Unreliable CTA service is a frustration for riders. It’s also costing Chicago.
Many mornings, Malcolm Maurice times his arrival at his Pilsen CTA stop to get to his downtown office early.
But then he has to wait for the train. It might be delayed because of maintenance, or a person on the tracks.
Maurice, 28, has been docked several hours of pay because the train made him unusually late to his job at a nonprofit, he said, even though his boss is generally understanding of CTA delays. He lost more money when, about six months ago, he had to cancel a dance class he teaches in the evening because he was going to arrive too late.
“It’s one of those things where I’m like, I need a bike or I need a car, and ... I feel like it’s more stressful to drive than it is to ride the train and it’s more stressful to ride a bike here than it is to ride the train,” he said.
The CTA’s struggles with service, rider concerns about safety and behaviors like smoking on buses and trains have meant time and money out of the pockets of riders like Maurice.
Employees have been late to work. They have switched jobs to ease commutes, and they’ve had to abandon plans to travel downtown for a day in the office because of transit delays. It’s a frustration and inconvenience for riders trying to get to jobs, appointments or social outings around “The City That Works.”
And the struggles cost Chicago, experts said. Challenges getting employees and visitors downtown — including the tens of thousands expected as the city hosts the Democratic National Convention next summer — are a hit to the city’s economic heart, which is still facing lower office occupancy than in 2019 and a hospitality industry recovering from the pandemic.
Reluctance to get on trains or buses can be one barrier to key efforts to boost residential development downtown and development near transit across the city.
The CTA has made strides to improve the reliability of bus and train service, and the violent crime rate on trains dropped in 2022, though it remained well above pre-pandemic levels. But the agency continues to contend with shortages of train and bus operators, sometimes longer wait times and a looming financial shortfall. As residents increasingly change the way they live and commute, CTA ridership in February was 56% of 2019 levels.
Addressing these challenges is one more item on a long to-do list for Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson, with the future of the city’s historically robust transit system hanging in the balance.
Public transit is a key economic driver for Chicago and the surrounding area. The Regional Transportation Authority estimates the area’s three public transit agencies provided $17.2 billion in regional benefits in 2022, including direct spending, economic impacts and increased productivity and economic output.
The state of public transit is a concern for members of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, said Brad Tietz, the chamber’s vice president of government relations and strategy. It’s affecting residents’ willingness to go into the Loop, and that means less spending and lower tax collections in the region’s economic engine and difficulty for small businesses that rely on foot traffic, he said.
“What would give (employers) some level of comfort in trying to say, ‘Hey, come back to the office,’ is reliable and safe public transit,” Tietz said.
Delaney Doolin’s bosses prefer that employees go into their office in the Old Post Office building downtown two days a week, she said, but her CTA commute from the Damen Blue Line stop can be a challenge.
Sometimes on her way home, Doolin, 24, has to shell out $50 or $60 for a ride-share because she can’t get on a train, she said. On several mornings earlier this year she stood on the platform watching multiple trains go by, each too crowded to board. They were spaced about 10 minutes apart, she said, and she finally gave up and went home.
“(I) ended up just saying, ‘I’m just going home; I’ll work from home today,’” she said.
Since then, the CTA has added extra trains along the most crowded section of the Blue Line — which is among the transit system’s busiest — and begun providing live video feeds of the line’s busiest stations, so commuters can monitor crowding. Doolin said she’s noticed service getting better in recent weeks.
Still, the days she decided to work from home can add up for the city’s downtown. In one estimate, researchers at the University of Chicago, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, MIT and Stanford University calculated that working from home led the average Chicago employee to spend $2,387 less per year near their workplace on things like food and shopping than they did in 2019.
It’s unclear whether employees might have instead spent some of that money closer to home, and public transit isn’t the only factor that goes into deciding whether to work from home. But that figure amounts to money that is not going into the downtown economy, said José María Barrero of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, one of the researchers.
It’s not just downtown spending that could take a hit. Public transit plays a role in drawing prospective residents to downtown Chicago, too, said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute who focuses on land use and transportation. Especially the booming South Loop and West Loop.
Chicago’s downtown population grew faster than any of the country’s other large metro areas in the four decades before the pandemic, according to a 2020 report by the Brookings Institution. More recently, the city has pledged financial support to convert empty offices along LaSalle Street to apartments.
