by Aaron M. Renn
Chronicling life riding the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)
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I did not have a good public transit week last week. First, I had a very bad time on the L on 11/19. I showed up at the Main St. stop to catch my train only to find that it had come early (Evanston trains have any annoying tendency to do that). So I had to wait 12 minutes for the next one. Once I finally boarded, we proceded to get stuck for a couple minutes at the Howard interlocking. While I could not see what was going on ahead of me, this normally indicates that both southbound tracks at Howard have Red Line trains on them and that we have to wait for one to leave before we can pull into the station. Sure enough, after finally getting into the station, we had a long wait for the next Howard train to leave the station. I checked this on my watch, so I know it is true: it took 25 minutes from the time I got to Main St. to the time I left Howard. That is 25 minutes to go one mile. The problems did not stop there. The Red Line train made a long stop at Berwyn, where the motorman got out and walked to the rear of the train to check out something. Also, I was subjected to two repetitions of the most notorious beggar on the CTA. (I'm sure you know him, since he is on nearly every Red Line train in the evening. You now, he's the guy that says "Can you help me? Please. I'm homeless. I'm trying to get something to eat.", etc).
On 11/20, my UP-North line train experienced heavy delays due to an unspecified problem with the train in front of us near Rogers Park. What was supposed to be an 18 minute trip took 55 minutes. Why we did not pass the stalled train on the other track was a mystery to me, until the next day when I observed the tracks on the way into the city: There do not seem to be any crossovers between Rogers Park and Clybourn.
On 11/21 I was again subjected to a lengthy wait at Howard tranferring from the Evanston to the Red Line. These trains have the same ten minute headway at the time I was riding, but it seems like they are "anti-synchronized" so that an annoying percentage of the time I end up stuck at Howard for the full ten minutes.
John C. Thomas (nospam-jthoma1@uic.edu) wrote in with this piece which I am including as an "op-ed":
"More should be made of the fact that the City of Chicago's contribution to the CTA has remained unchanged since the formation of the RTA in the mid-1970's-- $3 million per year. That figure was probably somewhere around 8% of the CTA budget in 1976, but it's less than half of one percent today. By means of comparison, The City of Chicago spent more than three times its total contribution to the CTA over the past 20 years in 1996 to reconfigure Lake Shore Drive ($110 million).
The disparity SHOULD be a rallying point for opposition to Daley in the 1999 election, but Bobby Rush (ex-Black Panther, pathologic Daley-hater) is too racially-devisive to galvanize lakefront transit users, and the economy in the downtown area of Chicago is doing so well that most transit users envision using a more costly alternative to mass transit before they would consider any form of activism to improve the CTA.
The cost of a pack of cigarettes went up 20% this week. Yet gasoline, which fuels the biggest group of air polluters in the nation, hasn't increased 20% since 1975-- in spite of it being a finite resource in addition to the nation's biggest polluter."
The Weekly Breakdown is a small Internet journal devoted to the trials and tribulations of being a regular rider of the Chicago Transit Authority. I would be happy to hear about and include your experiences. Just send mail to breakdown@urbanophile.com.
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