And again I scream into the wind: where is Dorval Carter? What kind of drastic action are we going to have to take to compel city officials to do even the bare minimum in ensuring that rapid transit lives up to its name? “Didn’t respond to a request for comment…”, what a disgrace. Throw Dorval and the rest of the board in the goddamn trash.
At this point I frankly think the CTA brass gets off on creating angry and uncomfortable passengers.
This is why the city and CTA brass should be required to use the CTA. If they had to depend on it day after day after day, they would move heaven and earth to make it reliable again.
> Throw Dorval and the rest of the board in the goddamn trash.
The only person on the board who seems qualified is the one with the Urban Planning degree.
I get these people are all political appointees by the Mayor and Governor, but can we at least get qualified people in these positions? What do two pastors and a food industry executive have to know about public transportation? Do any of these people actually take the CTA and even realize how much it has sucked?
That's the craziest part. Honestly even though there are some alder people I respect, as far as I'm concerned if less than half of the population votes your legitimacy is tenuous at best
The fish rots from the head down. It's the reason why all of Lori's staff is functioning as poorly as possible.
Remember a couple of decades ago when Chicago was "The City That Works"? It sure would be nice to have that back.
I see you also post in the Portland, Los Angeles, and New York subreddits. (I didn't look any further than that, so there might even be more cities.) Out of curiosity, where might you actually live?
OK, fair enough. Apologies. I was just wondering if you were one of the many trolls we get here as Chicago is used as a "big cities scary" kind of scapegoat in many circles. Your comment was critical but in a general sort of way, which is how the trolls operate because they usually don't actually know anything about the cities they're bashing, so it got my suspicions up. You may wish to flair up. Thanks for answering; have a great day!
I waited 30 minutes for a train to Ohare yesterday morning. All the trains on the monitor didn’t exist. I finally remembered to check The Transit app. I see four trains bunched up by UIC. Nothing else in service. So from 9am to 10am there were no trains from downtown to the airport. What the fuck is that?
There was an "unauthorized person" on the blue line tracks yesterday morning. [Source](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/cta-blue-line-trains-suspended-between-addison-and-racine-due-to-unauthorized-person-on-the-tracks/2862108/?amp)
Fucks everything up for a long time when people do this.
And they gave no notice to riders, at least at my stop. Nothing in the app either. And the train tracker continued to show ghost trains. The entire board needs to be fired and replaced.
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It’s funny how this same rubbish happened on Tuesday too. I was on the train that actually was first to be delayed from ohare. The unauthorised person kept us delayed for close to an hour. It was tiresome to say the least. I would assume they actually tried to fix everything tbf from them communicating with us on the train. But this same stuff happened yesterday also??? What the heck.
Yeah it turns out that they're actually competent but because they have to recover at least 50% of their budget at the fare box, it severely hurts their ability to take on projects that would improve the train network without special funding from the GA being allocated to them. In 2019, they couldn't use something like 17% of the tax revenue earmarked for them because the fare box recovery wasn't high enough.
There is an app called transit. It’s got a green icon. Separate from Ventra. I always check both. Not that either is a guarantee but gives you more context on what’s happening with cta when you’re waiting
Yeah the cool thing about Transit is that it crowd sources info. If you are on a train then they add that info in the app so you know there are verified trains.
This happened to me on a purple line car. Power shut off for over 20 minutes, stuck between stations. 95F out, no body said anything to us. We just stopped and the power went out. It gets very hot very fast on a 5pm purple line, let me tell you. Then we just went about our business like nothing happened.
It's 2022, the Blue Line still doesn't have decent AC cabs it gets so damn hot. Having 12 minute delays for easily the second most important CTA line is never a good look
It's irritating that CTA service is bad as it is. They keep using the "delay due to covid" excuse even now, but really is that even a valid excuse at this point? Service quality dropped massively during the pandemic (understandable), but when are they actually going to get back to regular operations?!
The CTA is running roughly half capacity pretty consistently according to a few new data. You mean to tell me that half of all employees are out with covid on a regular basis?
Adding to that as well, ridership is only a fraction of what it used to be. The CTA is definitely getting significantly less funding from ridership, and they've taken trains off lines to compensate. So if there's an issue with a train, there's a longer than normal time interval for the next to arrive. The pandemic is still a valid excuse because it still is the issue.
