Great post, such an important topic. Two things to add:
1. Public transit needs to be safe enough that absolutely everyone feels safe riding it at any time, in all circumstances.
2. While discussions of equity have focused on disparate impact of policing, this needs to be balanced by consideration of the disparate impact of crime. As you point out, many city employees who have to deal with the public feel that it has become more dangerous and disorderly to do so since the pandemic. Additionally, lack of enforcement of safety on transit is going to be felt the most by people coming from or passing through areas with the most crime. It should be clearly obvious that our greatest duty is to give those people the safe public services they deserve, moreso than it is to avoid punishing those who would endanger them.
Regarding #2, something Ive pushed for is having copa just kick smokers and such completely off the system. Smoking is hardly a police issue so dragging someone to court is a lotz but inconveniencing them? Great little punishment. Take it a step furth and confiscate their ciga before kicking them off. So the punishment for smoking on the train would be loss of cigarettes, missing your train, and having to pay to enter the train again.
This is relatively anodyne compared to smoking or physical/verbal abuse, but just once I want a CTA announcement to encourage people to remove their backpacks when the train is crowded.
I remember being 25 and chuckling about someone loudly playing terrible drill music on a speaker at 7:30am. Definitely more annoyed today as a middle-aged dad! Smoking a cig, though, is such a dick move.
I'm curious what sort of antisocial behavior was going on in the 1950s. Did having a second conductor on those trains actually help? Were societal norms strong enough then to keep trains quiet and orderly? I suspect there were probably still teenage "athletic club" members engaging is disorder back then too. Maybe fewer urine soaked down-on-their-luck types. They probably just got arrested.
Great article. I'm so glad you mentioned perception of safety. If people don't feel safe on transit, the actual numbers are next to useless. I agree that we've let perception of safety slip so far on the CTA that CPD are probably best equipped to bring us back to baseline, but non-police solutions (i.e.-ambassadors) and co-responder models (police + trained social service workers, like the Chicago CARE program) have proven successful in other places. I think the challenge with the CTA is we seem committed to creating facades of programs and then ceding defeat when they don't work. Take for example the security guards. When I was doing research a few years ago about public safety on transit, every place required the non-police responders (ambassadors, security guards, social workers, etc.) to track their engagements and report that data. This allowed the agencies to see what assistance was being provided and where. It also provided an insight into use of force, and a recurring finding was that only about 1% of engagements actually required police intervention. I can't confirm this, but given that it seems nobody's seen the security guards actually do anything besides huddle and ignore passengers, I can't imagine this engagement tracking is happening on the CTA.
Also, thank you for mentioning the communication gap. In the years following the pandemic, RTD (Denver), SEPTA (Philadelphia), Metro (Los Angeles) and several other agencies launched or expanded their "Watch" app that let users anonymously and discretely report shenanigans on the train. The fact that CTA hasn't done something at least similar to this is wild. There doesn't seem to be any attempt at accountability to ensure interventions are actually set up to achieve the outcomes they claim to support at the CTA, and that feels like an institutional issue.
As an aside, SEPTA stood out as the only agency that actually removed people from the train or bus if they refused the support of the social service providers. I think many people in transit have lost track of the plot. Transit is here to get people from point A to point B in a safe, efficient and dignified way. All other mandates have to come secondary to that.
Hey thanks! This is really helpful additional context. I'm not anti-transit ambassador, and I'm certainly not anti alternative response. But civilian employees (bus drivers, station attendants, or ambassadors) need to know that they can be backed up quickly. And I do worry that the evidence so far on Ambassador programs mostly comes from self report from agencies (i.e., XX% people when asked by an ambassador said that they liked an ambassador). We need more rigor on this stuff - some of which I hope will come as the programs mature.
The push by a small segment of activists and far-left researchers to force everyone to kowtow to their fringe ideas has led agencies like the CTA to make irrational decisions that don’t reflect what the majority of their riders want. Case in point the CTA’s decision to abandon posting alerts on Twitter/X and move over to Bluesky. Twitter/X has something like 15 times the number of users that Bluesky does, so if your goal is to put out messages that will be seen by the most numbers of customers/potential customers, you would obviously post on Twitter. But if your goal is to send a signal to the liberal chattering class about what you think about Elon Musk and DOGE, will then obviously you’ll abandon Twitter for the niche platform that liberal elites love.
