The continued development of downtown Chicago north of the river raises the question of whether the city has outgrown its mass transit system and is in danger of choking on automobile traffic.
The city and state have spent millions in recent years improving downtown thoroughfares such as Columbus Drive, but the traffic situation seems worse today than before those projects were started. You can walk the length of North Michigan Avenue at rush hour almost as fast as you can drive it.
The proposed development of the Chicago Dock & Canal Trust property north of the Chicago River and east of Michigan threatens to make an intolerable traffic situation worse. When completed, it will add 51,000 office workers and an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 apartment dwellers, more than doubling the daytime population of the area.
Some local streets, like Illinois Street, can expect to have traffic triple by the time the project is finished, according to recent projections by the Chicago Area Transportation Study (CATS).
Possibly the most disturbing statistic in the CATS study is that 34 percent of the employees in the developing area now drive their cars to work. That`s double the percentage in the Loop area who drive. The reason for the difference is obvious: Chicago has simply outgrown its downtown mass transit system.
Loop workers have a convenient system of subways, ”L” trains and commuter railroads to choose from, but workers north of the river are connected to the city`s rail transportation network primarily by slow, overcrowded and for the most part overaged buses. Commuting by mass transit to North Michigan Avenue is an ordeal that a substantial part of the working population apparently is unwilling to endure.
Ever since the Burnham Plan for Chicago was introduced in 1909, the city and its transportation agencies have proposed various solutions from time to time, but they all withered. The last major improvements to the downtown mass transit system–the State and Dearborn subways–were started before World War II. Transit lines to outlying areas since have been added, bringing more and more people into an increasingly congested downtown.
What`s needed now is an improved distributor system so the people who use mass transit to go downtown can get around once they get there. The Loop elevated, an ingenious system when it was built in 1895, has been outgrown.
A new subway under Michigan Avenue would relieve some of the traffic problems north of the river, but at $100 million a mile it`s financially impractical and would not solve the distribution problem.
There may be a cheaper, quicker solution. Architect Harry Weese suggested a few years ago that the city use for mass transit a Chicago & North Western branch freight line running under buildings along the north bank of the river. Money may not be available to convert that to a rapid transit riverbank line, as Mr. Weese originally suggested, but there`s no reason the city couldn`t pave the right-of-way and use it in the short term as an exclusive busway connecting North Michigan with the commuter railroad stations, rapid transit lines and, ultimately, the World`s Fair site south of the Loop.
The western leg of the system could be developed cheaply simply by banning auto traffic on Clinton Street west of Union and North Western stations. If money becomes available and ridership increases, the line could be converted to rapid transit, possibly by means of an ”L” above Clinton.
Although the riverbank proposal ultimately may prove impractical, Chicago should look for ways to improve its downtown distributor system before more riders are driven off the mass transit system and the city develops a terminal case of gridlock.
