A commuter boarding a Loop-bound Blue Line train in Forest Park during morning rush hour back in 2022 could expect to arrive downtown at Clark and Lake Station in 35 minutes. Now, the same trip takes five or six minutes longer.
The trip home takes even more extra time, to the tune of nine to 10 minutes longer than it did in 2022, according to the CTA’s published schedule.
The culprit?
Slow zones, or sections of the CTA’s aging track where trains must slow to a crawl. On the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line, which carries riders through Chicago’s West Side to suburban Oak Park and Forest Park, slow zones now comprise more than 84% of the track, up from 20% a decade ago.
That’s much higher than the O’Hare branch of the Blue Line, which carries riders through the city’s Northwest Side to the airport, and where just under 15% of the branch is classified as a slow zone.
Systemwide, 19% of all CTA track fell into a slow zone in July. And even on the Brown Line — which has been known to prompt rider complaints of its own when it comes to speed — slow zones made up just 21% of the line.
On the Blue Line’s Forest Park branch, trains travel on tracks that are nearly 70 years old, and that makes for time-consuming commutes.
“It’s slower than just about anything,” said Keith Long, a hospital employee waiting for a Forest Park-bound train at the Illinois Medical District station during an afternoon rush hour last month. On the O’Hare branch of the line, Long said, “it feels like the trains actually know how to go.”
“I have no desire to take this on a regular basis,” said Robert Rodgers as he sat aboard a Forest Park-bound train crawling west. Rodgers, of Hyde Park, was headed to visit a friend in the western suburbs. Still, he acknowledged, he’d taken the train because it was “less of a headache than driving.”
The CTA says a full replacement of the track is necessary to fix the problems plaguing the line, which opened in 1958. “It is 70 years old, and much of that track and supporting infrastructure remains in place today,” chief planning and innovation officer Molly Poppe said in an interview with the Tribune this month.
The agency has already replaced some track on the aging line. But the rest of the planned rebuild will be a massive and time-consuming undertaking.
Design work is slated to start later this year, and that process alone could take two years. Beyond the track replacement, most stations along the line need accessibility upgrades. The CTA must reopen the abandoned Central Blue Line station in the Austin neighborhood, or construct a new station near it, pursuant to the state’s transit funding and reform legislation. The drainage system along the corridor — which is plagued by flooding — needs to be replaced, too.
And then there’s the billion-dollar question — how will it all get paid for?
The CTA has estimated that the total cost of the project — including the portions that have already been funded or completed — could be about $3 billion. The CTA described the number as a preliminary estimate and said cost estimates could change as design work progresses.
“The progress has taken entirely too long to get to this area,” said Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman.
“If we’re going to see our residents get out of their cars and taking the train, then that train needs to be getting them to where they need to go in less time than their car would,” she said.
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Beyond its useful life
In transit parlance, the Forest Park branch track is “beyond its useful life.” In practice, that means the infrastructure is essentially too old to function well.
Old railway “ties” — the wood or composite planks that run perpendicular to the rail — can crack or rot. Aging infrastructure might lead to dips in the track. Those problems, along with a number of other issues, might lead the CTA to choose to run trains slower over a certain section of track so that the cars exert less force on the infrastructure as they rumble over it.
CTA inspectors regularly traverse the agency’s entire rail system looking for defects, turning down speeds when needed. And the agency also conducts regular slow zone mitigation work — like replacing problematic ties — that then allow speeds to be turned back up.
That’s why slow zones fluctuate from month to month.
On the Forest Park branch, those mitigation measures aren’t enough because of the weakness of the underlying infrastructure.
“It is an entire rebuild of the track bed and drainage system,” Poppe said. “It’s not just remove a tie,” she said.
Not all slow zones are caused by track conditions. Signal and power issues can lead to a slow zone classification, too. So can construction.
In 2023, the CTA rebuilt a section of track on a portion of the Forest Park branch close to downtown, between the LaSalle and Illinois Medical District stations. But some of that stretch is still classified as a slow zone — not because of track conditions, but because of ongoing construction.
Overall, the proportion of the branch classified as a slow zone has only grown since that portion of the project was completed several years ago.
Work on another section of track farther west — between the Kedzie-Homan and Pulaski stations — has been funded with the help of $111 million in federal money. Construction is expected to begin on that 2-mile stretch next year.
But there is no real timeline yet for when shovels might go in the ground on the rest of the track replacement project.
