The Corn Latitudes

The published version has here been slightly changed. I made no changes to the moony optimism I expressed about the project, construction of which still had not begun in March 2024. The most recent estimate is that the complex, consisting of public space, new Amtrak station, new 500+ space (!) parking garage, the new Tenth Street freight-and-rail corridor, and new city bus depot will be up and running by autumn 2027. It should be a fine facility but I still believe it will not have transformative effects on downtown or on public transit in the capital city.

The one in Bloomington-Normal works well but Bloomington-Normal hosts a state university with more than 20,000 students linked to Chicago by Amtrak.

I suppose the question to the Springfield City Council ought to be phrased this way: If they come, will you build it? “It” is a multimodal transit center, a nice plan for which was unveiled in February by Downtown Springfield, Inc. and the Springfield-Sangamon County Regional Planning Commission. It’s a concept drawing, not a blueprint, but if built the center would occupy the half-block between 9th and the 10th Street tracks and Washington and Jefferson streets—if, that is, passenger trains eventually trundle up and down the Tenth Street tracks rather than along Third Street.

Springfield’s transit center would be a central interchange point where buses serving city, charter, and intercity routes, airport, downtown and tourist shuttles, taxis and rental cars, bicycles and, of course, Amtrak passenger trains would meet and mingle, thus linking the many parts of the city’s transport system into a more efficient whole.

Makes sense. Make public transit more convenient and you make it more popular. What is widely reckoned to have been Illinois’s first genuine transit center outside Chicago is in downtown Champaign, at the downtown Illinois Terminal, which opened in 1999. There travelers arriving by city bus or taxi can board Amtrak trains to Chicago, St. Louis, or Indianapolis as well as intercity buses, including the massively popular Megabus. Two to three thousand travelers are said to pass every weekday through Illinois Terminal.

Does that sort of future await Springfield? A multimodal transit center will be used only to the extent there is demand for intermodal trips. University towns like Bloomington-Normal (which is building its own transit center) and Champaign-Urbana have large populations of students who are relatively poor, who make several trips out of town every year, and who do not own their own cars. It is no accident that the number of people passing through Illinois Terminal is often higher on weekends than during the work week, which is the reverse of the usual pattern.

Nor is it an accident that travelers in C-U can connect to a more evolved city bus system than Springfield’s, one that offers Sunday service and five of whose lines run later than 3 a.m. during the academic year. In contrast, UIS students are fewer, SMTD offers no connecting service to campus on Sundays when most return from trips and only hourly service other days. Car ownership among UIS students is high, thanks to university policies that encourage it, such as free parking and a campus conveniently and stupidly located just off the interstate.

Larger hopes than increasing transit use ride on the transportation center. It is expected to have happy effects on tourism and downtown development. The first is a topic that must await a future column. As for development, increasing transit access does indeed tend to push up the value of adjacent properties. That’s why property owners along new streetcar lines in Portland, Oregon not only agreed to but were eager to pay a special assessment that largely funded its construction.

That’s also why every burg from Punxsutawney to Puget Sound is building a transit center. “When you pull together your transportation in a city in a single location,” explained DSI executive director Victoria Ringer, “the entire area around it benefits from development.” That’s certainly what happens in big cities. Most travelers from Springfield do not usually think of it in these terms, but Chicago’s Union Station is not merely a train station but a transit center. There converge taxis, CTA buses, out-of-town chartered coaches, and commuter and interstate trains run by Amtrak. On an average weekday, almost 120,000 passengers pass through it.

The presence of Union Station was not the reason that Sears decided to put its headquarters operation into a skyscraper in the 1970s, but it was why it decided to put that skyscraper where it did. The building stands only a bit more than a block from Union Station. Nearby run several el lines on which its army of workers move in and out of the Loop, and Union Station itself is where commuter trains from the west terminate, including the suburb of Burr Ridge where most of Sears’ then-top execs lived.

Transit spurs development only, however, if the people transit brings into a neighborhood are potential shoppers, workers, or residents. Transit riders in the capital city are mostly high school and middle school kids or the poor. Unlike Chicago’s, Springfield’s working population is not transit-dependent and are unlikely to switch (barring a catastrophic increase in gasoline prices) thanks to aldermen who do everything to make life easy for automobile users short of valet-parking their cars.

A well-designed, clean, and safe central interchange facility can push ridership of underused systems a little closer to optimum even in Springfield. Bus-to-the-door service to Amtrak, for instance, might boost both bus and train ridership. So even if a transit center won’t transform either downtown or public transit in Springfield, it would still start a trip in the right direction. ●