So Chicago doesn't have anything like this with no station agents around to babysit? This isn't uncommon in New York, so switching to a normal faregate without station agents wasn't that insane for us. PATH has normal gates with *zero* station agents around.
Yeah we have the meat grinders for the auxiliary unstaffed entrances. The normal turnstiles are always staffed. For new stations 60% of entrances need to be accessible so you can only use those if you have at least 3. Check out the new Damen Green Line for the bad consequences of that rule.