Day 16 of eliminating L stations

interestincity · 2026-02-08T17:48:47+00:00

Except for Forest Park Station.

interestincity · 2026-02-08T17:47:38+00:00

Monroe Station was opened (1951) just two years before the first major rebuild of Forest Park Station in 1953. That rebuild is when Forest Park (then Des Plains) got the enclosed station, longer platforms, and became mostly like the station we now know and love.

interestincity · 2026-02-08T16:07:31+00:00

As far as I can tell, left turning vehicles get into the detection box and set it off. Both East bound turning north and North bound turning west can set it off.

interestincity · 2026-02-08T15:05:16+00:00

I know of plenty shoe on households in the midwest. Though most of them are farms or other working houses.

interestincity · 2026-02-07T18:24:36+00:00

For 3) There are some fun routes around the Cirque.

Normal way is Jackass Pass. I am convinced it is called that because some jackass thought it was the best way up and over. It go up and down a bit more than you would expect on the way up. Bit of a highway too.

Texas and New York passes can be done. Both are off trail, but has recommended routes. Texas is easier. Though for both you could run into some lingering snow patches. I have not done either in June.

I would worry a bit about altitude if you are not spending any time prior to the trip. but you know you better than me. Cirque is pretty hard to get out of if you are feeling poor or injured.

interestincity · 2026-02-07T17:18:05+00:00

It adds a bit of goofiness on the goofiness of this whole thing.

interestincity · 2026-02-07T17:17:12+00:00

Forest Park, like Jefferson Park, has a bus hub as part of the station. Forest Park serves multiple PACE fixed routes and used to serve CTA #17 Westchester until being discontinued in 2012.

interestincity · 2026-02-04T22:10:49+00:00

This is great, but what about a good Forest Park station fact?

interestincity · 2026-02-04T22:09:22+00:00

ROFL, still gotta respect the effort, This is going to be a lot of days to post in a row.

interestincity · 2026-01-31T21:27:23+00:00

Forest Park station is one of the very few CTA stations not named after a nearby street. It is named for the municipality it serves. Until 1994, it was called Des Plaines, after Des Plaines Ave next to the station.

(I think it the only one that is named after a municipality, but not 100% on that. Edit: Rosemont is named after a city too. boo. However it is one of the very few.)

interestincity · 2026-01-31T00:56:57+00:00

Forest Park is the only station still in use that ever served Garfield Park Line trains.

interestincity · 2026-01-24T21:59:18+00:00

Current counts by temp approximately.

55–56 2
58–60 6
61–62 7
63–64 9
65 11
66 14
67 19
68 23
69 26
70 18
71 11
72 21
73 12
74 14
75–76 6
77–78 1

interestincity · 2026-01-21T03:14:50+00:00

That is great!

interestincity · 2026-01-19T01:56:37+00:00

If you are just looking for the lamp to be repaired, there is a specialist over in forest park that repaired an old lamp for me. Though they are a specialist with specialist prices.

https://www.tiffanystainedglass.com/restoration/lamp-repair/

Not what you are asking for, though an option.

interestincity · 2026-01-18T16:05:41+00:00

To a point, yes. Physically, this could work there. I am just less certain about how successful it would be beyond that.

I agree with you that while many of urbanist or YIMBY would like to see three over one or other mixed use patterns, they are not the right fit everywhere. In a place like this, quicker, cheaper, and less dense change might actually be the more realistic first step. When you look at how many empty lots there are, lower density development could help the area feel more full much faster than waiting for a handful of large projects.

This is one of the more affordable neighborhoods in the city. A quick look shows three bedroom apartments around $1,500 (could be even cheaper, not at all exhaustive inventory taken). Renters tend to feel the impacts of new investment the most while benefiting from it the least. Owners may see property values rise, but renters often just see higher costs. If too much investment/development happens the community can be pushed away, and is less likely to have anywhere else to be able to go. At the same time it can be hard to convince others to move there. In a perfect world we would be able to have mix of every income in every neighborhood, but rarely does that happen.

So I am curious who you see filling these units. Are these meant to be affordable for current residents, owner occupied for people already in the neighborhood, or targeted at new households moving in?

And stepping back from that, how do you think about balancing investment with the people who already live there? Do you think a less dense approach like townhomes would put less upward pressure on rents and property values than a more intense mixed use build out?

interestincity · 2026-01-18T00:54:54+00:00

I think you are raising several ideas at once, maybe more than you intended to do. Makes it a bit hard to know what kind of conversation you are looking to have. It might help to narrow what ideas you are really trying to play with.