It’s rinse and repeat this type of decision making involving safety (“certain activists think police are bad”), capital investments (“sure, spending nearly $6 billion on a rail extension while hiding its true cost from decision makers is fine because it’s an economically disinvested area”), and other areas that has led the CTA to the point where it went from a model of how to run and maintain a legacy rail system to a national embarrassment.
Decades from now, historians should seriously research how ideas that were not only damaging but also unpopular from the jump wound up having so much purchase from around 2014 to 2022.
One other thing I've noticed is that perceptions that the system isn't safe are highly concentrated the Red and Blue lines, the most useful lines on the system from a transportation value standpoint.
The new-ish K-9 security guards at the Logan Square stop do a good job, but everyone seems to know they’re not allowed to physically intervene. When someone refuses to cooperate, the train just sits there while they wait for CPD or the person gets annoyed and leaves on their own. Unfortunately it seems like this also annoys the CTA conductors and makes me wonder if they have performance metrics that are impacted by the delays.
If someone wanted to prove a point about how riders feel about the CTA, even those of us who ride during the day when safety isn’t the main concern, they should go to random stations and film what happens when a train pulls in. Nine out of ten will scan each car to figure out which one to avoid. The other 10% are infrequent riders who quickly find out why that one empty car was too good to be true.
CFD responds to people on CTA everyday. Many times the patients are frequent fliers, but it is almost exclusively someone in need of social support services. The data from CFD would be helpful to track when having these conversations due to the sheer volume of runs. This is almost never a violent crime situation - since CFD is called - but the average person does not feel safe around a person having a psychotic episode.
Further, when CFD responds for “person down from the unknown” on the CTA (think central points like Clark & Lake or Redline along Grand to Jackson corridor):
A) often there are multiple people who fit this description bc the homeless will use CTA to stay warm;
B) sometimes as many as 20 “security guards” are not only standing around doing nothing but have no information about the situation. Again, communication issue.
Perception is reality. And on a very cold day in winter, you can find a dozen homeless people huddled near the elevators on the second floor of the Clark/Lake stop. They’re harming no one, but the average person doesn’t love that vibe.
I don’t have solutions but appreciate the conversation and hope it leads to positive change. The city needs and deserves better.
Great post, such an important topic. Two things to add:
1. Public transit needs to be safe enough that absolutely everyone feels safe riding it at any time, in all circumstances.
2. While discussions of equity have focused on disparate impact of policing, this needs to be balanced by consideration of the disparate impact of crime. As you point out, many city employees who have to deal with the public feel that it has become more dangerous and disorderly to do so since the pandemic. Additionally, lack of enforcement of safety on transit is going to be felt the most by people coming from or passing through areas with the most crime. It should be clearly obvious that our greatest duty is to give those people the safe public services they deserve, moreso than it is to avoid punishing those who would endanger them.
Yep. Women are a lot more likely to get harassed, and low-income Chicagoans, or people working late night shifts are getting the worst of this now.
Regarding #2, something Ive pushed for is having copa just kick smokers and such completely off the system. Smoking is hardly a police issue so dragging someone to court is a lotz but inconveniencing them? Great little punishment. Take it a step furth and confiscate their ciga before kicking them off. So the punishment for smoking on the train would be loss of cigarettes, missing your train, and having to pay to enter the train again.
Woah. Bad typing on my part! At least it seems legible ha ha
This is relatively anodyne compared to smoking or physical/verbal abuse, but just once I want a CTA announcement to encourage people to remove their backpacks when the train is crowded.
That and putting your phone on speaker.
I remember being 25 and chuckling about someone loudly playing terrible drill music on a speaker at 7:30am. Definitely more annoyed today as a middle-aged dad! Smoking a cig, though, is such a dick move.
I'm curious what sort of antisocial behavior was going on in the 1950s. Did having a second conductor on those trains actually help? Were societal norms strong enough then to keep trains quiet and orderly? I suspect there were probably still teenage "athletic club" members engaging is disorder back then too. Maybe fewer urine soaked down-on-their-luck types. They probably just got arrested.
Great article. I'm so glad you mentioned perception of safety. If people don't feel safe on transit, the actual numbers are next to useless. I agree that we've let perception of safety slip so far on the CTA that CPD are probably best equipped to bring us back to baseline, but non-police solutions (i.e.-ambassadors) and co-responder models (police + trained social service workers, like the Chicago CARE program) have proven successful in other places. I think the challenge with the CTA is we seem committed to creating facades of programs and then ceding defeat when they don't work. Take for example the security guards. When I was doing research a few years ago about public safety on transit, every place required the non-police responders (ambassadors, security guards, social workers, etc.) to track their engagements and report that data. This allowed the agencies to see what assistance was being provided and where. It also provided an insight into use of force, and a recurring finding was that only about 1% of engagements actually required police intervention. I can't confirm this, but given that it seems nobody's seen the security guards actually do anything besides huddle and ignore passengers, I can't imagine this engagement tracking is happening on the CTA.