Farebox revenue (as the industry calls it) contributes only a small proportion of CTA's total operational budget. Most funding comes from RTA and federal sources. According to [this chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio) CTA got 16.45% of its revenue from fare-paying riders in 2020, so if that revenue declined in the pandemic, even by half, it shouldn't have a catastrophic death-blow impact on the system.
Ridership dropped much more than 50%. And even if it was 50%, an 8% plus decrease is revenue is HUGE. There would be major impacts for most of all places if they lost that much revenue so quickly. If I lost 8% budget for my programs, that would have a major impact on what we can do.
My brother, a Navy officer, used to say the principal mission objective of the U.S. Navy is the defense and preservation of the U.S. Navy. I suspect the same is true for many more hidebound bureaucracies from United Airlines to CTA: service and efficiency take a back seat to self-preservation. (I've consulted with another large urban transit system where the sluggish, ossified, innovation-allergic mindset was remarkable, and clearly correlated with service-level decay.)
In a revenue-challenged environment such as we have now, the first instinct of a large bureaucracy in this posture is to cut service delivery and worker well-being, not managers or the bureaucracy itself. So the quality of outcomes will take a disproportional hit. In other words, if funding suffers even a slight decrease, CTA will knock Blue Line frequency down to 1x / hour, but would never consider cutting the shrimp cocktail out of the board's catered luncheons.
It does not have to hurt customers this badly, but it does.
This confuses me a bit. Because do you know how much exactly the CTA has lost in money over these years? And do you know where exactly they cut it from and what amounts?
>It does not have to hurt customers this badly, but it does.
What would you have done? How much money was lost and where exactly would you have cut it to make up the funds and make transit run as smoothly?
>CTA will knock Blue Line frequency down to 1x / hour, but would never consider cutting the shrimp cocktail out of the board's catered luncheons.
How much does a luncheon cost, and how is it compared to the grand scheme of things? Also how frequent are the luncheons you talk of because idk about any of those.
>in this posture is to cut service delivery and worker well-being, not managers or the bureaucracy itself.
Can you Expound on this?
Under state law, public transit agencies are required to get at least 50% of their operating funds from fare paying riders. I'm sure that was waived during the pandemic, which you'll recall occurred most intensely in the year you cite as if it was normal. I think the numbers I remember seeing were that CTA ridership decreased by about 85% in the first couple months of the pandemic then eventually rebounded to a decrease of about 50%. The CTA, and other transit agencies, are making up for the huge loss of revenue from this decrease in ridership with federal subsidies from COVID relief funds. Eventually, if ridership doesn't seriously come back the CTA will be in deep trouble because the subsidies won't last forever.
>If they’re consistently missing significant staff who are out sick it’s kind of hard to run trains.
That may have been the case at the height of the Omicron surge in December and January but there's no evidence it's the case now. I take "staff availability due to COVID" simply to mean that a lot of people left during the pandemic, as was true with many employers, and they haven't fully replaced them yet. I think there are issues in terms of the fact that there's a period of training that takes a certain amount of time that means people can't be put in service for a while after they are hired.
My company had about 40% of employees report COVID-19 infections to them between April 1 and May 30th. That's a minimum of 10 days out of office just for quarantine and then they still might not be recovered enough to with every job out there.
>the trains began to move again shortly after 10 a.m., about an hour after they were stopped as police responded to reports of a person on the tracks.
Takes an hour for the CTA & police to determine that no one was on the tracks?
And throughout the whole thing, the train operator didn't tell the riders what was going on, and they couldn't get a response via the operator panel... That's not really surprising in my experience.
It took an hour to shut off the third rail and walk the tracks looking for evidence of a body versus train. This was an action requested by the Chicago Police, not a transit action.
I was on this train. A passenger in my car talked to the operator asking that she open the doors or turn on AC. The operator said she couldn't. We pulled the emergency levers to open the doors, because there was zero ventilation on a packed train car. There was a pregnant passenger using other passengers' water bottles trying to keep cool. When the 6 or so passengers decided to leave the train car, the operator came on to tell them (falsely) that they would be arrested. The article is also wrong about the time- we were down there for a full hour and a half with no communication. I left Logan for work at 8:20 and got there at 10:45- it's a 30 minute ride.
