic projects to connect the infrastructure we already have, we can stretch our public investments far beyond what was previously possible to better leverage private-sector capital throughout all of northeastern Illinois.
Strategic, transformative, ambitious-yet-attainable transit investments to unlock Chicagoland.
It’s time for CrossTowner regional rail. It’s time to #BuildTheTunnel.
The revised transit proposal includes the previous “CHI-Line Circulator” bus corridor concept utilizing the McCormick Busway to connect ONE Central to Lakeshore East. In the interest of brevity, this post does not detail the Circulator, but additional detail can be found on pages 14-16 of the feasibility study. ↩︎
It can be challenging, however, to envision how such a system could be crafted, developed, built, and operated; indeed, it is one of the most common questions we’ve received. There are multiple existing constraints that need to be identified and mitigated, and major capital projects that would need to be built. The Chicago Terminal, as railroaders generally refer to the Chicagoland rail network, is an incredibly complex place to operate trains.
To this end, this post will attempt to identify a potentially-plausible phased approach to get Chicagoland from today to the regional rail network our region deserves. The service plans and proposals included herein are, of course, entirely unofficial: the CrossTowner regional rail proposal has always been, and continues to be, an exercise in imagining what could be rather than an official or professional regional plan. These plans have not been vetted by any of Chicagoland’s transit agencies, and rely exclusively on publicly-available materials and observations. Much further study and planning would be required before any implementation begins, but this post is an attempt to show how we could eat the proverbial elephant one bite at a time.
Before We Begin
Some housekeeping before we get into the details: this post will rely heavily on maps that document different phased implementation components of the larger CrossTowner regional rail network vision. In some cases, the phases are irrelevant: some infill1 stations, for instance, could be constructed at any time (or not at all). In other cases, it may make sense to move certain components up or push them back based on cost, constructability, political realities, and so on.
These maps also use a standardized “netgraph” approach to displaying service frequencies: each line represents one round-trip per hour. This allows an easier way to communicate average headways, or times between trains. Note, however, that these are averages: more detailed service planning would be required to determine more realistic schedules. Additionally, due to the realities of needing to balance local service with express service in some cases on shared tracks, perfectly-balanced headways all-day may not be entirely feasible.
Note that these maps all show proposed off-peak service levels. Additional trains would operate during peak periods, likely including Metra’s typical battery of suburban express services; these trains are not shown.
A quick mathematics cheat sheet:
One line = one train per hour = 60 minutes between trains
Two parallel lines = two trains per hour = 30 minutes between trains
Three parallel lines = three trains per hour = 20 minutes between trains
Four parallel lines = four trains per hour = 15 minutes between trains
Five parallel lines = five trains per hour = 12 minutes between trains
Six parallel lines = six trains per hour = 10 minutes between trains
Eight parallel lines = eight trains per hour = 7.5 minutes between trains
Thinner lines indicate lines that operate less than hourly; these stations are shown “inverted” (a solid-colored station with a white border, rather than a white circle with a colored border). Additionally, lines in future phases are shown by their “Yard Social Standard” identification scheme that is also shown on other CrossTowner materials. The below “baseline” map provides a comparison to that scheme and the existing line naming system.
The Regional Rail Road Map
Baseline: The Post-Commuter Era
We begin with the “Post-Commuter” era: Metra has already committed to transitioning their fundamental operating model from “commuter rail” to “regional rail”. Preliminarily, this can be best summarized as “hourly everywhere”: while some level of peak-period focus is warranted based on present ridership, the larger goal is to provide bi-directional all-day service throughout the service area. At present, Metra has been activelymoving towards hourly headways wherever possible.
Unfortunately, that is not feasible everywhere: freight conflicts at numerous locations on the Heritage Corridor and SouthWest Service, as well as some single-track chokepoints on the North Central Service, will make all-day hourly service challenging from an infrastructure perspective. Additionally, on most lines Metra remains at the whims of freight railroads that either control the lines outright or exercise a high degree of autonomy that prevents Metra from easily increasing service. These constraints are one of the primary reasons why Metra cannot easily add additional service, and they need to be a political priority for our region as the NITA era begins.
