The long and grinding road
Metropolitan Chicago is a magnet for people
wanting to carve out careers.
But commuters must choose
between congested roadways
and spotty public transportation
by Stephanie Zimmermann
Illustrations by Daisy Juarez
Each weekday, Kimberly Sims rises at dawn, three hours before she's due at work in Downers Grove, 35 miles from her home on Chicago's North Side. She likes her job as an assistant buyer for a retail corporation. It's better than her previous retail positions, and offers a chance to move up in the business world. Sims is 26 years old and willing to trade what amounts to three full weeks a year in her car for a shot at a successful corporate career.
Wheeling her Saturn out of its parking space, she hops on southbound Lake Shore Drive, which isn't too bad at 7:30 in the morning. As she shifts to the westbound Eisenhower Expressway and the East-West Tollway, however, the lanes get increasingly congested. On a bad day, the roads are a clogged sea of red taillights almost before she leaves downtown.
Sims doesn't particularly like to drive. But her options for mass transit on this city-to-suburb commute are severely limited. So, to vent her frustrations and commiserate with fellow drivers, Sims last June created a Web site (http://drivingmiss.tripod.com).
She's touched a nerve. Already, more than 2,100 people have logged on to share their views of life on the road. "I listen to the radio and just try not to think about how long I'm sitting there," Sims says. "I'm away from home 14 hours a day. I come home, and I sleep."
Like Kimberly Sims and her commute up the corporate ladder, the entire Chicago area is paying the price of success.
As the area's economy booms - with an unemployment rate of just 4 percent and a population that's growing - metropolitan Chicago has become a magnet for people wanting to carve out careers.
Meanwhile, households here are changing, with fewer extended families living together, more families buying their own homes and more people getting their own cars. The percentage of households owning their own homes jumped from 55 percent to 66 percent from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s.
All these people are making nearly 22 million trips covering more than 140 million miles each day in northeastern Illinois. And all this growth is leaving Chicago-area commuters in a tight spot. Those going to the flourishing suburbs must choose between congested roadways and spotty public transportation. And downtown, many fear the city's renaissance will bring an onslaught of new traffic that will overwhelm city streets.
Illinois Issues March 2000 / 17
Transportation - or a lack of it - affects where we live, work and play. A cruise in a beloved car can be exhilarating on a fast lane - or miserable in stand-still traffic. Time spent on the road, train or bus is time away from home, family and community.
Consider the case of Tamara Kerrill, a former downtown Chicago newspaper reporter now working at a high-tech firm in Arlington Heights. To make the 20-mile trip from her Evanston home to the northwest suburbs, she spends up to an hour in her car, taking a variety of side roads because she can't bear the Kennedy Expressway during rush hour. "There is no real reverse commute [advantage] anymore," she says.
Kerrill isn't driving downtown, or even starting her commute in the city. So why is her drive so bad? One reason is that with most of the job growth in the suburbs, more people are making that drive. Even reverse commuters on Metra's public transit - never an easy proposition - have increased dramatically, from about 4,300 riders in peak times in 1983 to more than 12,100 last year. Included in that group is everyone from young professionals to former welfare recipients moving into a largely suburban workforce. Unfortunately for them, metro Chicago's transportation system was designed to move people in the other direction - downtown.
But many more people work in the suburbs than downtown. Despite Chicago's impressive skyline, an estimated 90 percent of the jobs in the metro area are not downtown, says Siim Soot, executive director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Instead, jobs are in places like Skokie's Old Orchard area, Schaumburg and Oak Brook, where public transportation is seriously lacking.
Complicating things is the fact that, for many people, work is increasingly farther from home. Naperville in far west DuPage County used to be a long haul. Now, Sandwich in Kendall County is being touted as the next Chicago suburb.
Illinois Issues March 2000 / 18
More than 80 percent of Chicago-area commuters get to work by car. The reasons are many: a desire to control one's schedule and a lack of quicker transit options are but two of those cited in mass transit marketing surveys. But despite the perceived convenience of driving to work, Chicago's roads are getting increasingly clogged.
A study of 1996 data by the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University found Chicago the fourth-most congested city in the nation, behind Los Angeles, Washington and Miami. The reason? Too many cars on too few lanes, causing painfully slow rush hour speeds.
