Downtown St. Charles

[Drover]

Originally Posted by kleew

Drover - thank you for the information re the length of the train trip into Chicago / N. Michigan Ave. from Geneva. So they have a bus that takes you directly from the train station to Michigan Avenue? Does it run all day and evening?

What if I were to drive in to Chicago every day from Geneva?

Also - how would you compare Geneva to Naperville? Geneva to Northbrook?

1) There are actually several bus routes that pass by the Ogilvie train station on their way to Michigan Avenue, including the Routes 14, 20, 56, 60, 124, 127 and 157. All of them will take you to within a block of 150 N. Michigan; some might even drop you off right in front of it. Some of those routes only run during rush hour; many run well into the day or night. Check out the CTA's downtown route map (broken link) and check route schedules here (http://www.transitchicago.com/maps/bus/Bus.html - broken link).

2) Forget driving from Geneva unless you want to spend up to two hours each way in your car and pay $300/mo to park downtown.

3) I like downtown Naperville better than downtown Geneva. It's more inclusive, has more things to do, more and better restaurants and shops and what-not. But I like Geneva better overall because it's not as sprawling as Naperville (though it's trying its best), it costs less but delivers the same high quality of life, and the traffic isn't as gridlocked as in Naperville -- most of the time anyway. Getting from one side of the Fox River to the other during rush hour can kind of suck though because the tri-city area -- Geneva, Batavia and St. Charles -- has 85,000 residents between them and only six bridges over the river, and only half of them are 4 lanes wide. I don't really have an opinion on Northbrook because I don't think I've ever been there.