For the purposes of this post, let’s assume that they can be mitigated to some degree: Metra will need to continue to share tracks with freight traffic, and will need to ensure freight railroads can still reasonably operate throughout the day, but where freight traffic is lighter, Metra and the freights could come to some sort of agreement to add service.
For reference, here is a recent CMAP freight rail volume map, as of 2023.
As Chicagoland takes concrete steps to move towards a proper “regional rail” paradigm, the first step would be adding additional trains to the central part of the region, where population densities are more supportive of increased service on some of Metra’s busiest routes. While “hourly everywhere” remains the goal for the region as a whole, supplemental service would be offered such that frequencies would improve to half-hourly closer to the urban core, while also beginning to provide all-day (hourly) service to some current peak-only stations, especially along the BNSF and Milwaukee West lines.
Supplemental hourly trains (to create half-hourly headways) would begin running on the Union Pacific North (“A/B”), Union Pacific Northwest (“C/D”), BNSF (“M/N”), Rock Island Beverly Branch (“S”), and Metra Electric South Chicago (“W”) lines. Supplemental trains would also operate on the Metra Electric Main Line and Blue Island Branch (“V”), to provide half-hourly frequencies north of Kensington and hourly service on the Blue Island Branch. Combined with half-hourly service on the South Chicago Branch, this would provide 15-minute service between Hyde Park and Millennium Station, not including Main Line (“U”) and South Shore Line (“Z”) express trains.
A “new” line would also be created: Line “H” would serve as the supplemental hourly local pattern combining Milwaukee West and North Central Service stations between Chicago Union Station and O’Hare Transfer. Line “H” would also relieve the NCS of the need to make stops at Franklin Park, Schiller Park, and Rosemont, speeding trains up from the northern suburbs as well as speeding up express trains to O’Hare.
Following Phase I, most Metra stations in Chicago and some inner suburbs would be able to provide half-hourly service all day long, with only seven additional trains per hour region-wide.
Phase II: Regional Rail
Following the Enhanced Service in Phase I, Phase II would take a stronger step towards a proper “regional rail” network. At a high level, the goals of Phase II are to separate “inner” supplemental service trains from “outer” suburban trains, allowing the latter to run express all day long.2 To allow this, strategic station investments are needed to create better transfer stations — “superstations” — that allow “inner” and “outer” trains to coordinate service, maintaining connectivity throughout the region while speeding up express services. The six “regional rail” lines also now have their own distinct identification, and would likely also use a more modern rolling stock similar to Metra’s forthcoming Stadler FLIRT fleet.
Phase II has six primary infrastructure improvements:
A-2 Modernization and Fulton Market Superstation: Perhaps the most important project in this phase, this effort would reorganize Metra’s complicated A-2 interlocking on the West Side near Western Avenue, minimizing crossing conflicts by re-routing Line “K” (UP-W) trains into Chicago Union Station and Line “E” (MD-N) trains into Ogilvie Transportation Center. This reconfiguration would almost certainly be required before increasing frequencies between Chicago Union Station and O’Hare. This phase would also include a new Fulton Market Superstation to allow transfers and connections, as well as serve a burgeoning part of the city. (This project has been on Metra’s radar for a while.)
Grand/Harlem Superstation: A station consolidation on the Northwest Side would create a contiguous Harlem Avenue bus corridor that connects express and local rail service to O’Hare to two other Metra lines (UP-W at Oak Park and BNSF at Harlem Avenue) as well as two3 CTA ‘L’ lines (Green Line at Harlem/Lake and Blue Line at Harlem-Congress). The full CrossTowner vision includes this bus route as a Pace Pulse corridor that would extend to Summit, then east on Archer/55th to the Orange Line ‘L’ terminal at Midway Airport.
Mayfair Superstation: A new station on Line “C/D” (UP-NW) that would connect with the existing Line “E” (MD-N) Mayfair station and the existing Blue Line Montrose station. While the UP-NW also has Blue Line connections north and south of Mayfair, creating a unified Northwest Side superstation could anchor a future Brown Line western extension, as well as create far easier Amtrak connections between Hiawatha/Borealis/Empire Builder trains and O’Hare Airport via the Blue Line. Thinking far further into the future, a Mayfair superstation could also allow for reuse of the Weber Spur as a transit artery, as well as bookend a northern Cicero Avenue transitway.
