CTA locks down Red Line extension funding, reports the Sun-Times. Contracts have been signed, and apparently the thing will be built, despite availability of a much cheaper and sooner alternative.
Sun-Times reports the total cost of the extension to be $5.75 billion. CTA say it’s 5.5 miles long, so that works out to about $16,500 per inch. They say it’ll handle 40,000 rides/day, which, allowing for weekends and holidays and maybe a scamdemic or two, comes to about 12 million rides/year. If it lasts 50 years, that’s 600 million rides. So that’s $5.75 billion/600 million, or about $9.58/ride.
Assuming the forecasts are correct.
Service is already available in this area, from Metra Electric and CTA and Pace buses, but it might not be as fast(?) and convenient as a Red Line extension would be. But my question is, if you told everyone affected that, instead of riding an extended Red Line, you would pay them$9.58 to ride a bus or Metra train, how would they respond? Over 220 workdays/year, that’d work out to over $21,000. Enough to buy and operate a car, I suppose.
Recognize, too, that $5.75 billion is only the capital cost. It doesn’t pay the train operators, customer assistants, maintenance staff.