Metra

Two years after launching its first-ever strategic planning process with a series of public meetings, Metra is at last finalizing basic goals for the plan. Our preview last month showed that the draft plan focused as much on administrative matters as it did on customers and services. That split focus remains, but board members are now debating whether the plan should shift in one direction or the other.

[This article also appeared as a cover story in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

Oil production is booming across North America, as new technologies make it possible to extract liquid crude oil from sources like the Bakken shale oil field in North Dakota and Montana, or Alberta's tar sands. The ever-increasing volume of crude oil mined in remote Great Plains locations often finds its way to refineries via "rolling pipelines" – freight trains that tow a million barrels of oil around the United States every day. Production of Bakken crude has tripled over the past three years, and 79 percent of it is shipped out by rail.

If, like me, you optimistically view the summer as lasting until September 22, we’ve got more than five more weeks of beach season left. Still, time is running out for fun in the sun, so you should make a beeline for the shoreline as soon as possible. While people often gripe that Chicago has limited access to natural beauty, our city’s status as a rail hub actually makes it easy to reach the beach without a car.

Toronto's suburban commuter rail service, GO Transit, used to run its trains on a schedule that would seem familiar to Metra riders -- bringing commuters from the suburbs in by 9 a.m. and shuttling them from the city after 5 p.m. Last year, though, it launched a new schedule that doubled mid-day frequencies on its two Lakeshore rail lines, from once per hour to every 30 minutes, "turning GO from a bedroom commuter service into full, regular transit," said Ontario transportation minister Glen Murray. Their reward: a 30 percent increase in ridership on those lines in a year's time.

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.

Transport for London, that city's regional transit operator and planning agency, has had a "daily cap" on bus, tram, and train fares since 2005. The fare system stops charging pay-as-you-go riders for trips once they spend a certain amount, which depends on which services you use and zones you visit. This means that you'll never spend more on transit in one day than a daily pass would have cost (sometimes even less), which gives everyone the value of a day pass without making people buy those passes in advance.

Transit systems in Northeastern Illinois face a $20 billion maintenance backlog. Now the question is how to pay for it.

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development wants to dispel the notion that "transit-oriented development" only means high-rises. The agency will host two public meetings to gather ideas from residents who live near the city's 77 Metra stations on the kinds of development and station changes they'd like to see in their neighborhoods. The meetings are part of a "typology study" to classify Metra stations relative to their surrounding neighborhoods' shared characteristics and potential for development and public space improvements.