Hard on the CTA?

huh huh....I said "hard on"...huh huh....that was cool! huh huh....

*ahem* sorry...anyway...

I guess I've stirred up a mini-controversy recently. A week or so ago, there was a mention in Kyra Kyles' "Going Public" column in the RedEye about bus drivers taking unauthorized breaks with passengers in the car. The article was basically a Q&A with a CTA rep, and said rep said that drivers do have scheduled breaks but not during a route.

Well, to make a long story short, I posted this video on YouTube (details are on YouTube), and e-mailed Kyra and gave her a heads-up about it. She included my brief e-mail to her in this past Wednesday's column. Suddenly hundreds of people watched the video. I got many positive and neutral comments and a few negative ones that make me think that I might have caused a mini-controversy. One commenter mentioned "15 minutes of fame." Naaah, that's not what I was after -- hell, I was a radio broadcaster for about five years, so I already had my 15 minutes!

Anyway, I'd like to take this opportunity to both defend my own negativity and cite further examples -- and also to laud the Chicago Transit Authority, as believe it or not, they actually do things right sometimes!

Bad Experiences
Like many Chicago residents, I've had my share of aggravation from the CTA. Yes, I've been blasted before and I'll probably be blasted again for (God forbid!) saying not nice things about the CTA, but I give them 75 dollars a month to provide a service as promised, and that's what I expect. Hell, people pay less a month for cable and if one thing not right happens, they threaten lawsuits, have hissy fits, you name it; I just raise my concerns.

You can start with threats. Quit threatening to reduce service, especially on the South Side where they already have squat in terms of mass transit options. Quit threatening your people's jobs. Quit threatening to make people pay more for less service. Yeah, I know, doomsday was averted, but I won't be surprised to see the bitching and moaning later on. Don't even tell me that with all the people jamming your buses and trains that you don't have enough money.

Bus Drivers
Don't even tell me that bus drivers are perfect -- especially the one who ran over that lady who was removing her bike from the rack. Here are a few things I've seen first-hand:

• Unauthorized breaks. I wasn't on the bus at this time, but I was walking down Lincoln Avenue, and I actually saw a #11 bus, with a lot of passengers, pull over at the McDonald's at the intersection of Lincoln and Fullerton. The driver got out, so I decided to just hang around out of curiosity and see what happened. The driver actually went into the McDonald's, and minutes later came out with a bag of food (if you want to call it that), ran back into the bus with it, and drove away. Add to that my personal experience from February 16. I wouldn't have minded (or is it "mound"?) if the driver would have announced that he had to run in the store because he was dying of thirst or something, or even lied and said, "My dispatcher is asking me to go in and make a call" or something, but the thing is, people have things to do and places to go. I certainly did.
• Chatty drivers. On the same day that I videographed the driver on his unauthorized break, I was on the #22 bus when, at one stop, the driver recognized a friend of hers and the friend's young daughter and decided to just sit there and chat. Minutes went by. As they were chatting I saw the Montrose bus pass by. That was the bus I was supposed to transfer to at the next stop, but it was too late. (I figured I'd just get off at the stop and start walking and just grab the next Montrose bus to go by. I ended up walking the entire rest of my trip. Not that I don't need exercise, mind you!) I was about to speak up when she closed the door and the bus pulled away. The chattiness is also common during the morning rush on the #84 bus, when the driver takes a few moments to chat with the newspaper vendor.
• Where's the bus? Bus schedules are merely suggested times. Especially at night, when you'll wait 90 minutes for a Clark bus that's supposed to come by every 30 minutes.

L
You'll notice that I have actually not too many complaints about the buses. The trains are my main peeve.

• The Red Line schedules are not year-round. When the cold weather hits, somehow the rush hour is no longer very rushed at all. Before my office moved downtown, I worked in Lakeview and had a 20-minute train commute. That included switching from the Red Line to the Brown Line and a roughly five-minute wait on a bad day. Well, on one particularly cold day (seven degrees), I got on the Red Line platform at 8:30. My train commute was the usual 20 minutes. I got to work at 9:35. Red Line trains are scheduled to come by every five (or fewer) minutes during the morning and evening rushes. You do the math. Just last week when I was waiting for a train, I heard an announcement saying the next train was going to be express to Sheridan. Then when my train arrived, they announced it was going to be express to Addison. (Why are there express trains? Right -- to catch up because of train delays!) I loved going express to Addison, as it made my trip pretty zippy, but boy, did I not want to be among the masses I saw standing at Lawrence, Wilson, Argyle, and Berwyn!
• Unexplained slowdowns. Explain to me why at 8:00 in the morning the Red Line passes between Sheridan and Addison at about 20 miles an hour, but at 4:00 in the afternoon it's about three times faster. There have been times when I'd leave my Red Line stop on the North Side at 7:30am and still be late for my 9:00am shift downtown a block and a half away from the Red Line stop.
  
