Great article. The peer cities metric is good but it is important to remember that Chicago lags far behind leaders London and Berlin with its farm-to-market rail mass transit network. You simply cannot get quickly anywhere via a train but to and from downtown here in Chicago. Evanston to OHare? Gotta go downtown first. Lincoln Park to Wicker Park? Go downtown first. In London, Paris or Berlin? There are concentric rings where you can take a subway across town with heading into the center. Chicago has had an incredible amount of legacy systems that were simply tossed out without any thought of reuse. We once had the largest cable car network in the world. It was modified for faster street cars that were junked. When walking up Kingsbury and North Ave with a development group transforming an industrial area into needed housing, we stepped over railroad tracks that are being ripped out. Why? Why not create a new light rail line to combat the traffic congestion? Our imagination needs to broaden and see what is possible. Chicago needs a circle line and ways to get around quickly during rush hour. New rail mass transit that creates new opportunities here in Chicago and improves our quality of life. Yes, have a high speed bike lane but we need less rails to trails and more new rail and new bike lanes that foster a new paradigm in getting around.
Operations planning is definitely the largest (hidden) piece of the puzzle here. I think this funding gives the agencies the cushion to hopefully do the necessary planning.
One thing that handicaps CTA bus planning in the City of Chicago is aldermanic prerogative. In a weird way, it's extremely difficult for CTA to remove or alter bus stop placement without aldermanic coordination and tacit approval. And so, CTA, perhaps due to it's existing board structure under mayoral control (to be changed under NITA) has historically avoided this fight. That needs to change.
1. Upzoning around stations - I should not see SFH (or worse, empty lots) close to CTA and Metra stations. This alone would massively boost ridership AND increase affordability. Ideally you’d have no limits other than safety codes within a 1 mile radius (15-20 min walk) of a station. You can have a gradient of density after that such as low rise apartments, townhouses/stacked townhouses etc (though I’d rather we just allowed people to build whatever they wanted wherever as long as polluting uses are segregated).
2. Design and project management: instead of reinventing the wheel every time we want to build/upgrade/maintain transit the way we do currently, you could have a government agency that does in-house designs and project management so that it submits a full design package to the contractor. MIDOT does in house design for roads and they are way more efficient than other states. Collaborate with CA, MA and NY to fund this and start hiring for the design bureau. If it does well, it can even become an export industry for other states and countries.
Thanks for a great read. Found the bus stop frequency data to be particularly interesting and easy adjustment to yield faster service. Pretty astounding how different Chicago is than every other major metro in that regard. But truly one of the most agonizing parts of taking the bus home during rush hour. Surely if the one or two people at some in between stops were consolidated a block down the street it would speed things up some. My hunch is that this would need to be paired with greater ADA accessibility across the board, however. For those with mobility impairment, walking out the door to the bus is a lifeline.
Very true. The other benefit of consolidation is that with fewer stops, you can spend more on the stops you have. That means shelters, benches, and maybe even specific ADA enhancements, instead of a pole and a curb.
Thank you so much for this article. I've tried to recuse myself from a lot of the local transit conversation, at least until after the funding decision was made, mostly to not disrupt the momentum advocates were building. Now that transit is on more sure footing financially, we should party for a spell, but actually delivering on the "world class system" messaging that got us here takes more than an emotional appeal.
Thanks for mentioning bus stop spacing. It truly is one of my favorite transit topics because it's literally free to do if you do it in house.
Some years back, CTA actually tried out stop spacing on a handful of bus routes (I think the 49 was one) but there was some falling out (somebody probably got yelled at) and they never tried it again, (even though they kept the revised spacing). I think it also touched the farebox recovery conversation. I read online somewhere there was an initial drop in ridership (marginal and expected; you changed something), but that was enough to scare staff away from the concept because reduced ridership -> reduced recovery ratios. I think the reduced farebox recovery ratio that came with NITA is a valid enough solution to a problem that NITA itself should nullify. The 50% ratio gave CTA, Metra and Pace a strong enough incentive to infight over ridership instead of focusing on getting people where they need to go (ex- building a $5.5B extension of the Red Line Extension instead of beefing up the Metra Electric or fast tracking the Pace Pulse Halsted line, or both).
Another operational reform that I think would do numbers for CTA is ditching load based scheduling. Occasionally, when you see CTA buses bunched, they're scheduled to run together because of anticipated (modeled) loads at a specific time. It makes sense on paper, but two buses five minutes apart are much more useful than two buses in a platoon followed by a 10 minute gap.
Overall, I think the tricky part of transit operational reforms is that you just need people that know how to, and care to run a transit system, and there's not really an established pipeline of where to find those people (I think that's part of why transit has become such a natural landing place for political favor type appointments).
