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Fear mongering or reality?

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Illinois

You never really know whether a bureaucracy threatens shutdown to scare lawmakers into action, but this could really hurt if it’s true.

The Chicago Transit Authority’s staff will recommend a standby plan for deep service cuts and possible fare increases next month, and the CTA board will adopt a final plan in April in case the General Assembly fails to provide more funding, officials said Monday.

“We wanted to give you a heads-up because the craziness will begin very shortly,” CTA Chairman Carole Brown told the City Council’s Transportation Committee.

The CTA board must approve a backup plan well in advance of July 1, the date the cuts would go into effect barring legislative action, because of certain labor and other requirements mandating 60 to 90 days’ advance notice, Brown said.

CTA officials planned a 20 percent cut in service for January but delayed action at the urging of elected officials who said they would work for additional funding from the General Assembly in the spring session, now under way.

But the risk is that the transit authority’s financial situation will be even worse if Springfield does not act.

Because only the last six months of 2005 would remain in which to reduce spending, “we are looking at 40 percent service cuts in July if there is no action,” Brown said.

40 percent? That seems excessive, but I see so many empty CTA buses roaming the streets in search of passengers that much of the cuts could be accomplished without a huge amount of pain. But not all. Definitely not all.

posted by Rich Miller
Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 5:35 am

Comments

Rich, you must live in the South Loop or downtown. So anyway, you must appreciate this: Can the CTA actually reduce or re-route the number of buses going through newly dense residential areas - I can’t take it anymore! And these buses are empty! The yuppies must be walking to work or taking the el. The CTA must think this area is still a ghost town where buses can take off from to the friendlier confines of the Loop and Near North Side.

The CTA moves at the pace of a dinosaur, and they can’t plan their way out of a paper bag. $11 million for making the Brown and Blue lines cell phone friendly while playing poor mouth about basis services? WTF????

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 7:12 am
As long as ‘bus driver’ is a viable career path (i.e. if moving a bus from point A to point B during time interval t involves union scale, full benefits, and a pension payment), the CTA is doomed.

The downstaters in Springfield are going to have to approve $$$ to bailout the CTA, and why would they do that? (unless they were somehow bought off…)

See you at the loop casino!

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 7:35 am
Nice of Carole Brown to take time out of her schedule and give a “heads up” to the City Council.

CTA should cut the buses that run one right after another. And should coordinate with Pace so a CTA bus doesn’t follow directly behid a Pace bus. It can’t be that hard to keep to a schedule - Metra and Pace do it, why not the CTA?

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 12:10 pm
Rich, how do you think buses get to where the people are? By definition, if most people are going to an employment center (e.g., downtown), once they drop people off they will have to go back (relatively empty) to pick a new group of people up. If you look at the CTA map, buses from the south side go to the north side of the central business district, and vice versa. And buses coming from the west side have to make it to the east side of the loop and then go back through the loop empty.

My bus is always PACKED, and I wish they sent more empty buses the other direction earlier in the morning so that they could relieve the congestion.

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 7:34 pm
Bus bunching is actually a mathematical phenomenon related to chaos theory. http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/bunching.shtml

Comment by Anonymous Tuesday, Feb 8, 05 @ 8:30 pm
I have to agree with the others that your post is off the wall. I get on my two local buses at all hours, and I’ve never gotten on an empty bus on either of those routes.

Here’s a link to the latest CTA ridership figures:
http://transitchicago.com/news/newspostdescs/132346sep04bus.pdf

You can see that the average ridership for buses is 50 riders per hour of operation.

Of the two routes with the lowest ridership, shown near the bottom, one is an experimental route that was changed just before the new figures, and the other is a route that is sponsored by the University of Chicago.

CTA buses are more efficient than PACE in revenues at the farebox, and in passengers per hour of operation. And CTA rail is more efficient than Metra in revenues from the farebox, and in passengers.

Do some research; don’t just look out your window at some bus that just started its route as if that’s relevant to the budget crisis.

Comment by earnest Wednesday, Feb 9, 05 @ 6:24 pm
About a dozen years ago (or more), I recall reading an article in The Economist about reforms to the London transit system. In particular, that transit system discovered that more people would use buses if they ran on a regular schedule, and there was no more than a 5-10 minute wait. The transit system started considering reforms along those lines, including switching to smaller buses that offered more frequent service.

The point is that most American transit systems (and perhaps especially the CTA) are stuck in the mind set that budget can only be balanced by increasing fares, more government subsidies, or cutting service. I have yet to see the CTA have a serious discussion about increasing their ridership to start operating at fuller capacity.

Mass transit in a city like Chicago should be convenient, easy, and an attractive alternative to automobiles. A good public transit system should be designed to make the purchase of a car unnecessary. Unfortunately, CTA planning consistently acts as if passengers are merely freight rather than customers.

Comment by Anonymous Thursday, Feb 10, 05 @ 7:42 am
First, something like 80% of the CTA’s expenses are on personnel. Your idea of smaller buses wouldn’t save money. You have to pay another driver. The cost of the vehicle isn’t the big problem.

On a related point, the CTA is required by law to make it’s service handicapped accessible. This has cost an enormous amount. (And paratransit alone - a very important service, but one that is unrelated to the core mission of the CTA - is currently 5% of the budget, which says a lot about the CTA’s ability to deliver a better farebox/subsidy ratio than either Metra or PACE.) If your idea of smaller buses is so brilliant, perhaps you’d better explain how to cost-efficiently buy lots and lots of smaller buses that have handicapped lifts and wide aisles. I seriously doubt the smaller vehicles would even be much cheaper on the capital side of the budget.

Second, the CTA has been growing, contrary to your odd demand that the CTA start learning how to increase ridership.

Third, the ability to transfer back onto the same route has led to an increasing number of people riding off-rush, because you can head half-way home from work, get dinner, a drink or groceries, then get back on for the cost of the transfer. Or, you can go to the health club, work out for an hour and a half, then return for a quarter, instead of full-fare. This is just one way they’ve tried to fill their buses during hours when they aren’t at capacity, and help people who don’t own cars.

Finally, the CTA’s weekend ridership has been growing by leaps and bounds in recent years, a sign of some success in their efforts to use off-rush capacity and help people avoid buying a car

As I said above, people need to do a little research before you write anti-CTA rants. You’re spreading untruths on a forum with a lot of downstaters reading, who don’t have a good way of fact-checking you, and they’ll be misled.

Comment by earnest Thursday, Feb 10, 05 @ 6:06 pm
OK, let’s all settle down.

I admit I engaged in a bit of flippancy. Shouldn’t have done it, but did it anyway.

Still, the CTA has a lot to answer for, and its apologists who have posted here are not facing reality. Any agency that has backed itself so far into a corner that it is forced to threaten 40 percent service cuts is run by incompetents or prevaricators, or both.

Rather than slash at each other, how about coming up with some ideas.

Comment by Rich Miller Thursday, Feb 10, 05 @ 10:50 pm