Last August President Bush came to Aurora to sign into law a transportation bill laying out more than $590 million for the much-anticipated, long-delayed Red Line extension project. So any day now construction crews will be working to extend the line from 95th to 130th Street, right? “Very funny,” says Lou Turner, research and public policy coordinator for the Developing Communities Project, a south-side community group advocating for the extension. “That’s a good one.”
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“I can remember when I was a kid hearing people talk about extending the Dan Ryan line,” says Michael Evans, associate director of the DCP. “Down here it’s one of those urban legends. You still find people out there who’ll say, ‘They’ll never extend it to the city limits. They’ll never spend all that money on the south side–95th is just as far as it’s going to go.’”
Over the last four decades the extension project has simmered on the CTA’s back burner as other projects–the Orange Line to Midway, the Blue Line to O’Hare, the Green Line reconstruction, to name a few–were completed.
If you ask Turner and Evans, the Red Line deserves to be funded first. Under the current proposal the new line would drop south from 95th, just east of Halsted, along existing rail lines–so there would be no need to buy and demolish homes or businesses, usually the nastiest aspect of any major transportation project. At 111th Street the line would swing east to Michigan Avenue, stopping at 115th Street, then head farther east to 130th near Stony Island. In all it would include four new stops and run for some 6.1 miles through Roseland, Pullman, and Riverdale, servicing roughly 130,000 people.
Of course, once the CTA completes the alternatives analysis they will have other bureaucratic hurdles to clear. In addition to holding public hearings to solicit community reaction, the authority will have to commission an environmental impact study, and Springfield will still have to be persuaded to come up with the money. Each step in the process is a potential killer for a project that’s nearly 40 years behind schedule.
