CTA Tattler

They have rail car mechanics assigned at stations throughout the three-track corridor just for that purpose. If something goes wrong with a train, they jump in to fix it quickly rather than have the operator spend lots of time troubleshooting - of having to unload the train.

Of course, although you and I (and others on your train that morning) might think of this as a good thing, there are other posters who complained that that are too many CTA personnel standing around on platforms. Bet they won't mind when it helps keep their train moving.

It's always a balance between responsiveness and effciency.

Another example is how we pay to have firefighters hang around stations all over the place just in case there's a fire. It would be far more efficient, and less expensive to only call them into work when there's actually something to be done, but our leaders have decided that we ought to pay a few people to wait around just in case.

While a broken-down El train during rush hour might not be as life threatening as a late evening fire in Jefferson Park, the economic efficiencies are probably actually better.

I'd say it would be a waste of money to have mechanics waiting at various places around the system at 9pm on Sundays, but it make a lot of sense to me to have mechanics ready to spring into action during rush hour, especially around the 3-track project.

They may not save my life, but they are important to keep the city running.

Today, April 7, I got on the Red Line at Loyola at 6 am; arrived cermack/Chinatown 6:55am. On 18th Street bus by 6:07, arrived at work at 7:10 am. This is the best time yet.........counting my ride on the 155 to Loyola, which started at 5:45, I have come to this conclusion for my commute this am....1 hour and 25 minutes to go 9 miles.

red line sucked this morning!

~50min from Berwyn to Lake (720-810am). Standing room only by Lawrence, didnt move for 5min at the junction, then crept from belmont all way to north & clyborn.

Are they still staging red line trains before Belmont? I was wondering because hardly anyone boards the red line at belmont or fullerton anymore. I think this is causing delays for other red line trains (speculating of course).

I get on Southport each morning right around 7am (or even earlier), and my southbound commute is the same.

My commute time has increased overall...10 to 15 min on average. I expected delays considering all the lines are running on 1 track now. However, where I've noticed the biggest difference w/the reduction of Red Line runs.

Last week when I got to the platform between 8:15 and 8:25, the trains coming into Wilson were SRO (which rarely happened before 3-tracking). On Thurs/Fri I let 2 cars go by before giving up and boarding a train northbound to Bryn Mawr and then taking the next train southbound.

My commute has increased 10 - 20 minutes. On at Sheridan at 7:55 am change to brown and off at Washington/Wells.

This morning was especially bad - they were not alternating the trains at Belmont... there were consecutive Red Line trains which made the Belmont platform dangerously crowded.

Again, I have to ask why they don't offer a third option to transfer from Red to Brown/Purple. It is a shame that the CTA would rather inconvenience tax payers than those boarding the purple line in Evanston.

Whoever's getting my seat now that I've switched to the 147, you're welcome.

The 147 is great if you are arriving downtown well before 8am. If you're getting on The Drive after about 7:30am, the traffic is bad. Its sickening to be on a bus and see thousands of one occupant cars causing LSD to crawl. The best thing the Mayor could do to be "green" would be to negotiate with the state once they begin design on the rehab of LSD to put in center carpool/bus lanes with separate center on off ramps at key exits. The efficiency realized by doing this would be great. The cost of gas wasted on buses, number of buses needed for rush hour service, number of hours saved on CTA labor, hours wasted in traffic for riders, the list goes on. Also reward carpoolers as well and I think it would be a model project. This type of busway project would certainly qualify for Federal New Start transit dollars. Why are there NO discussions about major improvements in the LSD corridor?

Ed, encouraging people to drive isn't green even if it is carpooling. Neither are massive roadwork and earth moving project (remember, green isn't just emissions, it's the sum of the parts of a construction project). Plus it would just enhance the image of our lakefront parkway as an expressway - the loss of parkland wouldn't make it feasible and some of the busiest exits, such as Belmont, have no room for an engineering project like that. A better use of funds would be to improve transit access along the lakefront (and decrease parking downtown) - some of this will happen with increased fuel prices. And most of this would be in the city; I don't think the majority of traffic on Lake Shore is from the northern 'burbs despite what some in Edgewater says - a lot of it is from Lakeview, Uptown and Edgewater (just look how empty the streets west of Broadway are during the day vs. evening).

I think both Ed and nd make good points. I think a lot of the traffic going into downtown are people from the neighborhoods driving rather in addition to suburbanites. However, I think a combination of both ideas, encouraging people to carpool (which is different from encouraging people to drive - they are already driving, so encourage them to share the ride) and encouraging people not to drive at all with more transportation options and possibly incentives NOT to drive downtown (London's zone fees comes to mind), is better than beating down one or the other.

