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“It’s going to be chaotic,” said P.S. Sriraj, the director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
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“No funding without reform”. TRANSLATED: Reform means tax and reduce service to the suburbs and collar counties to subsidize CTA.
Glad it wasn’t funded. Makes me feel like someone listened to the people…but not really. They didn’t directly fund it, but some of them did come up with more creative ways to hide the collection of additional taxes for CTA that included trying the Toll Way toll increase route and a delivery fee surcharge grab. Luckily, those were caught too, but feel like it is only a matter of time. Based on the article, CTA is spending the rest of the one-time Covid money…on operating costs and salaries for routes and people that are not needed…until it runs out in… Read more »
Are Talia Soglin and Jeremy Gorner on the RTA’s payroll? Can one media type ever be honest about what actually happened to the RTA/CTA/Metra/Pace? Service cuts would be chaotic if the RTA still carried its 2015 ridership. It doesn’t. Transit in Chicago carries about half that now, losing 40% to JB the Hutt’s imprudent Coof mandates and Kim Foxx’s non-prosecution of Chicago’s thug element that destroyed The Loop as a business (read: employment) center. Service has to be reduced to where demand actually is. The executive directors who spent their agencies into these corners should be fired (and prosecuted if… Read more »
Service has to be reduced to where demand actually is, spot on these transportation systems in Chicago need an actual individual from the freight railroad side to show them how to consolidate routes and become more efficient. You don’t run a commuter train with 10 people on board and 15 minutes later another commuter train comes up with 50 people on board, what would you do, and there are far to many overlapping routes.
The RTA can’t pay for what its charges currently run. The executive directors all focus on ‘service improvements’, the RTA can’t afford. Customers have abandoned Chicago Transit for a variety of reasons, and they aren’t coming back. As anyone in the transportation business will tell you, you run what you have for the customers you have. The RTA operating wings run trains and buses like it’s 2017.
The Autopen-in-Chief’s Coof money was a band-aid, yet the wound remains.