It’s a balmy autumn day in 1998, and you decide to lunch in Grant Park. You never used to have time for such a treat, but these days it takes only 14 minutes to get there from your office at the Sears Tower, and that includes the walk to the trolley station at Canal Street–leaving plenty of time for a sandwich and a quick gawk.
The Loop circulator, in the works since 1987, is just now emerging from the “nice idea” stage. Preliminary studies for the system were released in September, which gives us a chance to ask a question or two. Such as: Will this thing be the salvation of the Loop? Or will it be a world’s fair on wheels?
So there’s a need for a transit link scaled between line-haul and shoe leather. Any number of transit technologies might serve as the basis for a circulator. For 20 years Jacob Dumelle, the former chairman of the Illinois Pollution Control Board, plumped for commuter hydrofoils on the Ship and Sanitary Canal, ferrying southwest-siders to and from the Loop at 60 miles per hour. The weather, alas, is a bar to year-round river travel, and the idea of a floating circulator sank out of sight at City Hall pretty quickly.
Such facts favor a Loop circulator system served entirely or substantially by LRVs. And the general assumption has been that some kind of trolley will form the basis of the system. But the choice has yet to be made officially. That decision is expected in November, when the planning department will announce its preferred modes and routes to the feds. Budget, technical factors, and neighborhood complaints are also expected to affect the choice of mode. Planners have analyzed four possible systems: a “full-build” LRV system, two systems that mix buses and light rail, and a bus-only system.
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Nonetheless, light rail looks inexpensive compared to new elevated trains and hugely cheaper than subways. Measured in terms of capacity, a full-build LRV system is even more economical than buses. The former would cost six times more to build in the Loop than a bus-only system, but it would increase Loop transit capacity eight times more than the rubber-wheeled variety.
Better, but maybe not quite good enough. Having larger buses would reduce the number of vehicles on the streets but wouldn’t do much to improve their efficiency and speed. Because buses move at such variable rates, their arrival times at intersections are pretty random; that makes it hard to coordinate their arrivals to coincide with green lights. New buses can be equipped with so-called signal-preemption gear that can electronically command a traffic light to turn green–but such interruptions would leave traffic on cross streets in chaos.
To make sense of an EIS you have to understand that it’s usually written less to demonstrate a project’s feasibility than to develop a political consensus. The project must be approved by the feds among others, and the questions asked by federal bureaucrats are not always the questions asked by the rest of us: not “Will this thing make the air cleaner downtown?” but “Will this thing result in nonattainment of National Ambient Air Quality Standards?” Readers can take my word for it that the answer to one is not necessarily the answer to the other.