In a timeline estimate provided to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, the CTA put the project’s “open to traffic” year in 2040. In response to a question about that estimate, the CTA said the project’s timeline would be contingent on securing funding for the entire branch.
When asked why, given the age of the track, the CTA had not gotten the ball rolling sooner on track replacement, Poppe pointed to the work the agency had already done on the line, including the first stage track replacement, planning for which she said would’ve started around 2020 or earlier. “We’ve all been working really diligently … but it is huge, it is complex,” she said.
The CTA acknowledges the Forest Park branch is a big problem.
“This corridor is in dire need of attention,” acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen said at the agency’s July board meeting, during which board members approved an agreement that will pave the way for the project’s design work to begin.
“I hear people transferring often to the Green Line because of the slower Blue Line on the West Side,” she said.
Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins said he gets complaints about speed from his constituents, too.
“I hear concerns about how long it takes to get downtown. I also hear concerns about safety,” said Hoskins, who is an incoming member of the board of the Northern Illinois Transit Authority — the new regional transit governing body that will soon oversee the CTA.
Poppe said the CTA was looking at “all the various pots of money that are available to us” to make the rebuild happen. The CTA has already secured some federal funding for portions of the project, including for the $111 million track work portion slated to start next year, and since 2019 has received $274 million in state funds for projects on the Forest Park branch, too.
Poppe said the agency did not have a specific target for how much of the project should be federally funded. But massive transit capital projects often rely on federal dollars.
The CTA’s Red Line Extension, for instance, was funded with the help of almost $2 billion in federal dollars secured during the waning days of the administration of former President Joe Biden.
But President Donald Trump’s administration last year froze the already-awarded Red Line dollars over what it said was an investigation into racial preferences in contracting, threatening the future of the project before a federal judge intervened and temporarily unfroze the money, allowing construction to begin.
“The federal funding picture for massive capital investments for transit is discouraging,” said Kate Lowe, a professor of urban planning and policy at University of Illinois Chicago, adding that the Trump administration “tries to reward allies and punish political opponents.”
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Poppe noted the Forest Park rebuild would not necessarily be funded under the same federal program as the Red Line Extension. The New York Times reported last month that the Trump administration had not signed a single new agreement under that program since his second term began.
One expert did wonder whether the Red Line project — which has faced criticism for its price tag, which has ballooned to more than $5.7 billion — could affect the CTA’s ability to secure funding for Forest Park, as well as its ability to use other funds to help pay for it.
“The Red Line Extension has real trade-offs,” said Joe Schwieterman of DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development. “Ask Washington for funding for one project, it hurts your chances for another,” he added.
CTA spokesperson Catherine Hosinski said the agency had been “highly successful” at securing federal funding and had specifically secured federal money — including $180 million for Forest Park — during the time that the Red Line Extension grant was under review by the feds.
The Eisenhower and the Blue Line
Adding a layer of complexity to the Forest Park rebuild is the fact that the Illinois Department of Transportation is planning to reconstruct the similarly aged and congested Eisenhower Expressway, another major capital undertaking on the same transportation corridor.
CTA and IDOT have agreed to work together in a joint office in coordination with CMAP to push work along the corridor forward. The agencies say they are working together to think about the projects holistically.
On the rail side, for instance, the funding the CTA plans to use for the design portion of the track rebuild includes an almost $16 million congestion relief grant from the Federal Highway Administration that IDOT secured on behalf of the transit agency.
IDOT program development engineer Steve Schilke explained that IDOT sees improving CTA rail service as something that would help draw cars off I-290. “(There) is a congestion relief component of using transit to help offset the overcapacity expressway,” he said.
Still, the setup adds some logistical challenges to the process.
“It’s not just bringing in the infrastructure that you need to fix your portion of the corridor, it’s how do you also make sure when you’re bringing that equipment in, you’re not impacting one of the other modes,” Poppe said.
Like the CTA, IDOT is already working along the corridor, including on overhead bridge structures and on drainage work.
Not everyone is convinced the agencies’ current level of coordination is sufficient to ensure the best possible outcome for both projects.
“We feel that more comprehensive coordination is needed to ensure the best possible outcomes for the corridor,” said Audrey Wennink of the Metropolitan Planning Council.
Wennink noted, for example, that the planning council has pushed for highway caps — structures built over highways that can be turned into pedestrian crossings or other useful land like bike lanes — that would in turn involve changes to some CTA stations along the corridor.
“We want to keep as many options open as possible,” Wennink said.