75th Street Corridor Improvement Program (CIP): Another project that has been on the books for years, the 75th Street CIP would allow Line “Q” (SWS) trains to connect to LaSalle Street Station instead of Chicago Union Station while also bypassing key freight bottlenecks. While this project would not have a direct impact to the “regional rail” lines, it would be a significant improvement that makes hourly SWS service more feasible.
Kensington Superstation: On the Far South Side, the existing 115th (Kensington) station would be (re-)expanded to (once again) allow for NICTD trains to make stops, supplementing the local/express patterns of the Metra Electric. Additionally, with NICTD operating the new Monon Corridor as an off-peak shuttle operation between Dyer and Hammond Gateway, Monon (Line “Y”) shuttle trains could be extended to the Kensington Superstation, doubling frequencies to Hegewisch.
McCormick Place Superstation: To better serve a major trip generator, as well as to provide another local/express transfer location along the Metra Electric, additional platforms would be added at McCormick Place in advance of future phases and service expansions. These new platforms would also allow special-event services on the express patterns to more easily serve McCormick Place without interfering with all-day local services.
On the North Side, these improvements, combined with three additional round-trips per hour, would allow for the busy “A” (UP-N) and “C” (UP-NW) lines to run express to speed up trips from the north and northwest suburbs, and on the West Side, local Line “H” trains could run twice an hour between Chicago Union Station and O’Hare Transfer to provide more robust all-day transit service connecting working-class neighborhoods to the region’s two largest job centers. The added hourly Line “H” train could also utilize the single existing thru-track at Chicago Union Station to replace the “N” BNSF supplemental pattern, creating a single-seat trip between Metra’s busiest line and O’Hare. Furthermore, with half-hourly service, Line “G” (NCS) trains could skip more stations, providing an early “O’Hare Express” operation between Chicago Union Station and the airport.
Phase III: CUS Thru-Running
The larger regional CrossTowner network starts to take shape in Phase III, when dedicated thru-running tracks at Chicago Union Station are constructed. This improvement can allow for proper thru-running operations at Chicago Union Station for regional rail service at higher frequencies. Combined with Amtrak’s Chicago Hub Improvement Program (CHIP), three primary routes could be implemented:
X5: Building on the work of Phase II, the other hourly Line “H” train would also be thru-run to Downers Grove Main Street and rebranded as the X5 CrossTowner. This change would allow Line “M” (BNSF) trains to run essentially express east of Downers Grove, with stops only at Hinsdale, LaGrange Road, Harlem Avenue, Cicero, and Western.
X6: To create a future unified hub at Chicago Union Station, Line “S” (Beverly Branch) trains would turn off of the Rock Island District to connect with the vacated4 SouthWest Service tracks, run through Chicago Union Station, and provide regional rail service along Line “K” (UP-W). The CrossTowner vision suggests this connection be made through the parking lots of Rate Field, but several alternative options could be feasible and require further study. This route would be rebranded as the X6 CrossTowner.
O’Hare Express (Line “G”): Thru-running Chicago Union Station, combined with fewer stops between downtown and O’Hare for Antioch-bound trains, and improving the St. Charles Air Line (SCAL) bridge over the Chicago River, creates the opportunity to operate an oft-desired airport express service between the McCormick Place Superstation, downtown, and O’Hare. Unlike other airport express operations, however, this would functionally be just an extension of Line “G” (NCS) suburban trains.56 While not officially a CrossTowner line, this service would be an important component of the larger system and would provide single-transfer connections from the Metra Electric lines to Chicago Union Station and O’Hare prior to the construction of the tunnel.