For what it's worth, I'm more optimistic than I've been in a while about the state of the CTA. I'm not going to pretend to understand the political inner workings of the CTA, but it does feel like the agency has taken on a more open, less stuffy tone since Nora took over. It could all just be signaling, but that's at least signaling that we can work with.
I just experienced load-based scheduling on the 152 Addison, where two buses were bunched to handle the PM peak (I was traveling west from the Addison Blue Line). The next two buses were 15 minutes behind.
It's a policy based in noble intentions (you never want to leave anybody at the bus stop), but life is more dynamic than a modeled bus schedule. If you keep the headway consistent and reliable, people can shift their travel around the service.
I also suspect there's some loose operations in the mix. Once a bus catches the one in front of them, the driver has a decently strong incentive to hang out behind the leading bus (and ride mostly empty). Ideally, a road supervisor or dispatcher should be monitoring and resolving operational issues like that as they present themselves, but I'm not sure how actively that happens at the CTA.
But a depressing read, also as usual. All of the good ideas and great intentions of the folks like you and your readers, people who are invested in the minutae of how to make the city work better, are wasted on a city whose government is more interested in patronage than progress.
Can any of us actually see this City government developing a plan that uses efficiencies to lower costs? Mayor Johnson has already said efficiency is just a dog whistle for racism.
Can we imagine this city council mustering enough votes to streamline labor costs? demand efficiency and budget adherence from contractors? look to REDUCE the amount of money the city pays to its workforce?
I feel nothing will change until the City is forced to change. And that will only happen with the oversight that comes from a bankruptcy and a state or federal takeover. Until then, we are destined to spend the most money in transit history for FOUR STOPS on the red line that will be lightly used and which is a massively expensive solution that addresses a very tiny problem.
While I broadly share your pessimism regarding governance in Chicagoland, the Mayor and Council do not have direct control over CTA labor agreements or operational efficiencies. NITA reform will dilute that influence even more for capital planning.....in theory. We'll see.
Wonderful piece, thanks for sharing. I wish more people in charge would listen to voices like yours and realize that getting more people to ride and use transit is the only way to ensure it will succeed. When the system is in a death-spiral, getting out of it is the only thing that matters.
I agree with the vast majority of what’s in here, but I do suspect the fare box recovery ratios of European cities have to do with land use differences that produce massively higher mode share. I think a more robust analysis of operational efficiency would compare the CTA to recovery ratios in, eg, NYC/Philly/DC/LA/Seattle, as well as looking at other measures, such as cost per revenue mile or revenue hour.
Hey thanks! It's definitely true that land use drivers are the biggest factor here -- but it's also true that European farebox recovery rates have bounced back much faster, and the new legislation here doesn't really plan for something similar to occur.
I do also fundamentally think we need to prioritize this metric going forward -- 15-20% recovery rates are bad for the system's finances, but they're also a major political liability in the long run.
Do you happen to know why our European peer cities’ fare box recovery post-pandemic recovered much faster than in US cities like Chicago? The numbers clearly show that they did, but knowing why they did is our best chance at knowing how to increase our own over time.
You write that the people in charge of the CTA "had displayed a shameful lack of focus on basically anything other than asking for more money". So...why do they suck? Why can't they get fired and replaced by more competent people? Running the public transit system of a city of three million people seems like it's kind of important to get right.
Some of them have left (like Dorval Carter). Right now, there’s also an opportunity to pick new board members who will maintain a higher set of standards, and potentially replace other managers, going forward.
Thanks, good to know. I hope there's a bit more specificity than this, but I'm glad to see there are requirements for certain experience and not just a random person from someone's friend group like we've seen happen before in Chicago in recent years.
Great article. The peer cities metric is good but it is important to remember that Chicago lags far behind leaders London and Berlin with its farm-to-market rail mass transit network. You simply cannot get quickly anywhere via a train but to and from downtown here in Chicago. Evanston to OHare? Gotta go downtown first. Lincoln Park to Wicker Park? Go downtown first. In London, Paris or Berlin? There are concentric rings where you can take a subway across town with heading into the center. Chicago has had an incredible amount of legacy systems that were simply tossed out without any thought of reuse. We once had the largest cable car network in the world. It was modified for faster street cars that were junked. When walking up Kingsbury and North Ave with a development group transforming an industrial area into needed housing, we stepped over railroad tracks that are being ripped out. Why? Why not create a new light rail line to combat the traffic congestion? Our imagination needs to broaden and see what is possible. Chicago needs a circle line and ways to get around quickly during rush hour. New rail mass transit that creates new opportunities here in Chicago and improves our quality of life. Yes, have a high speed bike lane but we need less rails to trails and more new rail and new bike lanes that foster a new paradigm in getting around.
