Six people in the past two years have been banned from all or part of the city's transit system because they committed unlawful acts on CTA property. See today's The Ride.
If you made the rules, what kind of behavior would merit someone losing his or her riding privileges?
This isn't just open to CTA riders. People who take Metra and Pace can give their two cents, too.
USA Today had a piece on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to make people driving into Manhattan pay an $8 congestion fee. Think a similar plan could or should be implemented in Chicago?
For my column this week, I spoke to several transit riders with disabilities who say that Pace, Metra and the CTA have gotten a lot better at accomodating disabled riders, but there are still big problems that need to be fixed.
The worst one: city paratransit users are being hit with higher fares to use the door-to-door pickup service, but these same riders are most affected by the inefficient routing system that paratransit carriers under contract with first the CTA and now Pace use to dispatch trips.
Pace is currently holding a series of public meetings to get riders' feedback on what improvements need to made, and Pace officials have made it clear that they're going to change the way paratransit carriers operate in the City of Chicago.
But there's another side to the coin: at the last Pace board meeting, board members noted that running the paratransit system more efficiently may actually hurt the cash-strapped agency in the long run, because it will cost Pace more money to serve more riders. As you can imagine, providing roughly 6,000 door-to-door paratransit rides a day (in the city alone) is a labor-intensive operation.
If you've taken paratransit, or are disabled but use mainline trains and buses, I'd love to hear about your experiences. How does Chicago rank among other places you've been to, as far as transit accessibility is concerned?
Also, I wasn't able to include this in the story but Shelley Sandow, an independent auditor hired by the CTA, did a very detailed analysis of accessibility on the CTA system. You can read her reports here.
The CTA announced that it's going to expand its bus tracker program to all routes by next year. That means people with access to the Bus Tracker site or a web-enabled PDA can check to see exactly where their bus is and how long they'll have to wait for it.
The CTA is also saying that Bus Tracker will make its supervisors and dispatchers better able to track delays and respond to them, since they'll be able to use the system to see where every bus on a particular route is. The way things are done now, supervisors don't have much more information on where buses are than members of the riding public standing at a bus stop.
What do you think? Will Bus Tracker be the answer to the infuriating problem of bus-bunching? Is it something that would help you plan your commute better? Or is it just a well-timed PR stunt to usher out the age of Kruesi on a positive note?
Four Northwest side alderman, in conjunction with the Healthy Streets Campaign, are on a mission: to cut in half the number of vehicle crashes in the 10-sq. mile area between Fullerton, Austin, Montrose and Kedzie. You can see why, considering there are roughly 25 crashes a day in that area, and ten people were killed in 2005.
Healthy Streets launched a new safety campaign today that aims to reduce crashes by beefing up traffic enforcement, raising public awareness and making low-cost modifications to signals and street design in the target zone.
It's an ambitious effort that hinges on people recognizing the four main contributors to accidents: inattentiveness, speed, failure to obey traffic signals and not yielding to pedestrians, Healthy Streets Coordinator Randy Neufeld said.
"Most people know where the traffic problems in their area are," Neufeld said. Through aggressive marketing, "We're trying to get to the point where a kid is saying, 'Mommy, you're not supposed to talk on a cell phone while driving.'"
Our City Hall reporter Fran Spielman wrote this piece today, raising the possibility that CTA Chair Carole Brown may be next to step down. Apparently, Ron Huberman, Daley's pick to replace outgoing CTA President Frank Kruesi, has expressed an interest in working with someone else, due to past clashes with Brown.
As transit riders, how would you rate Brown's performance so far as head of the CTA board? Think she usually has the riders' best interest at heart, or is she also to blame in part for the current state of the CTA?
NOTE: Brown, in her public statements, has given no indication that she's going anywhere. Then again, neither did Kruesi, so stay tuned.
By now, you've probably heard the news that CTA President Frank Kruesi is being replaced by Ron Huberman, Mayor Daley's former chief of staff. Think it will help?
Huberman lacks Kruesi's experience in the transportation realm, but insiders think he'll be more of a consensus builder in Springfield as the CTA, Metra and Pace continue to haggle for more money.
I'm going to be out of the country until next week, so if this blog seems quieter than usual, that's why.
Can't say I'm going to miss sitting in traffic on the expressway or listening to someone else's phone conversations on the bus. But I will miss reading your humorous posts on these and other topics, so please keep them coming while I'm gone.
What's the longest amount of time it has taken you to get to work on the CTA, Metra or Pace? I bet you CTA riders can pull from your experiences this week, now that one of the tracks at Belmont and Fullerton is shut down.
In the first installment of my new column, The Ride, I wrote about the 10 intersections where you're most likely to get caught by one of the city's red-light cameras.
So far, I've been lucky enough not to get one of these yet, but several people I know have. What about you? At $90 a pop, these tickets are no joke.
If you ride buses and trains often enough, you're bound to see and hear some strange things.
I, for instance, recently heard a guy breaking up with his girlfriend on a Red Line train. It was awful because the guy had to keep repeating himself because it was too noisy. Why he couldn't wait a few stops is beyond me.
And while telling someone 'it's not you, it's me," over the phone is bad enough, making your girlfriend ask for clarification during a breakup is just wrong.
What are your travel tales? If they're good, they might end up in the paper.