Phase IV: #BuildTheTunnel
By the time we get to building the tunnel, operationally it ends up being an extremely straightforward enhancement. The tunnel gets built under Clinton Street and Roosevelt Road, and each of the four remaining regional rail lines (“B”, “D”, “V”, and “W”) simply continue through the tunnel and out to regional rail lines on the other side as CrossTowners. Doing so halves headways on the rest of the regional rail network, while expanding half-hourly service further out into the suburbs. Within the tunnel itself, and indeed down the entire “trunk” between Clybourn and Hyde Park, CrossTowner trains now operate every 7.5 minutes, and every 15 minutes as far as Kensington, South Chicago, Winnetka, and Des Plaines.
The tunnel would greatly enhance regional intermodal connectivity with stations at Randolph/Clinton (connecting to Green and Pink Line ‘L’ trains at the existing Clinton/Lake station and Metra trains at Ogilvie), Chicago Union Station (connecting to Blue Line ‘L’ trains at the existing Clinton/Congress station as well as Amtrak, Metra, X5 and X6 trains at the station), Taylor/Clinton (to seed a new transit-oriented development neighborhood), and Roosevelt (connecting to Red, Orange, and Green Line ‘L’ trains at the existing Roosevelt station).
The core CrossTowner network is now complete.
Beyond The Tunnel
While the initial vision would be complete, that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be additional opportunities for expansion. With no freight conflicts on the Metra Electric District, additional regional rail routes could be added later; more frequent service to O’Hare, or expanding regional rail to the Milwaukee North, or entirely new services could be added in the future. The original 2034sight Plan calls for a tunnel under Ohio Street and Columbus Drive, a corridor that remains ideal for additional high-frequency, high-capacity transit options to serve River North, Streeterville, and Lakeshore East. This alignment could also provide single-seat trips from the Far South Side to O’Hare more feasibly, and closer to downtown the Ohio-Columbus tunnel is bookended at each end by “superstations” to provide universal connectivity between lines as needed. Rather than precluding these service alternatives, the CrossTowner vision is intentionally open-ended and forward-compatible for the continued growth of Chicagoland’s transit network.
CrossTowner regional rail network map, showing 2034sight and CRCL Plan enhancements.
The time is now
As the new Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) launches this summer, Chicagoland transit is in a position to not only survive but to thrive on regional coordination, integration, and bold visions for the future. Nothing worth having is ever easy, but CrossTowner regional rail can be the bold, achievable, pragmatic vision Chicagoland needs to once again shoot for the stars.
It’s time to unlock our regional potential. It’s time for regional rail.
Justification for individual infill stations are generally not included in this post, but additional information will eventually be posted somewhere. These posts are long enough without getting truly into the weeds. ↩︎
Ideally three in the more distant future with a Pink Line extension to North Riverside. ↩︎
Metra operations would have been moved off of this segment following completion of the 75th Street CIP, but Amtrak and occasional freight traffic would still likely use portions of the route. ↩︎
Amtrak could plausibly extend Midwest intercity trains to O’Hare on the same routing; however, there is potential for that to be a net-negative at a local Chicagoland level if that operation would come at the cost of more frequent suburban service on the NCS. ↩︎
It is not shown on these maps, but O’Hare Express (Line “G”) trains could also serve the proposed One Central megaproject near 18th Street in lieu of that project’s proposed reverse-branching of the BNSF. ↩︎
Over the past few weeks, this blog has explored what we’ve been calling the “Grand Corridor”, what should be a high-performing intermodal transit corridor straddling Chicago’s Northwest and West Sides as well as suburban Cook County that, ideally, could connect these working-class neighborhoods to Elgin, O’Hare, and the Loop with fast and frequent transit service, but due to Chicagoland’s byzantine, balkanized approach to transit operations and planning, result in only modest plans that fail to fully leverage this incredible asset.
However, it is the editorial policy of this blog that it does not offer criticism without also offering potential solutions, so to conclude this series, this post will detail a governance proposal to address some of these challenges and set the groundwork for a more efficient, more effective option to better position Chicagoland to operate and build a proper 21st-Century transit network that better levels the regional playing field, streamline processes, and break down harmful silos of governance, all without throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.
