The CTA says it is more than $6 billion short of adequately modernizing its rail and bus lines, a staggering number lost in the debate as the agency lurches from one Doomsday to another searching for the tens of millions of dollars it needs to keep operating.
The result is that more than 500 CTA buses, one-fourth of its fleet, have been on the road for 16 years, logging an average of 580,000 miles apiece.
It’s not just traffic that can make the wait for a CTA bus so long. The oldest CTA buses miss thousands of scheduled runs each month because of equipment breakdowns that keep them idle in the garage.
Rail passengers aren’t spared from the ills of ancient infrastructure either. They must endure longer commutes each year as trains crawl as slowly as 5 mph through numerous “slow zones” caused by crumbling viaducts or deteriorated tracks.
In fact, the slow zones cover about 50 miles of track, more than one-fifth of its rail network, according to the CTA.
The neglect of the rail system also has led to derailments, including the July 2006 one in which a Blue Line subway train jumped tracks held barely in place by rusted screw spikes and fastening clips. Hundreds of passengers had to escape from the smoky subway tunnel.
Some of the challenges facing the nation’s second-largest and perhaps most-antiquated transit system are illustrated by the CTA’s 77th Street bus barn, at 79th Street and Wentworth Avenue.
Many of the CTA’s oldest buses — workhorses that entered service in 1991 and should have been retired long ago — are sent onto the street each day from the 77th Street garage, which itself housed the first horse-drawn street cars in Chicago in the late 1800s.
Insufficient funding for capital improvements has forced the transit agency to keep these vintage clunkers, the rustiest, most uncomfortable and costliest to maintain vehicles in the CTA fleet.
The old buses also fall short of pollution standards and lack wider seats, LED-illuminated destination signs and security cameras. The cost of repairing and maintaining the old buses is soaring. The CTA said it spends about $16 million a year keeping the old buses in running order, more than five-fold the $3 million cost for upkeep on newer models.
Despite the clearly inefficient use of public money, the failure to renew transit infrastructure has received much less attention among politicians and other decision-makers than the prospect of hundreds of thousands of commuters losing their bus routes to service cuts.
Even if the current transit operating crisis was resolved, the system would remain under siege until a funding stream is established to overhaul and replace aging equipment, transit officials said.
“My concern about the transit discussions in Springfield is that the focus has been solely on funding operations,” CTA chairwoman Carole Brown said. “The capital needs are equally as critical, and they really seem to have been ignored.”
Shoring up, modernizing and expanding the mass transit system in the entire six-county Chicago metropolitan area comes with a breathtaking price tag that exceeds $10 billion over the next five years for CTA, Metra and Pace combined, according to the Regional Transportation Authority.
