Evanston-Chicago commute
 

Thinking of taking a job in Chicago (downtown - Northwestern Hospital), but may have to live in Evanston. How's the commute? Work hours would be around 7:30 am to 5 pm. Thanks.

If you're close to the purple line, your best bet would be the purple express to Belmont, transfer to the red line, take red to Chicago. Couple block walk from Chicago/State to NMH.

I'd guess you're looking at 35-45 minutes, depending on where you start in Evanston.

Out of curiousity, why "have to live in Evanston"? Potential free housing?

Thanks. No, no specific reason for Evanston. My wife will likely be working in Northbrook. Evanston just looked halfway. Any livable community will do.

OK, seems very reasonable, just be aware that getting to/from ORD or MDW is a very very difficult proposition. I used to live one suburb north of Evanston, and many of my friends/colleagues from that suburb would refer to Evanston as the place from which one could GET TO NOWHERE.

Good luck in your quest!!
Dave

As for livability, you and your wife will need to sort out how urban/suburban an environment you prefer.

About "halfway", that would still be a significant commute for both persons. OTOH, if you lived in Northbrook, then you'd be left with just one commute. No matter where you live, roads at 5PM will be busy.

Either way, you both are looking at 35-50 minute commutes.

Taking the EL is your best bet; there's a Metra, but that goes to the Loop so is of little to no use for NWH.

Also, the advice of others is true -- Evanston is a great little suburb right on the lake, but it's horribly inaccessible to freeways. The only good thing is since you take sidestreets to ORD, the journey time is almost always the same; I used to allow 35 minutes (in the car). If you lived in Chicago, the ride could be 15 minutes (no traffic) or 1 hour and 15 minutes.

I lived in Evanston for 3 years in grad school. It is a nice suburb that, if you live near one of the three downtowns (particularly the two closer to Chicago), can feel nicely urban but is still definitely a suburb. But if you get too far from the lake, it turns into the hood fairly quickly.

There are good restaurants, funky independent businesses, and a decidedly hippie college town vibe at times. You will see many Subaru and Volvo wagons with alternative school bumper stickers. Think of Lindsay Lohan's parents in Mean Girls and you've about got it. Actually, Mean Girls was filmed in Evanston.

In terms of getting places, everything everyone says is true. I think Evanston intentionally leaves side streets in disrepair and mostly unplowed, and sets traffic lights to keep you from getting anywhere, to discourage traffic through Evanston.

It's not terribly hard to get to O'hare, but it will take the same 35 minutes that it would take from downtown in light to moderate traffic. You have to take a main street (like Dempster) west to 94, get off on Cicero and switch to 90 to Ohare. I tried all the routes and that was the fastest and most consistent.

Your wife's commute would involve 35 minutes or so to get to 94 and up into Northbrook, or to take Sheridan Rd/Green Bay Rd if 94 traffic is bad (which it frequently is).

Thanks everyone. We're looking for a more suburb feel, but since I'd be working downtown, I don't want a really long commute. Would living somewhere near 94, like Lincolnwood or Skokie be better?

IMO, yes. Western Evanston is NOT likely a place you'd want to live. There is some light industry, some housing, and some not so desirable areas.

Lincolnwood has some areas that have a bit of an Evanstonian "feel" to them, however, as it is near the city proper. Skokie is similar. Since you want to be closer to CTA transpo for NWM, I'd think you might actually consider Skokie. There is a CTA line directly into Skokie proper. The "SkokieSwift".

Good luck!
Dave

It depends on your definition of livable, of course :)

You're coming from Madison? If so, Evanston is a good bet. It's a good mix of urban and suburban. You can actually walk places.

The problem with Lincolnwood is that it's not close to the CTA. Unless you're a doc who will get comped parking, you don't want to be driving to NMH every day (monthly parking is something like $200). Skokie has the yellow line, but most of the housing right by the station is pretty awful (just ugly old 50s buildings that don't tend to be in very good shape).

As others have stated, Evanston isn't close to the expressways, so it can be tough to get around.

I'm sorry to get off topic here, but you're off your rocker on this. The edens can be so awful between dempster and cicero that while this will work when it's quiet, when there's traffic, just that section can take 25 minutes, and then you're dumping onto the kennedy at foster.

South side of evanston, the best bet is devon/nagle. from the north side, golf/potter/dempster/tri-state usually beats out going all the way down to devon. While you may have lived in evanston and gone to ord a bunch of times, I made this trip daily for years going out to schaumburg (never again!)

I like Lincolnwood and think it's a great, quiet place to live, but it wouldn't help your commute to NMH. I would look into Skokie or Morton Grove; you can get to NMH easily using the EL Yellow and Red lines and your wife can go up to Northbrook by 94 or Metra's Milwaukee District-North line.

