Chicago Suburbs

The Chicagoland region "underspends on transit operations and capital" compared to peer cities, and the "region's economic competitiveness will suffer" as a result, according to a recent analysis by the Metropolitan Planning Council [PDF]. The report takes a look at Metra, the CTA, and Pace as a collective system, comparing it to transit networks in 17 other regions.

Update: IDOT updated their statistics today which now show that there were 124 fatal crashes in Chicago in 2013, not 120, as initially reported. This represents a decrease from 2012 of 7.5 percent.

If you’re a TV reporter who did an exposé on drunk driving among first responders, and then get busted for a DUI yourself, it takes a lot of brass to turn around and try to keep your driving privileges, but that’s exactly what CBS 2’s Dave Savini is doing.

Divvy and the Chicago Department of Transportation quietly launched a new bike-share station suggestion map yesterday. The new version features design and speed improvements (both versions were built by the software division at OpenPlans, Streetsblog's parent non-profit).

Traffic jams cost Chicagoland residents more than $7.3 billion every year in wasted time and fuel, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council’s 2008 report “Moving at the Speed of Congestion.” And we're not headed in the right direction: The share of drive-alone commuters in the region increased from 46 percent to 51 percent from 1990 to 2008.

In the wake of the recent Metra patronage scandal, the Regional Transit Authority has come under intense scrutiny. Many journalists, elected officials and policy experts have argued that the current system of separate boards for the CTA, Metra and Pace, overseen by the RTA, lends itself to interagency competition and corruption that gets in the way of improving the area’s transportation network. However, given the complex nature of politics in Illinois, overhauling the system is a daunting task.

In its upcoming update of the GO TO 2040 comprehensive regional plan, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning needs to take a closer look at the transportation projects it funds with federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grants. In the latest round of these grants, announced Tuesday, CMAP committees have approved funding for nine projects that only add more space for cars.

Illinois students celebrate National Walk and Bike to School Day. Photo: Champaign-Urbana MTD

After discussion that was heated at times, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning board voted ten to four yesterday against including the Illiana Tollway as a fiscally constrained project in the GO TO 2040 regional plan. This advisory vote precedes the MPO policy committee's deciding vote, which was supposed to take place yesterday, but was pushed back to Thursday, October 17 by Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary Ann Schneider. Presumably, this was done to give the state more time to rally support for this 47-mile tollway, which would run south of the urbanized metro region, serving relatively few drivers in the foreseeable future. The project would cost an estimated $2.75 billion, but it's estimated to create only 940 new jobs over the next 40 years, and it would facilitate jobs being moved out of Illinois and into Indiana.