Informative video. But your skits & accents are cringe. Stick to the facts.

I believe too that lengthening the Dempster Street platform to accommodate up to 8 car trains should be done. Longer trains should be run during the rush hours week days.

..metro could never get there headway system (computer reading of spacing between buses) readout working Why couldnt ST Rapid ride put doors left side with small islands on I/405 &85th instead of dighing up 4 offramps $$$

I think your supposed to turn the front wheel of the bike in the rack moving back of the bike parallel to the aisle

The Skokie Swift should run 4 car trains during the rush hour and extend the length of the Demster Street platform to accommodate 4 car trains.

We need police at every L station from what I've seen

It’s not true to say the blue and red lines don’t share tracks with other lines. The purple and redline have shared track at many times over the past decade or so due to construction on the north side redline tracks. I don’t ride the train anymore but I used to ride it a lot from the early 2000s until the mid to late 2010s. Do you honestly think the CTA can afford to upgrade to driverless trains? Do you have any idea what that would cost them? Ridership in Paris is not even comparable.

All these station parking lots need to be densely developed.

They need to rebuild Main & all of the Ⓜ️ between Oakton-Skokie-Howard

We suck

That red lines looks like it intertwined with purple and brown line 3:52 , and so blue is the *only line that is separate from other lines!

Do Houston next

Regarding the origins of the L, worth mentioning that the reason Chicago ended up with a downtown Loop in the first place is because of Charles Tyson Yerkes, who was also later involved with the London Underground. He created the Underground Electric Railways Company of London to take control of the District Railway and the partly built Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, and Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, and he helped electrify what's now the District line and open Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines and the Charing Cross section of what's now the Northern line though he died before they opened. Prior to construction of the Loop, Chicago's three elevated railway lines, the South Side Elevated Railroad, the Lake Street Elevated Railroad, and the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad, each had their own terminal on the edges of downtown, where it was considered too expensive and politically inexpedient to build rapid transit. With Yerkes, the Union Elevated Railroad Company was created in 1894, whose purpose was to construct the loop. The Loop is the result of Yerkes aggregating the competing rapid transit lines and built a loop connecting them, which was constructed and opened between 1895 and 1897, finally completing its last connection in 1900 with the Northwestern Elevated Railroad. Upon completion, all the rail lines running downtown had to pay Yerkes's operation a fee, which raised fares for commuters. After bribery of the state legislature, where he secured legislation by which he claimed a fifty-year franchise, the resulting furor drove him out of town. Its steel structure was designed by bridge designer John Alexander Low Waddell. John Alexander Low Waddell is notable for the "A" Truss bridge, which allowed for cheap and rapid construction and contributed to the rapid expansion of several railway companies, as well as being the first to invent a modern vertical-lift bridge design. Besides the Loop, he also worked on the original Goethals Bridge, Outerbridge Crossing, Cleveland's Detroit-Superior Bridge, and the Lower Hack Lift used by NJ Transit. Change through TOD and overall encouragement to use transit is very much possible in the suburbs! In Long Island's case, the LIRR has been a big reason why many historically moved to Long Island, and it's now one of the most populated islands in the Americas! And yet, Long Island has become so car-centric despite the LIRR thanks to Robert Moses planning (like adding low bridges on his parkways to discourage poor and lower-middle class families from taking transit from visiting state parks). In 1908, the former Long Island Motor Parkway, privately built by William Kissam Vanderbilt II, was the first highway in the US built exclusively for cars. The Vanderbilt family financed the road to host safer auto-races and to encourage the public to use cars. And Long Island is also where the first Levittown was built in 1947 (initially with 2,000 homes but had over 17,000 homes by 1951). While Nassau County has typically been unwilling to densify housing around train stations (except places like Hicksville and Mineola which have been) or improve upon the transit options in the county, Suffolk County on the other hand has been open. Former Democrat Suffolk county executive Steve Bellone (executive from 2012 to 2023) engaged with the youth and understood that people wanted affordable, walkable, bike-friendly communities with easy access to transit, that LI's car dependency was bad for the local environment, and the youth were leaving LI in droves because it's too expensive to live on the island, and something needed to change. They also wanted to address north-south transit corridors between the North and South Shores, which LI lacked. Let's say someone wanted to go from Patchogue on the South Shore to Cold Spring Harbor on the North Shore. If they did that during rush-hour, then it'd be easy if the Montauk Branch train uses the Central Branch and stops at Hicksville, where they can then change to a Huntington-bound train to Cold Spring Harbor. But for every other time of the day, then I'd have to go all the way to Jamaica in Queens, just to back track and take a Huntington-bound train back east. So it's up to NICE of Nassau County or SCT of Suffolk County to fill in the gaps of the LIRR, and for North Shore-South Shore travel, not many NICE nor SCT routes actually go between the two shores, usually just stopping somewhere in between. But one that does, SCT's 1 between Amityville LIRR on the South Shore and Halesite on the North Shore which also stops at Huntington LIRR and Farmingdale State College, is one of SCT's busiest routes! So to address a lack of quality affordable rental housing, a lack of that type of housing in environments in which young people want to live (like walkable downtowns), high costs of living, auto-centric transportation system with limited north-south mobility, and a scarcity of high paying jobs, Suffolk County launched the Connect Long Island plan to promote TOD, build a modern transportation system and support sustainable growth. Besides TOD projects (like at Riverhead, Patchogue, Wyandanch, and Ronkonkoma; the Ronkonkoma TOD includes a new airport terminal, convention center, and life sciences hub on top of housing), relocating Yaphank station to East Yaphank to serve the important Brookhaven National Lab, building a continuous second track on the Ronkonkoma Branch from Farmingdale to Ronkonkoma, improving hiking and biking networks, and introducing Bethpage Ride bikeshare in 2019 (which Patchogue, Babylon, Gilgo Beach, Lindenhurst, Huntington, the Hamptons, and Riverhead all participate in bikeshare), the plan also included redesigning the bus network, making many new routes with most routes having 30-minute headways and timed connections. One of the routes kept was of course the 1. And to improve north-south corridors, part of the plan is studying BRT, specifically along Route 110 between Huntington and Amityville (the 1's route; which will also serve new TOD in East Farmingdale to coincide with the reopening of Republic station), along the Sagtikos Parkway from Babylon to Kings Park (which includes Suffolk County Community College’s Grant Campus in Brentwood, Kings Park LIRR, Heartland Town Square TOD in Brentwood, and Tanger Outlets), and along Nicolls Road from Patchogue to Stony Brook (serving Stony Brook University, Suffolk County Community College’s Ammerman Campus, St. Joseph's College, Ronkonkoma LIRR, and LI MacArthur Airport).

