flying to chicago

Our journey started at 4 AM in SFO as we arrived at our destination, Chicago Midway Airport at 12 PM after flying with Southwest Airlines.

We found that we had a lot of trouble trying to get ticket passes to take the CTA (Chicago Transportation Authority). It was very inconvenient as we couldn’t buy fourteen passes at once and we had to buy one pass at a time from the machine. The ticket pass was also different from the paper day pass that tourists get in SF, the ones in Chicago are plastic and reusable. While we were taking the Orange Line under CTA, we realized that the look of the seats and arrangement of the seats were similar to those of Metro in SF. There were two maps on the CTA train, one was the complete map of all the trains that connected through a loop and the other one was a specific map only for the Orange Line. This makes it a lot easier for people to figure out where they are at instead of being confused from looking at a map that consisted of multiple lines. When we were transferring from the Orange Line to the Red Line, we found out that there are a lot of stairs, making it difficult for people who carry suitcases and people with disabilities to get to the stations. On our way to the AirBnB, we noticed that the sidewalks and the roads were a bit wider than the ones in San Francisco. The white lines on the road meant to be indications of where to walk to cross the street and were much narrower as those in SF. There were some problematic crosswalks in which the crossing lights were blocked by electricity poles. Both of these observations are what we noticed that could affect how pedestrians cross the streets safely. We think the reason for these differences between Chicago and San Francisco is because of the major earthquake that occurred. SF had to rebuild the entire city due to the destruction, thus, the structure of our city is more modernized and more well-planned with details.

- Lina Mai, Roy Yu, Irene Tan