Chicagoland Transit Authority?
The survival of the city's aging
mass transportation system may rest
on regional cooperation
by Burney Simpson
Illustrations by Daisy Juarez
Chicago's elevated Loop trains have become a symbol of that city, and nearly as well known as San Francisco's fabled cable cars.
But the rail lines in Illinois' biggest metropolis, some a century old, are beyond quaint. They're falling apart. The trains must creak to a 15-mile-an-hour crawl on certain sections just to avoid jarring the steel underpinnings. At the same time, the capacity of at least two of the lines hasn't kept pace with the growing crush of commuters who need them to get to and from work.
More to the point, not enough public dollars have been spent over the years to repair, rebuild and expand Chicago's most practical landmark.
In fairness, Frank Kruesi, president of the Chicago Transit Authority, the public agency that runs the trains, says it will take $700 million just to shore up the Ravenswood Brown Line and the Douglas branch of the Blue Line, two routes especially popular with those who travel between downtown and neighborhoods in the west and northwest regions of the metropolitan area.
Kruesi got a bit of good news last month when U.S. Transportation Secretary Rodney Slater announced the CTA could get $315 million from the feds for a major overhaul of the Douglas branch. The Blue Line travels east from Cicero into the Loop, but that commute, affected by slowdowns designed to save decrepit rails, can stretch to nearly 50 minutes. With top-of-the-line equipment, it should take only 33 minutes.
If the federal dollars materialize, they will cover only a fraction of the CTA's needs. Kruesi estimates his agency will have to have $4.3 billion over the next five years to put the city's entire system in good repair.
So far, only about $2.8 billion can be expected to come from Washington.
Still, CTA officials had reason to be jubilant about this most recent promise. And Kruesi credits Gov. George Ryan and the legislature. The $4.1 billion designated for mass transit in the state's five-year transportation plan gave the CTA additional leverage with the feds.
Critics see a lesson in that: the need for cooperation. The state and its mass transportation systems, especially those in the northeast part of the state, they argue, need to show a united front in Washington. If they do, everybody wins. And, because the CTA's transportation system is the oldest and most underfunded, the survival of Chicago's mass transit system could well depend on regional cooperation.
The relationship among the metropolitan area's transit systems is bumpy. That's because it's grounded in politics and history.
The Regional Transportation Authority coordinates the three mass transit systems in the metropolitan area, including the CTA. The other two are Metra, the suburban rail system, and Pace, the suburban bus system.
All three systems share riders, but each is run independently and has its own board. And, according to some longtime observers, the three systems spend more time competing with each other than cooperating.
A typical dustup occurred last year when lobbyists from each authority went to Washington. Metra was the winner at that time when it came home with $25 million to extend some train lines. Now Kruesi has bragging rights.
But U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, a central Illinois Democrat, sees a way everyone might win. He's called a summit this spring aimed at finding
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better ways to coordinate regional transportation, including a united front in seeking federal dollars. "We have to look regionally beyond individual congressional borders and get a consensus of the governor, the mayor of Chicago and county leaders on transportation funding," he says. "Otherwise it can become an unseemly cat fight."
State lawmakers are urging cooperation, too. But Chicago Democratic Rep. Julie Hamos has commuters in mind. She argues the hodgepodge of overlapping, even conflicting, schedules of the three RTA systems no longer serves the public's needs. The RTA, she says, should recognize that work schedules are changing from the traditional 9-to-5 pattern and that job growth is occurring in the collar counties. Metra may excel at taking riders into Chicago, but that doesn't address many workers' needs, she says.
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"Times were different when the RTA was created. The jobs were downtown. Now we have clogged expressways that don't accommodate reverse commuters," says Hamos.
To prod the RTA to take a new look at the roles of its systems, Hamos sponsored a resolution to set aside $400,000 for a two-year study on coordinating the CTA, Metra and Pace systems. One priority, she says, would be to determine how to implement a universal fare card. Currently, riders can use the same card for only the CTA and the Pace systems. Another goal would be more transfer links among the three systems.
The effort to build regional coordination is finding an ally in the business community, too. Business Leaders for Transportation, a coalition of 10,000 employers, was formed two years ago by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Metropolitan Planning Council. The coalition's manager, Stephen Schlickman, calls the level of federal funding for the CTA disappointing.
Reverse commuting is now a fact of life and transit systems have to reflect that, he says. "Our overriding principal is giving employers access to labor and employees to jobs. That's the overall goal. You do that with a better transit system." If transportation realities are changing, the public's attitudes will have to catch up. Suburbanites might complain, for instance, about money spent on the CTA, but that system has long served their communities. Today, the CTA operates buses or trains in 38 suburbs.
But, then, the CTA, and its privately held forerunners, has a long, colorful and complicated past. In the early days, competing private systems within the city often ran side by side. Companies went bankrupt, merged, were recreated. Downtown was a gridlocked mass of horse-drawn buses and carts, pedestrians, cable cars and an occasional auto. The elevated and subway lines were seen as the answer to this congestion.
The first electric line was built for the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Loop line opened in 1897. By the mid-1920s, the rail system was growing haphazardly as lines were built to serve the new developments of the burgeoning city. Then the rise of the automobile took its toll on the system. By 1945, transit ridership was down, people were moving to the suburbs, lines were hemorrhaging money and autos accounted for 30 percent of all commutes.
Democratic Chicago Mayor Edward Kelly and Republican Gov. Dwight Green, also a Chicagoan, forged a plan to buy the entire transit system for $75 million, along with the existing debt. The elevated lines cost only $12.2 million. But neither the city nor the state would pay for daily operations, which were to be funded from the nickels and dimes that went into the fare box. There were never enough of them. Rising deficits and inflation threatened bankruptcy.
In 1974, state officials created the RTA to run the bus and rail service in the six counties of the northeast, excluding the CTA. The move also gave the Chicago system a new funding source, though commuters continued to defect. The CTA lost 100 million riders between 1979 and 1983.
Now, however, Durbin's efforts coincide with several years of good news for the CTA's subway and elevated trains. In 1998, that rail system operated 1,190 cars over 289 miles of track, with 140 stations on seven routes. There are about 500,000 El riders each workday. And annual ridership has been heading slightly upward after bottoming out with 118 million riders in 1993. Management credits an automated fare card, discounts for students and seniors and the introduction of weekly and monthly passes for the boost in ridership to 132 million in 1998.
Even with its troubled history and current money needs, the CTA will be an essential part of the transportation mix in the area, according to George Ranney, president of Chicago Metropolis 2020, a business group working on regional cooperation. "We're going to see another one and a half million people in the region, and we need an alternative to the auto," he says. "We need to renew the lines in the city and build anew in the suburbs."
Kruesi couldn't agree more. Usage on the Brown Line, almost shut down for lack of ridership in the 1980s, is growing every day. The suburbs are eager for extensions of a northern line all the way to the Old Orchard Mall. And the Orange Line, which now stops at Midway Airport, could go farther southwest to the Ford City Mall.
"One out of five of our customers is a suburbanite. This is not just a city system," he says. "We should be called the Chicagoland Transit Authority."
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