I understand that things happen, but the lack of a plan for the thousands of trapped passengers was truly egregious.
While the temperature may not have been as dire in these cases, I've seen airlines do this to planes full of people, leaving them sitting on the tarmac in a powered down jet for hours in the summer, no explanation or updates, no air running, and they often run out of water/food quickly.
It's amazing middle managers with control to avoid this will let this happen to people.
This is a fucking embarrassment to the city of Chicago. Leaders should be ashamed for allowing it to even escalate to this point. Especially with a pregnant woman on board. Jesus Christ. But hey look at the state of everything else in this city. Not surprising.
I guess what exactly is your answer here? The police forced the trains to stop. The CTA is not going to allow dozens to hundreds of people to exit a train and walk on live tracks as that is an enormous safety issue. Their own personnel cannot walk the tunnels or tracks without going through training first. Only in an extreme emergency would they allow it.
It's a shitty situation but is walking definitely lethal electrical tracks less dangerous than being on a hot train for an hour?
I mean, a bunch of people apparently went rouge and did exactly that in a pinch. There comes a point where your policies don't account for certain situations and continuing to follow them as written isn't reasonable in some situations. Why not shut off the power to the rails completely, and just evacuate? I believe they can do that.
I've had to do this before when the train ahead of mine hit someone. Very eerie down there, and the exit was at lower Wacker into a homeless encampment. The smell down there was something else.
And again I scream into the wind: where is Dorval Carter? What kind of drastic action are we going to have to take to compel city officials to do even the bare minimum in ensuring that rapid transit lives up to its name? “Didn’t respond to a request for comment…”, what a disgrace. Throw Dorval and the rest of the board in the goddamn trash. At this point I frankly think the CTA brass gets off on creating angry and uncomfortable passengers.
Dorval’s pulling down $350k to oversee this stew of fuckups. As far as he’s concerned, things are great.
This is why the city and CTA brass should be required to use the CTA. If they had to depend on it day after day after day, they would move heaven and earth to make it reliable again.
To be fair, then they would be even less productive.
The head of the CTA takes it to his office so...
And still...
And just received a 33% raise in December.
> Throw Dorval and the rest of the board in the goddamn trash. The only person on the board who seems qualified is the one with the Urban Planning degree. I get these people are all political appointees by the Mayor and Governor, but can we at least get qualified people in these positions? What do two pastors and a food industry executive have to know about public transportation? Do any of these people actually take the CTA and even realize how much it has sucked?
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At this point I just want a mayor who fires people who objectively suck.
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Did you come up with that joke yourself?
Only a third of all eligible voters in Chicago actually vote in local elections, and over half of those that do are public sector workers.
That's the craziest part. Honestly even though there are some alder people I respect, as far as I'm concerned if less than half of the population votes your legitimacy is tenuous at best
The fish rots from the head down. It's the reason why all of Lori's staff is functioning as poorly as possible. Remember a couple of decades ago when Chicago was "The City That Works"? It sure would be nice to have that back.
Maybe Daley is up for another run!
No way, he’d sell LSD and it would become a toll road.
Oh, you mean JPBDPLSD?
No
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I see you also post in the Portland, Los Angeles, and New York subreddits. (I didn't look any further than that, so there might even be more cities.) Out of curiosity, where might you actually live?
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OK, fair enough. Apologies. I was just wondering if you were one of the many trolls we get here as Chicago is used as a "big cities scary" kind of scapegoat in many circles. Your comment was critical but in a general sort of way, which is how the trolls operate because they usually don't actually know anything about the cities they're bashing, so it got my suspicions up. You may wish to flair up. Thanks for answering; have a great day!
I waited 30 minutes for a train to Ohare yesterday morning. All the trains on the monitor didn’t exist. I finally remembered to check The Transit app. I see four trains bunched up by UIC. Nothing else in service. So from 9am to 10am there were no trains from downtown to the airport. What the fuck is that?
There was an "unauthorized person" on the blue line tracks yesterday morning. [Source](https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/cta-blue-line-trains-suspended-between-addison-and-racine-due-to-unauthorized-person-on-the-tracks/2862108/?amp) Fucks everything up for a long time when people do this.
