By: Mark Glennon*
More dire news over the past week makes clear that mass transit in the Chicago area is severely threatened.
From The Civic Federation: If it weren’t for federal Covid relief funds still unspent, the Chicago Transit Authority’s operating budget for the coming year would face a deficit of $472 million representing nearly a quarter of the entire budget. The projected budget for 2025 will also be balanced with federal relief funds in a similar amount.
However, the CTA will face a whopping $577 million deficit in 2026 when the federal money is gone, forcing the CTA to find new additional revenue sources, make severe service cuts, increase fares or some combination thereof.
A similar budget report on the Pace suburban bus system came from a DuPage County representative on Pace’s board. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, over 20% of Pace’s 2024 budget relies on federal Covid relief that will be expiring. “We, the region, are asking the state legislature to come up with somewhere in the neighborhood of $740-750 million as soon as two years from now,” the board member said. “If that doesn’t happen, public transportation in the Chicago metropolitan area will be on the verge of collapse.”
The crisis goes beyond the CTA and Pace to all mass transit in Chicago and most American cities. Last year, the Regional Transit Authority warned of the “fiscal cliff” it faces. By 2026, the Chicago area system could face a $730 million annual budget gap, assuming current service levels are maintained — nearly 20% of the annual expense budget. That gap, if unaddressed, “would drastically impact current service and prohibit any additional improvements to the regional system,” the RTA said.
Riders aren’t returning fast enough to public transit since Covid and work-from-home took hold. The American Public Transportation Association has the numbers through the third quarter of this year. The good news is that ridership is up over last year. Total CTA rides for this year-to-date are up about 15% over the same period last year. Metra’s total rides are up 37% for the year.
However, total rides are still down 40% for the CTA for this year-to-date compared to the same period for 2019, the last pre-Covid year. Metra is down 53%.
It’s a similar story for Pace buses. Despite recent growth, according to the Tribune, Pace is still under 60% of its pre-Covid traffic.
Public transportation is particularly important to minorities and the poor, as RTA Chairman Kirk Dillard wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times this week. Regionally, 25% of black households do not have access to a vehicle compared with 12% of all households, he wrote. And the “latest Census data show that 17% of Black workers commute via transit, compared with 10% of all workers in our region.”
Mass transit’s problems are part of what’s now widely called the urban “doom loop.” That’s the vicious cycle centered mostly on empty offices. Thanks to work-from-home and high crime, the actual occupancy of Chicago’s offices hovers at only a bit above 50%, as in many large cities. Empty offices mean lower valuations and lower property tax revenues. Likewise for mass transit, work-from-home and crime mean fewer riders and less revenue. That all results in higher taxes for others and worse city services, further feeding the doom loop.
Federal Covid relief money hid mass transit’s crisis, but that money is running out. The resulting challenge for Chicago and many other cities dependent on public transportation will be enormous.
*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
“The public be damned! Part Duh!” The ridership and revenue shortfall at the three RTA operations is no crisis. It is the direct result of terrible management, typical of the public sector, where ‘we don’t see nobody nobody sent’ HR practices rule. Who saw this coming? Everyone not employed at Metra, apparently. Can the loss of paying customers be entirely blamed on the “Mystery Illness of Unknown Origin (MIUO) virus? Nope. It only pushed the whole of the RTA off a cliff it had edged towards for two decades prior. In sports, it is said that winning hides problems. Unlike… Read more »
Thanks for a thoughtful and detailed comment.
If the actual mass-transit service sucks, then the fee-paying riders will seek alternate methods of transportation, whether Uber, whether personal car, whether motorized scooter, anything BUT CTA, PACE, and now, Metra. CTA and Metra boards apparently have no comprehension of how NICE mass-transit is in Europe and 1st world Asia, how NICE to could be here, if these boards, and the agency employees, actually did their jobs with effectiveness and quality-control. Now, seems like every CTA worker is merely putting-in minimal work-effort, probably as defined by their unions, to retain their job while ignoring their work job-descriptions. The various El… Read more »
Spot on Streeter. Old Joe actually rode trains in Japan. Clean, fast and safe despite the sale of alcohol in train stations and even on some trains. I once saw a Japan Railways cleaning crew on action. Think an Indianapolis 500 pit stop for an entire train and you’ll get the picture. I should have timed them but I’d say they cleaned the entire train in about 7 minutes. Then they started boarding.
