So it looks like this is what gets me out of the rut I’ve been in, huh.
Yesterday I randomly found out that in the 90s, Rosemont had put in a bid for a PRT system that the RTA wanted to build somewhere in the Chicago suburbs. The proposal itself is something, going into some detail about station locations, station design, expected ridership, development/economic benefits, renderings, and so on and so on…and, of course, they have a map, and I immediately wanted to know what it would look like if it were cleaned up for public consumption, hence the thing up there.
(Notes on the map: Red = rose, Rosemont, and my font of choice was Optima because it has a very specific 90s-retro-corporate-mall-edge-city-vaporwave thing going on that you just know would have been all over this system if it ever got built. Some station names were changed or updated to reflect what’s there now (Balmoral Ave became Theatre, Otto Street became Entertainment District, Arts Centre became Fashion Outlets). The park-and-ride at Mannheim station is my own invention, as is the connecting track from the O’Hare MMF to Mannheim station (for folks flying or taking Metra in to Allstate Arena functions). The routing of the northern ORD/Allstate Arena loop was changed slightly to account for the recent extension of the airport people mover to the MMF/Metra station.)
The plan was to start out with a unidirectional loop going from the L station to the Convention Center and surrounding offices and hotels, effectively functioning as a circulator for folks going to conventions. Later on they’d build extensions to the north and west, eventually reaching what is now Allstate Arena and the eastern fringes of O’Hare airport, with additional park-and-ride facilities and new connections to Metra and the airport people mover producing a more sustainable commuter-oriented ridership. But in the way these things go, plans stalled out, the company contracted to manufacture the system exited the industry, and the system just kinda died on the vine.
But I am a sucker for gadgetbahns. When I’m in an airport I’m one of those dorks who will ride the people mover just for the experience of riding the people mover. The trouble is, people movers outside of airports have a very…mixed record in the USA. The Metromover in Miami is doing okay, but similar systems in Detroit, Las Colinas, and Jacksonville have been unmitigated failures. The city I live in, Indianapolis, had a people mover connecting a pair of hospital campuses for a while, but it closed long before I could ever ride it. There are a lot of reasons people movers often become white elephants, mostly boiling down to limited connectivity to other modes of transport, construction going over-budget, lack of maintenance, the use of bespoke infrastructure that’s difficult to replace (especially if the manufacturer exits the business), and just plain general uselessness. I rarely include them in my own fantasy maps because I may love the novelty but novelty does not good transit make. That said, I began to seriously wonder if Rosemont would have been able to get lucky with this one, mostly because I am a hopeless weeb who lives in the Midwest, which means I’m in Rosemont once or twice a year for stuff like Anime Central, and so I actually have a pretty good idea of how I would use the system if it existed.
First thing’s first, there is zero chance this thing would have ever run as a true PRT system, at least not regularly. If the system in Morgantown doesn’t run as a true PRT most of the time, then neither would this one. In the vast majority of cases having the system operationally run as a regular people mover where every car stops at every stop is just simpler and more convenient, and that’s what we would expect here, too.
Second, the unidirectional nature of the starter loop is going to present some problems, as unidirectional loops always do. Let’s say I’m going to ACen and I decide to come in via the Blue Line. The initial PRT/CTA transfer station has one track going north, which means I’ll be going in the wrong direction for a good distance before coming back down again. And once I’m on the right side of 190 I have two options: sit there as the car loops around the Entertainment District before stopping at the convention center, or get off at the Hyatt station and get there via a ten-minute walk in the cramped, sweaty, labyrinthine skywalk system. Either way, I’m traveling at least three or four times the distance on the PRT that I would have if I had just walked.
This issue doesn’t necessarily resolve itself if the system were fully built out. Let’s say I’m in town for ACen and I’m staying, for some godforsaken reason, at the Aloft, which is right at the Fashion Outlets station. Getting to the convention center is simple enough, just a two-stop ride and there you are. Coming from the convention center, though, is another matter entirely: the easiest way to get back to the Aloft involves (once again) a ten-minute slog through the skywalks, to the Hyatt, in the opposite direction of where I want to go, meaning my total travel distance is (once again) about three times what it would be if I had just walked.
