ARTICLE: Merge Metra, Pace, CTA into a mega-agency? CMAP suggests massive changes, but there's pushb

Daily Herald

Rescuing transit from a fiscal free fall could require higher taxes or fees and possibly kneading Metra, Pace and the CTA into one mega-agency, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning officials said Wednesday.

The three organizations face a combined $730 million annual budget shortfall starting in 2026, when federal COVID-19 funding dries up. In 2022, state lawmakers required CMAP to report on the crisis and offer solutions.

"Be bold. Re-imagine our transportation system. Focus on ensuring the system is financially viable. Make it stronger than it was before COVID-19. Consider equity, climate change and economic growth," is how CMAP Executive Director Erin Aleman described their objectives.
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This proposal won't end well. Hopefully, by 2026 when the bottom falls out, we will be out of the Illinois Dept of Taxation Theft's reach.

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I really hope they go through with this. I feel like we're such a sore outlier with such an agency structure. I also hope the state will fully fund the desires of CMAP, I'll gladly put my tax dollars towards that.

They won't cut service to meet the budget or shrinking ridership.

This is all about finding a legal structure to take the suburbs' tax base to make up for the city's shortfall rather than having to live within their means.

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Makes sense to me. The suburbs should pay up. Don't expect stuff without paying for it. It's either that or higher fares. Or no service. But that's my opinion, and the taxpayer always hates paying money for anything, even if it's good. Oh well. FIngers crossed.

Also quoting doesn't work for me right now for some reason.

Yeah, no. This deal isn't about bailing out Metra. It's about bailing out the CTA.

Suburban users don't expect stuff from the CTA because THEY DON"T USE IT. And they shouldn't have to pay for services that operate exclusively within the City limits....

Metra can (and should) cut services to match demand, and raise fares to better reflect the cost of the service. It's something they can do without too much voter backlash... at the end of the day, only 5% of suburban residents (300,000 daily out of 6M) use Metra. And the folks who ride Metra are indeed a captive audience. Nobody's ditching the train to sit in traffic and pay more for parking than what they pay for a round trip ticket on Metra.

The City of Chicago.... can't cut service or raise fares without serious voter backlash. Around 30-50% of city residents ride CTA.... (1.7M daily rides with 3M residents). And those residents are already getting hit with higher taxes to pay for police/fire/school contracts that can't be supported by the current tax base.


We've had this discussion for three years ---- ridership projections for the next five years is still only expected to get back to 70% of pre-Pandemic ridership. You simply cannot operate 100% of the pre-Pandemic network at 70% funding, nor can you justify operating that much excess capacity.

Schedules need to shrink and fares need to go up. Merging agencies is only going to kick the can further down the road (something Illinois is great at doing).

Maybe you should look at a map of the CTA service area and of the city of Chicago. Every L train route extends outside of Chicago except the brown and red lines, and the yellow and purple lines have only one station just inside the city limits.

If the suburbs didn't use L services, they wouldn't be running outside the city, so clearly the suburbs do benefit from the CTA's operations.

I'm a suburban user of the CTA. Plenty of people from the suburbs use it. And there are many systems around the country that operate under the same structure that they would like to implement. And reducing schedules/increasing fares will make that ridership recovery even worse.

Also, Metra doesn't need to reduce service, they need to adjust it as they have properly identified. Most of their recovery has been in off-peak hours, and so they need to provide more service in those hours. Plus, the schedule on most lines is abysmal.

I'm tired of this mentality that just because ridership hasn't recovered to exactly 100% we need to make the system even worse. They need to adapt and learn. Metra has done this by recognizing and starting to switch over to a regional rail model.

DominikW118 wrote: ↑Sun Oct 08, 2023 2:21 pmI'm tired of this mentality that just because ridership hasn't recovered to exactly 100% we need to make the system even worse. They need to adapt and learn. Metra has done this by recognizing and starting to switch over to a regional rail model.

There are days where I am glad that the South Shore is not controlled by Metra and other days when I am extremely glad.

Services should be modified to match ridership demands. Consideration needs to be given to the potential riders lost due to trains not running at times the passengers desire. There are physical constraints and logical ones as well, but "what would work better" should be the question, not "what can we cut".

The South Shore currently runs a 21 train schedule (modified during ongoing construction). When construction completes in May 2024 they will be ADDING 14 more trains, and in 2025 they will be adding an additional 10 trains between Munster and Chicago. Improving service by running trains at desired times.

RandallW wrote: ↑Mon Sep 25, 2023 3:25 pm Maybe you should look at a map of the CTA service area and of the city of Chicago. Every L train route extends outside of Chicago except the brown and red lines, and the yellow and purple lines have only one station just inside the city limits.

If the suburbs didn't use L services, they wouldn't be running outside the city, so clearly the suburbs do benefit from the CTA's operations.

Sure, let's play demographic semantics. You're technically correct that Evanston, Skokie, Forest Park, Oak Park, Cicero, and Rosemont "benefit" by being adjacent to the City Limits.

With the exception of the Purple line, all of those are still mostly within a mile (or less) of the City Limits, and a rounding error when you look at the Suburbs and the Metra tax base as a whole.

The Rosemont station is 900 feet from the City Limits. Oak Park is 5000 feet, Forest Park and Skokie are both less than 3500 feet away.

Only the Purple Line is really any meaningful distance outside the City Limits, and there's history on that as well -- it's repeatedly been looked at for shutting down since it duplicates the Metra UP-N service area (all of its stations are less than 5000 feet away from a UP-N station).

I just heard about this on the radio. I haven't checked this forum in a while. Coincidentally, tonight I just talked to a close friend of a recent member of Metra's board, who I also worked with on railroad projects about ten years ago. I know he (one time board member) knows trains and dollars. Well he also saw what's coming in the books and got out of there. I don't think the plan will stop it. Yeah, I bailed from billsnnoise too.