Tcmetro

Thanks for the link. That looks like a lot of progress in the past week! Looking forward to the flyover opening.

I went past last weekend and saw that steel up. At the time they only had laid steel on that one deck, but there's more on property waiting to be installed.

Crazy stuff seems to happen all over the city. Last fight I saw was on the 9 by Chicago and Ashland. Routes like Belmont and Lawrence have their fair share of characters. I used to live off the #12 (probably a bit biased from riding it everyday) and I always thought that one takes the cake. Fare issues happen everywhere, I feel like operators give people more slack on the north side compared to the south side.

I'm just looking at their archive of public timetables. A lot of the cuts only amount to a few runs for most routes. It's things like going from an 8 min headway to 10, or 10 to 12 or 15. Everything I've noticed is at peak as well, no changes off-peak. Also, like you've mentioned school trips not running, a lot of those have been removed from the recent versions of the timetables. I see what you mean about the runs that aren't being filled. I'm just comparing the schedules between the two. Interesting that the public bus timetables are being updated but the rail ones haven't. Good to hear new operators are being hired. Here's the link to the timetables: http://irm-cta.org/TT/TT.html

I checked through some more timetables on IRM-CTA and saw that the 1, 2, X9, J14, X49, and 65 also got some frequency cuts this summer/fall.

Yeah, the best bet for T5 is to take the farthest exit from the garage on the T3 side (past the O'Hare badging office). There's an elevator that takes you directly to ATS in the garage, no need to go through the terminal. Of course, ATS isn't running so you have to take the shuttle bus from the departures roadway. The O'Hare 21 plan adds two new satellites in T1. One of the new ones is an extension on the existing one. The other one would be further out. There will be a walkway and utility tunnel from T2 to the satellites, and it will have room for a future security-side train. That train could one day be extended to the Western Terminal and/or to T5. That's a very long ways away however, and the Covid pandemic and current collapse of air travel might delay the plans. For what it's worth, the O'Hare 21 plan includes a security gate for employees where a Western Terminal would go. This will at least help some of the suburban workers get to work faster by being able to use 390/490 instead of 90/190/294.

Metra is running reduced service. They've said they are looking at a total review of service, so we might see a public hearing soon. If they're following the same rules as Pace, they'll have to have a public hearing to make the temporary schedule permanent. CTA cut some service in the summer pick. I believe the 120, 121, 125, 134, 135, 136, 143, 148, and 156 had pretty significant rush hour frequency cuts. I think the 1 and the 2 also had frequency reductions. We haven't seen a full ridership report since June so it's hard to say how things are standing now.

The bids must still be under evaluation. I believe staff will have to bring the contract to the board which is probably the next time we'll hear about it. My guess is that will be in the next few months, but who knows.

7009-7010 testing today. https://twitter.com/itskylelucas/status/1321143951068483587?s=19

There's probably no reason to run a full peak service on the Blue Line. I'd imagine downtown is still a ghost town, especially on streets like LaSalle and Wacker.

Interesting about the 700 bus orders between 2020 and 2022. I believe the 600 bus RFP is still being worked through, so can we expect an additional bid for another 100 bus order?

At the last Metra board meeting they said that they were going to look into rewriting the schedules to provide a more regular service throughout the day. We'll see in due time if anything actually happens.

There were some cuts at the summer service change, mostly the routes that have been running extremely empty. I believe the 134 went from every 2-3 minutes to every 5-10 or so. Good to see CTA holding things steady. I'd imagine that off-peak ridership has held up better than peak times. Some office workers have started to return, so I would only imagine that ridership is going to increase. Pace said that the reason they're making the cuts permanent is because they can only temporarily reduce service for 12 months. I assume they're getting the hearings out of the way at budget time. They've said that when ridership rebounds they'll consider adding the service back. (but that's a topic for another thread) The capital plan has some really interesting stuff. Seems like more work coming to the Blue Line and some added accessible stations.

Thanks for the pics. Looks much better than before! One of the previously closed staircases at Grand was also reopened!

I think the service reductions are likely to be exactly the same as the ones going on right now because of Covid. If this is true I feel that this might be more of a "look how bad things will get" if another stimulus doesn't happen. Will be interesting to see what CTA and Metra put together soon.