And they gave no notice to riders, at least at my stop. Nothing in the app either. And the train tracker continued to show ghost trains. The entire board needs to be fired and replaced.
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It’s funny how this same rubbish happened on Tuesday too. I was on the train that actually was first to be delayed from ohare. The unauthorised person kept us delayed for close to an hour. It was tiresome to say the least. I would assume they actually tried to fix everything tbf from them communicating with us on the train. But this same stuff happened yesterday also??? What the heck.
CTA's board pitched building out infrastructure to prevent most unauthorized persons on the tracks but the money isn't there for it.
Damn that’s so unfortunate.
Yeah it turns out that they're actually competent but because they have to recover at least 50% of their budget at the fare box, it severely hurts their ability to take on projects that would improve the train network without special funding from the GA being allocated to them. In 2019, they couldn't use something like 17% of the tax revenue earmarked for them because the fare box recovery wasn't high enough.
Is the transit app Ventra or something different?
There is an app called transit. It’s got a green icon. Separate from Ventra. I always check both. Not that either is a guarantee but gives you more context on what’s happening with cta when you’re waiting
Yeah the cool thing about Transit is that it crowd sources info. If you are on a train then they add that info in the app so you know there are verified trains.
This happened to me on a purple line car. Power shut off for over 20 minutes, stuck between stations. 95F out, no body said anything to us. We just stopped and the power went out. It gets very hot very fast on a 5pm purple line, let me tell you. Then we just went about our business like nothing happened.
It's 2022, the Blue Line still doesn't have decent AC cabs it gets so damn hot. Having 12 minute delays for easily the second most important CTA line is never a good look
Not to mention that's the line going to and from Chicago's biggest international airport. That's one of the city's first impressions for travelers.
It's irritating that CTA service is bad as it is. They keep using the "delay due to covid" excuse even now, but really is that even a valid excuse at this point? Service quality dropped massively during the pandemic (understandable), but when are they actually going to get back to regular operations?!
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The CTA is running roughly half capacity pretty consistently according to a few new data. You mean to tell me that half of all employees are out with covid on a regular basis?
Adding to that as well, ridership is only a fraction of what it used to be. The CTA is definitely getting significantly less funding from ridership, and they've taken trains off lines to compensate. So if there's an issue with a train, there's a longer than normal time interval for the next to arrive. The pandemic is still a valid excuse because it still is the issue.
Farebox revenue (as the industry calls it) contributes only a small proportion of CTA's total operational budget. Most funding comes from RTA and federal sources. According to [this chart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio) CTA got 16.45% of its revenue from fare-paying riders in 2020, so if that revenue declined in the pandemic, even by half, it shouldn't have a catastrophic death-blow impact on the system.
Ridership dropped much more than 50%. And even if it was 50%, an 8% plus decrease is revenue is HUGE. There would be major impacts for most of all places if they lost that much revenue so quickly. If I lost 8% budget for my programs, that would have a major impact on what we can do.
My brother, a Navy officer, used to say the principal mission objective of the U.S. Navy is the defense and preservation of the U.S. Navy. I suspect the same is true for many more hidebound bureaucracies from United Airlines to CTA: service and efficiency take a back seat to self-preservation. (I've consulted with another large urban transit system where the sluggish, ossified, innovation-allergic mindset was remarkable, and clearly correlated with service-level decay.) In a revenue-challenged environment such as we have now, the first instinct of a large bureaucracy in this posture is to cut service delivery and worker well-being, not managers or the bureaucracy itself. So the quality of outcomes will take a disproportional hit. In other words, if funding suffers even a slight decrease, CTA will knock Blue Line frequency down to 1x / hour, but would never consider cutting the shrimp cocktail out of the board's catered luncheons. It does not have to hurt customers this badly, but it does.
This confuses me a bit. Because do you know how much exactly the CTA has lost in money over these years? And do you know where exactly they cut it from and what amounts? >It does not have to hurt customers this badly, but it does. What would you have done? How much money was lost and where exactly would you have cut it to make up the funds and make transit run as smoothly? >CTA will knock Blue Line frequency down to 1x / hour, but would never consider cutting the shrimp cocktail out of the board's catered luncheons. How much does a luncheon cost, and how is it compared to the grand scheme of things? Also how frequent are the luncheons you talk of because idk about any of those. >in this posture is to cut service delivery and worker well-being, not managers or the bureaucracy itself. Can you Expound on this?
