Chew very carefully. CTA President Ron Huberman is on a mission.
He’s determined to remove any remnants of gum-chewing that passengers leave behind on trains and buses.
To do so, he’s assembled a team of gum exterminators. The CTA Gum Busters, he calls them.
Huberman says chewing gum — stuck on bus seats, spit onto rail car floors and left on countless other places where it does not belong — represents a huge problem at transit systems nationwide.
“Gum is the nemesis of transit,” Huberman said.
It’s an especially sticky situation on buses operating on routes students take to school. Similar to graffiti, a single bus can be tagged with dozens of gum wads in a day. The most frequent repositories of gum pollution include the underside of seats, floors, rear exit door handles and grab-bars, according to CTA cleaning personnel.
But riders should start noticing improvements, transit officials say.
Bus servicers who clean vehicles at the CTA’s 74th Street garage are armed to the teeth with a $6,000 machine, made by Gum Busters of New York, that uses steam and non-toxic chemicals to zap gum in as little as five seconds, even from cloth seats and carpeting.
“Before, everything took a lot of muscle, scraping and time,” said Elbert Harrington, 37, a CTA bus servicer at the 74th Street garage who has been fighting the gum battle for 14 years.
Harrington, whose uniform includes gloves and knee-high rubber boots, begins the gum-removal process in the back of a bus by heating water in the Gum Busters machine to 290 degrees Fahrenheit, to create steam. He then points the tip of the machine’s nozzle over a patch of gum for several seconds to release the steam and an anti-gum solution. Most of the gum dissolves and the rest is wiped away, leaving zero residue.
Harrington, who has become an expert in determining the age of gum he finds on buses, must absolutely detest the stuff, right?
“No, man. I love gum,” he said with a broad toothy smile, referring to the chewing satisfaction and the job security gum brings to his life.
The goal is twofold: Sending cleaner buses out onto the streets and reducing the four hours it takes for a bus servicer to complete a general cleaning of one bus, which goes beyond the daily cleaning regimen to include washing and sanitizing the ceiling, windows, all interior surfaces and mopping the floor, said John Henry, maintenance manager at the 74th Street garage.
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GUM BATTLE
The pilot project involving the one anti-gum machine at the 74th Street garage has been successful, officials said, and the CTA plans to buy more of the devices for the transit agency’s seven other bus garages, said Jerusha Rodgers, a CTA general manager. The agency employs more than 270 bus servicers at its eight garages.
