How I love writing that. Barry just gave a $1.1 billion shoutout to Chicago. From Crain's:
CTA lands $1.1 billion goodbye grant from Obama
City Hall has received the parting gift it wanted from the Obama administration: just under $1.1 billion in federal grants to rebuild a key stretch of the Chicago Transit Authority's Red Line north.
The city and U.S. Department of Transportation officials are scheduled to sign a contract tomorrow known as a full-funding grant agreement, committing the DOT's Federal Transit Agency to provide $957 million in "core capacity" funds and another $125 million in anti-congestion money for the CTA's Phase One Red/Purple Modernization project.
The money will be matched with city property taxes collected by a special transit tax-increment financing district that the City Council in November unanimously voted to establish, covering property one half mile on either side of the Red Line from North Avenue to the city limits.
And not just Chicago:
Just a few days earlier, Los Angeles received an even larger, $1.6 billion core capacity agreement to extend one of its train lines west through the Wilshire Avenue corridor to the UCLA campus.
Just out of curiosity - from Infogalactic: Red Line (CTA):
The route is 23.4 miles (37.7 km) long with a total of 33 stations, from Howard station in Rogers Park on the north side, through the State Street subway and to 95th/Dan Ryan in Roseland on the south side.
And:
It is the busiest line on the "L" system, with an average of 251,813 passengers boarding each weekday in 2012.
So, dividing 1,100,000,000 by 23.4 = $47,008,547 per mile and this is just the Federal money coming from us taxpayers - it does not count the matching money being raised by taxes on Illinois citizens.
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