I do get free parking at NMH, so driving wouldn't be too much of an issue (if it saves me time over the El or metra - not to mention that in the winter time I wouldn't want to be walking the 5-6 blocks from the train stop to NMH).

Depends on your hours then. If you're doing off hours shifts, then driving will be faster than the red line, but if your work hours line up with the rush hours, the traffic can easily make the L faster.

NMH runs a shuttle between Ogilvie/Union stations:

http://www.northwestern.edu/uservice...instation.html

If you can find a place close to a Metra stop this might be a better solution, since the Metra will likely be considerably faster than the CTA. I would kill myself before committing to driving between the North Shore and the North Michigan area on a daily basis.

Thanks milepig, that's really helpful. I am beginning to think the same thing as you. I've had long commutes before (I used to live in the DC area), and I don't really want to waste my life that way.

I think you'll find that you end up driving half the time. With free parking you won't be able to resist. Ridge to Hollywood to Lake Shore Drive will be a breeze at 7 a.m.

If Metra is an option, you might want to consider other suburbs as well: Winnetka, Wilmette, Glenview, or even Northbrook. You can live within walking distance of a Metra station, and your wife may have a bit easier commute. While I can't think of any other suburb offering an equal combination of a lively downtown and lakefront, quite a few people enjoy Glenview's proximity to major roads and amenities at The Glen (http://www.theglentowncenter.com/home_live.html). Just a thought; not meant to confuse you. :)

I lived in Evanstion and commuted to the city every day, and later commuted to Arlington Heights every day. It wasn't fun (especially the driving part), but being able to walk places was great. Not using major freeways may actually be a blessing in disguise: your commute time will be roughly the same all the time, while freeways are sometimes a crap shoot.

I've lived in Chicagoland 16+ years and IMO you would get tired of this commute by car VERY quickly. In the winter it can be horrible.

I'd probably go with milepig's suggestion.

+1

I used to work in the Streeterville area (that is where NMH is). As long as you are close to one of the Metra stations, there are CTA express bus lines that run from the down town train terminals (Olgilvie or Union Station) to Navy Pier. These will drop you off about 2 or 3 blocks south of the NMH campus.

The link below will allow you to select one of the bus lines and will show you the route map and schedule. The bus lines you want are 120 and 121.

http://www.transitchicago.com/riding_cta/systemguide/

Here is a link to the Metra rail site. There are 4 lines that would allow your wife to be close to Northbrook and would give you a manageable commute to downtown Chicago.

http://metrarail.com/metra/en/home.html

What if he's going in at 8 or 8:30 when it won't be a breeze?

He said he'll have to be there at 7:30. Hence, my comments. @:-)

Granted, going home at 5:00 won't be a breeze, but as I said, he'll end up driving half the time. Free parking? It will be irresistible. LSD is nothing like driving on the Kennedy or Edens.

Oh, duh, first post, sorry, missed that.

LSD doesn't seem to get nearly as bad at night as it does between 8-9 in the morning. There will be backups at Fullerton and Belmont and at Hollywood due to the light, but yeah, nowhere near as bad as the expressways.

That's good to know. I suspect the morning won't be bad, since I need to get there so early. I was worried about the afternoon, but if northbound LSD is tolerable in the afternoon, that would be great.

Why don't you make a "virtual experiment" by looking at the traffic situations at different times of the day?

http://www.travelmidwest.com/lmiga/m...me=chicagoArea
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&...,0.649567&z=11

Northbound LSD is "ok", but does back up at Hollywood. The easiest way around this is to take Sheridan north and then cut West just a bit north of the light.

You'll be fine - I do the same drive a few times a week.

Dave

To partially quote Mayor Daley, however, "never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever," drive on a day when the Cubs have a night game. :D LSD is a parking lot from Grant Park through Irving Park until after 7 p.m.

If you're able to leave at 5 pm on the dot, LSD shouldn't be too bad. (I live just north of Belmont and drove or bused to/from downtown for 15 years.) Stay in the left-most lanes. I think Cubs-related traffic is the worst starting at about 5:45.

Freeway
 

Can tell the non locals here-- there are no "freeways" in Chicago, only "highways"

Actually we call the "expressways."

Isn't "freeway" mainly a California thing?

freeway in MN (where I grew up), I adapted to expressway ;)

One thing to be aware of, if you decide to drive in on a really cold day, a lot of other people will have made the same decision. I've often seen traffic be quite a bit worse on cold days (and no snow/ice to cause it due to bad roads, just more people).

Current Evanston resident here (at least, until June). If you're working at Northwestern Hospital, you might be able to take the NU intercampus shuttle bus from Sheridan Road (and the big parking lots at Ryan Field) to the downtown campus.

