Practicalmadness

First, a little history: the CTA decided last month to try creating a “new” train line by bridging the Cermak branch of the Blue Line with the Lake Street branch of the Green Line via the Paulina Connector. And they announced that they would be holding a “Name the Line” essay contest for area schoolchildren to pick the new route’s color.

The current lines (for you non-Chicagoans) are Red, Blue, Brown, Green, Orange, Purple and Yellow. The initial news reports of the “new” line suggested its color might be Silver, which would have been a worthy addition. And I thought “Bronze Line” had a nice ring to it.

But neither I nor the Chicago Tribune are area students, grades K-8, and it is not our place to decide what the new color should be — the children alone enjoy the privilege to nominate names via their essays, and the winning child alone bears responsibility for whether Chicago thinks their suggested name is sweet or so, so, sour.

And now that the winning name has been selected, it is that child West Side residents should be thinking of when they hear the robot voice tell them they’re riding a Pink Line train to work every morning.

Pink was chosen over Gold and Silver, and I have strong feelings about both of those colors. I think Silver Line would be a bitchin’ name, for example, and (now that the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album is out) singing “Gold Line’s gonna tell me where the light is…!” would amuse me for all of ten minutes.

The Tribune reports that many children chose pink, so there isn’t (yet) a story about why a Pink Line would be at all relevant to the city or neighborhood, about what pink means to the winning child, anything like that. What we do have to justify it is this:

“Pink clearly works,” CTA President Frank Kruesi said. “What was really exciting to the board members, and also a lot of people writing the essays, is that it brings a smile to people’s faces. That’s not bad as a start for someone hopping on a train.”

Well, gee — if making people smile is the best justification for a color choice, I’d like to suggest to the CTA board that we re-color the existing lines while we’re at it. For example, why on earth should I take the Blue Line to work, when I could be traveling on the Periwinkle Line? And maybe the trip from downtown to Evanston would be less irritating if one were spending an hour on the Lavender Line before changing to a Mauve Line train at Howard, don’t you think?