Although Brendan and Valerie Kelly, both 29, spend more than 10 hours a week commuting from their home in St. Charles to their jobs in downtown Chicago, it’s what they do on that commute that counts.
“We talk, we sleep, we read, we look out the window,” said Brendan Kelly, a banking attorney for the Nisen & Elliott law firm. Valerie Kelly is a legal secretary with the Barack Ferrazzano law firm.
What the couple isn’t doing, he said, is fighting traffic.
“I’m definitely happy,” said Kelly, who moved to St. Charles from the Wrigleyville neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side a year ago. “The commute is a piece of cake.”
The Kellys are representative of a small but growing part of the DuPage and Kane County commuting pools: those who choose public transportation in an auto-centric area.
The Kellys ride Metra’s Union-Pacific West line from a station at 328 Crescent Pl. in Geneva to the Ogilvie Transportation Center in the West Loop.
It’s an hourlong ride, plus a short car ride to and from the Geneva station to their home in the Fox Mill subdivision. “But it goes by quickly,” Kelly said. “Plus, I know if we drove in, it would take two hours.”
Because of commuters like the Kellys, ridership at the 29 stations in DuPage and Kane Counties has increased by 15 percent in the last decade: to 37,500 commuters in 1999 from 32,600 in 1990, said Tom Miller, a Metra spokesman.
In addition to the Union-Pacific West line, the counties are served by the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe line, which runs from Aurora to Union Station in Chicago, and the Milwaukee District West line, which runs from Elgin to Union Station.
“Out of the 223 stations in the entire Metra system, the top 10 stations include those in DuPage and Kane Counties such as the Aurora-Naperville Route 59 station, the Naperville station and the Lisle station,” Miller said.
Ridership is expected to continue to increase, not only as the population in the two counties grows, but as Metra expands over the next few years.
The agency is planning to lengthen the Union Pacific-West line by adding six-plus miles of track from the Geneva station to Elburn in Kane County.
The system also is planning a new station for the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe line on Walnut Avenue parallel to Interstate Highway 355. It will be completed in two to three years. An access road from the tollway and a parking lot for 1,000 cars would link the station to commuters.
Knowing that most of their riders still depend on an automobile to get them to their stations, Metra officials have increased parking around their depots in DuPage and Kane County. Since 1989, for example, Metra has added 3,000 parking spaces to the Aurora-Naperville Route 59 station, which now has 4,100 spaces.