Also, thank you for mentioning the communication gap. In the years following the pandemic, RTD (Denver), SEPTA (Philadelphia), Metro (Los Angeles) and several other agencies launched or expanded their "Watch" app that let users anonymously and discretely report shenanigans on the train. The fact that CTA hasn't done something at least similar to this is wild. There doesn't seem to be any attempt at accountability to ensure interventions are actually set up to achieve the outcomes they claim to support at the CTA, and that feels like an institutional issue.
As an aside, SEPTA stood out as the only agency that actually removed people from the train or bus if they refused the support of the social service providers. I think many people in transit have lost track of the plot. Transit is here to get people from point A to point B in a safe, efficient and dignified way. All other mandates have to come secondary to that.
Thanks for the article!
Hey thanks! This is really helpful additional context. I'm not anti-transit ambassador, and I'm certainly not anti alternative response. But civilian employees (bus drivers, station attendants, or ambassadors) need to know that they can be backed up quickly. And I do worry that the evidence so far on Ambassador programs mostly comes from self report from agencies (i.e., XX% people when asked by an ambassador said that they liked an ambassador). We need more rigor on this stuff - some of which I hope will come as the programs mature.
The push by a small segment of activists and far-left researchers to force everyone to kowtow to their fringe ideas has led agencies like the CTA to make irrational decisions that don’t reflect what the majority of their riders want. Case in point the CTA’s decision to abandon posting alerts on Twitter/X and move over to Bluesky. Twitter/X has something like 15 times the number of users that Bluesky does, so if your goal is to put out messages that will be seen by the most numbers of customers/potential customers, you would obviously post on Twitter. But if your goal is to send a signal to the liberal chattering class about what you think about Elon Musk and DOGE, will then obviously you’ll abandon Twitter for the niche platform that liberal elites love.
It’s rinse and repeat this type of decision making involving safety (“certain activists think police are bad”), capital investments (“sure, spending nearly $6 billion on a rail extension while hiding its true cost from decision makers is fine because it’s an economically disinvested area”), and other areas that has led the CTA to the point where it went from a model of how to run and maintain a legacy rail system to a national embarrassment.
Decades from now, historians should seriously research how ideas that were not only damaging but also unpopular from the jump wound up having so much purchase from around 2014 to 2022.
One other thing I've noticed is that perceptions that the system isn't safe are highly concentrated the Red and Blue lines, the most useful lines on the system from a transportation value standpoint.
Green line.
The new-ish K-9 security guards at the Logan Square stop do a good job, but everyone seems to know they’re not allowed to physically intervene. When someone refuses to cooperate, the train just sits there while they wait for CPD or the person gets annoyed and leaves on their own. Unfortunately it seems like this also annoys the CTA conductors and makes me wonder if they have performance metrics that are impacted by the delays.
If someone wanted to prove a point about how riders feel about the CTA, even those of us who ride during the day when safety isn’t the main concern, they should go to random stations and film what happens when a train pulls in. Nine out of ten will scan each car to figure out which one to avoid. The other 10% are infrequent riders who quickly find out why that one empty car was too good to be true.
great write-up. As a regular CTA user, I hope decision-makers find this article and drive the safety issue through local enforcement.
If you protect it, they will come
CFD responds to people on CTA everyday. Many times the patients are frequent fliers, but it is almost exclusively someone in need of social support services. The data from CFD would be helpful to track when having these conversations due to the sheer volume of runs. This is almost never a violent crime situation - since CFD is called - but the average person does not feel safe around a person having a psychotic episode.
Further, when CFD responds for “person down from the unknown” on the CTA (think central points like Clark & Lake or Redline along Grand to Jackson corridor):
A) often there are multiple people who fit this description bc the homeless will use CTA to stay warm;
B) sometimes as many as 20 “security guards” are not only standing around doing nothing but have no information about the situation. Again, communication issue.
Perception is reality. And on a very cold day in winter, you can find a dozen homeless people huddled near the elevators on the second floor of the Clark/Lake stop. They’re harming no one, but the average person doesn’t love that vibe.
I don’t have solutions but appreciate the conversation and hope it leads to positive change. The city needs and deserves better.