If you’re reading this, there is an extremely high likelihood that you are already at least somewhat familiar with two primary pieces of legislation working their ways through the Illinois General Assembly down in Springfield that would both address transit governance issues in Northeastern Illinois: the Metropolitan Mobility Act, supported by the Partnership for Action on Reimagining Transit, which would dramatically transform our governance model by merging the RTA, CTA, Metra, and Pace into a single agency; and a more modest reform bill (that would simply delegate to the RTA some additional limited powers to oversee the three service boards) colloquially known as “the labor bill” in honor of the United We Move labor coalition that is championing the legislation. Much ink has been spilled already in taking deeper looks at both of these approaches; I personally suggest reading RIchard Day’s (pro-MMA) City That Works post about the larger reform efforts and the benefits of the Metropolitan Mobility Act in the context of less-comprehensive reform. However, MMA opponents have also made some very fair critiques of the legislation, most notably the idea that simply putting everyone under the same roof does not necessarily guarantee a more efficient transit operation for riders; any frequent user of the CTA undoubtedly has a few stories about missed bus-to-bus or train-to-train connections even within the same agency. There are also fears that with the MMA’s singular board split between the different “factions” in Chicagoland, someone will get (pardon the pun) railroaded by joint governance. Of course, these fears simply reinforce the existing siloed thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, and depending on who you talk to it’s either going to result in the suburbs running roughshod over the city, or the city running roughshod over the suburbs. In addition to concerns about Naperville calling the shots on the ‘L’, or the Fifth Floor deciding what transit in Will County should look like, there are also concerns from the folks who do the hard work of operating the buses and trains themselves: while union contracts could undoubtedly be resolved eventually, adding uncertainty and requiring new negotiations with any new agency is a level of instability the unions would understandably prefer to avoid.
On the opposite side of the argument, of course, is history: faced with a “doomsday” budget scenario in 2008, Illinois empowered the RTA with additional oversight tasks and duties as part of additional revenues to stabilize transit operations. Today, there’s understandably a healthy skepticism that, faced with a “doomsday” budget scenario in 2026, empowering the RTA with additional oversight tasks and duties as part of additional revenues to stabilize transit operations would not necessarily be a long-term solution. While the RTA’s “Transforming Transit” vision document, for instance, calls on the legislature to empower the RTA to create things like a unified fare product, this overlooks the inconvenient fact that the RTA was empowered by the legislature to create a unified fare product years ago, and has missed the statutorily-mandated deadline by a decade and counting.
While the MMA and the labor bills continue to work their way through Springfield, there is a potential third option that has not yet been fully explored in the legislation, a middle ground that could finally have found its moment: an RTA-like agency tasked not merely with “oversight” but explicitly tasked with managing a unified network and contracting out operations to publicly-owned operating units, which could then remain officially standalone agencies with their own boards of directors and local control of day-to-day operations and service delivery. This is something along the lines of the German verkehrsverbund model, of which Steven Vance has previously written a terrific primer on the subject. Since it can be an intimidating idea (and, of course, an intimidating German word to try to pronounce), let’s walk through what something like that could look like in Chicagoland in a much more user-friendly vernacular.
Introducing: Cartesian
For the purposes of this hypothetical, we will create a “new” agency named CARTESIAN: the Chicagoland Association of Regional Transportation Enterprises, Strategy, Innovation, and Accessible Networks. While it is quite a lengthy acronym, and for legibility purposes we’ll use “Cartesian” in mixed-case in this post, it is meant to be as widely-encompassing as possible, tasked with all aspects of creating a single, unified, regional transit network. From an artistic standpoint, the name also deliberately invokes the Cartesian coordinate plane, an infinite two-dimensional grid stretching to the horizon, which, let’s be honest, is more or less what Chicagoland’s transportation network looks like from the air.
