Daniel Hertz

An O'Hare express train won't save anybody any time, but the replacement of a CTA station at Damen is great news for people living on the Near West Side.

Cross-posted from City Observatory

Start with the good news: Ridership on Metra, Chicagoland’s main commuter rail service, has grown almost 14 percent over the last ten years. It remains near the all-time high it reached in 2008, just before the Great Recession. On any given weekday, Metra provides nearly 300,000 rides across its 11 lines, or roughly as many as the CTA’s Brown and Blue lines put together. Some lines have even continued to grow, surpassing their 2008 ridership, notably the North Central Service running northwest to Antioch, and the SouthWest Service through Ashburn and Orland Park to Manhattan. Of Metra's more-established lines, the best performer since 2008 has been the Union Pacific Northwest line, which runs through towns like Arlington Heights (pictured above) and Des Plaines that have pursued Transit Oriented Development in their downtowns.

Ever since it opened in 1993, the CTA's Orange Line has become the public transit backbone of the Southwest Side, with over 60,000 rides on an average weekday. But unlike the patrons of many other 'L' lines, who step out of their neighborhood stations onto commercial streets lined with restaurants, shops, and other businesses, Orange Line riders are more likely to see bus turnarounds, parking lots, and forbidding industrial corridors.

On July 1, 2014, Illinois' pool of transportation money will dry up. That's the day that the state's last five-year capital program—the law that funds maintenance and construction of roads, highways, and public transit across the state—expires. Without a replacement, roughly a billion dollars of annual support to the state's transportation infrastructure will disappear.