The clock on the huge direction panel in the Chicago O’Hare Airport reads 6:42. I am way too early for my 9:05 flight to Washington DC. Still, being stuck in the airport to wait a little of your life away sure beats sweating in the shuttle and cursing as the darned van you are in simply cannot move in the lattice structure called a gridlock, except in Brownian motion speeds. Being stuck like is would be considered a “happy problem”, as an ex-boss would call it. Contradictory? Yeah, but that has how my experience in Chicago has been.
1. Enabled but not enabling
Chicago has a well thought out, rather comprehensive transport network. The city and its surrounding areas are served by the Metro, the Metra (I suspect it was named as a pun because it supplements the Metro to the more outlying areas), buses and taxis. Car hire, both chauffeured and self-drive, are available.
One thing in particular caught my eye about the Metro stations. Like with many major US cities, their main city airport(s) and train stations are Metro-enabled. The Metro or its equivalent in that city serves the airport and the Amtrak station. In this regard, one would expect the transport planners to cater to travellers who have large bags. But no! Many stations do not have either elevators or escalators. In fact, when I collected a train ticket from the Chicago Union Station, the nearest metro station, Quinsy/Wells, did not have any! I saw poor passengers lugging their bags and trying to get down from the platform to street level on the treacherously narrow steps.
Another key feature of the Chicago Transit Authority Metro system is the need for extensive transfers. The purple line, which I use, only loops in the downtown during peak hours. All other times, one has to transfer to a red line and then to any other line, depending on where they need to go. A direct journey is pretty unheard of. And for a tourist like me, constant map reading is necessary to figure out at which station I should be alighting.
Another joke is the advertising pamphlets that major shops along Michigan Avenue, aka the Magnificent Mile, give out tourists. Unfortunately, attractive as some of the bargains might be, the maps are bereft of any supplementary transport information such as metre stations to help tourists get there. In the Singapore way of asking, how to get business liddat?
I had already known that Chicago was going to be “Bus 11” intensive. Bootedharleydude told me as such. But little did I expect that Chicago would also be a city suitable for aspiring mountain climbers. After you walk up and down umpteenth flights of stairs, you’ll understand what I mean.
This city that worked hard to enable convenient transport options must now look to enabling effective transport means. And that would pave the way to their 2016 Olympic bid.
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