We love our limitless grid, don’t we folks? (Google Maps aerial screenshot)
Whether Cartesian ends up becoming a totally new agency that would replace the RTA, or a public RTA rebrand, or simply a shorthand way to refer to the new tasks delegated to the RTA, is ultimately a political question best left up to the politicians. However, Cartesian would officially become the provider of transit for all of Chicagoland: capital planning, service planning, procurement, communications, fare structures, and more would all become part of Cartesian’s core mission, and the Cartesian board would represent a broad geographic cross-section of Chicagoland, just like the RTA board currently does. To ensure one geographic “faction” could not overrule another, the Cartesian board would be required to have unanimity among its factions, but not necessarily among its full board. In other words, assuming Cartesian’s board would be constituted the same way as the proposed MMA board — 3 gubernatorial appointees, 5 collar county appointees, 5 Cook County appointees, and 5 City of Chicago appointees — board actions would need 11 out of 18 votes, but would require a majority of each appointing unit (2/3rds of the Governor’s appointees and 3/5ths of each of the other three constituencies) to ensure that everyone’s on the same page.
Cartesian, as a “transit association”, would be the sole agency responsible for coordinating present and future transit services for the entire region, including presenting a unified network vision for Chicagoland transit to ensure our entire system functions as a single, cohesive, expansive transit network. With a unified vision, Cartesian can take the lead on applying for discretionary funds and working with agencies like CMAP and our Departments of Transportation to identify, coordinate, and execute capital investment opportunities that are most beneficial to the region as a whole, avoiding potentially expensive duplication — or worse, competition — between projects currently segregated by mode or by operator. Similar to existing efforts by all three service boards and the RTA, Cartesian would also be empowered to help municipalities and neighborhoods create station-area plans and support local efforts to build and enhance transit-oriented development opportunities; unlike the current paradigm, however, Cartesian would be a “one stop shop” for these initiatives, rather than leaving station-area stakeholders to try to figure out who they should be working with based on mode or operator.
The Enterprise System
There is one key role that Cartesian would not have, however: like the RTA today, Cartesian would not directly operate any transit service in Chicagoland. Instead, Cartesian would contract out all day-to-day operations to enterprises, which would be the new name for the service boards. The primary difference between an enterprise and a current authority or service board would be replacing annual budgets with fixed-duration contracts between Cartesian and each individual enterprise. Rather than simply giving the CTA, Metra, and Pace’s annual budgets a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down as they do today (although a “thumbs down” has never been publicly issued anyway), there would be an agreed-upon contract between the enterprises and Cartesian, which spell out key performance indicators (KPIs), required minimum service levels, and incentives for meeting these targets. Contracts would not necessarily be competitive — there’s only a single enterprise that could operate the ‘L’, for instance — but they would provide verifiable, quantifiable, actionable metrics and service standards. By shifting from budgets to contracts, these accountability measures can be consistently managed throughout the life of the contract, with the boards of each enterprise empowered to directly hold accountable their respective management staffs based on contractually-required KPIs and service standards. When contracts need to be renewed, they can then also be renegotiated between Cartesian and the individual enterprises based on changing conditions, along with sweeteners for good performance — and perhaps mandatory accountability for unsatisfactory performance. (Note that “accountability” can take many forms and does not necessarily mean a funding reduction.) These contracts can also provide more stability with discretionary funds while also providing for reviews of discretionary fund allotment at regular intervals to help ensure the various enterprises are all appropriately funded based on overall revenues even as operating conditions may change and evolve over time.
Enterprises would be tasked exclusively with day-to-day operations, which also includes things like security as well as preventative and routine maintenance. Since capital planning and programming would become the responsibility of Cartesian, the enterprises would also have no need for bonding authority and would be required to maintain balanced operating budgets. Enterprises also allow for pass-through funding to guarantee each enterprise a financial “floor” — for instance, the Chicago Transit Enterprise could be guaranteed a very high percentage of all sales tax revenues generated within the city proper, with supplemental funds determined by the contracts with Cartesian based on farebox revenues (since Cartesian would own and operate all fare media and equipment) or other revenue sources that will inevitably be needed to bridge the fiscal cliff. With the near-entire focus on simply running high-quality regular service, the boards of each enterprise could focus exclusively on service performance and rider experience issues, providing a direct avenue of accountability both internally within each enterprise and for the riding public; enterprise boards could also include members of organized labor to ensure that front-line employees also have representation in each operating unit.
