Louciana Johnson thought his corporate wellness job’s move to Merchandise Mart downtown would ease his commute, allowing him to take the Brown Line instead of paying for ride-shares.
Johnson remembered trains once arriving nearly back to back during rush hour. If one train was too crowded, it was easy enough to wait until a less crowded train arrived.
But that is no longer the case. Early one recent morning, Johnson, 43, arrived at the Western Brown Line station to find train trackers that provided only an approximation of wait times, and the approximation was wrong. After waiting nearly 20 minutes, worried about running late to meet a client, he left and took a ride-share downtown instead — something he said has become a common occurrence.
Johnson is now considering moving his job to Evanston. The struggle to get downtown, combined with fewer potential clients in Loop offices, isn’t worth it. If he has to take a ride-share anyway, it’s easier for him to justify paying for a 15-minute ride to the nearby north suburbs, he said.
“It’s gotten ridiculous,” he said. “I am still trying to figure out at this point how the Brown Line can work in people’s travel schedules. It makes no sense.”
CTA riders across the city have complained of long wait times, crowded buses and trains and conditions on public transit. But Johnson’s commute might be particularly frustrating: Weekday Brown Line schedules were cut by 32% compared with pre-pandemic schedules, more than any other train line, a Tribune analysis of CTA data shows.
As the CTA has cut back on schedules, facing a shortage of bus and train drivers that limits the amount of service it can run, the Tribune analysis of CTA data and a separate analysis of federal data by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning show exactly how much service has been cut, and where the CTA is trimming schedules the most.
The problem is not unique to Chicago, but other cities have tried various approaches to addressing public transit service and some have begun to add back to their train schedules, public transit experts said. Key to adding back more service will be hiring more bus and train operators, and some have pointed to pay, working conditions and hiring policies as key to attracting and retaining employees.
CTA President Dorval Carter has acknowledged running less service, saying he called the schedule changes “optimizations” because they are intended to help scheduled service better reflect the reality of how often buses and trains are actually running.
“It is not the service that we were providing prior to the pandemic,” he told board members during a June update on service reliability. “We do not refer to it as a service cut because it is our intention to restore that service once we get our workforce up to a level that allows us to do that.”
In the meantime, the repercussions of running fewer CTA trains and buses are reverberating throughout Chicago.
“Chicago’s comparative advantage versus other cities in the United States — except New York — is that it has a very large and strong downtown that is only possible because it has a large transit network,” said Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute who focuses on land use and transportation. “And when you diminish the quality of that transit network, you are making it very difficult for that downtown to prosper. So it seems very important for the city.”
The amount of bus and train service the CTA is running will be down roughly 15% in 2023 compared with 2019, according to a CMAP analysis of federal data showing the number of hours trains and buses spend on passenger routes. That includes a nearly 14% cut in train service and a 16% cut in bus service.
Bus service is expected to tick upward slightly this year from 2022, but train service is projected to fall, according to CMAP, which projected existing data forward to estimate what service for the full year would be.
A different set of data about CTA schedules, obtained by the Tribune through an open records request, shows every line saw cuts to the number of train runs scheduled on both weekdays and weekends, except for the Yellow Line on Saturdays and Sundays, which had the fewest trains scheduled to run but had seen no reductions. The data tracked train schedules from October 2019, the last schedule in effect before the COVID-19 pandemic sent ridership plummeting, to the schedule in effect from spring through fall 2023.
New schedules took effect Sunday that further cut the number of daily trips on some lines because of ongoing construction on the Blue Line, the CTA said. The agency said the reductions will be temporary and by mid-November, when construction is complete, schedules will return to the levels in effect earlier in the year.
Click each bar to see the exact percent change in scheduled trains for that line.
Under those schedules, the weekday Brown Line, which runs from the Loop to Albany Park, saw the highest rate of scheduled cuts since 2019. Weekday Orange Line schedules to and from Midway Airport also saw high rates of cuts, with schedules slashed by 27%.
Other lines cut by more than a quarter were Saturday schedules on the Red and Brown Line, which were also reduced by about 27%.
Weekday service on the system’s two busiest lines, the Red and the Blue, were both cut by about 20%.
The Tribune analysis reflects only scheduled service, not the number of trains or buses that are actually running. The CTA struggled through much of the pandemic to run all of its scheduled trains and buses, effectively cutting service and leading to the phenomenon known as “ghosting.”
But since the agency began trimming schedules in late 2022, the schedules have more accurately matched how often trains and buses are running. In August the CTA reported running 90% of all scheduled trains and 96% of scheduled buses.
The results show similar trends as data analyses published by Brandon McFadden, who works with the commuter advocacy group Commuters Take Action.
“Both me and the other organizers at Commuters Take Action, we want the CTA to succeed,” he said. “But to do that they of course had to pull schedules down so they could run closer to 100% of scheduled service. And we want them to be truthful about that.”
CTA officials said in a statement the lines with the highest cuts are, generally, the lines with more frequent service, and times of day and ridership are also factored in. They determined reductions on routes with more frequent service would affect riders less, and said reductions during off-peak hours, when trains run less frequently, are more noticeable.
Click the points to see the number of scheduled trains for that line.
“CTA’s ultimate goal has been and continues to (be to) find the delicate balance of providing the most consistent and reliable service with the current available workforce while also accommodating ridership demands throughout the day,” the agency said in a statement.
