When was the Chicago Central Area Transit Plan first introduced?
Chicago Central Area Transit Plan
The Chicago Central Area Transit Plan called for subway construction to start in 1969, with the system opening in stages between 1973 and 1978. According to the 1968 report, the new Loop and Distributor Subways should have carried more than 390,000 passengers on an average weekday, including 152,000 daily passengers using the Distributor system. The total daily Distributor Subway travel by passengers who transferred to or from the commuter railroads (today's Metra and Amtrak) or other CTA rapid transit lines would have been twice these volumes. The Chicago Central Area Transit Plan's financial recommendations were, in retrospect, overly optimistic even for those days before the runaway inflation of the late 1960s and 1970s. The projected cost of building the Loop and Distributor Subway systems was $478 million in 1969 dollars. In this and other financial projections, the CCATPS assumed an "escalation" of 5% per year, an unfortunate estimate of the unforeseeable 8–11% inflation rates of the next few years.