• Balance the damn volume of the announcements! In one car the announcements can be so loud that your eardrum blows out, while in the next one they're so quiet that they might actually be silent and you might be hearing sound leakage from the next car.
• Emergency doors. Hey, CTA -- panhandling isn't an emergency! How about putting alarms on the damn doors so that if someone goes through the door, it's assumed that it's an emergency, and an alarm sounds? I'll betcha that'll cut down on panhandlers.
• Odors. The Blue Line and, at night, the Red Line is full of 'em. Hey, CTA -- Febreze is pretty cheap and it'll last for several trains. USE IT! There's no reason I should get in an empty train at Howard and smell death (and see Chee-tos all over the floor).
• More train lines! Just to give you an idea...Someone living in Edgewater and who needs to go to O'Hare via mass transit has to take a 92 bus to Jefferson Park and wait a while for a Blue Line train...either that or take the Red Line all the way downtown and transfer to a train on the slow-zone-infested Blue Line. Just to go due west. How about a train line that goes to Hyde Park? Or a Pink Line stop close to United Center? In New York City, for comparison's sake, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a subway station -- and their trains are FAST (you can go from lower Manhattan to 71st Street in under ten minutes -- I've done it) and soundproof. Yeah, you can take a bus, but what about rapid transit?
• Yellow Line. Who the hell wants to go to Skokie? Especially if the train doesn't stop at Old Orchard! I guess it's useful if you want to get out of Skokie, though. And what's with that ridiculous waste-of-paper-and-ink station map in the Yellow Line?
  

Okay, enough bitching, now for the....

Good Things About CTA

Does the New York subway system have advantages over Chicago's L system? Yup. The MTA subway (and elevated lines) are all over the city, everywhere you go. However, CTA has only a small handful of train lines, and they're limited in their scope. You can go to an MTA subway station and pay for your fare with a credit/debit card; can't do that at a CTA station. MTA trains are pretty soundproof -- you can actually hold a conversation with someone, but forget it if you're going through the State Street, Dearborn, or Logan Square subway and you want to have a conversation or perhaps listen to your iPod. New York subway trains are lightning-fast, too, while CTA blames its slow trains on deteriorating rails that are much younger than those of MTA.

Having said that, CTA has some significant advantages. The trains and stations are cleaner -- even on the Red and Blue Lines! The CTA announcements are much clearer, as opposed to the muffles in the MTA subway. When the doors on a New York subway train are about to close, you hear two unpleasant off-key blips and a creepy clownlike voice telling you, "Staaaaand clear of the closing doooors!" On CTA trains, you hear two notes of a (possibly synthesized) bell carillon, followed by a voice very candidly saying, "Doors closing." Rides can be cheaper -- in New York, the fare is two bucks across the board; no fast cards, no nothin' (except perhaps for student, senior, and handicapped discounts). CTA has $1.75 fares via Chicago Card, $75 unlimited monthly passes, $5 all-day passes (MTA has this, too, but when they first rolled it out it was a complete disaster), weekly passes, etc. And dammit, when Chicago has the Crosstown Classic, it truly is a subway series -- you can take the Red Line from one ballpark to the other (and going through the entire State Street Subway), while New York's excuse for a "subway series" isn't quite so direct; it involves some complex transfers. And you can see some pretty interesting things in CTA's elevated trains. I'm sure you can on the MTA's elevated trains in the outer boroughs, but through Manhattan, you just see....darkness. Yuk! And rats.

CTA has -- or used to have -- the "blessed train" on the Red Line. That was nice -- getting in the train on the way to work and hearing a pleasant voice telling you that you're "on the best train 'cause it's the blessed train," telling students to study hard so they can be successful, etc.

Ride the #147 bus and see Lake Shore Drive how you can't see it if you're driving. And a lot of times it's much quicker than the Red Line.

Dig the view of the skyline as you're riding between Armitage and Sedgwick on the Brown or Purple Line, and tell me that's not worth the fare.

CTA Holiday Train. 'Nuff said.

In fairness, with the exception of Hyde Park, everything worth going to in Chicago is easily accessible via CTA vehicles.

I think I shall end this post abruptly.