The CTA has pegged service challenges on a shortage of bus and train operators. As of August, the CTA had about 3,400 bus operators, up 6% from the 3,200 drivers employed in September 2022. On the rail side, it had 722 “L” operating employees in August, down slightly from the 724 employed in September 2022.
The CTA has held hiring fairs, raised some salaries and offered financial incentives intended to attract and retain employees. Still, the numbers of both bus and train operators remained below the number of drivers the CTA budgeted for this year — 3,707 bus drivers and 839 rail operators. And the number of positions the CTA is aiming for this year was below the target numbers set before the COVID-19 pandemic.
CTA officials said in the statement they have hired more rail employees this year than in recent years — 161 through August, according to agency data — but a key problem has been attrition.
The training process to become an operator is complex “and simply cannot be expedited,” they said. Operators are promoted from within the ranks of existing rail employees, and training can take three months as they learn the ins and outs of train and signal operations, spokesman Brian Steele said. The small size of a rail cab also limits how many people can be trained in a railcar at once, he said.
“We will not let expediency circumvent safety and comprehensive training of rail operators,” he said.
A class of 16 new rail operators graduated recently and will go to work on the Blue, Red and Brown lines, CTA officials said in the statement, and another class is set to graduate in December.
The CTA has, on the other hand, had more success hiring bus operators, which is one reason the agency has been able to add back slightly more bus service this year, Steele said.
Agencies nationwide have reported operator shortages, but some are adding back rail service. Freemark, from the Urban Institute, pointed to New York City, where authorities have begun to increase subway service thanks to an influx of state funding.
In San Francisco, hard hit by the decline of office commuters and where transit riders faced 30-minute wait times on nights and weekends, BART has also begun to increase rail service.
The Washington, D.C., Metro is running trains over more miles of track than ever before after a new train line was completed. The agency is also running trains more often than during the depths of the pandemic, reflecting returning ridership and the return to service of rail cars that had been sidelined because of a defect. A spokeswoman said train service was not yet at pre-pandemic levels, but bus service was nearing 2019 levels.
In Chicago, the situation is “disappointing,” Freemark said.
“It seems like other major cities are really taking the initiative to expand transit availability in the post-pandemic context,” Freemark said.
But bus ridership can pose a different problem for transit agencies.
Philadelphia’s SEPTA, which operates trolleys, subways, buses and commuter rail, aims to run 90% of pre-pandemic bus service, but some runs are skipped when operators are not available, CEO Leslie Richards said. Subways are set to run around 85% to 90% of pre-pandemic service, but have faced equipment issues, she said.
The agency has also struggled with operator shortages, lower ridership and a budget cliff looming next year when federal pandemic aid runs out. SEPTA hired more than 1,000 bus operators last year, but after departures ended up with a total addition of only about 125 operators, Richards said. She is grateful the agency was able to roughly break even.
To keep bus service running at its current levels, bus operators have had to work mandatory overtime. If mandatory overtime were to end, which could come up during the next round of union contract negotiations, the agency would have to hire at a faster pace than it is now to maintain bus service, and increase training classes to keep up. If it is unable to do so, SEPTA will have to consider cutting bus service, Richards said.
“At this point we could not add service because of the workforce,” she said. “So we really have to get more operators on board before we could add any more service.”
Some transit agencies, like those in Los Angeles and Boston, have had success hiring more bus operators by raising salaries, said Chris Van Eyken, director of research and policy at the New York-based TransitCenter. But others, like the King County Metro, which operates transit around Seattle, continue to cut bus service, he said.
One key problem is how operators feel they are being treated on the job, by both the public and their bosses, Van Eyken said. Drivers face upticks in aggressive passenger behavior, sometimes unpleasant work hours and tough working conditions, like difficulty finding a bathroom during a short turnaround time between bus runs.
Along with raising wages and trying to address safety concerns, transit agencies can ease lengthy application processes, he said. Though not a quick fix, adding bus lanes to city streets can also make driving a bus through traffic easier, helping to improve employee retention. It also helps drivers complete a route faster, potentially allowing them to make more runs during one shift, he said.
“People are just less likely to consider the position when they don’t feel safe and comfortable every day,” Van Eyken said.
That was the explanation of CTA rail mechanic and employee organizer Eric Basir, who said he was also a former train operator. He described the difficulty of one person simultaneously operating the train, keeping an eye on the doors down the length of the cars and interacting with riders, who can be drunk, unruly or unpredictable.
Operators sometimes work in cabs that are dirty or have human fluids in them, he said. Operators who start as part-time employees must work their way up to get some improved benefits, he said. And always, there is the nagging need to make their schedules.
“Mark my words: It will never be able to hire enough people because the working conditions are so horrible,” he said.
Steele highlighted measures the CTA has taken to boost safety, such as installing bus driver shields and adding police, security and cameras to trains and stations.
Schedules are developed to provide operators enough personal time between runs, he said. Still, the job can be difficult.
Aundra Thompson, a retired bus driver who said he worked a variety of South Side routes over decades with the CTA, saw a marked increase in “disrespect” from the public in recent years. He felt he had little recourse to handle passengers who refuse to pay fares.
Over the course of his career, the time between bus runs seemed to him to shrink. Where once operators had time to use the bathroom at the end of the line or smoke a cigarette, they now have only minutes. They used to be able to use the restroom in a business near their route, but during the COVID-19 pandemic many businesses stopped allowing them in, he said.
But an operator will do what they need to do during their break. Then, they might leave late, and lag throughout their route. And a late bus only gives customers another reason to get upset, he said.
“It’s just getting too rough at the CTA,” he said.
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