Funding Problems
For those of you who haven't read it, I highly recommend taking the time to check out the following document:

http://keepchicagolandmoving.com/funding/200501funding.pdf

Now, in order to really understand CTA's argument, you do need to look at every page, but the most profound slides are probably 10 and 13, and 19 is important too.

They explain how it is that CTA's funding has declined drastically (when you adjust for inflation), in comparison to its ridership, which has only declined slightly.

It also explains how security costs and paratransit have gone up significantly but CTA's operating budget, from where the RTA requires them to cover those costs (despite they aren't a part of actual transit operations at all), has shrunk significantly.

I mean, look... If you put all the subsidies from every source together, CTA got $564 million in 1980, $442 million in 2004. It's no wonder there's a crisis, especially if you factor in things like the increasing costs of paratransit, the greater needs for security, and the higher standards demanded by the riding public today.

Meanwhile, the suburban Cook County people are being screwed, since their tax money is being funneled into collar county service, for people who live really far out of town, while CTA provides a vast majority of the trips made in and around suburban Cook, when more of that money SHOULD go into CTA, and the gap be filled by increased taxes for the people who are essentially robbing suburban Cook by using exclusively the most expensive-to-run part of the RTA system and paying the absolute least into the pot.

Suburban Cook residents are also being screwed since Pace is also grossly underfunded, and CTA's plan includes funding increases for Pace as well.

And while taxes collected in Chicago go entirely into CTA (as few Chicagoans use Metra and Pace), when Chicagoans step outside of city limits to shop at malls and big box stores (see Page 19), Chicagoans start to get screwed since their tax money is not all going into CTA. This is a big reason why these geographic boundaries are just plain wrong.

When my mom, who NEVER uses Metra or Pace goes shopping for almost everything she needs through the year, by visiting the Cub Foods, Target, Walmart, The Home Depot, Kohl's, and a dozen other stores in Burbank, IL, near her Chicago home, she ends up inadvertently giving money so people in Du Page County can get a cheap ride on Metra, when she is legally blind and is now facing severe cuts to her only way to go places without any help from others.

CTA is so efficient that trips in the city are only subsidized by about $0.87 right now and are still pretty well available to most people. Meanwhile, people who ride Metra in the collar counties, who pay only a quarter as much in sales taxes for transit, are getting subsidized $3.63 PER RIDE. So who's paying for that? My mom and anyone else who shops in suburban Cook County. Accounting for Chicagoans that shop in suburban Cook alone, it comes out to around $40 million every year that is getting taken out of CTA and dumped into suburban service that Chicagoans don't use.

And then there are the people who criticize CTA's plan saying "it's unfair to Metra," or "it's a cash-grab" or "it's just a game of brinksmanship, and CTA is just trying to get more money when they're inefficient and bloated." CTA is pretty understaffed right now it seems, and honestly, they HAVE to operate at a loss. Asking CTA to operate service without losses is rooted in absurdity, since public transit isn't profitable, anywhere. But, it's so essential to life as a city it's a necessary expense. CTA has too few services as it is--it's why so many people use cars, even in areas where parking simply isn't convenient.

In 1993, when I started riding the 'L' as a teenager, every single line in the city, except for the Orange and Yellow, ran 24-hour service. There were probably a dozen or so more bus routes serving different areas that are now underserved, and probably a dozen more that ran during rush periods only, just to make life even more convenient for commuters in lower-density neighborhoods, plus of all the buses that remain today, there was a route almost every mile through the city that ran overnight service, and, at the very least, almost all routes ran seven days a week for most of the day--none of this "no weekend service" nonsense.

Meanwhile, those cuts done in the mid-to-late 90s that left us with the skeleton of a system we have today, while they did make CTA much more efficient, they also reduced the viability of neighborhoods as dense, walkable areas. And where are people moving to today? Dense, walkable areas. Why aren't people moving to Humboldt Park at North Ave and California or Kedzie? Because it's too far to walk to the train and the buses just aren't convenient.

Nevermind that there's some crime--it didn't stop Wicker, or West Loop, or Bucktown, or Lakeview, or Logan Square from becoming popular areas. Why did those turn and other, equally ready-for-change areas not? Because the transit is there.

Chicago's growth is being choked by a transit system that is just barely good enough to live with, without a car. Any less transit, and the tipping point will be reached. Chicago will cease to grow.

And Daley's solution? Not better transit, no... He just wants more off-street parking spaces. Idiotic.

CTA should be extending hours of more rail and bus routes, adding weekend service to bus routes that don't have it, reconfiguring a few routes, and they NEED MORE FUNDING. Even if you make some cuts to get rid of the gap this year, as inflation increases at a rate greater than the subsidy for operating expenses CTA receives, compounded with wildly increasing paratransit costs that are mandated by (but no longer subsidized by) the federal government, next year you have another gap, and another, and another. The problem won't go away until the formula isn't designed to keep draining CTA's funding every year when you account for inflation (which is the only proper way to do it).

What are they to do? Just keep cutting and cutting until we've got a system like Pace serving the one urban space in the United States outside of New York that really, really needs a comprehensive, 24-hour transit system?
Chicago is too big and too dense to live like other cities. And if its transit ends up like the just-barely-tolerable services in the mid-tier cities (Chicago is quite clearly top tier), Chicago will have to remodel itself as one of those other kinds of cities, and the downward cultural spiral--Chicago won't even be Chicago in thirty years.

I do see areas where they could improve wasteful service by consolidating services. For example, they could probably make 63W a route that only uses one or two buses all day, and have the 62 Archer alternate between buses that go down Harlem, Narragansett, and Central for those people wanting to get to the Orange Line. For the most part, everything that exists serves a NEED.

If you eliminate services that exist, then neighborhoods and businesses fizzle out. Chicago becomes a less attractive place. People start moving out to the burbs or better cities. Less people move in. The current momentum is lost. Chicago deteriorates back to 1970s and 80s conditions.
And the suburbs, with all the recent expansion, lose the source of everything that makes them able to exist.

A metropolis with a city core is like a snake: cut off its head, and the whole thing dies. Then the whole metropolis festers like a corpse in August. All because CTA didn't get what was deserved.

The fact that CTA is proposing something that would work well for Metra, and especially for Pace, is very fair.