Chicago

RTA: The inevitable crisis

THE CHICAGO area has experienced perhaps the biggest governmental crisis in its history in the last few months — the struggle to keep metropolitan mass transit alive.

It was inevitable that such a crisis would occur, and after the smoke clears, we all may be the better for it. For one thing, there will be some new players, and it is hoped they will do a better job of managing northeastern Illinois transportation than their predecessors. At any rate, most observers believe they could do no worse.

But what got us into this mess? The largest factor was simply inflation. The cost of operating trains and buses, like the cost of everything else these days, has skyrocketed. Fuel costs, of course, are way up, but the cost of paying the people who operate mass transit is by far the biggest segment of the budget.

The primary sources of funds to pay those costs are fares and taxes. Fares can be increased, but only to a point. At some level people will refuse to pay the fare and try to find some alternative means of transportation. What they will find is probably the automobile. Yet ironically, the government, in the interest of combating air pollution, has been trying to keep fares low enough to encourage people to use public transit and to discourage them from using their cars. Besides, it obviously would be wrong to raise fares so high that only the affluent could afford them. The dispute has been over what a reasonable fare is. The fares paid by users of the commuter railroads as of June covered nearly 60 percent of the cost of operating those lines. The 80-cent fare on the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) rapid transit lines and buses paid 44 percent of the CTA costs. The fares of suburban buses paid only 34 percent of their costs.

Taxes are paid by users of public transit and nonusers alike, and the nonusers invariably argue that the fares should be higher — that the users should bear a greater burden. The fact is that the Regional Transportation Authority's (RTA) largest single revenue source has been fares. The seond largest revenue source was the sales tax — a 1 percent tax in Cook County and ¹/4 of 1 percent in the five other counties of the region. But the fares and the sales tax, combined with a relatively small allocation from the federal government, resulted in only about $700 million in projected revenue in this fiscal year, ending September 30. The RTA's projected expenditures totaled $850 million, I the system was woefully short of what it needed.

In the past when Chicago or the Chicago area needed something, it went to Springfield — and had little problem getting what it wanted from the legislature. But population shifts have diluted Chicago's power in the legislature — and not even the Chicago Democratic bloc is what it used to be — so it's not so easy anymore. Down state legislators didn't look kindly toward increasing taxes to bail out the Chicago area. Suburban legislators complained that a disproportionate share of RTA funds was going to the CTA. And it was a bad year to get anything in the legislature — the year the assembly was faced with reapportionment and the year one-third of the House became lame ducks as a result of the legislative cutback amendment. In the midst of the debate, along came Mike Royko of the Chicago Sun-Times with a series of columns castigating downstaters — and their legislators — as "nothing but a bunch of rubes and bumpkins." The downstaters' determination to refuse to help Chicago stiffened, and the crisis escalated.

Can such a crisis be averted in the future? There isn't a lot of cause for optimism. Inflation seems likely to remain with us for some time. The split between Chicago and the rest of the state is a fact of life. It's a free country so columnists will keep writing columns. And the big decisions undoubtedly will continue to be made by politicians who are more concerned about their reelection than they are about the public good.

If only we could all just walk to work. . . .

32 | August 1981 | Illinois Issues