Garfield Going Gangbusters? Red Line Rehab Will Bring Crazy Number of Riders To Green Line Stop
By JoshMogerman in News on Feb 24, 2013 7:00PM
The clock is ticking South Siders. It remains to be seen what the impact of the CTA’s Red Line closure south of Chinatown will look like when it starts in mid-May, but the Sun-Times gives a glimpse with this eye-popping stat:
The CTA predicts a 10-fold increase in riders on from its Garfield Boulevard Green Line stop.
That geometric growth is not coming because the platform is posh… Instead, the CTA is funneling riders to Garfield via five different shuttles and doling out free rides from the stop to make up for the Red Line refurb fuss.
If the predictions come true, it will be a big change for the sleepy, rag-tag stop at the western edge of Washington Park. Despite being the L stop closest to University of Chicago and Museum of Science and Industry (both are still quite a hoof from there), it only sees 1,300 riders on an average day. The rider shift brings a lot of hubbub to a block where community groups had been campaigning to turn the original L stop structure (opened for the Columbian Exposition and since abandoned) into a library. Should be interesting…