Worth mentioning that when the Skokie Swift became a thing in the 1960s, it was a federally-aided mass transit demonstration project! On its first day of service in 1964, it carried nearly 4,000 passengers in a 16-hour period compared to approximately 1,600 passengers carried by the North Shore Line from the Dempster Terminal in a 12-hour period before the railroad terminated. Ridership continued to increase and by the end of the first year, nearly 6,000 passengers were riding the new line each weekday. Because of the weekday success, Saturday service was inaugurated, with more than 2,000 riders. At the end of the two-year experimental period, 3.5 million people had used the new service and CTA authorized operation of the Skokie Swift as a permanent part of its system. The Yellow Line used to operate by switching between third-rail and catenary, as in half of it was third-rail while the other-half was catenary left over from the Chicago North Shore and Milwaukee Railroad. It switched between these while in motion, just like New Haven Line trains do. This unique operation stopped in 2004 when third-rail replaced the catenary portion to increase reliability, reduce maintenance costs, and allow compatibility with other rapid-transit lines. The Purple Line used to operate like that as well. The Evanston shuttle as it was called before the Purple Line, once had overhead that originally extended all the way to Howard, but in 1963 the wire was replaced with third rail between South Blvd and Howard, so South Boulevard was where the trains switched between overhead and third-rail. The overhead between South Boulevard and Linden was converted to third-rail in 1973, which allowed the CTA to retire the Cincinnati Car Company-manufactured 4000-series cars. Besides the CTA doing this park-and-ride demonstration with the Skokie Swift, the first train park-and-ride in general in the country was Jersey Avenue on NJ Transit's Northeast Corridor Line, which opened in 1963. The conception of the Jersey Avenue station dates back to July 16, 1963, when officials for the Pennsylvania Railroad and then NJ governor Richard J. Hughes broke ground on a new station and freight depot along the line by the Tri-State Transportation Committee. The new station was started as an 18-month park-and-ride experiment done by the committee, and supplement New Brunswick station (which is the very opposite of Jersey Ave, with great walkability and connectivity to NJT routes, Somerset County routes, Rutgers's shuttle buses; not to mention served by Amtrak as well) to the north. The station opened in October. Unlike all other stations on the NJT Northeast Corridor Line, Jersey Avenue has low-level platforms (the rest are elevated), and, since there's no wheelchair ramp, it's also the only station on the line that is not handicapped-accessible. Jersey Ave has a very interesting layout. It has two platforms, a southbound platform on the main line for trains heading south towards Trenton, and a northbound platform on a siding behind the southbound platform for trains heading north to New York Penn. The platforms are separated by the station's parking lot. There is no platform on the northbound main line, so northbound trains from Trenton cannot serve Jersey Ave. In 2014, NJT tried to relocate the northbound platform and allow for high-level boarding, pedestrian overpass, vertical circulation, improved parking, and bus connection areas, but none of this was constructed then. And then there's two infill park-and-rides that were built by Penn Central and Amtrak on the NEC for the Metroliners, Capital Beltway Metropark and Garden State Metropark (Metroliner + park-and-ride = Metropark). Capital Beltway Metropark was later called just Capital Beltway, and Garden State Metropark was later called just Metropark. Capital Beltway opened in 1970, while Metropark opened in November 1971. Amtrak used Capital Beltway until 1983 when New Carrollton opened to the south. But Metropark still exists in NJ, and the Acela stops there as part of the legacy of the Metroliners. Because of Metropark, a large business park grew, called "the first Edge City in the world to grow from a parking lot". Besides being an Acela stop and other Amtrak services, Metropark is among the busiest NJT stations, and many Staten Islanders from the South Shore of Staten Island drive out to Metropark for their commute to Manhattan. NJT also runs several peak loop bus routes serving the office parks in the area in coordination with train schedules.

