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Public transportation in Chicago and commuter rail in the suburbs have seen significant change during the pandemic. Ridership numbers have dropped since 2020 due to, among other things, a lasting shift to remote and hybrid work for many downtown office workers, and the CTA and Metra have scrambled to adjust.
However, mass transit remains an essential service that keeps Chicago and the suburbs on the move, and the CTA’s lack of reliability, for one, has left many Chicagoans frustrated and uttering, “I got ghosted by the CTA.” Our op-ed contributors and columnist Laura Washington this year have called on the Chicago agency to overhaul its leadership and step up its game by improving service. Another writer has called for more ambitious planning for regional rail.
Here is a look back at this year’s transportation-related op-eds in excerpts.
Feb. 28: Christina Marfice and Morgan Madderom, ‘CTA riders deserve honesty, not fudged stats’
Members of the grassroots advocacy group Commuters Take Action, which we are a part of, developed a computer program that uses the CTA’s publicly available vehicle position data to track train service reliability against published schedules. The program has been running continuously since December 2021.
Since late last year, the CTA has been rolling out updated service schedules, which it calls “schedule optimization.” Despite the CTA’s reluctance to use these words, we’re calling the new schedules what they are: service cuts.
We’ve found that the CTA is currently scheduling an average of 17.4% less rail service and 10% less bus service than before the pandemic. Some lines have experienced much deeper cuts than the average — the No. 79 bus, for example, one of the city’s busiest, has had 124 daily weekday trips removed from its schedule, a cut of 25%.
So when the CTA touts 80.6% of currently scheduled rail service delivered, it’s actually delivering just 66.6% of scheduled service before the cuts. When it claims 92.7% of currently scheduled bus service delivered, that represents 83.4% of scheduled service before the cuts.
In other words, service hasn’t improved at all. The CTA is comparing delivered service percentages for these trimmed-down schedules to its pre-pandemic schedules. It’s fudging the numbers to make it look like service is getting better when riders know that’s simply not the case.
There’s an argument to be made that the new schedules provide riders with better planning reliability, since they more closely match the actual levels of service the CTA is providing. But still, 80.6% of scheduled rail service delivered means that nearly 1 in 5 scheduled trains isn’t running. Riders are still being ghosted regularly, meaning they still can’t rely on the CTA.
March 10: F.K. Plous, ‘How Metra could build regional rail in Chicago’
The Feb. 16 editorial “R.I.P., Metra’s commuter rail. Long live regional rail!” gets the issue right: Working from home has made the traditional suburb-to-downtown work commute and commuter-train schedule obsolete.
But if the commute is obsolete, the tracks and the trains are not. Both can be repurposed into a genuinely regional passenger-rail system that demolishes Chicago’s downtown depot barrier and connects south and north suburbs with a single trip. Fast, frequent, electrified trains must be able to transfer seamlessly from railroad to railroad and race across the Chicago region faster than a car.
This is not commuter rail but regional express rail. It can connect city and suburbs — and suburbs and suburbs — across the metropolitan region as highways do, but with speed, safety, silence and reliability that highway travel cannot duplicate. You can work, eat, read, play games on your phone and even use the restroom without interrupting your trip or losing a minute of travel time.
But regional express rail won’t work without connectivity. All of Metra’s 11 routes end in downtown Chicago at stub terminals. Incoming trains can only back out. They cannot run through downtown to reach additional destinations. You can’t get a one-seat ride from Glenview to Oak Lawn. The tracks don’t connect.
This is the problem Paris faced more than 30 years ago as its suburbs expanded from residential retreats into regional business and manufacturing hubs. ...
... Unlike Paris, Chicago doesn’t need to build a crosstown tunnel to connect its railroad lines.
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July 18: Consumer advocates, ‘Chicago needs a CTA board that will challenge agency leadership’
It’s no secret that the last few years have been tough for the CTA. The agency has faced historic challenges: the pandemic, staffing shortages and a looming funding cliff. But CTA leaders and riders have also found themselves in a frustrating catch-22 — ridership hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, but neither has service. Buses and trains are inconsistent and unreliable, and CTA leaders like President Dorval Carter Jr. dodge accountability and fudge numbers to try to make the CTA seem better than it actually is.
