No highway in the sky

You know, I can't go to a meeting, or even have a discussion, about the Bloomingdale trail (AKA The 606) without someone asking the question, "When will they extend it to the river?".

I'm here to tell ya, quit askin'.

The answer to that question is "Not in our life times."

The people building it won't tell you that. When asked, they hem and haw around it like a politician being asked about taxes.
I'm not sure why they do that. One guess is that a lot of money for alternative transportation is backing the construction and they don't want to admit that it is the bicycle version of the Amstutz Highway (AKA The road to nowhere) until they finish this part.

The problem is that on the other side of Ashland the ROW makes a grade crossing with a commuter railway. In fact with two lines of the Metra UP. On the average week day, during park hours, over 130 trains cross there. About 1 train crossing every 8 minutes. A crossing gate isn't an option.

How about a bridge? To build a bridge to clear the bi-level rail cars to ADA standards (slope of 1 in 12 and landings every 30" in rise) will require ramps around 250 feet long. The good news is that there is enough land there to do that and connect to another underused track that crosses over Clybourn and runs directly to the river.

The bad news is that they don't have the headroom.

The expressway crosses over the Bloomingdale line about 60 feet from the Metra tracks. In fact the height of the expressway bridge at this point was designed specifically to to clear the loading guage of a boxcar on the Bloomingdale line. I estimate it to be no more than 20 feet above the railbed. But that doesn't matter, the trail bridge would need at least as much structure gauge to clear the commuter line 60 feet away.

60 feet, one landing. You will have a maximum of 57 inches of headroom when you pass under the Kennedy.

You could build a bridge that rises 10 feet under the expressway, turns 90 deg, goes another 125 feet, turns 90 deg again over the tracks and does it all over on the other side. This is a lot more complicated and involves rights of way they do not own.

In some ways, a viaduct would be a better solution. It only needs to be eight or ten feet deep. That would still be above the street level so drainage would be easy.  But you would need a bridge to support the rails. I can't imagine that happening without interrupting all rail traffic on those lines for at least a couple of weeks, Not bloody likely.

Getting the trail to the east side of the Metra tracks will probably cost more than all the other bridgework on the trail, and CDoT won't be doing much of it. Until a river trail runs all the way downtown, the impetus to fund such an undertaking will not exist.

Accept the 606 for what it is. A nice park, someplace to take a stroll on a sunny morning and maybe a bicycle shortcut from the "K" streets to the Metra station. But it's no highway in the sky.

Paul K. Dickman