Quote Originally Posted by professorscott View Post
OK, I must respectfully disagree. The major employment locations, the biggest ones, are Quicken and the City-County building, each of which is ten blocks or so from RPTC. People just are not walking these distances: go watch. The People Mover has not caught on as a way to cover the last half-mile, for various reasons. As I said before, a downtown transit center needs to be downtown, and this just is not.

You might be younger than I am. When Cadillac Square was the TC, it was very common to see people - hordes of them - walking the last block, or two, or three, from the bus to their offices. Once they moved to Capitol Park, this became vanishingly rare, and now it is nonexistent. When the City made the deliberate and conscious decision to get the undesirable bus passengers out of downtown proper, the [[completely predictable) side effect was to banish from the buses the people who worked in downtown proper.

When I say "undesirable", that is not my own opinion [[I was one of the bus passengers, routinely) but that is how the City saw them then. I have seen nothing since to change my mind about it; the City just doesn't like the people who ride the buses and wants to keep them away from the desirable people. This is sad, but seems to be true.
RPTC and One Campus Martius is not 10 blocks. Walking down Michigan...Washington, Shelby, Griswold, Woodward, then bam you're there. Yes, city hall is another 5 blocks south but Professor, this just goes to show how lazy we've become.

Ogilvie Transportation Center is on the other side of the Chicago River and I've been down there on a weekday morning seeing the hordes of people walking from Ogilvie across the river to their Loop office building. Yes, some catch a bus if it's further but not all do.

Not sure how you can say RPTC is not downtown when it clearly is. Hey, if we had built a subway, Campus Martius would've been one big inter-modal subway station! And perhaps it would behoove future streetcar planners to end the Jefferson line at RPTC.