This is an important distinction between the two sides of public accountability: while Cartesian would be responsible for (and held accountable for) service planning — for instance, regional network planning, procurement, capital project prioritization, and so on — the enterprises would be responsible for service quality, like balanced headways, cleanliness, and reliability. This could ensure additional protection against something like a purely hypothetical scenario where executive staff allows service quality to severely deteriorate but an executive director politically could not be forced out because they have, say, a supposed knack for winning federal discretionary funding awards. While that scenario — again, totally hypothetical and in no way based on recent events — is entirely possible under our current governance paradigm and under less-ambitious RTA reforms, under the Cartesian system those particular skill sets would be entirely separated and responsibilities more explicitly delineated, ultimately improving accountability for service planning and for service quality.
The enterprise system also allows the larger Cartesian model to remain forward-compatible with future operators or entire modes. Maybe someday the South Shore Line joins, or Illinois Tollway becomes part of the fold, or even Divvy or a scooter operator wants to expand their footprint beyond the city proper. Rather than determine where to try to cram any of those entities into the existing enterprises, or make individual municipalities have to enter into new agreements on an individual basis that creates service gaps, Cartesian can simply create a new contract and/or adapt existing contracts at the next scheduled negotiation point.
In the context of this blog series though, service planning is where the rubber really starts to hit the road under the Cartesian model.
Cartesian Service Planning
At its most elemental and speaking operator-agnostically, Chicagoland has four primary modes of transit:
Commuter/regional trains (Metra)
The ‘L’ (CTA)
Fixed-route buses (CTA and Pace)
Microtransit (ADA paratransit, on-demand/dial-a-ride, vanpool, e-scooters, bike share, etc.)
Cartesian’s mandate would treat each of them accordingly, creating a single regional network plan and service schedules focused purely on what individual routes (and at what frequencies) would be the most efficient and effective to best serve the traveling public, regardless of who happens to be operating them or where they happen to operate.
As we discussed in Part 2 of this series, the mode with the most restrictions in terms of operating frequencies and schedules is Metra, considering the agency’s reliance on and constraints with sharing tracks with freight railroads. First, Cartesian would work with Metra on an annual or semi-annual basis to establish regional rail schedules based on operating, funding, and labor constraints, and agree to a systemwide framework schedule.
With the regional rail schedule in place, Cartesian would then move onto updating and creating service goals and schedules for the bus network, ensuring bus routes have intermodal connectivity throughout the entire region wherever possible and planning schedules accordingly.
90X Routes
Cartesian’s service planners would identify certain routes as 90x routes. The 90x designation (note: this is not necessarily a route number, but rather an internal categorization) denotes a high-frequency route, which would be defined as meeting the following criteria:
The route operates seven days a week, with
An average at least six trips per hour (average 10-minute headways) on weekdays, for
At least 15 hours a day (5am-8pm) on weekdays, and
No scheduled gaps of longer than 15 minutes during the same hours, as well as between 8am and 8pm on weekends.
Routes that would meet these criteria would operate at least 90 trips in each direction per weekday (6 trips per hour x 15 hours), hence the “90x” designation. Given the high frequencies, connections to regional rail trains would be assumed to be convenient enough to support show-up-and-go transfers; accordingly, the operating enterprises for these routes — which likely also would include most or all of the ‘L’ network — would handle scheduling entirely in-house, and the contracts for these routes would measure headway reliability rather than on-time performance. (This also provides an incentive for bus operators to find ways to operate more service, as routes that meet the 90x threshold would be scheduled and controlled internally rather than the enterprise being forced to operate schedules determined by Cartesian’s schedulers and service planners.) Likewise, 90x routes would have no restrictions on operating more frequently than the minimums established above, if the enterprise chooses to do so; this is intended to ensure city residents that Cartesian couldn’t “take over” busy city routes, considering a vast majority, if not all, of the 90x routes would likely be concentrated in Chicago proper. For routes that do not meet the 90x threshold — and, if needed, on 90x routes during early mornings and late evenings — scheduling would be centrally planned by Cartesian to ensure more convenient timed transfers to regional rail trains based on those schedules, as well as timed transfers (wherever possible) between non-90x bus routes.
