And I don't see this changing given the politics surrounding transit funding. Sure, Daley can say he isn't raising property taxes, but we suffer as a result. Good politics, bad policy. I'd imagine the same goes for spending existing property tax revenues. Diverting them to transit is likely a politically risky venture for Daley.

Taft

The news about TIFs being used for transit funding (esp. the "River Line") is very, very good to hear. I can't think of a better use for that money.

Taft

^ So true. I'd really like to see this "River Line" happen. Although I'd prefer a subway system, light rail isn't a bad alternative.

Can you explain how sales taxes (which are a percent) of gross sale do not keep up with inflation?

10% of 100$ is 10$
If inflation pushes price up to 110$, 10% becomes 11$ and keeps up with inflation. Seems fairly intuitive.

I should have been more clear; it does not keep up with the inflation in the cost of transit's inputs, about 80% of which is labor (but construction price inflation shouldn't be ignored either). Wage inflation has been much faster than overall CPI inflation, to which sales tax would be more in line. Basically until CTA breaks its union OR gets a new revenue source, it will have a perpetual budget mess. And both of those are political nightmares in this town. That, at least, is the structual problem.

The other problem is that the collar counties only pay a 0.25% tax into the transit fund, while getting more than their share in Pace and Metra service. Suburbanization has very much hurt sales tax collections in the city, in relative terms. As much as we on this board detest big box retail, the city was wise to allow it to be built because so many people were travelling to the suburbs to do their shopping, where the city (and subsequently, CTA, pertinent to this discussing) got none of the tax revenue.

Can someone explain what the Carroll Ave (river line) is? What is its proposed route?

Thanks for these illuminating comments. I thought there were general revenues, and a general budget. But it turns out that apparently each alderman/ward has their own budgets as well! It's not enough that Chicagoland as a whole has some 200 different political jurisdictions...

There's maps floating around; some have been posted in this thread. Do a forum search. Basically it would run northbound on canal, southbound on clinton, cross the river at kinzie, then run on Carroll to lower michigan, then turn eastbound on illinois to Navy Pier, westbound on Grand to form a loop. It will either be a Bus Rapid Transit (raised boarding, exclusive lanes in the roadway, signal priority, etc) with eventual upgrade to streetcar/light rail, or will (hopefully) start as a streetcar/lightrail.

That is the basic route, and there are a bunch of assorted branches (such as one going up St. Clair, or extending the Grand/Illinois loop to connect to the Grand Red line station, and it all started as part of a tie-in to the Ogden streetcar proposal. I'm not sure which of these branches are still under consideration.

The number I heard thrown around a year or 2 ago was $400 million, but who knows if that holds any weight.

^ It's in the Alternative Analysis stage, which is one step beyond the proposal stage. The Circle Line is also in this stage. And that's not saying much, because they're both still years away.

Correct me if I'm wrong on any of this, transit experts

Crain’s Investigates: What’s wrong with the CTA?

http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=23556

(Crain's) — Business travelers on Blue Line trains crawl downtown from O’Hare International Airport at speeds as low as 15 miles an hour—half the speed of a fast horse.


CRUMBLING STRUCTURES
$904 MILLION: Foundations, bridges, walls and viaducts need fixing. Support structures on the Red Line from Wilson to Howard were built in the 1920s.
Loop office workers from the North Side jam Red Line cars for a trip that can take an hour thanks to aging rails, agonizing slow zones and balky switches.

Brown Line riders face more than two years of construction delays that could double their travel time, but won’t upgrade the line’s structure or signals.

Commuting on the el is bad and getting worse, with no likely solution in sight.

A decrepit elevated train system is sliding deeper into decay that eventually will threaten service on almost every line.

The Chicago Transit Authority says repairing the system will cost $6 billion, money it doesn’t have.

Even if the state and federal governments cough up the money, repairs will take years—meaning years of additional delays and other inconveniences for Chicago commuters.

The question commuters are asking: What’s wrong with the CTA?

The answer: a crippling combination of aging infrastructure, funding shortfalls, questionable choices by CTA management, a string of bad luck and a historic rise in ridership — up 25% since 1999 — that has overwhelmed a rail system once considered nearly as reliable as cold in January.

