- Italo-Europeo
- Our correspondent learned a lesson or two from London town.
Freshly home from London, I empty the notebook . . .
• Chicago media made a big to-do last fall when the CTA rolled out its newest cars on the Green and Pink Lines—cars that will be introduced this month on the far more heavily traveled Red Line. The controversy turned on the cars’ longitudinal seating—a configuration new to Chicago—and the contoured design of those seats, which arguably constrain and vex the ampler haunches nestled upon them. Reporting in October on a survey of passengers by the Active Transportation Alliance, the Tribune‘s John Hilkevitch wrote that “forty-nine percent said they would prefer New York-style benches with no defined separation between passengers instead of the individual ‘scoop’ seats that are on the CTA’s new 5000 Series rail cars.”
The Active Transportation Alliance poll measured consternation that Hilkevitch had been instrumental in stirring up. A month earlier he’d laid out the case against the contoured seats, paying close attention to the New York alternative.