Adapting Transit Infrastructure to Climate Impacts across Chicagoland
Whether waiting for the train on a hot day or trying to get to work during a flood, transit riders are intimately familiar with how sensitive public transit infrastructure is to daily weather conditions. In recent years, city planners have been directing their attention to how to suitably adapt existing infrastructure to our needs in a changing climate where the norm has shifted.
The Chicagoland area has many different systems of transportation—namely, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, and Pace Bus—to get people where they need to go. But extreme weather and natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly more common, have severe impacts on the reliability and functioning of these systems.
According to a risk assessment from the Chicago Metropolitan Planning Agency (CMAP), 47 percent of Pace bus stops are exposed to flooding, which poses challenges for the 127,000 daily riders trying to get where they need to go. This percentage is even higher at 64% for the CTA, which sees around 600,000 bus riders on weekdays, according to monthly ridership reports from this year.
The Transportation Resilience Improvement Plan (TRIP), developed by many organizations across the Chicagoland region and published this year by CMAP, identifies existing vulnerabilities in the transportation system as well as what can, and needs to be, done.
Kate Evasic, program lead for Climate Resilience at CMAP, who also serves as the Project Manager for TRIP says: “The solutions, especially to combat flooding—but extreme heat too—aren’t just benefiting our roads or our transit systems, they’re benefiting communities as a whole.”
Cities in northeastern Illinois are not the first to consider climate resilience in transit. Phoenix implemented their Cool Corridors Program in recent years, which involved increasing tree canopy cover in the area to reduce vulnerability to extreme heat. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) also has plans to incorporate climate resilience and adaptation in their transportation systems in order to keep riders safe.
Among the high priority projects under TRIP is modernizing Metra stations, including the Evanston Central Street Station. This would include warming shelters with on-demand heating, sufficient enclosure for heavy rain, and bench seating. These changes would benefit riders during extreme weather, but they also make public transportation in the Chicagoland area more accessible, especially for disabled riders.
The next step is moving from proposals to implementation.
Creating a more resilient transit system is a complex task in a county where annual temperatures can range from below -10 °F to around 100 °F. New bus shelters must be built to withstand extreme cold, but also keep people cool enough during extreme heat.
Engaging directly with the people affected on what their needs are can be vital in this process. Evasic shed light on the risk assessment process while working on TRIP.
“We knew that flooding has been and will continue to be a big concern so we wanted to make sure that we had people involved who have been either impacted by flooding or different county stormwater agencies, the City of Chicago Department of Water Management, for example, at the table,” she said.
Another challenge comes from uncertainties about future climate impacts. Any projects intending to make transportation more resilient to climate change has to take into account both present and future conditions.
“We don’t know what the future will exactly look like, but we can definitely use climate projections to guide us and be able to assess if the infrastructure we’re designing today is going to be able to continue to serve us well into the future,” says Evasic.
The full document for TRIP can be found on the CMAP website.
*Cover image courtesy of Hazal Kara