Politics
CTA Awards Design-Build Contract for Red Line Extension; Agency President Diplomatic on Proposed Lake Shore Drive Overhaul
A southbound CTA Red Line train is pictured in a file photo. (WTTW News)
Applause broke out Wednesday at the Chicago Transit Authority’s board meeting after directors approved a $2.93 billion contract for the design and construction of the Red Line Extension to 130th Street.
The award went to Walsh-Vinci Transit Community Partners, a coalition of firms with extensive transit experience, including work on the CTA’s ongoing Red and Purple Modernization effort on the North Side.
CTA President Dorval Carter got emotional while discussing the long-awaited project. Carter, who first came to the agency in the 1980s as a staff attorney, said he was frustrated by seeing previous attempts at the Red Line Extension die on the vine: “I was never in a position to influence that earlier in my career.”
Returning to Chicago after continuing his transit career at the federal level in Washington, D.C., Carter told the board he knew the skill he brought to the CTA wasn’t operating a train or doing track maintenance — it was in raising money for major projects.
“I knew if I put my mind to it, I could bring to the Far South Side of Chicago something that I had been hearing about since I was a kid,” Carter said.
The Red Line Extension will add 5.6 miles of track past the current 95th Street terminus, with stations at 103rd Street, 111th Street, Michigan Avenue near 115th Street, and 130th Street. Models show it will significantly reduce travel times for Far South Side residents who are underserved by transit and cut off from job and recreational opportunities.
The project is expected to break ground in late 2025, with service beginning in 2030. The train line was first floated back in the 1950s.
“The fact that it took us this long to get here is an abomination,” Carter said.
His comments were echoed by board member Robert Requejo, a longtime advocate for equitable transit-oriented development. He urged the CTA and other city leaders to ensure that the new opportunities the train extension creates are to the benefit of neighbors.
“This could be a great opportunity for building community wealth, or it could be an opportunity for speculation and investors coming from outside and taking away from communities,” Requejo said.
While the project’s total cost has increased since it was first proposed, CTA staff said that’s a problem facing transit agencies and other entities working on major construction projects around the country — but that a delay will only make things more expensive. They also said a recently announced accelerated timeline for the federal government to pay its portion of the project will help CTA save on financing costs.
CTA leaders were pushed to take a more active role in advocating for a dedicated bus lane on North DuSable Lake Shore Drive. Last week, lawmakers and advocates slammed the Illinois and Chicago departments of transportation, who’ve spent more than a decade developing plans to overhaul the aging roadway between Grand and Hollywood avenues.
But despite considering multiple options with some form of dedicated or shared transit lane, the plan the agencies are recommending includes only bus lanes and signal priority at on and off ramps, which critics call a fatal flaw in the plan.
Laura Saltzman, a senior policy analyst for Access Living and chair of the CTA’s ADA Advisory Committee, told the board that an opportunity to dramatically improve transit service along the Drive is an accessibility issue — citing a recent survey that improved speed and reliability is a top priority for passengers with disabilities.
“Redefine the Drive is an opportunity to make a meaningful improvement in that direction, but for the most part any improvements merely were a byproduct of a private car-centric design,” Saltzman said. “There is no prioritizing disabled people if you are not prioritizing transit. … If the needs of disabled people matter, then the current design cannot be considered acceptable.”
Asked by Requejo about the committee’s concerns — which include other issues like the timeline for making stations ADA compliant, better wayfinding and improved communication, many of which also involve collaboration among other agencies — Carter said he didn’t disagree with Saltzman’s comments.
“There honestly are a lot of competing interests involved in a lot of the decisions that we’re talking about, and certainly CTA advocates for and attempts to push decisions we believe are in the best interests of public transportation — recognizing that we don’t necessarily have the ultimate decision around what we do or how we do it,” Carter said.
“I hear you, President Carter, on the competing interests,” Requejo said. “I always get a little worried when I hear that, because we have made a commitment as a city to prioritize transit, prioritize pedestrians, prioritize people with disabilities, Black and Brown communities, etc. And so whenever that conflict arises, we have said, ‘OK, but here’s what the priority should be,’ and I just don’t see that. I see a car-centric development being treated on the same level.”
Carter noted that the Redefine the Drive design has yet to win final approval, and said opponents of the project’s design made themselves heard “very loud and clear” at a demonstration last week.
“I don’t have a crystal ball as to whether that will influence the final outcome of this process one way or another, but certainly I do know that it was heard,” Carter said. “That kind of advocacy is always very helpful because it amplifies a lot of what CTA tries to convey in terms of what we believe is the position on various issues and how it may affect our customers.”
Contact Nick Blumberg: [email protected] | (773) 509-5434 | @ndblumberg