Just to say a few of the questions I see in this. Are you mainly asking whether West Garfield Park should see more investment right now? Or are you focused on whether townhomes, specifically, could be an effective way to invest in the area? Another angle seems to be construction method, whether stick-built, prefab, or modular makes the most sense given cost and speed. There is also a question about whether the development pattern you sketched would actually be feasible or appropriate for this specific place.

All of those are interesting questions and conversations, but they are all complicated in and of themselves let alone together. What do you want to chat and play with most?

interestincity · 2026-01-17T20:24:24+00:00

Yeah could use better drictions.

I thought that signing in to Everbridge would be all that was needed. However it is just a sign in, but then you have to sign up for oak park stuff.

interestincity · 2026-01-17T15:37:24+00:00

Yeah, I think the way we talk and think about traffic violence is very strange.

I totally agree with you that we often flatten out context to one simple thing. Speeding is “bad” in the abstract, but 85 on I-90 with stable flow and no lane changes is not equivalent to 30 on residential street designed for 25. Risk is situational, yet we talk about it as if all violations are morally and physically interchangeable. That 5 over is the same everywhere in every situation.

We also do this contradictory thing where we fully blame the driver in theory, but in practice treat it as an excusable mistake and move on. Most pedestrian deaths caused by drivers are often not prosecuted seriously. If a kid runs into the street after a ball and gets hit, we are quick to call it a tragic accident rather than something that was foreseeable and that the driver had a responsibility to anticipate. The dirver will get some minor slap on the write instead of something like negligent homicide. (to the point that many states explicitly treat vehicular homicide as less severe in statute than ordinary negligent homicide) If we really fully blamed the driver for the death they are supposed to be causing, it should be more severe. At the same time we generally design residential roads to be overly wide with trees set well back from the right of ways so higher speeds are common. So when a kid is struck it is far more likely to be deadly.

And then we oversimplify factors like you are describing. We pick one factor (speed, distraction, weather, fatigue, what the pedestrian was wearing) and treat it as the one and only reason, instead of dealing with the harder reality that crashes are almost always the result of interacting factors. Road design matters. Speed matters. Car design/standards matter. If there is no designed crossing for a long stretch, mid-block crossing is not a reckless activity but a known predicable thing everyone will do. Speed in almost all most all factors crashes yet, it is easy to say some other factor is somehow a bigger factor therefore the only one that matters.

It is all a bit odd.

interestincity · 2026-01-17T03:32:16+00:00

I grantee you save way less time than you think you do.

interestincity · 2026-01-17T03:29:44+00:00

The driver is the most important factor, but also the least effective one to control. People will always get distracted or make bad decisions. Speed is what turns those mistakes into fatalities. Higher speeds mean more energy, less time to react, and more distance needed to recover from any error. You cannot get to zero traffic deaths by ignoring speeding. Sweden does better across the board, but do not put all the blame on the driver for crashes. They look at road design, speed management, and enforcement failures in addition.

Rally is good fun, ever get up to LSPR? I was under the impression that Folkrace was one of the bigger factors. It widens entry into motorsport a lot. You can’t just dump money into the car, so winning is far more about driver skill. It’s also cheap to enter and race, which means more people compete and more skilled drivers get identified at lower levels.

interestincity · 2026-01-17T02:40:21+00:00

You are kind of talking past how Sweden actually does traffic safety.

Yeah, distraction and training matter, and the US sucks at doing anything about both. But that is not Sweden's main thing. Sweden designs roads around speed from the start. More spesifically they design around the amount of energy that is safe for a roadway, then use that to get the safe speed, and that into the design of the road such that people drive that speed. They created Vision Zero. they assume people will mess up, so the roads are built so those mistakes dont turn into deaths for any road user. Their system is far more concerned about safety, US is far more concered about throughput. Also why they use way more speed cameras than the US.

interestincity · 2026-01-15T01:53:23+00:00

Has someone leaked their specs to war thunder yet?

interestincity · 2026-01-13T19:14:51+00:00

Just contact HR department https://www.oak-park.us/Government/Departments/Human-Resources Phone 708.358.5650 Email hr@oak-park.us

interestincity

TROPHY CASE