Jessica Czech Hirschboeck would like to have more company.
For several years, she has operated Koo Koo’s Nest, a specialty gift and retail clothing boutique near the Metra station in southwest suburban Lemont.
Her business is doing fine, but Czech Hirschboeck would not mind looking out the store’s picture window to see more commuters rushing to or strolling home from the village’s Metra Station, served by the Heritage Corridor Line.
Lemont needs more train service, she said. It has three trains in and three out on weekdays but none on weekends. She also would welcome seeing more people in the downtown doing errands, eating in restaurants, shopping at stores, operating businesses or living in condos and townhouses that would be built there.
“I think it would pump life into the business district,” she said. “There would be an energy and life flowing in the streets. Businesses would stay open later and more would open up.”
Like other business owners and officials in communities throughout the suburban Chicago area, Czech Hirschboeck sees transit as a key to redeveloping and sustaining a thriving downtown business district.
Village planners’ and transit officials’ efforts improve transportation and to create lively business and residential districts around transit stations is dubbed “transit-oriented development.” It’s a hot topic in Chicago-area communities that look at train stations as the hubs around which redevelopment would occur.
Since 1999, 15 suburbs have received grants through the Regional Transportation Authority to study how transportation issues affect their ability to redevelop the areas immediately around their Metra stations. Other communities, such as Riverdale, also have received grants from other sources, such as the Illinois Department of Transportation, for transit-oriented development studies.
“These communities are trying to look at how to have sustainable downtowns. They see that their transit stations are assets. They want to capitalize on those,” said Bill Reynolds, principal analyst for the RTA.
Transit-oriented development, he noted, “uses transportation as the focal point of development. It could be a train station or a bus station. But, in the Chicago area, it’s generally train stations.”
In a sense, history is repeating itself. Communities that developed in the 19th Century around train lines also put important services near stations, such as village halls, U.S. Post Offices and public libraries. The train lines were so important to Tinley Park’s early years, for instance, that the village was named for the community’s first station master, Samuel Tinley.
“The impact of the automobile changed that. It re-oriented [these services] away from train stations because you needed parking,” said Larry McClellan, a consultant in regional planning and history who works for the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission and for Riverdale.
“There are plenty of places where the village hall and the post office were moved away from the train station. Now we’re looking at how to reconnect with our transit stations,” he said.
Reynolds agreed.
“Ten or 20 years ago, people were saying `We’re suburbia. We’re going to disperse all those uses.’ That led to the death of downtowns,” he said.
Today, area train stations and the neighborhoods around them are looking to add services that will make life more convenient for residents. Restaurants–eat-in and takeout–dry cleaners, coffee shops and other such services are an important component of transit-oriented development. Other elements include fostering a pedestrian-friendly environment, mixed uses, higher residential density and public open space.
“None of these elements by themselves are going to work,” Reynolds said. “There’s a whole chemistry of all these things working together.”
Though traffic congestion may have once seemed the province of cities, it has spread to the suburbs, and community leaders are looking for solutions, said Dave Loveday, director of communications for the RTA.
Communities in every direction of the Chicago area, including Arlington Heights, Elmhurst, Morton Grove, Tinley Park, Orland Park, Riverdale and Waukegan have done, are preparing or are conducting transit-oriented development studies.
“All of these communities are realizing that there’s congestion [from automobile traffic] in the suburbs. They need to look at transit and how to improve it,” Loveday said.
Representatives of Metra and the Pace Suburban Bus Service welcome the chance to take part in the RTA-sponsored studies. They said they expect thriving downtowns to lead to increased ridership as well as reductions in traffic gridlock and air pollution.
In places where development is booming, village officials note that having a train line has been an important element in their growth.
“The fact that a train line [Metra] comes through town and has two stops makes Tinley Park a desirable place to be,” said Assistant Village Manager Scott Niehaus.
For the last four years, the village has added 1,500 to 2,000 residents a year. It issues 700 building permits a year.
Metra estimates that 1,250 people a day board trains that stop in Tinley Park. The village is served by 34 trains in and 34 trains out each weekday.
Tom Miller, a spokesman for Metra, said the agency has taken steps to try to increase ridership by encouraging re-development in downtowns. In the last decade, Metra has distributed brochures to the approximately 200 communities on its lines outlining ideas such as encouraging newsstands, dry cleaners, coffee shops and restaurants near the stations.
“We don’t go in and tell communities what they should do,” Miller said. “But these are all things that commuters find helpful on their way to and from the station.”
Increasing multifamily housing in downtowns also could lead to increased Metra or Pace ridership without adding more cars to train stations’ parking lots, he added.
“It promotes walking to the train station. That opens up parking for others–rather than having somebody drive downtown and take up a parking space for eight or 10 hours a day,” Miller said.
Lemont
One community embarking on a transit-oriented development study is Lemont. The village has hired a consultant to do the study, which will begin in 2003 and will take six months to a year to complete.
It will address a host of issues, including land uses, traffic patterns, infrastructure and how many housing units may be built in or near the downtown.
But officials in Lemont recently learned that Metra has no plans to increase the number of trains serving the village.
“I know they [residents and village officials in Lemont] have been clamoring for more train service for years,” said Miller. “But you can’t jump from six trains [a day] to 80 on the drop of a dime.”
The average number of people boarding trains each weekday in Lemont is 350.
Miller said the tracks of the Heritage Corridor Line are owned by the Canadian National Railroad, which controls how they are used. The line is heavily used by freight trains and has a half-dozen crossings with other tracks that carry freight trains.
Adding more trains at this time, Miller said, would likely result in time delays for Metra trains that would have to stop at crossings at bridges and viaducts to allow freight trains to pass. The tracks, particularly at crossings in and near Chicago, also would require expensive infrastructure improvements, Miller said.