Operations planning is definitely the largest (hidden) piece of the puzzle here. I think this funding gives the agencies the cushion to hopefully do the necessary planning.
One thing that handicaps CTA bus planning in the City of Chicago is aldermanic prerogative. In a weird way, it's extremely difficult for CTA to remove or alter bus stop placement without aldermanic coordination and tacit approval. And so, CTA, perhaps due to it's existing board structure under mayoral control (to be changed under NITA) has historically avoided this fight. That needs to change.
Good article. I would add a few solutions:
1. Upzoning around stations - I should not see SFH (or worse, empty lots) close to CTA and Metra stations. This alone would massively boost ridership AND increase affordability. Ideally you’d have no limits other than safety codes within a 1 mile radius (15-20 min walk) of a station. You can have a gradient of density after that such as low rise apartments, townhouses/stacked townhouses etc (though I’d rather we just allowed people to build whatever they wanted wherever as long as polluting uses are segregated).
2. Design and project management: instead of reinventing the wheel every time we want to build/upgrade/maintain transit the way we do currently, you could have a government agency that does in-house designs and project management so that it submits a full design package to the contractor. MIDOT does in house design for roads and they are way more efficient than other states. Collaborate with CA, MA and NY to fund this and start hiring for the design bureau. If it does well, it can even become an export industry for other states and countries.
Thanks for a great read. Found the bus stop frequency data to be particularly interesting and easy adjustment to yield faster service. Pretty astounding how different Chicago is than every other major metro in that regard. But truly one of the most agonizing parts of taking the bus home during rush hour. Surely if the one or two people at some in between stops were consolidated a block down the street it would speed things up some. My hunch is that this would need to be paired with greater ADA accessibility across the board, however. For those with mobility impairment, walking out the door to the bus is a lifeline.
Very true. The other benefit of consolidation is that with fewer stops, you can spend more on the stops you have. That means shelters, benches, and maybe even specific ADA enhancements, instead of a pole and a curb.
Thank you so much for this article. I've tried to recuse myself from a lot of the local transit conversation, at least until after the funding decision was made, mostly to not disrupt the momentum advocates were building. Now that transit is on more sure footing financially, we should party for a spell, but actually delivering on the "world class system" messaging that got us here takes more than an emotional appeal.
Thanks for mentioning bus stop spacing. It truly is one of my favorite transit topics because it's literally free to do if you do it in house.
(Shameless plug for my article on bus stop balancing: https://www.planetizen.com/blogs/135975-wow-these-bus-stops-are-close-together-case-bus-stop-balancing)
Some years back, CTA actually tried out stop spacing on a handful of bus routes (I think the 49 was one) but there was some falling out (somebody probably got yelled at) and they never tried it again, (even though they kept the revised spacing). I think it also touched the farebox recovery conversation. I read online somewhere there was an initial drop in ridership (marginal and expected; you changed something), but that was enough to scare staff away from the concept because reduced ridership -> reduced recovery ratios. I think the reduced farebox recovery ratio that came with NITA is a valid enough solution to a problem that NITA itself should nullify. The 50% ratio gave CTA, Metra and Pace a strong enough incentive to infight over ridership instead of focusing on getting people where they need to go (ex- building a $5.5B extension of the Red Line Extension instead of beefing up the Metra Electric or fast tracking the Pace Pulse Halsted line, or both).
Another operational reform that I think would do numbers for CTA is ditching load based scheduling. Occasionally, when you see CTA buses bunched, they're scheduled to run together because of anticipated (modeled) loads at a specific time. It makes sense on paper, but two buses five minutes apart are much more useful than two buses in a platoon followed by a 10 minute gap.
Overall, I think the tricky part of transit operational reforms is that you just need people that know how to, and care to run a transit system, and there's not really an established pipeline of where to find those people (I think that's part of why transit has become such a natural landing place for political favor type appointments).
For what it's worth, I'm more optimistic than I've been in a while about the state of the CTA. I'm not going to pretend to understand the political inner workings of the CTA, but it does feel like the agency has taken on a more open, less stuffy tone since Nora took over. It could all just be signaling, but that's at least signaling that we can work with.
I just experienced load-based scheduling on the 152 Addison, where two buses were bunched to handle the PM peak (I was traveling west from the Addison Blue Line). The next two buses were 15 minutes behind.
It's a policy based in noble intentions (you never want to leave anybody at the bus stop), but life is more dynamic than a modeled bus schedule. If you keep the headway consistent and reliable, people can shift their travel around the service.
