Surprise. Surprise. The new management team at the Chicago Transit Authority has discovered that the bus-and-train agency is $20 million in the hole and sinking deeper by the day.
Surprise. Surprise. Incoming CTA Chairwoman Valerie Jarrett and President David Mosena, following expressions of shock and dismay, have ordered a top-to-bottom management study. To that end, the CTA board has authorized the expenditure of $500,000 to hire a crack team of efficiency experts, led by the estimable Booz Allen & Hamilton Inc.
If I sound a bit blase, it’s because this is my fourth or fifth CTA financial crisis. I’ve lost count. What I do know is that these meltdowns occur right after a new set of managers takes over from an old set of managers, and after the new guard finds out the old guard was keeping things together with chicken wire and chewing gum.
Well, of course they were.
Certainly that’s how Bob Belcaster, Mosena’s predecessor, had been doing it. He’d tell anyone who would listen that the CTA was going broke. A successful commercial real estate developer who took over the CTA as a favor to Mayor Richard Daley, Belcaster made no secret of the fact that the agency’s budget was being strung together year-to-year with a series of accounting gimmicks. Capital improvement funds were being used to cover operational expenses. Rapid transit cars were being sold to private investors and leased back so as to front-end desperately needed cash.
The truth is, Belcaster did an outstanding job . . . assuming his mandate from the mayor was to keep the system running without a big fare increase or a drastic reduction in service. He just ran out of tricks. The deck, after all, has been stacked against the CTA for a long time.
For one thing, the agency’s service area has been steadily losing population and jobs. Growth in our metropolitan region is something which occurs along the suburban fringe, not back in the city and the inner-suburbs served by CTA. That’s one reason Metra’s far-reaching commuter rail service is doing so well.
More important, America makes it ridiculously easy to drive an automobile. You can buy a serviceable used car for $500 and fuel it with gasoline priced cheaper than bottled water. The cost of building and maintaining the highway system is considered an important national “investment.” Accordingly, road projects are funded more than adequately from state and local taxes and from the huge federal gas tax fund. The cost of maintaining and operating public transportation, however, is considered a “subsidy,” and our state and federal governments have been getting out of the subsidy business. Federal operating aid to the CTA has been cut by $54 million over the last six years and some of the new leaders in Congress want to zero it out.
Not that past management of CTA has been blameless for the agency’s financial woes, or for the staggering 40 percent drop in ridership that has occurred since 1979.
The quality of service on the CTA, based on my experience, is barely adequate at best. The “rapid” transit is painfully slow and not nearly as dependable as Metra’s commuter trains. And while CTA’s buses can move no faster than traffic, they don’t have to be hot in the summer, cold in the winter and defaced year-round by ink markers and glass-etchers. (How do the punks get away with that, anyway?)
If it wants my business back (I switched to Metra in 1991) the CTA would have to publish and stick to a train schedule, and come a lot closer to that “30 minutes to the Loop” promise that once hung on my elevated train platform in Evanston. (Now it can take that long to get to the Loyola stop.)
Improving service and cleanliness requires money, of course, but the CTA doesn’t always spend its money wisely. Did you ever wonder why they bolted public address loudspeakers every 20 feet on every “L” platform? Wouldn’t two or three speakers per station have been enough? And on a far larger scale, why didn’t Daley and Belcaster show some political gumption and close, for good, the Lake Street/Englewood rapid transit Green Line? There would have been hell to pay on the South and West Sides, I know, but it was insane for a system as broke as CTA to spend $400 million (albeit, mostly federal dollars) rebuilding a line so closely paralleled by other transit.
Now there is no money in the kitty to rebuild the decrepit Ravenswood service–the only line in the city where ridership has been building.
Then again, when Booz Allen gets done peeling off the wire and the chewing gum there won’t be money for a lot of things. Say goodbye, I predict, to overnight rapid transit service and to express buses that run from outlying neighborhoods to downtown. Once the efficiency experts do their thing, rush hour buses will feed the trains, and after 10 p.m., buses will be the only ride in town. As for fares, get ready for a $2 ride.
These are ugly choices, to be sure, for a system that already is losing the battle against the automobile.
But it’s crucial that the CTA not be allowed to collapse. Gas won’t always be cheaper than a gallon of Hinckley & Schmitt. And Congress, you may recall, just passed a welfare law that, in two years time, will prod some 100,000 car-less Chicagoans into the rush hour crush.
And who knows? Some day the public, and even the pols, might figure out the real cost of the automobile. Then the CTA would look pretty good, loudspeakers and all.