Drones paid first whether needed or not. Then come retired drones and their families. Then come the dead drones’ relatives who keep mailboxes and bank accounts alive. PPF expands like all the letters after LBGT. as we multiply and increase sinecures for cynical seniors. So we can expect mission failures in schools and transportation and water systems and roads. Simple economic logic.
Metra is at the top for funding and is probably the most well run of the three. Pace isn’t even necessary except directly on the suburbs that border Chicago. CTA will waste billions to extend the Red Line when ridership is extremely poor. This is a DEI play to have it extend to Altgeld Gardens whether it makes sense or not. Leadership at CTA is increasingly woke and dumb with tenured professionals who knew how to run the system retiring in droves to political jokes who know Donald Bonds and Dorval Carter. The mayor is an idiot who probably won’t… Read more »
Metra though had the largest drop in ridership. I used to take the train 4-5 times a week. Now, I’ve taken the train 5x in 4 years. That’s no exaggeration. My spouse takes the train once a week at most and it used to be 5x a week. Downtown isn’t coming back. Downtown shutdown for too long, and we all moved on. The community’s criminality has filled the void left by commuters and now we have homeless people randomly throwing logs at tourists and daytime shootouts in Streeterville. The only way to get serious about fixing downtown is to get… Read more »
Force majeure — Covid and crime and multiple other impacts justify ignoring whatever the collective bargaining agreements provide for continuing pay and benefits for those who drive empty busses. Put them on unemployment and let the courts decide whether taxpayers should continue to prop up this system which has become an anachronism in corrupt communities that are unable to maintain public order. Compassion may dictate unemployment compensation and other welfare-type benefits and job-training but does not warrant underwriting a permanent bureaucracy at union scale. “Not their fault” could be ascribed to any of those who snagged the brass ring of… Read more »
But, but, but they told us to stay home. Skyscrapers are obsolete, makes sense that the trains that used to fill them up with people everyday are obsolete too!
The people didn’t vote for more of Burke today. Guilty of RICO! Lets see if Martwick shuts down his tax appeal business. LOL
Federal juries are mostly made up of suburbanites because they draw from the entire Chicagoland area and not just Cook County. Most people on the jury probably hadn’t set foot in Chicago in years other than for this jury duty. They hate Chicago and want to punish all Chicago politicians.
Oh, oh, time for another incurable, contagious disease and a statewide shutdown. It was the state’s worst and biggest moneymaker ever. Gotta have the subsidies to keep the state, and those who like to steal those subsidies, flush with cash.
Turns out the Bolsheviks are at the mercy of Suburban Commuters who don’t feel like being victims of crime encouraged and aided and abetted by the Communist Thugs. Let it all fail.
CTA and Metra make little genuine effort to ensure a comfortable and SAFE trip for its commuters. Spend some time on British rail, London tube, or most European mass-transit systems, where this in fact happens, day in, day out. Here in Cook County, and in Chicago even more so, mass-transit is too often an unpleasant experience, sometimes dangerous, often smelly/dirty ride. Blue Line train-ride to/from O’Hare airport is a terrible first impression for tourists. And the mass-transit administrators, the middle-managers, and the staff all earn generous salaries, pensions, and benefits, plenty of holidays and personal time, with little risk of… Read more »
Yep. CTA & Metra employees are graduates of the Lake Woebegon school system where all the kids were above average!
Governor Flintstone needs outlaw work from home.
Look for an Empty Desk tax from the spoiled billionaire.
Don’t forget, ASFCME won in latest contract right to keeping remote work provision from COVID permanent. I don’t know about Chicago or CC gov workers? Or what % of city, county & state workers are supposedly working remotely productively in all depts? Or what % of city, county or state office space is currently sitting empty? All at chump taxpayers expense, as usual….it would seem this issue would make a great news story for someone.
I see empty trains and full trains, empty buses and full buses. Service schedules should be constantly evolving. You shouldn’t wait for a funding crisis to do it.
