Can I ask why the CTA Blue Line has been a ... show lately? I'm looking at an upcoming Chicago excursion for the holiday weekend and the downtown hotels are crazy expensive, so a hotel along the CTA line might work better. Either ORD or Midway, although, I guess the latter would actually involve the Orange Line.
There are a few key issues, some of which are general societal issues, some specific to CTA, and some which are specific to the Blue Line.
I’m not going to go into the societal problems, except to say that things have been headed this way for a long time (even when things appeared to be improving), with crime rates accelerating in the past few years, and then things really falling apart during COVID and in the aftermath of the unrest/fallout of the George Floyd murder. A lot of the fallout of these issues are persisting, with no real end in site.
On the CTA side, their biggest problem has been the dishonesty that the agency has adopted as official policy with respect to operating conditions during COVID. CTA has continually claimed that they are the only large agency not to cut service during COVID (they even won an award from APTA for it, and their president, Dorval Carter was recognized by APTA as outstanding manager of the year or something for this work, all of which led to the CTA board giving Dorval and his executive team a 33% pay raise last fall for all of his “outstanding” work and blah blah blah…). This is just one big lie (or any other strong derogatory term you want to use).
The reality is that only “on paper” has full service been maintained. On the street (or on the rails), a good 25-30% of the service has not operated. On the rail system, they absolutely adjusted the schedule behind the scenes. They just never published the new schedule to the public. They also adjusted the rail schedule in such a way that it actually made it more difficult to fill the (reduced) schedule than if they’d just gone ahead and published said schedule officially.
To understand how/why this is a problem, you have to understand how work gets assigned to operators at virtually any public transit agency in North America. At CTA (and pretty much anywhere else), every few months they will publish a new set of schedules to be operated for an upcoming period. The schedules aren’t just the times a bus or train will be somewhere. They are also (and, from the standpoint of the schedulers, more significantly) where and when each operator run will have to report, what they will be driving while on their shift, where/when to take breaks, where/when they will finish, and which operator run will take over for them at the end of their work day (or if they are bringing the vehicle back to the yard to park). This is an overly simplified view, but basically there is a very delicate set of interconnected pieces that all have to work together in order for the schedule to function properly.
Once these schedules are published, operators will, in seniority order (i.e. starting with whoever has been working there the longest, finishing with whoever just got hired most recently), choose which of those operator runs they want to work, and on which days of the week. Basically, the most senior folks get to pick from the entire slate (subject to certain rules; at CTA the restrictions are that you must only pick from what is posted to your bus garage or your rail terminal; there is a separate process for giving operators the opportunity to change which garage/terminal they work out of). The next-most-senior operators can pick from anything except what the seniormost guys picked. And so on…down to the least senior folks (or “juniorest”?) that basically get the leftover scraps. These leftover scraps are generally the least desirable, often working either long split shifts with barely-minimum overnight rest, and/or night shifts on routes that have rougher operating conditions (historically, the “early straight,” or something that reports around 5-6 am and works until early afternoon, is typically the category that goes first, as it only deals with folks going to work, and then a lighter midday load; this gives operators the opportunity to work overtime in the afternoon rush, or just take the rest of the day off; weekend and night work tends to be leftover more often).
Now, take the above and introduce something like COVID. COVID has given us (among other things), a staffing shortage. The shortage comes in two parts. First is the higher absenteeism related to more people being sick, and their time off being longer (e.g., the 14-day quarantines, when previously an illness might have you out for a day or two at most). Second is the fact that staffing levels themselves are lower, as hiring and retention are more difficult.
Since the success of the entire operation is dependent on all of those carefully scheduled pieces falling into place, if you have a higher level of absenteeism, your extra board (drivers without regular schedules, but who are available for day-to-day assignments) gets depleted quite quickly. Once it’s used up, the next person that calls in sick; well, their scheduled run doesn’t operate. Anybody waiting for the bus or train that they were supposed to run will have to wait an extra headway for the next one.
Then, consider that actual staffing is reduced from where you planned it to be. This makes things even worse, still. Consider the above practice of operators picking their work in advance. When fully staffed, the last few drivers on the seniority list get the leftovers. Now, consider what happens when your staffing is 5% or 10% less than you scheduled around. Instead of those leftovers going to the last person hired, those leftovers go to…nobody. Because you went through your seniority list of operators and then ran out of drivers before you ran out of work. This disproportionately affects certain routes, certain times of the day, and certain days of the week (i.e. anything that is less desirable to work). So while the morning rush hour can seem like everything is running fine, the weekends and evenings are just a nightmare.
Now we get to some Blue Line specific issues, again, related to CTA’s general lack of honesty. The reality is that, even without the operator shortage, the Blue Line cannot run to schedule. The schedule is built based on the assumed conditions of several years ago. Meanwhile, they have been doing some signal and power upgrades on the north end, resulting in single-tracking and other disruptions. These are not accounted for in the schedule.
Even worse, however, is that the south end (Congress branch) is significantly slow-ordered because of a deterioration in the track and roadbed. (As a side note, this is because highway medians are a terrible place to build rail transit, and more specifically, the highway medians CTA uses do not have proper drainage, so whenever it rains, it all just goes into the ballast and loosens it up over time, degrades the ties, etc.).
In reality, the Congress branch takes 10-20 minutes longer than scheduled. It is just a pathetic stretch of railroad. The seemingly obvious solution would be to extend the schedule in the short-term (and do repairs for longer-term improvements). However, by extending the schedule by that amount, the Blue Line would take so long that operators could not legally do three round-trips in a day, which is what they are scheduled to do currently. This would mean either increasing the staffing levels (not possible right now), or reducing (on paper) the amount of scheduled service to reflect their ability to operate. Since CTA’s executives have this mindset that they’d rather look good on paper rather than run properly in reality, the option of modifying the schedules was rejected in favor of sticking their heads in the sand.
A friend of mine built a tracker that measures the CTA Blue Line’s operational performance vs. schedule, and on weekdays, they are running, at best, 50-60% of their service. On weekends, its even worse. Gaps of 30-45 minutes during the daytime are sadly normal because of this mess. And as long as CTA as an agency refuses to do anything but put a footnote on a service alert about “COVID-19 related staffing shortages” rather than scheduling around the number they expect to have in the foreseeable future, the service will continue to struggle.