Ed, your agenda aside, I generally catch the 147 around 8ish, and while traffic may suck, I get a seat and my coworkers tell me I'm getting to work a little faster than they are. And I've freed up a seat for someone downstream on the Red Line.

nd, I take Ridge to either Bryn Mawr or Hollywood, and I guarantee you the very heavy traffic taking that route to LSD isn't coming from Uptown, let alone Lakeview. I believe most traffic maps even chart Green Bay to Ridge to Hollywood to Lake Shore Drive.

Ed,

Better would be congestion charging on the drive at rush.

The experience in London is that if people have to pay $7 (or whatever the charge amounts to now), enough of them choose against driving that the buses and the remaining vehicles move a lot faster. Which in turn gets more people to use the buses.

Congestion pricing would be great. There was a brief discussion about it by His Mayoral Majesty last fall. Imagine all the $$ that could be raised to fund mass transit capital improvements. The first US attempt at congestion pricing recently passed the city council in New York. Now it has to be approved by the NY state legislature. I'm not sure if the same process would apply to Chicago, but can you imagine trying to get something like that through the Illinois state legislature? Yikes!

Yeah, those jerks trying to get downtown -- they should charge them out the ass for their mode of transportation! Yours is way better! What a bunch of chumps, not going downtown the same way you do. Jerks!

Congestion pricing, doubling downtown parking garage taxes, etc. whatever works to get LSD moving again at the Speed Limit at rush hours works for me. The Tribune has posted a story this afternoon...they are *NOT* raising the North Lakeshore Speed Limit back up to 45 this year because of the horrible condition of the drive, especially between Irving Park and Foster. I'm sure the condition of the road certainly isn't helping traffic flow lately either.

Update 2 minutes ago on the NY Times website: Congestion pricing bill died in committee before it even made it to a full vote in Albany. Abandon all hope, ye who live here.

I still don't understand why if there are still three tracks that 2 of them can't be dedicated to inbound traffic in the morning and then switched so that 2 are outbound during the afternoon. Is it me or does this make sense?

Compared to putting up with a few extra minutes travel time, and a crowded platform, moving trains so you can catch them on different tracks at different times of the day would be logistically far more complicated.

If all you were doing is pushing trains through, it would make sense. But because human passengers are involved, it wouldn't work. People -- especially half asleep people -- are harder to herd to the right place than cattle.

I live in Wrigleyville, don't own a car, and take the Brown line to work in the Loop daily. I'm continually shocked by the number of people in my office who live near me, have great access to CTA, and prefer to drive into work. I enjoy it when I'm able to get home in 20-25 mins on a snowy day, and I hear them complain about taking 60+ minutes to go 4 miles!

I don't believe a congestion charge or HOV lanes on LSD are practical solutions. As explained already, rebuilding LSD to include HOV would take away parkland. A congestion charge in Chicago would be, at best naive and at worst selfish. The congestion charge would just give a reason for businesses to move from downtown to the O'Hare Corridor. Also, a congestion charge seems to me like a regressive tax since it would help those who live close or in downtown get to work sooner by penalizing the commuters who can't afford to live in areas like the West Loop and Lincoln Park. Although this may cost a lot of money, a subway along the north lakefront might be a better idea.

I saw something on the CTA site where they were talking about why they couldn't alternate the tracks to be two in the rush direction -- it turned out there would still be bottlenecks. I can't remember exactly how it worked, but I was convinced at the time.

The address of the brochure is below -- the diagram is on page 6. That was for phase one, but I assume similar problems would arise in the current phase as well.

http://www.transitchicago.com/news/motion/board/3trkbrd20070214.pdf

The thing about congestion charging is that in the cities where it's been tried, virtually everyone loves it. Bus ridership soared in London, because suddenly, the buses were running much faster. Bus service was also less expensive to provide, because some of those buses that were running faster could be turned around and run again, rather than only making one run.

I don't actually take a bus OR drive on LSD. I just suggested it because it would make an awful lot of people's commute a lot better. It would do so by discouraging about 5,000 cars/day from entering the Drive. Some of those 5,000 would find their new bus commute nearly as fast, and much cheaper, so they wouldn't mind much, or might even prefer it. And yes, some of those 5,000 would find that their commute was longer, or less convenient, but meanwhile, tens of thousands of people would find their commute more convenient.

I do love the story of the poor schlumps who can't afford to live near any el anywhere, so instead they drive downtown from the far northside and pay $26/day to park. That was a very creative story!

Google Maps is giving out Chicago directions including public transit -- again.

This time it looks like it's official because the Google Transit page (http://www.google.com/transit) is now showing Chicago as one of the cities it covers - but no Pace or Metra. I tried it out and it gave me three good options.

