Elevating Episode 1

nat sounds of CTA

NARRATION: There’s no question that Chicago’s elevated rail system keeps the city – and suburbs – moving. It’s sort of an iconic image — watch any movie or TV show set in Chicago, and you’ll probably see more than a few shots of the L. 

I didn’t grow up with the L. I’m from Austin — a car-centric city that’s only becoming more so. I guess that’s why I’ve always liked the idea of public transportation, as a tool for the community. By focusing on the Chicago L, I hoped to learn how public transportation systems come to be, how they operate now and how they’re planning to operate in the future. And I wanted to share some of my findings.

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I’m Allison Rauch, and this is Elevating, a new podcast series from WNUR News.

NARRATION: Episode 1: How does the L work?

Before we dive in, let’s get at least a little familiar with how the L came to be. Like many public transportation systems, what would become the L started developing just as Chicago was emerging as an important American city.

SADOWSKI: In each city, there were natural factors that influenced the course of events. Chicago being a major city, one of the larger cities, certainly in its time, with rapid growth in the late 1800s, developed a lot of congestion.

That’s David Sadowski, a lifelong Chicagoan and a public transportation enthusiast. Sadowski has written several books on the Chicago L and maintains a blog called The Trolley Dodger, dedicated to archival photos of public transportation systems. He also gives presentations for the public from time to time.

*nat sound from presentation

SADOWSKI: The first thing that happened was you had the development of what were called horsecar lines…horse drawn transportation. Or omnibuses. And the first horse car line in Chicago was in 1859…and then the next thing that sort of was more efficient than the horse car was a cable car. People today just associate cable cars with San Francisco, but actually, in the 1880s, a cable car system developed in Chicago that was actually larger than the San Francisco system. 

The cable car system eventually got replaced by electric-powered streetcars. These forms of transportation were developing at the same time as the elevated rail systems.

SADOWSKI: Meanwhile, then also, you have what’s called a grade separation movement in Chicago, where, because first starting with the World’s Columbian Exposition, and the 1890s, the idea was, well, there’s gonna be so many people going down to the site of the Fair, which was in Jackson Park, that the congestion is is going to be totally unmanageable. So the solution there was to elevate the railroads and get them off of the street level … and that was the Southside L ,which was the first elevated that we had and the Lake Street L which was the second private company to start elevating. They began using steam steam, so they had small steam locomotives to power those trains. And then on the fare itself, there was sort of an electrical railroad that was using a third rail, kind of like a demonstration railroad of the concept of what we have now, and that was called the Columbian intramural railway. So sort of like the proof of concept.

Fast forward through decades of industrial development and the merging of various private companies, Chicago’s public transit system ended up how it is today.

JOSEPH SCHOFER: In the Chicago metropolitan area, there’s commuter rail, there’s rail, rapid transit, and there’s bus service. And those services are delivered by three different organizations.

That’s Joseph Schofer, emeritus professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University. He explained more about how the CTA was formed.

SCHOFER: The CTA is really the descendant of private carriers that were in the market from the beginning of the 20th century, up until the late 1940s. They were in the business to make money and they did make money for a long time. And when they stopped making money, the possibility was that they either were subsidized, okay, then we did that for a while, or that they went away, which would have been a problem for lots of residents of the city, or that the government took them over. So the CTA is this marriage of or adoption, if you will, of a bunch of private carriers into a unified system.

Schofer touched on an always-critical point for public transportation: funding. 

SCHOFER: One of the things to remember is that these lines are not profitable. No public transit system in the United States is profitable, hey, you might find a tiny little piece here or there. Maybe the New York subway system is because they have a lot of riders. But everything else is subsidized. If you stopped subsidizing, they would just go away. So why do we subsidize them, because society has decided that the service is really important. And so we’re willing to share the cost of it.

Anything you buy in Cook County, you’ll pay a 1% sales tax. This goes to the Regional Transportation Authority, or RTA. This organization funnels the money back out to the CTA, as well as Metra and Pace.

SCHOFER:  What’s really important about it is that the transit operators in this region have a certain source of money that they know that’s going to come in so they can plan and manage with that, we could argue that that isn’t enough. And we could have that discussion. Okay, we can always do that…But we have this regular built-in source of funding that we agreed on in the 70s, in the 1970s. So that’s really good, a good thing. 