You can hear the congestion in the morning radio travel times that drone on every 10 minutes. What used to be a breezy "reverse commute" from the city to the northwest suburbs or to DuPage County has turned into a grueling hour or more of near bumper-to-bumper traffic. At times, the outbound Kennedy Expressway, which used to zip opposite the clogged downtown-bound lanes, is slower than the downtown commute.
Some of the blame for Chicago's clogged roads can be laid at the feet of misguided planners who automatically think "cars" when they talk about transportation, says Jan Metzger, co-director of the nonprofit Chicagoland Transportation and Air Quality Commission. Society is so fixated on the automobile, most new development is geared toward cars.
But what cars bring is sprawl - and more roads and more sprawl. "Highways are different from rail lines," Metzger says. "Nobody wants to live next to a highway. So what you get is really dispersed development."
New roads help relieve congestion for a while, but soon become filled as more development arrives. "That's called 'build it and they will come,'" Metzger says. The Illinois Department of Transportation admits things aren't perfect. The department is struggling to come up with money to alleviate the most congested roads. An infusion of cash from Gov. George Ryan's new Illinois First plan will help, says Carla Berroyer, the agency's chief of urban program planning.
But Berroyer takes strong issue with those who say the state contributes to sprawl by building more roads. The department, she says, is merely trying to keep up with people's search for reasonably priced homes on open land. The state does try to add lanes and eliminate bottlenecks, but that's only because the public still isn't entirely convinced mass transit is better, she says. "There seems to be this myth that IDOT is building all these roads out there and causing all this sprawl, and nothing could be further from the truth," Berroyer says. "I think the more accurate [saying] in the Chicago area is, 'If you don't build it, they will come anyway.'"
One benefit of living in Chicago is that you don't have to have a car. But depending on which way you're traveling, your mass transit commute may be pleasant - or a nightmare on rails and wheels. When Erik Canning, 29, of Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, got a job as an operations coordinator for an Arlington Heights-based logistics company, he was determined to join other Chicago-area mass transit riders, who each weekday make 1.8 million trips. He would rise by 6:30 a.m., walk to the bus stop, take the Chicago Transit Authority's Lawrence Avenue bus for about 25 minutes to Metra's Union-Pacific Northwest Line, then take another 25-minute ride to Arlington Heights. There, he would get off the train and hustle to a waiting Pace bus, which would drive him 15 minutes to his office. The trip there and back would eat three hours out of each day, but the cost was cheaper than owning a car - just $135 a month - and he could read or work on the way.
It sounded fine, but complications soon arose. If the CTA bus was late, Canning would miss the train. And because the Pace bus made only one pickup each morning, if he missed the train, he couldn't make it the five miles to the office. "I would have to call to work and have somebody come get me," he says. On the way home, bad weather might delay the Pace bus, which would miss its connection with the 5:30 p.m. Metra train. Canning would have to wait an hour for another train.
More often than not, he made his connections. But the long time spent in transit left him with little free time.
The difficult commute was a major reason Canning changed jobs last summer. Now he works in downtown's River North area, happily riding for just 20 minutes each way on the CTA's Brown Line. "It's really improved my life," he says.
Despite systemwide mass transit ridership gains of 4.3 percent over the past year, that sort of city-to-suburb horror story is just what Richard Bacigalupo, executive director of the Regional Transportation Authority, says needs to be addressed. "We need to re-think how we provide transit to jobs," says Bacigalupo. "We've got a good commuter rail system to start with, but the problem is how are they going to get from there to the [suburban] job site?"
The lack of good outbound mass transit is especially hard on people moving from welfare to work, because they often don't have cars and might not be as motivated to fight their way to the job. People working a second or third shift in the suburbs are pretty much shut out of public transportation. "We don't have public transportation service at all in the suburbs after 6 or 7 at night," says Linda Bolte, deputy
Illinois Issues March 2000 / 19
for planning at the Chicago Area Transportation Study, the designated transportation planning agency for northeastern Illinois. "That, I think, is a real challenge for us."