Yes, I also laugh my head off at people bitching about parking rates downtown, traffic, how dare those hordes of pedestrians crossing the driveway of MY parking garage that cuts across a busy sidewalk delay me! And these people live within a few blocks of the train. Another friend was nearly in tears over driving home up LSD in an evening snowstorm a couple months ago...lives at Irving Park and Broadway and works at LaSalle/Madison. I refuse to sympathize with folks that continually complain about car costs, gas, parking, traffic, etc. but have an easy one train or one bus ride to work in less than 30 minutes. Gas prices will never be $1.25 ever again, get over it!

CJ we already have a subway along the north lakefront, it's called the Red Line.

Interestingly my commute by el was quick as normal or even quicker; until AFTER the three tracking when we crawled along through the subway tunnels - does anybody know if they have temporarily reduced the speed there due to the nighttime construction? Or was the driver trying to get back on schedule or held up by a "sneaker" train?

Congestion pricing is not a tax; it's a user fee. The only people who would be subject to it are those who choose to incur it. Driving a car is a priviledge, not a right. Unfortunately, lawmakers don't seem to understand this and transit will never reach its potential until policy reflects the fact that driving a car should be considered a choice not a necessity.

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The thing about congestion charging is that in the cities where it's been tried, virtually everyone loves it.
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The only people who would be subject to it are those who choose to incur it.
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Only in the same sense that paying for electricity is also a choice.

Yes, there are people who could just as easily choose mass transit over their car. And there are many people for who a congestion fee would be the tipping factor to get them to make a different choice.

But that doesn't mean everyone has a real choice.

The question isn't one of semantics, and what you call it is semantics. The question is would it be fair. If you're going to shift the costs to this class of people, are you doing so fairly?

Of course you could find ways to make it fair by creating multi-tiered pricing, rebates, and tax exemptions or credits for people in situations in which it's not fair to charge them.

But the bottom line is you're shifting costs to different people than who are paying those costs now. The intention seems to be to get more people to use more efficient public transportation, but that's not going to be the only result.

It's an idea that's worth studying. It may even be an idea worth experimenting with. But to think that the result will be "virtually everyone" loving it, and a simple shift of people from single passenger cars to more efficient mass transit, that's a very naive view.

Even if it works, I don't think that even a majority of people will love it. But I don't think it'll work as simply as some people think, either. I think that proponents would be so surprised by the unintended consequences that they'd become ultra-defensive, and go into total denial about those consequences.

Sure, let's take a look at congestion taxes or fees or whatever you want to call them. But let's be objective when examining the results. This is not a simple problem, and there's no simple solution that virtually everyone will love.

No, don't you understand -- people riding 2 mpg buses are totally better than other people riding in more efficient cars! What jerks, not riding buses. Those people should have to pay a lot more!

I just saw a great quote in the NYT in a posting about their failed congestion pricing tax, but it was to the effect that the middle and lower/working classes who were supposedly driving to Manhattan to/for work must be awfully wealthy to pay for the tolls on the bridges and for the parking as is. The point of it was that the purported hit that these people would take was a rather false arguement.

I always wondered how something like this would work here - where would they put the readers/toll booths. I New York, London, Oslo and other cities where they've done this there were easier choke points, but how would we configure it here?

Chicago Kate -- Evanston residents ARE taxpayers for the purposes of the CTA; they pay the same one percent surcharge on the sales tax that we do. Ditto for everyone in Cook County, actually, which means that some Cook suburbs like Hoffman Estates on the northwest side and Thornton Township on the far south side are paying for CTA service but not getting it.

Congestion charging depends on how good the alternatives are. It works very well in London because the Tube runs every two to four minutes on all lines, all day, and also forms lots of direct connections rather than pushing you through a single hub -- so not driving really isn't a burden in terms of time.

Chicago, however, might not be so good; the connections on the L are all either in the Loop or else at Roosevelt, Fullerton and Belmont, and both trains and buses typically run at less than half London frequencies. On top of that our rail service is slower than the Tube in general, although at least the Blue Line is going to get a lot faster in the near future.

red line sucked again today! 2 express trains and 1 SRO train went by before I could get on.

Green Guy:

"No, don't you understand -- people riding 2 mpg buses are totally better than other people riding in more efficient cars! What jerks, not riding buses. Those people should have to pay a lot more!"

Nice try.

Let's assume you have an outrageously fuel-efficient car that gets 40 mpg in the city.

You: 40mpg x 1 occupant = 40 passenger miles per gallon.

Bus: 2mpg x 50 occupants = 100 passenger miles per gallon.

Fail.