Sorry folks, it’s over for Chicago. We were unfortunately built as an early 20th century city, with most light rail and public transit beginning and terminating in a central downtown business district. Then, we piggybacked suburban sprawl 50 miles out into the cornfields from the central downtown business district and gave ourselves some of the longest commuting times in the country. Now that the loop office market is dead, and the suburban office market is completely DOA (they’re tearing down office buildings all over the suburbs now), what remains is hundreds of miles of suburban sprawl in either direction with… Read more »
Many of the Metra lines will not be sustainable once the money runs out. The press is never going to complain about a suburban train line being shut down, as suburbs bad, city good, in their eyes. Plus the transportation boards in Illinois are not made up of transportation experts, they’re filled with political hacks who just want to preserve their pensions, so they’ll gladly reduce service to keep their personal gravy train chugging along. Remember that there used to be many elevated train lines in the city that were shut down and dismantled, so it could happen. All that… Read more »
+1
I think the near permanent shift to remote working caught the marxists off guard. A unintended and severe consequence of the totalitarian behavior of Pritzker and Lightfoot.
Spot on!
They have no way to stop the Doom Loop they started, either.
Empty buildings and less people downtown.
Less tax money from downtown means higher residential taxes.
Middle class continues to exit.
Neighborhoods break down further.
Downtown gets even more empty.
Tax receipts plunge.
And no Democrat can stop it. They own all of it.
Well they could raise rider fares to what the services actually cost couldn’t they?
As a Metra rider I’m ok with paying what it actually costs if it were run by an outside company. But seeing that Metra is a government jobs program then all the taxpayers need to chip in.
The transit agencies have already lined up a laundry list of possible new revenue sources: sales tax, payroll tax, headcount tax, diverting money from roads, regional fees, etc. The Big Ask is right around the corner.
https://www.cmap.illinois.gov/programs/regional-transit-action
In Peoria we have a flush tax and rain tax also.
I’m tired of hearing about all the people who cannot live without mass transit. If they can’t afford it then some good choices, walk if not
Bicycle, get a horse, if not get a ride from a friend or mugger. We need to keep the dirty politicians Hands OUT of our pockets.
We are not a piggy bank for the poor urchins.
No one is holding a gun to their heads to live here, move to the east coast plenty of cheap
Transit.
Hmm.. wondering if the illegals the city is shipping out to points west are paying their fares. Reports of our “ new neighbors “ being put on buses and Metra trains with a one way ticket. And re the buses burning fuel and driving around in circles all day with 2-3 riders, it gives the homeless shelter and something to do until meal time at the mission. I’ve witnessed drivers that know this, and really don’t care. In addition, one time my Metra card wouldn’t work and I was waved on for what could’ve been a free ride for all… Read more »
Free rides on Metra – it’s very common. Usually because the train is too crowded for the conductor to collect fares.
For a full year during the pandemic, the UP conductors who run the UPNW line refused to collect fares. https://chi.streetsblog.org/2021/06/08/a-bittersweet-look-back-at-12-months-of-free-metra-union-pacific-line-rides A bittersweet look back at 12 months of free Metra Union Pacific line rides “The free rides were going to end sooner or later. I kept having that thought every time I rode one of Metra’s three Union Pacific lines for the past 12 months, when conductors were not checking tickets. Finally the gravy train ended on the first of the month as conductors resumed fare collection. Union Pacific has a longstanding agreement with Metra to operate its UP North,… Read more »
Most ‘public transportation’ doesn’t make economic sense – it’s transportation welfare, and a union jobs program. Throw in lots of crime, and you have to be desperate to use it.
The PACE busses in the suburbs are ridiculous. Except for the people that ride them in the morning and afternoon to go from home to the train station to go to work downtown, the things run around during the day 99% empty. The whole line should be shut down and the tax money returned to the taxpayers. It would probably be cheaper to buy all the daytime users a car and let them drive.
It would be cheaper and more efficient to give them free Uber rides.
Wow, who’d a thunk that the CTA wasn’t self supporting with all those high paying public sector union jobs.
If Trump wins they’ll actually have to tighten their belts!
They’ll keep this problem masked until after the election. If the Dems can control the Presidency, Senate and House they’ll just bail out the blue states again. Vote like your life depends on it.