No to Madigan's Crosstown Expressway

The last time Chicagoans were talking about the Crosstown Expressway, I was too young to notice. But the generation before me already understood that the urban expressway was a thing of the 1960s, and they had the wisdom to kill the idea.

Two weeks ago, Illinois Speaker of the House Michael Madigan dusted off the 28-year-dead proposal and tried reviving its corpse. This had a lot of people scratching their heads, since the Crosstown Expressway proposal would compete with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's Mid-City Transitway. While I've been known to criticize Daley on occasion, in this case I feel that Daley's idea is the better one.

When the Interstate highways were first built, we lacked the experience to see how, in urban and suburban settings, they would create a positive feedback loop that leads to ever increasing sprawl and traffic congestion. Traffic engineers would look at the mess they created and then decide that if only we build this one more highway, we'll all be sailing along at 55 miles an hour. But of course, the new highway will soon be just as congested as all the others, and the others will be worse than before. And I won't even get into the destruction of neighborhoods through which the highway passes.

Development of transportation infrastructure along the western edge of Chicago does make sense, just not in the form of a six-lane highway. For the most part, Chicago's streets are laid out in a north-south and east-west grid. Superimposed on that are a number of angled streets (Milwaukee, Elston, Lincoln, Clark, etc.) that radiate from downtown like spokes. CTA rail lines are also laid out like spokes that converge in the Loop. What is lacking is a quick way to get from the far end of one line to the far end of an adjacent one, something that could be provided by mass transit on a Mid-City Transitway.