Where are my seats?

And...according to signage in the trains, one 8 car train when filled to capacity equals 600 automobiles.

Well, gee, I can't wait to check out which cars are SRO and which have seats. It may be easy to tell them apart, though. They'd be the ones no one picks first!

1. Everyone gets equal service, as opposed to the people getting on at the first few stations getting a more comfortable seated ride.

2. Not new. From a Seashore Trolley Museum tour guide (yours truly), "... This car is from Budapest Hungary. As you can see there are very few seats, they being just at the very front and very rear. Trolley car companies found that they could cram many more passengers in each car with people standing. ... (then off topic) ... The car has an unusually low floor by standards back then. It ran in a subway with a low ceiling clearance so it had to be constructed lower to the ground. The low floor concept is regaining popularity nowadays to better accommodate strollers and wheelchairs." (By the way, a seatless or nearly seatless car can better accommodate an assortment of wheelchairs, strollers, and luggage.) Does Illinois Rail Museum have a comparably seatless car on display? By comparably I mean not stripped of seats after its service life was over and a new life perhaps as a chicken coop about to begin.

3. With trackwork on the north side forcing a reduction in the number of trains, the seatless concept may help a lot. How many people would prefer taking substitute buses instead?

4. I would guess that infirm persons would prefer that the seatless cars not be contiguous, although switching the seatless cars out of the trains during off hours would be easier if they were contiguous.

The CTA is running out of capacity gets it can squeeze out of the existing infrastructure. As demand ticks up capacity in the CBD will need to be addressed.

I almost always stand anyway, even on an empty train. I have to be terminally hungover or jet lagged to ride sitting down. It might be wise to paint a stripe of some color or otherwise indicate the standing-only cars so people like my grandmother do not have to ride standing all the way to O'hare (as if she ride the L anyway...)

MMMMoooooooo. Thank God I ride Metra instead of the CTA. Maybe, instead of turning L cars into something resembling cattle cars, they would reinstate skip-stop service. I hate crowds and I know I'm not alone. Perhaps they are trying to decrease ridership by making it unbearable for some people to ride.

Are the seatless cars running yet? It was just publicized today that the MBTA here in Boston is going to apply the concept to our Red Line. Just wondering how its working out there so far?

Boston Herald article

MBTA Forum discussion of the topic...

octr202 wrote:Are the seatless cars running yet? It was just publicized today that the MBTA here in Boston is going to apply the concept to our Red Line. Just wondering how its working out there so far?

Last I heard, the seatless cars were in use during rush hours on the Brown line. The experiment started a little over a month ago, and to my knowledge, there hasn't been much feedback yet from either the riders or CTA...

I haven't seen them yet but I don't ride during weekdays very often for the last few years.

Here's a pic of the MAX cars on the Brown line. As you can see not all the seats were removed, actually not half even. Engineers discovered if all the seats were removed and if the passengers filled all the empty space, the weight would far exceed design limits of the 3200s. So only a select amount of seating was removed with "straphanger" straps installed.



David Harrison

The real problem on the CTA was never lack of standing room, but lack of good handholds except near the door.

The NYC subway ultimate solution (though they have gotten away from it it recent times):
Long bench seats along the walls (and only along the walls), and lots of handholds.

Why there isn't more straphangs on CTA, I have no idea. Instead, we play Twister as the motorman throttles up and down. You can always tell when an old-timer is running the trains, because they only have two control settings: 1. GOGOGOGOGOGO and 2. STOPOHMYGODSTOPBEFOREWECRASH!!! And those are terms of art too, you see the controller labeled as such...

Chicagopcclcars wrote:Here's a pic of the MAX cars on the Brown line. As you can see not all the seats were removed, actually not half even. Engineers discovered if all the seats were removed and if the passengers filled all the empty space, the weight would far exceed design limits of the 3200s. So only a select amount of seating was removed with "straphanger" straps installed.
David Harrison

Were the cars designed to the limits of the elevated structure?

Zanperk wrote: Were the cars designed to the limits of the elevated structure?

I don't know if there is such a thing as ...limits of the elevated structure. The cars have a weight limit which concerns suspension, balance, performance and that is what would have been exceeded if more seating had been removed. Had the no seat/max capacity been designed from the start, then suspension, trucks, structural strength would have been included in the design of the cars. The new 5000 series will have "bowling alley seats" for what I understand which will yield more room for standees.

David Harrison