In a recent post I explained some of the findings of our recent Framing Report for Chicago Transit Authority’s Bus Vision Project. It’s a detailed and image-rich exploration of how Chicago’s bus network functions, or sometimes doesn’t, and what it would take to improve its design. We focus especially on the problem of racial equity in Chicago, and the way this goal conflicts with the goal of ridership because of Chicago’s racial geography.
Again, read the post, or if you really want to go deep, read the report. On the other hand, if you’d prefer 14 minutes of video, I did a virtual presentation this morning to the CTA’s governing body, the Chicago Transit Board. The whole meeting is interesting if you want to understand the larger context of CTA’s Bus Vision Project and hear the questions that were asked, but if you just want my part, it runs from 9:46 to 23:54.
It’s here, and here:
Having previously worked for the CTA myself, I know why you excluded Pace Suburban Bus (and Metra commuter rail*) service in that screenshot above. CTA acts all the time like Pace doesn’t exist, or worse, that Pace is some kind of competitor instead of a partner that often hands over up to 100% of its riders on each route to a CTA bus or train to complete their journeys. But by doing so, it makes your screenshot above look as if bus service only exists in the City of Chicago.
When I was there, we were scheduling buses to be a few minutes ahead of Pace buses on streets with both CTA and Pace routes, in order to “scoop” them on any riders standing at the stops… so that a 30 min CTA route and 30 min Pace route didn’t combine to be 15 min headway, but rather more like a 28 min headway then 2 buses arriving in 2 min of each other. The interagency rivalry was a factor in my leaving – and I’m sad to see that it might not have gone away, decades later.
*everywhere I say “Pace” or “bus” also applies to Metra and rail, but with wide headways and limited service hours, Metra isn’t as complimentary to CTA as Pace is. Lots more Metra riders than Pace riders never ride CTA – they just go downtown and walk to their office then go home again. So I’m ok with the decision to leave them off the rail map, for the same reason that Amtrak service would also have been excluded (although Metra can be kind of frequent on some lines on the south side of the city too).
I think he left it off because this is just a CTA project, not a Chicagoland transit project. It would seem like the lack of coordination/competition between different transit agencies in the same metropolitan area would be an easy “win” to improve transit, but it appears to be impossible to overcome. For every at least somewhat coordinated metro transit system like MTA New York City Subway/Bus/Long Island Railroad/Metro North and Sound Transit in the Seattle area there are a multitude of uncoordinated transit areas like Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, and especially the San Francisco Bay and Los Angeles areas in California. Note a recent shelving of a bill in the California legislature that would have forced the SF Bay transit agencies to discuss amalgamation in exchange for additional funding. Naturally CEOs would be opposed to mergers because after the merger there can only be on CEO.