Great video, an Evanston infill station and the Old Orchard extension should absolutely be a priority for CTA!

I have one suggestion which is that the South Shore Connector should use the Allentown branch to connect to the South Shore, instead of stopping at Duquesne, and having to build a new bridge. This would be cheaper. I also suggest continuing to use current rolling stock on it, since that would also likely be cheaper than buying whole new rolling stock.

Great job on this video

You guys are cute 😍

Cool to see young people to discuss it.

Why is Denver's airport in the shape of a swastika?

Truly excellent job guys, from a total transit nerd who is old enough to have ridden the Electroliners and other North Shore Line trains. One additional point to your history. The uniqueness of the Skokie Siwft has much to do with the LBJ administration. As part of his "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" program and the newly established Department of Transportation, the feds for the first time became interested in urban tranit and formed the Urban Mass Transit Administration. They had a good pot of meny and were looking for test projects to fund. Johnson was buddies with Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley. The North Shore had recently been abandoned (Jan, 1963) and the CTA saw using the right-of-way as a cheap option. The deal was done and the relativel few upgrades meant that by 1965 service began. Many planners envisioned extending the line northward along the North Shore's Skokie Valley Route but before they could act pieces of the right of way had been sold off and developed. This is the main reason that the Swift is such an outlier in transit, not just in Chicago but elsewhere.

In high school back in the 60's we would show up for first period then scoot down the Edens from Lake County, grab the 'Swift over to Howard and the the L down to Addison and spend the rest of the day in the 'friendly confines'. After the game reverse the process and most of the time we could make it home for dinner and no one was wiser. Except for the time my girl friend forgot her dentist appointment. Her mom was so PO'd she called the school and our wonderful 'guardians' figured out that my GF, me and two of my 'known associates' along with their GFs had disappeared after first hour. We were so busted. Back then the school did not do a thing, they knew our parents would provide the necessary 'corrective measures'.

RETVRN of the North Shore Line!!! I want it! 😭

Incredible research, incredible editing, and an incredible video

"too busy"? Is there any line that is busy on the CTA? Cause the ridership numbers seem abysmal for a system of that size.

Nice video! (Though would argue Orange line not inspired by Skokie Swift and never leaves city/for airport and area which had no train prior/only bus routes). Many of the L lines used to go out further into suburbs past, including many in or near the near western suburbs, where the top four most densely populated municipalities in Illinois are located (Chicago is #5).

Such an unfair tease about the PATCO video! Will we get to see one in the future?

4:28 FYI your favorite rail fleet is only gonna operate for another year and a half, RTA is getting new trains... Looks like your gonna have to find another logo then 😢

Where do you find the old-timey music?? I’ve heard it on other channels

I hope passenger service on the Former Skokie Valley (North of Dempster-Skokie) can be restored whether it be by CTA or Metra that restores this.