Even though the CTA can rely on money coming in, it’s expensive to maintain a rail system. Schofer estimated that the CTA covers a little less than 50% of costs from fares, with the subsidy helping to make up the rest. But it’s still a challenge, especially on the fare side. 

SCHOFER: The market which was this big, you can’t see it, which was, which was, let’s say, 100. Units 100%. The market is like 50, or 60%, of what it used to be. So at the end of the day, they’re counting money that goes into the farebox…and they’re comparing it to their costs, which it turns out, didn’t go down, because for the most part, they didn’t cut back service. So they’re looking at a situation where they’re going to have to make massive cuts, or they’re going to need more money.

The market for public transportation has decreased for various reasons, but the COVID-19 pandemic was a big one. 

SCHOFER: When, when I was getting into the transportation business, which was many decades ago, there were people who were poking around saying, you know, someday, communication is going to be so good, that we won’t need to travel. And, people did research on it and made all kinds of predictions. And it was a bunch of I don’t know if you can say this on your radio, but it was a bunch of crap. It wasn’t true. It didn’t happen. The technology came. And and and it didn’t really make any change… Then something came along called COVID.

With quarantining and the switch to online events, ridership was bound to be affected. 

BRIAN STEELE: Prior to the pandemic, the CTA was carrying roughly 1.5 million customers on an average weekday, then came the pandemic and that ridership plunged. More than 80%, we dropped down to about 250,000 daily rides.

That’s Brian Steele, Vice President of Communications and Marketing for the CTA. Steele said that ridership today has risen to about 900,000 on an average weekday. So while that’s way up from the peak of the pandemic, it’s still a far cry from pre-COVID numbers.

STEELE: Transit ridership doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Transit ridership is a function of what’s going on in larger society. Prior to March 2020, there really wasn’t this thing called work from home, remote working. And as we’ve seen, multiple industries now have hybrid work schedules for their workers. So instead of taking public transit five days a week to and from the office, some workers are taking it three days a week, some workers are taking it two days a week, some are taking it one day a week. So that’s certainly going to have an impact on ridership. But beyond the work commute, I think there’s some other societal factors that are factoring into transit ridership…I think a lot of people’s daily routines and how they approach their transportation and mobility has changed. 

Those missing riders mean that the CTA is still figuring out how to continue operations with a significant chunk of their budget gone. But Steele says that another concern is labor.

STEELE: Even before the pandemic began, the CTA was starting to see some challenges in frankly, having enough workers to operate our trains and buses. Then the pandemic hit. And we saw the impacts that many industries had about the great resignation, about people switching careers. We also saw significantly increased competition from other marketplace transportation, and like delivery company providers, right, operators who normally would want to drive a CTA bus, we’re now getting these big bonuses, and signing bonuses and incentives from the likes of UPS and FedEx and things like that. So we saw a lot of marketplace competition. The challenges of a reduced workforce are something that three years after the pandemic, we are still addressing.

Steele said that although the CTA has been successful in filling vacancies on the bus side of operations, rail has been more complicated.

STEELE: Rail continues to be a challenge. Rail Operations is really where we’re seeing the biggest challenges in hiring. And not surprisingly, where we’re seeing the biggest challenges in service. Let me say it this way, our rail service is not where we want it to be, and not where it should be and not what our customers deserve. 

Lack of labor can mean fewer or less frequent trains. This affects customer experience, which in turn can affect ridership and fares. It’s sort of a complicated cycle, but the bottom line is always the money. We’ll talk more about issues with the L, as well as challenges it’s facing, in a future episode. 

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Next episode, we’ll talk about who the L is serving, and how it plays into Chicago from a customer perspective.

SCHOEFER: We always talk about the choice riders in the policy process, because on environmental grounds, you know, so if I can get you out of your car and onto the train, it’s better for the environment, but you’re not a captive rider. 

STEELE: Why is it that the sub far south side of Chicago is the only part of the city that does not have rail service?

Thanks for listening to Elevating. For WNUR News, I’m Allison Rauch.

Theme: Fight to the End