Mayor John Piazza said he is disappointed that no additional trains are planned soon for Lemont.
“But I’d much rather that Metra be upfront and honest with us,” he said.
The village will still go forward with its transit-oriented development study.
Piazza said there are still many issues for the village to look at such as increasing parking in the downtown, analyzing traffic patterns and circulation, studying the feasibility of building another bridge near the terminus of Stephen Street across the Sanitary & Ship Canal to connect with Old Lemont Road (which becomes Lemont Road/State Street and connects with another bridge over the Des Plaines River). That would give cars additional north-south access to the downtown and consider how the downtown’s commercial and residential components may be developed.
The news that Metra is not considering adding trains to the Heritage Corridor Line will not affect Lemont’s growth, Piazza said, because the village has three trains in and out on weekdays, because it is not far from the Stevenson Expressway and because it is an attractive place to live.
Tim Teddy, Lemont’s community development director, said one goal of the transit-oriented development study will be to try to gain regional support for improving the crossings that could lead to increased Metra service.
He noted that other towns on the Heritage Corridor Line, such as Willow Springs and Lockport, are also affected by the inability to increase service.
“We’re basically going to acknowledge that there are constraints,” he said. “And we’re going to investigate the possibilities for removing those constraints.”
Tinley Park
Though Lemont has not begun its study, Tinley Park has finished one and is beginning to see the results. The village used information and ideas from its study to design a new Metra station at 6700 South Street.
Participating in the study also enabled the village to get grants for downtown redevelopment, including building a plaza decorated with six bronze statues next to the station.
“It has allowed us to expand a train station that was totally out of date. It was too small and it didn’t have amenities [such as the plaza],” said Mayor Ed Zabrocki.
Rather than a utilitarian-looking structure, the new $4 million station will feature brick and limestone on the exterior, have a clock tower overlooking the plaza and a coffee shop and concession area inside.
Zabrocki said the village had significant input in how the station, which will be owned by Metra, will look and what features it will have. Though it will not be finished until next year, the station is intended to complement other older, historic buildings in the downtown. The village also wants the station to be a focal point, a place people will want to visit for more than just hopping on the train.
“We’re going to have concerts in the plaza [outside the station],” Zabrocki said. “It lends itself to that type of thing.”
As it builds a new station, Tinley Park also is looking at functional aspects of the downtown, such as improving traffic flow and making it easier to drop commuters off at the station.
Downtown traffic traditionally has backed up near the station because “inbound trains [when stopped] have been hanging over Oak Park Avenue [west of the station],” said Niehaus.
He said the new station’s platform will be larger and will be moved to the east to cure this long-standing traffic problem.
The proposals each village makes for redevelopment around transit stations are unique to their towns and may be massive, as is the case for the north suburban community of Waukegan, or innovative, as Riverdale is trying to do.
Waukegan
Waukegan wants to redevelop 1,500 acres on the lakefront that had been used for industry and is crossed by railroad tracks.
The city sits on a bluff above where the Metra station stands in this 2.5-mile-long area.
Access from the bluff to the station is one of the problems Waukegan officials want to fix.
“We want to build a new station, and we want to make it easier for people to get to,” said Mayor Richard Hyde.
The city’s proposals for the area include building a new train/bus station in the lakefront area, constructing a pedestrian bridge from the bluff to the new station, building another bridge to improve access to the lakefront, moving some tracks that run through the redevelopment area and building multifamily housing and recreational attractions, such as open space, trails and possibly a minor league ballpark.
Reynolds acknowledged that Waukegan is dreaming big and that making these ideas work will be a long process.
“It’s a matter of piecing it all together,” he said.
“Once the [industrial] stuff is cleaned up, it’s prime real estate. It has beautiful views and beaches. There’s no place like it on the North Shore,” Reynolds said.
A new train and bus station are an important part of the package and may be the piece that spurs redevelopment, he said.
“A [train and bus] facility would be the catalyst for getting redevelopment going,” said Reynolds.
Waukegan is served by 25 trains in and 25 trains out on weekdays. The average daily ridership is 925.
Riverdale
While Waukegan is thinking big, Riverdale is thinking cutting-edge.
The village used its IDOT-funded transit-oriented development study to come up with the idea for creating a new public facility that would be called a Network Station.
Janice Morrissy, Riverdale’s director of community and economic development, said the Network Station would be a place where people could access all sorts of high technology. It would be within easy walking distance of the Ivanhoe station on 144th Street.
The community is served by 40 trains in and 40 out every weekday.
An average of six hundred people a day board trains in Riverdale.
The new station would include audio and video conferencing facilities; e-government services; computer linkups for telework activities; computer training; public access computing; high-speed Internet access; satellite access to remote meetings of civic, labor and professional organizations in such places as Washington D.C.; and virtual field trips to zoos, museums or educational institutions.
If Network Station is built, Morrissy said the village sees it as a destination that would draw people via the Metra train to Riverdale.
“A business person could take the train to the Network Station to do a video conference or a resident could stand at a kiosk to pay their water bill before they get on the train [to go to Chicago],” she said.
“It’s an innovative use of a transit stop, and we believe it will increase transit use,” said McClellan, who worked with Riverdale to come up with the idea for the Network Station.
Morrissy said the village has applied for grants to build the station.
Whether Riverdale’s or any other community’s plans are fully realized or not, Zabrocki said not many towns can afford or want to see their downtowns become parking lots.
When the village first noticed signs of deterioration and people and businesses moving out about six or seven years ago, he said, some people said the downtown should be paved to create more parking for Metra commuters.
The new train station reflects the direction toward redevelopment the village opted to take.
“We thought we could either pave over the center of town or re-vitalize it. We’re revitalizing it,” he said.