I also suspect there's some loose operations in the mix. Once a bus catches the one in front of them, the driver has a decently strong incentive to hang out behind the leading bus (and ride mostly empty). Ideally, a road supervisor or dispatcher should be monitoring and resolving operational issues like that as they present themselves, but I'm not sure how actively that happens at the CTA.
A good read as usual. Nice job
But a depressing read, also as usual. All of the good ideas and great intentions of the folks like you and your readers, people who are invested in the minutae of how to make the city work better, are wasted on a city whose government is more interested in patronage than progress.
Can any of us actually see this City government developing a plan that uses efficiencies to lower costs? Mayor Johnson has already said efficiency is just a dog whistle for racism.
Can we imagine this city council mustering enough votes to streamline labor costs? demand efficiency and budget adherence from contractors? look to REDUCE the amount of money the city pays to its workforce?
I feel nothing will change until the City is forced to change. And that will only happen with the oversight that comes from a bankruptcy and a state or federal takeover. Until then, we are destined to spend the most money in transit history for FOUR STOPS on the red line that will be lightly used and which is a massively expensive solution that addresses a very tiny problem.
yours truly,
debbie downer.
While I broadly share your pessimism regarding governance in Chicagoland, the Mayor and Council do not have direct control over CTA labor agreements or operational efficiencies. NITA reform will dilute that influence even more for capital planning.....in theory. We'll see.
Wonderful piece, thanks for sharing. I wish more people in charge would listen to voices like yours and realize that getting more people to ride and use transit is the only way to ensure it will succeed. When the system is in a death-spiral, getting out of it is the only thing that matters.
Thank you!
I agree with the vast majority of what’s in here, but I do suspect the fare box recovery ratios of European cities have to do with land use differences that produce massively higher mode share. I think a more robust analysis of operational efficiency would compare the CTA to recovery ratios in, eg, NYC/Philly/DC/LA/Seattle, as well as looking at other measures, such as cost per revenue mile or revenue hour.
Hey thanks! It's definitely true that land use drivers are the biggest factor here -- but it's also true that European farebox recovery rates have bounced back much faster, and the new legislation here doesn't really plan for something similar to occur.
I do also fundamentally think we need to prioritize this metric going forward -- 15-20% recovery rates are bad for the system's finances, but they're also a major political liability in the long run.
I don't have all the data on comparisons to US transit agencies (and it'd very much be worth a follow-up), but I would note that the RTA's dashboard indicates that CTA, Pace and Metra are all performing a (self-selected) set of peers: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/b1a29e850bf44bf087e01277eabfcaad/page/Ridership
Do you happen to know why our European peer cities’ fare box recovery post-pandemic recovered much faster than in US cities like Chicago? The numbers clearly show that they did, but knowing why they did is our best chance at knowing how to increase our own over time.
Doesn't the legislation drop the recovery ratio to just 20% starting in 2029 (pg. 308)?
Would be interested to have a deeper dive into the politics of the recovery ratio and the "free bus" debate.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/16/nx-s1-5535831/new-york-free-buses-advocates-divided
It does. Sounds like I've got my work cut out for me :)
You write that the people in charge of the CTA "had displayed a shameful lack of focus on basically anything other than asking for more money". So...why do they suck? Why can't they get fired and replaced by more competent people? Running the public transit system of a city of three million people seems like it's kind of important to get right.
Some of them have left (like Dorval Carter). Right now, there’s also an opportunity to pick new board members who will maintain a higher set of standards, and potentially replace other managers, going forward.
Any idea if there are any requirements for these new appointed board members to have demonstrate transit system operations experience at all?
SB2111 outlines requirements for the boards of each agency. Here's the snippet for the NITA board
10 (i) Directors shall have diverse and substantial relevant
11 experience and expertise for overseeing the planning,
12 operation, and funding of a regional transportation system,
13 including, but not limited to, backgrounds in urban and
14 regional planning, management of large capital projects, labor
15 and workforce development, business management, public
16 administration, transportation, and community organizations.
17 (j) Those responsible for appointing Directors shall
18 strive to assemble a set of Directors that, to the greatest
19 extent possible, reflects the ethnic, cultural, economic,
20 racial, and geographic diversity of the metropolitan region.
21 (Source: P.A. 98-709, eff. 7-16-14.)
Thanks, good to know. I hope there's a bit more specificity than this, but I'm glad to see there are requirements for certain experience and not just a random person from someone's friend group like we've seen happen before in Chicago in recent years.
You're telling me we don't want another random pastor on the board?? Wild.