As part of the regular contract negotiations, bus enterprises (Chicago Transit Enterprise and Pace) would bid on all bus routes, likely at the garage level. While it’s unlikely that the CTE would ever seriously compete with Pace for a collar-county route, and vice versa for routes in the urban core, this process would help ensure more efficient operations in the city/suburban “fringe” (like the Grand Corridor), as well as add a measure of cost control by allowing the two bus agencies to “compete” with each other in some areas without necessarily opening the market to private contractors who could undercut labor agreements. In either case, however, a typical rider would not be aware of the difference: publicly the system would be presented as a single network, using a single fare structure, with coordinated schedules between different routes and different modes, creating a seamless riding experience regardless of which enterprise happens to be operating the bus.
Ultimately, the Cartesian system would solve the problem that the Metropolitan Mobility Act is not guaranteed to solve, and what modest RTA reform efforts by definition cannot solve: existing oversight and coordination of our transit governance network is inherently passive and reactionary. Service boards are of course encouraged to work together and while they all claim to, our current governance structure can do no more than politely ask them to do so: the agency that ostensibly serves to unify the region’s transit network is only able to approve or reject whatever the service boards send them, rather than proactively creating and maintaining a unified network. While it’s true that the public transit needs of, say, 79th Street through the South Side are totally different than dial-a-ride services in rural McHenry County, it also is not a binary of “city transit” vs. “suburban transit”, even if plenty of elected officials (and transit users) on both sides of the 606XX divide may believe otherwise. The Chicagoland region is diverse in every sense of the word (except perhaps topographically), which means our transit needs exist on a broad spectrum of frequencies, modes, and geographies. We can’t afford to continue only hoping for the best that our four different agencies are all actually moving in the same direction.
This series has focused on the Grand Corridor because the corridor is emblematic of all the reasons why our current transit governance and operating paradigm doesn’t work, but also because of the incredible potential the corridor has if we’re able to reorient how we govern, how we operate, and how we fundamentally think about our transportation network as a whole. This is not a hopeless situation; nothing is broken beyond repair, but rather it’s just frustrating and inefficient. The impulse to want to blow it all up and start over is understandable, as is the fear that doing so would take things too far and cause undue disruption and burden. Likewise, approaching the situation cautiously and easing our way into considerable reform efforts is also understandably appealing, but may result merely in reform in name only, with no serious changes and ending up in yet another doomsday governance scenario once again another decade or so down the line.
We cannot afford to go over the fiscal cliff; significant new revenues are sorely needed simply to keep the lights on at our transit agencies, to say nothing of the need for generational investments in transformative transit. However, there is no — nor should there be — appetite for major new investments without also modernizing our transit governance structure, expanding accountability and creating a unified regional approach to improve transit for all of Chicagoland.
For nearly 80 years, Chicago-area transit funding, operations, and governance have been defined in some variation of a looming structural failure and finding a way to prop up the failing system: whether that was creating the Chicago Transit Authority to bring the ‘L’ and bus companies under public control after World War II, or creating the Regional Transportation Authority in the early 1970s to subsidize the railroads struggling to operate commuter service as well as saving failing suburban bus operators, or spinning off Metra and Pace a little over 40 years ago to directly operate suburban transit services, or tweaking board structures and funding formulas in 2008 to keep buses and trains running, every iteration of reforms have been focused on keeping a faltering 20th-Century model sputtering along until the next “doomsday” inevitably comes back around. A quarter of the way into the 21st Century, we have the opportunity — and responsibility — to finally break that cycle by making the effort to start imagining the unified, cohesive, coordinated regional transit network we want, and then determining how we can reform and retool our agencies to get us there.
We are Chicagoland. We are a region that gets things done, whether that’s raising our city out of a swamp, or literally rising from the ashes to become one of the fastest-growing cities in human history, or reversing the flow of an entire river to protect our drinking water, or building a sprawling network of tunnels throughout the region to fight floods, and throughout all of that our transit and transportation networks have always quite literally been the circulation that pumps prosperity and vitality throughout our city, our region, our state, and the entire Midwest. We owe it to ourselves and future Chicagoans and Chicagolanders to do better than just keeping the lights on.
