In a week, maybe two, the tax-refund forms will be mailed out of City Hall, and the first of the last official acts in the life of Mayor Daley’s great circulator will have commenced.
The circulator was so closely linked to Daley it’s hard to remember that the idea was born in the early 80s, years before he took office. Wouldn’t it make sense, boosters conjectured, to link the Metra and Amtrak stations along Canal Street to the eastern portions of the city’s rapidly expanding business and shopping district? Wouldn’t it make sense to provide tourists and downtown workers a fast, convenient way to cross town without walking or taking a cab? Wouldn’t it boost tourism to be able to zip out-of-towners around the Loop in sleek new trolleys?
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To Daley, the answer to these questions was an obvious yes. And by the early 1990s he had thrown his political muscle behind the plan, winning support from the Tribune, Crain’s, Congress, the state legislature, and the downtown business community, which loved the circulator so much it was willing to pay a special real estate tax to help cover its cost. It would be, Daley said, a textbook example of public-private cooperation–a $775 million project, evenly shouldered by state, federal, and local taxpayers.
For many critics, the circulator bore the flaws of a plan devised by a mayor who was used to getting his way. As Daley saw it, the city had no need to build consensus beyond the narrow confines of mainstream corporate and commercial interests. It was presented to the wider community not so much as a proposal or a work in progress but as a fait accompli. Those who dared to criticize–no matter how extensive their training in transportation–were disregarded or marginalized.
The critics began attending circulator board meetings and other forums, emphatically pressing their point of view to the press. There must be, they said, less expensive, more efficient ways to shuttle commuters and tourists across the Loop. By 1995 opponents were holding protest rallies, including one well-covered affair where 50 or so senior citizens, led by Metro Seniors’ Lucy Marshall, marched on City Hall carrying placards and chanting, “Two, four, six, eight-er, we don’t need a circulator.”
In many ways bitterness over the circulator lingers, particularly as activists and riders contemplate the latest round of CTA service cuts, which, among other things, will eliminate as of March 1 weekend el service in most of Pilsen and Little Village. “I don’t know anyone who says, ‘I miss the circulator,’” says Leavy. “But a lot of people think we wasted political will in Springfield and Washington on it. We should have used those efforts to shore up and modernize the CTA. The circulator’s supporters kept saying, ‘You don’t understand. This money can’t be spent elsewhere.’ But they never understood that if you spend so much money and time on one aspect of the system, you’ll pay for it everywhere else.” o