Third, there would be similar issues for folks commuting in, as well. Under the starter system, anyone who takes the L to work at the Columbia Center would have some issues. Under the full system, so would anyone coming in from the northwest who works close to the Casino or Lakeside stations. A lot of these workplaces have pretty ample parking already, so a lot of commuters driving in may still decide that parking directly at the office is less of a hassle, despite the traffic, than parking at say Allstate Arena and taking a meandering people mover for the last mile or two to the office. Ultimately, a lot of the PRT’s traffic would be from congoers and other people who have to get from Point A to Point B within the system’s service area.
But that may also be the thing that allows the system to just barely hang on. When we make these judgments, we’re generally assuming a spherical, frictionless Rosemont in a vacuum. The Rosemont that actually exists, meanwhile, is a traffic-sewer shithole actively hostile to pedestrians. The L station is isolated from the rest of town by a literal freeway interchange. Getting to the convention center from the Aloft requires crossing not one but two enormous parking garages right up against each other. Every street is six lanes wide and is the kind of street that kills people. If the PRT existed, it may still be faster to walk on the street in most cases, but I don’t think most people would want to walk on the street in Rosemont unless they absolutely had to. Since Rosemont gets convention traffic that Las Colinas doesn’t, and business traveler/airport traffic that Detroit doesn’t, and is fairly well-connected to the rest of the area thanks to the L station and bus terminal, that’s more than most places. It may not do what people thought it would to make Rosemont better, and I’d be endlessly complaining about it if it was actually built, but it definitely wouldn’t have made Rosemont worse, either. I would have something (else) to foam at whenever I’m up there, at least.
(If something like this were proposed today, it would absolutely be exploding Teslas in single-lane bored tunnels or something, which feels like PRT’s endgame in some ways so it’s kind of appropriate.)
(The Deerfield and Lisle systems would at best have limped along until the pandemic, and the Schaumburg system would have been DOA.)
[Update the First: some additional context from megaripple on Reddit. The most amazing thing was that Raytheon’s prototype vehicles initially weren’t ADA-compliant (!!?!), and in general it just kind of sounded like they had no idea what they were doing. At least—and god willing this will be the only time I ever say anything nice about Raytheon—it wasn’t a transparent grift like if this was a hyperloop company.]
[Update the Second: below is more or less what I’d come up with if I were asked to design an APM system for Rosemont with stations where the PRT proposal had stations, as well as some small adaptations to reflect how Rosemont developed in the 35 years (!) since the PRT was proposed. This is an uncomfortable compromise with the first idea I had—the route was ruthlessly straightened to the point where anyone with business at Columbia Centre, the Entertainment District, or the Hyatt had very long walks ahead of them, that idea was posted on Twitter and Bluesky if you wanna take a look at it yourself—and the second—leave the routing as-is but introduce some extremely complicated service patterns to reflect the contradictory needs of area workers and folks going to ACen or Furfest. It’s the old speed versus coverage issue, basically, and I figured if the Metromover can handle deviations to meet destinations such as the old Omni Mall and the Brickell train station, then so can this thing. There’s some stuff here I’m not 100% happy with (especially the conceit that the direction of travel reverses direction every morning so trains entering each loop go to offices instead of entertainment destinations, or that the way the loops are designed mean trains often run on the left), and I reserve the right to jimmy with it in future. But here it is. Since this is a fantasy map, I’ve also thrown in some stuff from the other Chicago fantasy map, like the elevated line to Schaumburg, and the PACE Dempster Line, which is an LRT here because it interacts with the streetcar system in Evanston.]
[Update the Third: Here’s a cleaned-up sketch of the single-line concept for this thing that I mentioned earlier. The service pattern for this one is so much simpler, which is a major advantage, but whether this one or the other one is preferable will depend on whether you think your average commuter to Rosemont will put up with a walk of up to a quarter mile from the station to their workplace.]
Theodoræ Ditsek 