The overdesigners are at it again.
You remember them.
They’re the architects and engineers who wanted to build a temporary city out in Lake Michigan for Chicago’s 1992 World’s Fair. Then they wanted to build an 80,000-seat stadium in Washington Park on the South Side for our 2016 Olympic Games. And now, a multilevel, subterranean train station under the intersection of Clinton and Monroe streets called the West Loop Transportation Center.
It’s a special calling, the overdesigning of public works. It takes lots of imagination. It takes global vision. Freed from the narrowing constraints of feasibility and budget, overdesigners vie to become the next Le Corbusier, the Swiss architect who inspired a generation of modernists with his never-realized plan for a machinelike — la ville radieuse — a prefab city in which an entire population could live, work and play.
Most of this spectacular stuff never gets built. But an ambitious designer can enter his or her drawings in international competitions. Later they can be reproduced as art prints.
What provokes this rant is Mayor Richard Daley’s latest pronouncement about building a high-speed rail line from the Loop to O’Hare International Airport. We already have slow-speed rail to O’Hare — the CTA’s Blue Line — and Daley is right that this won’t do for international business travelers. There’s no way Armani-clad foreign business types will be hanging on grab bars aboard lurching subway trains under Milwaukee Avenue.
At a press event last week to announce educational and cultural exchanges worked out on his recent trip to China, Daley mused that the new train will need to run nonstop from O’Hare to downtown. He also said Chinese and other offshore investors can be recruited to finance part of the cost. That would be good.
But then he started calling it a “bullet train” like the 200 mph models he saw in China. And he explained that airline passengers would do their ticketing, baggage checking and security clearing at a remote terminal downtown so at O’Hare they would just board their jets.
Hmmm. The overdesigners had struck again.
Daley has been good for Chicago and several of his “think-big” projects have succeeded spectacularly. O’Hare expansion and Millennium Park come to mind.
But when it comes to everyday transportation, Daley’s Chicago remains a city with no downtown circulator to move people from the West Loop commuter rail stations to destinations such as McCormick Place, the museums or Michigan Avenue for shopping. The mayor leaves us with a not-so-rapid transit system that is, in many places, more than a century old. It is noisy, slow and so resigned to discomfort that even the newest cars are configured so most riders have to stand.
Basic linkages, from an integrated regional fare system to a sheltered passageway between Union Station and Ogilvie Transportation Center, still do not exist.
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Solutions have been talked about, to be sure. And some, like a rebuild of the ancient Brown Line (Ravenswood) stations, or the new Metra station at 35th/Sox, have been completed under Daley. But much remains to be done, especially now that $4-a-gallon gasoline has pushed ridership to door-bursting levels.
Some say Daley has done well by commuters given the political circumstances. Federal transit funding is slowing to a trickle and state resources flow disproportionately to Illinois’ downstate highway/employment program. But another major obstacle has been the city’s tendency to overdesign … to draw up plans so spectacular they tend to remain just that — plans.
Example: Instead of an off-street busway that uses available buses and rights-of-way to move people across downtown, the visionaries at City Hall have drawn up the transportation equivalent of the Deep Tunnel. Check out their plan for a West Loop Transportation Center, a five-level subterranean fantasy where new Amtrak, subway and bus lines converge near Metra’s Ogilvie station.
You’d think by now Daley would be in “fool-me-once” mode, but there he stood last week, talking bullet train alongside some of the same architects and planners who brought us 1992’s city-in-the-lake and 2016’s Nero-like Olympic stadium.
Yes it would be good to have fast, comfortable trains to O’Hare. And a downtown circulator. Won’t somebody please help the next mayor develop practical plans to actually get stuff done?
John McCarron writes, teaches and consults on urban affairs.