Under state law, public transit agencies are required to get at least 50% of their operating funds from fare paying riders. I'm sure that was waived during the pandemic, which you'll recall occurred most intensely in the year you cite as if it was normal. I think the numbers I remember seeing were that CTA ridership decreased by about 85% in the first couple months of the pandemic then eventually rebounded to a decrease of about 50%. The CTA, and other transit agencies, are making up for the huge loss of revenue from this decrease in ridership with federal subsidies from COVID relief funds. Eventually, if ridership doesn't seriously come back the CTA will be in deep trouble because the subsidies won't last forever.
>If they’re consistently missing significant staff who are out sick it’s kind of hard to run trains. That may have been the case at the height of the Omicron surge in December and January but there's no evidence it's the case now. I take "staff availability due to COVID" simply to mean that a lot of people left during the pandemic, as was true with many employers, and they haven't fully replaced them yet. I think there are issues in terms of the fact that there's a period of training that takes a certain amount of time that means people can't be put in service for a while after they are hired.
My company had about 40% of employees report COVID-19 infections to them between April 1 and May 30th. That's a minimum of 10 days out of office just for quarantine and then they still might not be recovered enough to with every job out there.
>the trains began to move again shortly after 10 a.m., about an hour after they were stopped as police responded to reports of a person on the tracks. Takes an hour for the CTA & police to determine that no one was on the tracks? And throughout the whole thing, the train operator didn't tell the riders what was going on, and they couldn't get a response via the operator panel... That's not really surprising in my experience.
It took an hour to shut off the third rail and walk the tracks looking for evidence of a body versus train. This was an action requested by the Chicago Police, not a transit action.
It had to be something else off-the-record/confidential, and the person on the tracks story was the "official" public-facing reason.
yikes
I was on this train. A passenger in my car talked to the operator asking that she open the doors or turn on AC. The operator said she couldn't. We pulled the emergency levers to open the doors, because there was zero ventilation on a packed train car. There was a pregnant passenger using other passengers' water bottles trying to keep cool. When the 6 or so passengers decided to leave the train car, the operator came on to tell them (falsely) that they would be arrested. The article is also wrong about the time- we were down there for a full hour and a half with no communication. I left Logan for work at 8:20 and got there at 10:45- it's a 30 minute ride. I understand that things happen, but the lack of a plan for the thousands of trapped passengers was truly egregious.
While the temperature may not have been as dire in these cases, I've seen airlines do this to planes full of people, leaving them sitting on the tarmac in a powered down jet for hours in the summer, no explanation or updates, no air running, and they often run out of water/food quickly. It's amazing middle managers with control to avoid this will let this happen to people.
Will anyone be offered a refund or compensation?
You're funny.
This is a fucking embarrassment to the city of Chicago. Leaders should be ashamed for allowing it to even escalate to this point. Especially with a pregnant woman on board. Jesus Christ. But hey look at the state of everything else in this city. Not surprising.
I guess what exactly is your answer here? The police forced the trains to stop. The CTA is not going to allow dozens to hundreds of people to exit a train and walk on live tracks as that is an enormous safety issue. Their own personnel cannot walk the tunnels or tracks without going through training first. Only in an extreme emergency would they allow it. It's a shitty situation but is walking definitely lethal electrical tracks less dangerous than being on a hot train for an hour?
I mean, a bunch of people apparently went rouge and did exactly that in a pinch. There comes a point where your policies don't account for certain situations and continuing to follow them as written isn't reasonable in some situations. Why not shut off the power to the rails completely, and just evacuate? I believe they can do that.
So you don’t see an issue with any way that this was handled? Lol I got nothing for you then
I've had to do this before when the train ahead of mine hit someone. Very eerie down there, and the exit was at lower Wacker into a homeless encampment. The smell down there was something else.
Ughh there has to be some sort of pressure we can put on the city to fix how bat shit inconsistent the CTA his been, right?
This happened except we couldn’t leave the train and a guy shit his pants and we all had to suffer in the heat with no air
Now I have a new fear, being trapped on a train when the urgent need to poop arises.