Should transit problems force residents to begin relying more on cars, residential growth might not be sustainable, Freemark said. Construction costs rise when parking must be included, and living in a dense downtown becomes less desirable when residents are dependent on cars, he said.
“At that point you start to raise the question of what you’re doing living in a dense urban environment in the first place,” Freemark said. “One of the attractions of living in that kind of environment is, fundamentally, that you’re not having to spend the enormous amounts of money it takes to take a car everyday.”
Access to many train lines was one reason Jason Freeman, 41, chose to live in the Printers Row section of the South Loop when he moved back to Chicago from New York City in 2020. But conditions on the train — smoking, behavior from other riders that seemed to him to be aggressive, hearing from neighbors that they refused to get on at one nearby station — made him worry about getting caught in a bad situation.
Freeman said he teaches Brazilian jujitsu and knows how to handle himself, but still, he stopped taking public transit.
Freeman recently moved away from Printers Row to River North. He made the decision for a variety of reasons, but among them was his reluctance to use public transit in his neighborhood.
“I feel like I’m in an area where I can’t utilize the assets of that area,” he said.
In the Loop, Steven DeGraff is part of a group looking to convert a historic office building at 36 W. Randolph St. to residential use. He doesn’t think CTA service will affect future demand to live in the building because of the type of apartment he’s looking to create — studios that will likely draw residents looking primarily to live near work or school — but said it could be one of many barriers to plans to convert LaSalle Street offices to residential use.
LaSalle Street isn’t packed with restaurants, bars or grocery stores, he said. Residents without cars would be more dependent on buses or trains.
“You really don’t have any amenities down there,” he said.
Transit service has also shaped Tamara Kruse Roselius’ desire to visit Chicago and buy property in the city. Kruse Roselius, 62, lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, and regularly stops in Chicago on her way to visit her mom in downstate Quincy. She was trying to convince her son to attend college in Chicago.
But on one visit in spring 2022, she said she and her son were stuck underground on the Red Line when there was a disturbance in the next car. They had taken a train from O’Hare International Airport and were making their way to their Gold Coast hotel one evening when the fracas broke out. After what she described as a long wait without much information about what was going on, a CTA employee helped riders walk off the train and along the tunnel to the closest station, Kruse Roselius lugging her suitcase.
She praised CTA employees’ response, but said the experience was scary and rattled her son. He made it to one college tour at the Illinois Institute of Technology that she had set up for their visit, but didn’t want to attend a second tour at the University of Illinois Chicago.
“This is an 18-year-old kid that’s coming from Alaska, and that’s just everything, the ‘big bad city of Chicago,’ you read about. And I’ve been telling him it’s not (like that),” she said.
Kruse Roselius still visits Chicago, but bypasses the city if she’s scheduled to arrive in the Midwest at night. She doesn’t want to take public transit after dark, and doesn’t want to have to pay for a ride-share from the airport.
She had been considering buying a condo in the city, perhaps near Hyde Park, to be closer to her mom. She’s now thinking about buying in Oak Park instead.
“Chicago, from childhood on, has been one of my favorite places,” she said. “It’s my dad’s favorite place. I love going for the shopping, the food, all of it. But none of it matters if the transit isn’t safe, clean and available.”
The CTA has also meant changes for Chicago residents like Ryan Ray. It played a role in her decision to switch jobs, easing her commute from her home in Chatham.
Ray, 35, used to take two buses to get to the community services organization where she worked in the West Loop. But, at the time, she found the bus trackers weren’t accurate. She was often ghosted by buses that never arrived, or had long waits to transfer.
The Red Line would have shortened her commute, but she doesn’t feel safe taking the train because of the reports of violence she hears about, she said.
Since then, CTA has worked to upgrade its trackers and changed bus schedules to try to make wait times more consistent. Ray said she has noticed the trackers have become more accurate.
Ray got a new job where she has to go into her downtown office only four days a month. When she goes in, she can take one bus, and it rarely makes her late. The ability to work from home and the prospect of fewer days commuting on public transit were key factors in her decision to make a change, she said.
Fewer days in the office mean fewer days she is running errands downtown, buying lunch or stopping at Block 37 or Macy’s, she said. It has meant less time on public transit, and fewer nights that she comes home too tired to make dinner.
“Since changing jobs and having to be on the bus a lot less, it’s been much more pleasurable,” she said.
