Evanston’s City Council voted Monday night to accept a report selecting Asbury Avenue as the preferred site for a new CTA Yellow Line station in the city.
The engineering feasibility study considered three possible locations for the new station — including Ridge and Dodge Avenues.
All once had been station stops on the old Niles Center Branch of the North Shore Line, which stopped commuter service in 1948.
The only objection to the Asbury site at Monday’s meeting came from Donna Spicuzza, a former city employee, whose home at 229 Wesley Ave. is adjacent to the proposed station site.
Spicuzza said she couldn’t agree with the Asbury location because of the noise from construction and the station’s operation.
Tom Coleman of Parsons Brinckerhoff.
Tom Coleman of the city’s engineering consultant for the study, Parsons Brinckerhoff, said that assuming funding was found to actually build the station, the earliest it might be completed would be sometime between 2016 and 2018.
Alderman Don Wilson, 4th Ward, asked whether there were ways that the CTA might let a municipality like Evanston recapture some of the money invested in a new station.
Coleman said that the CTA has shown some additional flexibility on that issue recently — for example allowing a developer to pay the cost of modernizing the Red Line subway station at Clybourn.
He also said there’s been some discussion about letting a local municipality participate in the operation of a station, something the CTA hasn’t done in the past because of existing labor agreements.
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Asbury
Asbury is a good location…it will make it easy for people to get to work at the many businesses at that corner, and it will be easy for leisure travellers to get to IHOP.
Enquiring minds want to know about the Central Street station. I thought that they were going to put a business on the ground floor, where that awful Chinese restaurant used to be. How long has it been empty? Ten years?
Niles Center line
I'm splitting hairs here, but the Ridge, Asbury and Dodge stations were actually served not by the North Shore Line, but by the Niles Center Line of the Chicago Rapid Transit Company, the predecessor of the CTA.The North Shore Line — an interurban railroad to Milwaukee — ran non-stop between Howard Street and Dempster Street in Skokie.
Central Street CTA station
The CTA recently completed a process to solicit and secure tenants for several of its empty station spaces, including the space in its Central Street station. Stay tuned.