I did a similar commute this summer to River North, and I took the Purple express to Merchandise Mart, but the hospital is significantly further East so the bus is a better option as long as your job covers it. If you have a Northwestern employee ID card, you should be fine.

Finally, re: quality of life in Evanston. The relationship between the university and the city is really, really, bad, a function of the school not having to pay any property taxes on its bundle of valuable lakefront real estate. Rents are really high in the "nicer" part of Evanston near campus, and there are constantly issues between students partying and residents trying to live in peace (despite the fact that NU isn't a party school compared to anywhere else in the Big Ten). Check out this article: http://gawker.com/5664243/epic-rager...ghten-children. Ridiculous, on so many different levels.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions about the area, too.

Before I get started on this, disclaimer, I'm an NU alum, former NU employee, and was an Evanston resident for 10 years not counting my 4 as a student.

To be clear on this, that's the relationship between the city council/government and the university. IME, most residents don't really care all that much (and a good number of them are tied in some way to the university, either as employees or alums). Obviously, those living really close like in the article below would be an exception to that.

History note: Northwestern has been there longer than Evanston (1851 vs 1855) and has that property tax exemption in its charter (that is, state law). The Evanston city council routinely uses that exemption as a red herring whenever they have problems balancing their budget and need to raise taxes (look over there! they're not paying taxes! it's their fault yours have to be raised, not that we can't control our spending!). This isn't a recent thing. I found a news record once of this same thing happening in the 1870s. That's right, the city has been using this excuse for at least 130 years. Northwestern also generally pays for the city services it uses (has own police, pays for fire service, pays for water/sewer, etc).

It's not just near campus that's nice. Most of the area between the L and the Lake is nice, as are scattered other areas like Central Street.

That party thing seems odd to me. Was a random home game (homecoming was a couple weeks later, family weekend was one week prior), was a loss, so the exuberance level should have been down some. I guess it was only 3 weeks into the year, so probably another week until midterms rolled around. If it'd just been near the game, etc, I'd happily blame the Purdue fans, but it sounds like it was the houses near Maple/Foster. That's been a weird spot for years. Split neighborhood, bunch of houses rented to students, the rest residents, those off campus spots tend to get more parties, since campus is pretty heavily regulated.

Actually in my experience they are quite the opposite - more like "crawlways" or "parkingways" :D

Hey now. They're just fine...

At 3 AM Sunday morning.

lol, isn't that true....

I'm a NU senior, and you're pretty much spot-on. Most residents (especially in the "student ghetto" between Ridge and Sheridan) understand this, they know that they're moving into a college neighborhood, and they recognize that if they lived near campus in a place like East Lansing or Madison things would be much, much rowdier. Northwestern employs more police than the city itself, and actually funds a "party car" operated by EPD to patrol the student areas on weekend nights. Things are changing, slowly, with university president Shapiro a lot more open to wet status for fraternities on campus because he recognizes that it's bad PR/neighborhood relations for drunk students to be causing a ruckus in the streets around campus.

This was in the news again this week, with Evanston threatening to begin enforcing a decades-long "brothel" ordinance (actually, had nothing to do with brothels ever, but NU took the moniker and ran with it) that prohibits more than 3 unrelated people from living together. See: http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/upd...-law-1.2448459 Enough bad press made them back down, but the law remains on the books, and it's believed that the university agreed to think more about bringing social life back on campus when they talked to the city government about this.

I was referring to the "nicer" area as the part where students live, even though most of the houses and apartments that students rent are anything but nice...converted sun porches as bedrooms, people living illegally in basements, etc. There are certainly some families who have been there for a while and have really nice houses, but the whole area is kind of a zoo. Back to the topic of this thread, if the OP is looking to move to Evanston I'd recommend more "downtown" - the new condo buildings are pretty nice and not a bad deal with the weakened real estate market, and there's a lot less competition for housing once you get a bit further from campus because students aren't as willing to make the trek to their classes, so rents are way lower.

I agree with some of the other posts saying to look at other north shore communities like Wilmette, Winnetka, etc. Evanston is an easier commute to NMH, but the Metra is pretty good from points north as well.

Sorry, but this is not true. Evanston has 165 sworn officers. I can't find a sworn number for UP, could only find 93 for all divisions, but that's including parking enforcement, which I don't think are sworn officers (they're not even part of the police in Evanston).

The trend toward pushing the partying off campus goes back to the early 90's (just before I started) when there was a rash of people getting drunk and falling out of 3rd/4th floor windows (it was 3 or 4 people, 2 died within a year or so). Hell, back in the late 80's, there was a bar in Norris. Those days are long gone. It's probably wise to reverse the current trend that has pushed so much of the raucous behavior off campus into the surrounding neighborhoods.

My personal favorite is the formal dining room with french doors to the living room converted to a bedroom. Two different places I lived in had that one.