We support sharable high speed rail between downtowns and the nearest major airports. Although this is for Chicago, outside our map of the US North East, the concept proposed in the Chicago Crossrailchicago.org plan is profoundly wise. We would prefer that the plan include a unifying rail tunnel connecting Chicago Union Station and LaSalle Street Station, so that heavy rail passengers can transfer at LaSalle transfer to the Chicago CTA L trains (elevated subway), and CTA Blue line subway, and walking distance destination, and use Chicago Union Station to transfer to all other modes of transportation, such as intercity rail, commuter rail, buses, taxis, walking, etc. Further we would wish to see a similar premium airport express proposal to connect downtown Chicago to Midway Airport, so that both Chicago airports are served by Premium Airport Express rail, and the unifying rail tunnel to reach LaSalle and Union Stations is shared with the two highest premium rail services. We would like to see the 4 trains in each direction between Chicago and St. Louis share the high speed track at least as far as the alignment exit to Midway airport. Premium Airport Express trains have the highest margins of any rail service, because they provide the most time savings for the most affluent travelers, and shortest distance, as well as the highest number of potential premium passengers in an metro region. This creates the best model to fund high speed rail capacity improvements and expansions. Building the sharable unifying Chicago intercity rail tunnel connecting LaSalle and Chicago Union Stations, would be immediately sharable with 56 Amtrak trains per day using Chicago. By cooperating the Premium Airport Express service with Amtrak intercity rail, the two systems could afford the essential unifying rail tunnel. LaSalle has ready access to 726,459 passenger per day on the CTA L (elevated subway) and Blue line subway, which makes for a mind blowing number of possible passengers and destinations for all heavy rail trains using a downtown unified rail tunnel. This means the Chicago Subway network has 229.12 million (2013) passengers per year, and the Amtrak network Chicago Union Station has 3.5 million passengers per year (2012), and the premium airport express trains if achieving 8.4% of airport passenger usage would have 5.6 million passengers per year between downtown and OHare (ORD) Airport, and 1.7 million passengers per year between downtown and Midway (MDW) Airport. If high speed rail has $10 per passenger to pay for the infrastructure, and Amtrak $5 per pop, the tunnel would have $91 million dollars per year to pay for the unifying tunnel and shared high speed rail corridors. If CTA had to find $91 million per year for this one project, it requires $0.40 cents from each passenger per trip. If CTA had buy this infrastructure for a much smaller number of people, such as 7.3 million airport express riders, it would be impossible, because the CTA fare is less than $10 per person per trip.
Posted on: Thu, 03 Jul 2014 05:59:10 +0000
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