Even if commuters get close to their destinations, mass transit riders to the suburbs can't simply walk to their offices like workers downtown. "It's not at all pedestrian-friendly," Bolte says. Big corporate parks in the suburbs with lush green campuses on winding roads might look lovely, but they're so dispersed they make frequent suburban bus routes impossible.
Bolte's agency does have a regional plan for Chicago's transportation. But like the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, its counterpart in land-use issues, the Chicago Area Transportation Study's biggest problem is that the plan can't be enforced. The entire planning system is fragmented, with 20 agencies and governmental bodies feeding into one coordinating agency, concerned with such diverse transportation modes as cars, trains, buses and bicycles.
The agency's plan for the next two decades, "Destination 2020," does address some big regional questions, such as how to provide increased mobility while preserving the region's infrastructure. Among other solutions, it recommends expanding the expressway system's lane miles by 16 percent and rail transit by 14 percent. But the agency readily admits there isn't enough money to do all that's needed. "We have a huge infrastructure to maintain," says Bolte. The agency's long-range plan forecasts spending 80 percent of its funds just for upkeep. "That doesn't leave a whole lot for [new] improvements."
So, what's in Chicago's transportation future? Environmentalists such as Jan Metzger want to stop sprawl and give people incentives to live near existing rail lines. Others, such as Siim Soot of UIC, believe sprawl, or the preferred term "decentralization," is an inevitable sign of a prosperous local economy. Some of the solutions, it seems, lie somewhere in between.
On the mass transit front, the RTA and its operators are trying to entice commuters back to rails and buses to free up the roads. Their model is the north suburban Lake-Cook Road area on the Milwaukee District North Line, where businesses, including Motorola, Walgreens and Allstate, lure workers from the city and the northern reaches of Lake County with trains and frequent free "Shuttle Bug" buses. So far, the Lake-Cook shuttles are a hit, with more than 600 workers using them every day.
Philip Pagano, executive director of Metra, couldn't be happier. When Metra started working on Lake-Cook, "I said to the board, 'If this doesn't work here, it doesn't work anywhere,'" Pagano says. "We have a concentration of jobs. We have a station that's in the middle of this thing." And just as important, he says, the project has the support of businesses and local government.
The transit agencies also are looking at how to move people from Chicago to another cluster of development: the jobs-heavy northwest corridor of Rolling Meadows, Schaumburg and Elk Grove Village. Also under study are three possible new commuter rail lines: between O'Hare and Midway airports, from downtown to Will County and from Waukegan to Indiana, traversing suburbs in four counties.
There also are ideas for making buses more efficient, such as installing mechanisms to let them trigger a green light or hold a light long enough to get through an intersection. The RTA is looking at ways to make boarding a bus more like riding a train, with passengers paying at the loading point before the bus arrives. "More people would take the bus, taking cars off the road, which would help congestion," says the RTA's Bacigalupo. "We would get benefits throughout the system."
Those planners seeking to unclog roads are looking at several projects in the next few years, including untangling the infamous "Hillside Strangler" bottleneck on the Eisenhower Expressway, building a new interchange at I-57 and the Tri-State Tollway and widening I-80 from the Bishop Ford Expressway to the Indiana state line.
Other ideas for unclogging the roads include special high-occupancy vehicle lanes for buses or cars with more than one rider, setting up ride-sharing programs, increasing the city's bicycling lanes and encouraging telecommuting.
The main stumbling block, as always, is money. The RTA, for instance, has identified $6.6 billion in capital program needs, but only has $4.1 billion to pay for them.
One hopeful development is Illinois First, Gov. Ryan's ambitious, $12 billion plan to rebuild the state's infrastructure. With the funds, transportation officials say they will be able to move faster on some projects that would have waited longer for federal aid. "It will allow us to take a big step in reducing and alleviating congestion," says the transportation department's Berroyer, who calls Illinois First "the biggest thing that's happened to Illinois transportation in years."
Even so, the commute in Chicago won't ever be hassle-free. The experts agree that the issue is how to manage traffic congestion - not eliminate it entirely. "Congestion is going to be with us always," Berroyer says. "It's sort of like death and taxes."
Stephanie Zimmermann is a reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times. Her most recent article for the magazine,"Costly cargo," appeared in June.
Illinois Issues March 2000 / 20