by Aaron M. Renn
Chronicling life riding the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA)
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CTA ridership increased for the first six months of the year, reaching 224.1 million rides. L ridership was up 5.2% and bus ridership was up 2.3%. [ Source: CTA press release ]
nospam-bennett@interaccess.com writes:
So the G-freind and I went to LA for a few days for a mini-vacation. Flew Southwest out of Midway. Damen bus down from Andersonville at 8 in the morning to the Orange line. Got to LA and made a point of riding "the most expensive subway in the world", the LA Red line. Bored in places under 800 ft of rock. Every station different, lots of art, and the use of space and light reminded me of D.C. Very nice. The Blue Line to Long Beach is _Long_ 1hr 40min. end to end. Overhead wires and partly street running, but mostly, like the Orange line here, on old railroad right-of-way. Top speed is 55. Being "new" to rail transit, LA does some things differently than Chicago (parts of LA's small system close at 9 pm). The rail system is honor-based like in some parts of Europe, and we couldn't imagine what the thinking was there. (Spot checks are performed with penalties for unticketed passengers. Yes, you get a ticket from a machine which will eat your money with no agent present to give you a refund. This happened.) People like to make fun of difference, and we had a ball with this post-never-industrial city's courageous start at a new system starting from the ground up.Karma bit us in the ass on our 11:30pm arrival at Midway.
We knew the Orange line wouldn't be running that late so we weren't expecting to simply reverse our route to Midway. But the 62 Archer to the loop, and then to a cab, did seem an option. The public address system in the airport mockingly advertises "trains every 8 to 15 minutes, depending upon the time of day for $1.50 with a transit time to the loop of bla bla bla" We and bunch of other Southwest passengers (who didn't know the train had stopped running) dutifully followed the PA system's instructions on the long trek through the airport, the parking garage, and across the pedway to, not where the buses or the train should be, but at the bottom of the last escalator A LOCKED GATE. We had schlepped all this way for A LOCKED GATE. We could see the buses at the L terminal! The gate was one of those electric roll-em-up type things made of bar stock and chain links. Just on the other side stood a CTA agent. We said "we're trapped! let us out!" His reply: "go back; that's the airport gate- I can't open it, go back." Now we had been traveling a good while and were exhausted and just wanted to get on the bus. A small but steady stream of other people were experiencing this same "Welcome to Chicago", and all we got was "Go back." The guy (I don't think I'm imagining this) seemed to look a little pleased with the imprisonment of the people on the other side of that gate. So as we schlepped our bags back through the pedway, and across the parking garage -a very long distance- we were tormented by "trains every 8 to 15 minutes, depending upon ...". We then tried to find a way out to the buses that didn't include the 'L' pedway and were, after a lot of walking (and an asthma attack, which wasn't funny) so completely frustrated that we took a shared cab up north. The taxi puddle of urine discount is a connected issue, but for another venue.
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. The views expressed by contributors are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the publisher.
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