Last month I met my “birthday friend” (we share a birthday) in Chicago as it is roughly half way in between where she lives now and where I live. We ended up staying in a Residence Inn (Marriott) in Lombard, IL, a suburb of Chicago. As many of the attractions are downtown, we needed to decide if we wanted to drive downtown, or use public transportation. I was able to plug in routes on the transit website http://www.transitchicago.com/ to see what some of our options were. There is an option to buy a 1, 3 or 5 day “all you can ride” on Chicago Transit pass. We ordered our 1 day passes online and had them within a week ($5). We ended up going with a mixture of driving and El, we drove to a nearby El (Elevated Train) and then rode the EL into downtown. If you are worried about being confused about the EL, it’s really quite simple and this method can carry over to most public rail transit systems. If you look at the map here
you will see each line has it’s own color. So you figure out which color line you need to be on and if you will have to transfer. To make sure you are getting on the line going in the right direction, you need to see what the final stop is on that line for the direction you are going, and get on that train, not the one on the other side of the platform. So for example, we got the Green line in Harlem/Lake. Our train would say Green- Ashland/63rd OR Green-Cottage Grover, as the direction we want to go is the train that will end up at one of those two end points. As we were getting off prior to the split after Garfield, we could take either one of those trains. We rode to Roosevelt, got off, planned on transferring to a bus route #146, but after asking someone we saw how close we actually were to the Shedd Aquarium (our destination), we decided to walk. There was a nice underpass going under the freeway as well.
Looking down this road from the Roosevelt EL station, the building you see smack dab in the middle is the Shedd Aquarium- it was about a 6 block walk.
The loop area is the most condensed downtown area, and there is a insert showing the loop in more detail in the lower right hand corner. Again this did not affect us as we were getting off after the loop.
A couple more things to be aware of, if you need to transfer, if you look at the Roosevelt stop, there is three EL lines that come in there, you can transfer without leaving the “station” to one of the other trains. So we could have gotten off at Roosevelt, then gotten on the Orange line for Midway and gone to Midway airport. If you look at the Morgan station, where the green and pink lines run alongside each other and the dots do not connect, you can transfer there but would have to go down(or up) to street level and enter the other station.
There is also a regional train system connecting some of the further out cities to downtown, this is called the Tetra and typically their routes all go to Union Station.
By buying our tickets ahead of time, I never felt pressured to come up with the right amount of change when getting on the bus, we didn’t have to stop and buy tickets for the EL, we just scanned our passes and boarded.
There is a bus pick up in the museum area that includes the Planetarium, Shedd Aquarium and The Field Museum. (the aforementioned Bus route #146). This particular bus route also goes to Roosevelt Station and to the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sunday morning as I was headed home my friend decided to drive downtown and stop at the Art Institute. She said parking was expensive and difficult to navigate. So we had made the right choice to take the El, it did take us well over an hour however to get from our hotel, drive to the El station, ride the El and walk to the Aquarium. So plan according.