Staffing shortages continue to plague the system, making it difficult for the CTA to run its already-reduced train schedules. On the Purple Line, the line with the worst reliability, it’s typical for only around 60% of scheduled trains to run on any given day.
Carter isn’t the only leader responsible for the state of the CTA. The system is also overseen by a board of directors appointed by the mayor and the governor. But is the CTA board doing its job? We don’t think so.
At meetings, the board consistently praises Carter’s performance and rarely offers any criticism or challenges. Instead of addressing reliability and staffing concerns in December 2021, the board gave Carter a 33% salary raise and called him a “rock star.”
At the same meeting, board Chair Lester Barclay noted, “It is important to remember that CTA was the only major U.S. transit agency to not cut scheduled service.” This was not true at the time, and the CTA has since cut service even more deeply.
... What’s worse is that in the board members’ biographies, only one member, Michele Lee, is described as a regular transit rider. Ventra data reported by Streetsblog Chicago backs this up. Lee is the only member of the CTA board who used her Ventra card more than once a week on average last year — 57 times total — despite joining the board midyear. ... One member, (L. Bernard) Jakes, did not use his card at all in 2022.
July 31: Laura Washington, ‘CTA leaders far removed from realities of mass transit’
What will it take to bring back the CTA?
The indispensable public transportation system has been in crisis since the COVID-19 pandemic descended on our city.
I ride the CTA daily, sometimes several times a day. Ridership has been up in recent months, and there have been some improvements, but the service remains substandard. The bus tracker is frequently inaccurate. Safety issues persist as the system is plagued by crime. One morning predawn last week, I had to duck as a group of unruly young women threatened a CTA employee, then jumped the turnstiles at a Red Line subway stop.
What are agency leaders doing about it? They could start by getting on their buses and trains. When it comes to using the system, many of the agency’s top executives are missing in action.
Eight members of the CTA’s top brass, among the agency’s highest paid officials, “used their unlimited work cards to swipe onto the system on less than 50 days each in all of 2021 and 2022,” Block Club Chicago reported on July 14. ...
If you want to run a railroad, you should be on it. These fat-cat elites are far removed from the real life of public transportation. The biggies are too busy, their matters too important, to bother with the CTA. ...
Chicago Tribune Opinion
Many CTA muckety-mucks earn six-figure salaries. Many CTA passengers are working-class, essential workers who must rely on the broken system to get to their jobs.
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Sept. 19: Consumer advocates, ‘More cuts are likely coming to CTA service. It’s time to fire Dorval Carter Jr. instead.’
It’s impossible to see (President Dorval Carter Jr.’s) tenure leading the CTA as anything other than an abject failure, as much as he tries to hide that fact. In the last few years, especially, he’s been known to cherry-pick data and statistics to make his performance look better than it is.
Take his “Meeting the Moment” plan’s one-year anniversary. Carter points to increased service delivery as a sign of the initiative’s success — even though a higher percentage of buses and trains now run on schedule only because the schedules have been cut so deeply. And even with the service cuts, the CTA still fails, week after week, to deliver all of its scheduled service.
According to data compiled by our organization, Commuters Take Action, the total number of trains dispatched per day has hardly increased since August 2022 — 1,065 last year compared with 1,140 this year. That’s an increase of 75 daily trains — after 500 were removed from the schedules. And still, Carter refuses to acknowledge that his agency has made schedule cuts. He stubbornly refers to them as “schedule optimizations.” Transit riders stuck waiting while upward of 40% of trains arrive at inconsistent intervals know that nothing about their experience is “optimized.”
Carter places the blame for many of the CTA’s shortcomings on a staffing shortfall that predates the pandemic and points to his agency’s “unprecedented and aggressive” hiring as another measure of his success.
... Carter has dismissed the CTA’s challenges as something all transit agencies across the nation are experiencing. But the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority in the District of Columbia restored most of its bus and rail service to pre-pandemic levels in August 2020 and announced this June that its Metrobus schedules would begin to exceed pre-pandemic service.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.