Also, I think it would be better to route the purple line onto the Skokie branch. With this, the grade crossings on the Evanston/Wilmette branch would be removed, Noyes station would be closed, and red line trains would run on it. I would also make the red line train run express through Chicago, with stations at Howard, Loyola, Bryn Mawr, Lawrence, Addison, and all stations further south.

My grandfather helped with the planning process of the Oakton-Skokie station while he was the village clerk.

A solid and entertaining history!

Talking heads using Talking Heads. 😂😂 Love it! As a Chicagoan, I love seeing videos on our beloved but challenged system. Thanks for the vid!

I ride the yellow line to get to work, even with speed reduction it takes me 10 minutes to get from howard to dempsrer

This was awesome! Just did a video on the Skokie Swift myself- so it was cool to see where we overlapped

If Purple takes over say one of the Green Line branches, then maybe just extend half of red line trains (all at peak) so everyone has a direct connection to downtown, Then make Yellow the Damon BRT running from Montrose Point to North Center, then Damen to Damen (pink), then Ashland to Ashland/63rd, parallel the Green Line Branches to Jackson Park

Was 55 mph until the November 2023 crash. Since it reopened, it had an immense speed reduction to 35 mph

THEY'RE BACK

0:05 “The next episode”by Dr Dre and snoop Dogg is my favorite song that everybody has heard of before

Why can't buses and light rail share the dedicated busways, as well? Is it a case where there isn't enough ridership to make it workable?

0:58 that bicyclist is going places.

could ypu do avideomanout te actaulpittsburgh transit plan.

The -biggest- mistake to this is removing SL1. SL1 is the -fastest- way to get to downtown from the Airport. The Blue Line doesn't go to the airport, it goes to Airport Station, then you need to catch a shuttle to the terminal. This transfer takes time and you still need to walk outside the train, possibly over the causeway and down to the busway. The shuttles are also subject to traffic delays. I work in hospitality and I've got years of examples of people who take the shuttles to get to our Hostel. It'll take them 40m-1H to get here from the airport via existing routes. Meanwhile, the Silver Line will get them to the airport in 25m. I say branch your light rail Silver Line directly to the Airport in order to maintain that service. The SL1 is also free from the airport to south station, a big perk to visitors. Silver Line already exists somewhat in tunnels. Wouldn't take much to add rails and wires and make a light rail service. The biggest flaw is what you pointed out, and that is SL1 SL2 and SL3 are not connected to SL4 and SL5 SL4 and SL5 could be merged. SL3 adds Chelsea service, which is vital. SL2 and SL1 connect the ship terminal, ship port and airport to the city, they're vital. I'd say when it's done, you have SL Airport Line SL Seaport Line SL Nubian Line SL Chelsea Line As for the Green Line, there's one more added possibility. Bring back the A-Branch. There was an existing Watertown A-Branch of the Green Line. It fell into disrepair but the structures are still there and just need some updates. It's a lot cheaper than brand new construction. As for the Commuter Rail, I like that you showed the extension map. I want our Commuter Rail to extend North to Concord and Manchester NH. And I want to connect possibly to Albany heading west. We'd have the first Commuter Rail network to connect to four state capitals. This would be a MASSIVE economic possibility for all four states. Imagine the level of cooperation that could be created if those four important cities (Boston, Albany, Providence, Concord) could link in an efficient and effective way?

I’ve been hearing talk about abandoning the Library line. I certainly hope people will rise up and fight this.

Metro ride is now seasonal and hardly runs even during that time.

Automation sounds great, but I wonder how that would work at Howard station. Specifically how the red would interact with the yellow/purple lines since they have the same yard and share many of tracks. Feels like either the yellow and purple would have to be automated and grade separated or a massive rebuilding of Howard would have to happen.

I really appreciate your perspective, and the downtown loop tunnels are very elegant. However, at this point I think I’d bring back the C line and drop the D, as well as bring back the F line and drop the E, then I’d upgrade the C & W lines to the same standards as the heavy regional lines and build a tunnel under DUS to allow thru-running of the A & N onto the C and the B & G onto the W. I’d then build a tunnel under downtown to replace the CBD loop for the F & H lines and then send them all the way to 38th & Blake, replacing the L line as well. Your ideas for metro lines to serve existing density nodes + potential TOD corridors are pretty much exactly what I’d do as well.

oh lol I've been using the G line everyday for a couple of months, not knowing it was a new line (i moved to a new place recently that happens to be near a G line stop). It's a blessing

Great ideas that sadly won't happen.