The Weekly Breakdown - Vol. 3, #24 Chronicling life riding the Chicago Transit Authority Note that email distribution of the Weekly Breakdown is suspended until further notice because my computer crashed. My new computer is on order, so hopefully we'll be back in business soon. If my hard drive survived, the mailing list will be 100% restored, otherwise some names might be lost as I'll have to reload from a somewhat out of date backup tape. Commentary ---------- I about went postal on Metra this week. Thursday I was out drinking rather late downtown. I thought about taking a cab home, but then said, "Hey, it's just about time for the 12:35 train". So I cabbed to North Western Station instead and got to the front entrance at 12:33, sprinted up to the platforms and barely made it on the train - or so I thought. I'd noticed tons of people either in high school or early college filtering into the station about the same time as me, but paid not much attention to them. I did see a few of them from the cab in front of me run for the 12:30 Harvard train. I briefly thought to myself "They're screwed", but then saw a "Delayed" sign on that train. Lucky for them. Well, maybe not so lucky. As it turned out, there were tons of people who wanted to buy tickets before getting on the train, so the absolute complete morons at Metra decided to hold every train until they could. This wasn't a slight delay. Instead, my train left at 1:15am - 40 minutes late! I could have taken a cab to Highland Park in that time. The conductors refused to give any idea of when the train might leave, and in fact must've been so bothered by the angry crowd on the train, that they went to the end of the platform and hung out by themselves. I've just got a few questions: 1. Why are people in high school immune from the train schedule? Nobody has ever held a train so I could buy a ticket. 2. Why can't people in high school pay a $1 penalty charge and pay their fares on the train like everyone else who is running late? 3. If Metra was really concerned about the $1 penalty charge, why didn't they just waive it and tell everybody to get on board? 4. Heck, given the low ridership of the last trains out, why didn't Metra just let everybody ride free? In fact, option 4 ended up being the one chosen. When I got off a Main St., no conductor had come through to collect tickets. If the riders were smart, they kept their ticket when they got off and so got to ride free. So we were delayed for nothing. Delaying a late night train for 45 minutes with no explanation is quite frankly ridiculous. I think the people responsible for doing it should be fired. I am planning to write Jeff Ladd about this and demand an explanation. Not everybody has a cell phone. I wonder how many wives and husbands were wondering why their spouse didn't get home and started to worry? I wonder how many parents were waiting up an extra 40 minutes for their kids who said they would be on the 12:35 train? It's obvious that they "I'm getting paid by the hour" staff at Metra didn't give a rat's ass about any of their passengers. If I were in charge, many people would be losing their jobs over this. John F. Kuczaj wrote in to say:
My daily 1/2 hour Blue Line trip from Jeff Park to Clark/Lake took 20 minutes longer than normal this morning (June 28). Between the Chicago & Grand stop, our train lurched to a halt and was stopped for a while. The motorman told us there were signal problems. Eventually, we slowly arrived at the Grand station. Something was definitely wrong as all lights, except the emergency lights, were out at the station. Obviously something happened with the power around Grand. When we tried to leave, it was obvious that the block signals were either locked at red or not working as the emergency brake kept activating. The motorman did the only thing he could do to get the train anywhere--he continued to rapidly accelerate until the brakes activated, lurching us to a stop. This was repeated for a few minutes until we were about 3/4 of the way to Clark/Lake where the signals were apparently working properly. My 30 minute trip took 50 minutes. Fun.