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The CTA clearly is struggling to deal with that troublesome mix. Just last week, it fired five workers in connection with a Blue Line derailment in July, one of four such accidents last year.

Recently, trains at times have been moving at reduced speeds on as much as 18% of tracks, mostly due to safety engineers’ fears that aging tracks and ties could lead to more accidents.

It adds up to unending heartburn for CTA passengers, who are expected to ride the rails a total of 170 million times this year, and a huge hit to the city’s economy.

“The short-term costs are staggering,” as workers and their employers lose time “easily” worth tens of millions of dollars a year, says Joseph Schwieterman, director of the Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development at DePaul University.

In the long run, CTA woes are one more reason for middle-class workers — and developers — to head to the suburbs, he adds.

Agency officials, led by CTA President Frank Kruesi, blame funding shortfalls that have forced them to defer routine and critical maintenance year after year.

There’s truth in that. But it’s also true that the CTA under Mr. Kruesi often has spent its limited capital dollars on ostentatious expansion projects rather than the smaller, cheaper, more mundane maintenance that keeps trains running on time.

“You can’t be so enamored of glamorous capital projects that you are neglecting the million people you serve a day,” says Robert Paaswell, the CTA’s top manager from 1986 to 1989 and now director of the Urban Transportation Research Center at City University of New York (CUNY).

Most of what’s wrong at the CTA can be linked to delayed capital investment.

The agency pegs its unfunded capital needs by 2011 at $5.8 billion — an amount called “immensely high” by Mr. Paaswell, who hasn’t studied the CTA’s predicament lately but is an authority on transit systems.

The amount “tells me they got behind,” he says. “They’re having to play catch-up.”

CRUMBLING WALLS, SEEDY STATIONS

Remarkably, the CTA is coming off a relatively flush period, having funded major work on four lines (Brown, Red, Blue and Green) in recent years with federal cash and the proceeds of Illinois First bond issues. But the Illinois First money has about run out. If the General Assembly doesn’t come up with a new funding source this spring, the CTA may not have the local dollars needed to qualify for matching federal funds.

Even when it was flowing, Illinois First money wasn’t enough to tackle many of the CTA’s thorniest problems, especially along North Side routes, where some of the oldest transit lines run through many of the city’s fastest-growing neighborhoods.

For instance, among the CTA’s $5.8 billion in unfunded capital needs are large, crumbling sections of concrete walls supporting the 1920s-era Red Line from Wilson Avenue to Howard Street that are held together by steel braces and plates.

Estimated cost of replacement: $406 million.

At least five seedy, forbidding subway stations on that same line need to be rebuilt at $50 million-plus each.

Even if the CTA gets the money, such projects will likely slow or take whole sections of train lines out of commission for years.

One developing trouble spot: railcars. The CTA hasn’t bought any since Orange Line service began in 1993, and while some new cars are on order, they won’t start arriving until 2010. By then, the average age of the 1,190-car fleet will be 27 years, above the 25-year maximum recommended by the Federal Transit Authority.

At the same time, the agency doesn’t have the $623 million it needs for quarter- and half-life overhauls that would extend the useful age of its existing cars, says Paul Fish, CTA vice-president of capital planning. Instead, it makes spot repairs, costing an extra $50 million a year, according to the agency.

That could lead to big problems eventually, because rising passenger traffic means cars run more often, with total annual fleet mileage up 25% since 1999.

And the cars are more crowded, with rush-hour trains, designed to carry no more than 600 to 800 passengers, jammed with as many as 1,000 at a time, according to Rick Harris, president of Local 308 of the Amalgamated Transit Union, which represents rail workers. “They need more equipment,” he says.

EXPANSION OVER NEW SIGNALS

For frustrated commuters, the CTA’s most pressing need might be the $727 million it would take to finish replacing mechanical signals, built as far back as the 1950s, with electronic gear. Modern devices are more reliable and can handle more trains, Mr. Fish says. Mr. Paaswell calls such spending “probably the best investment you can make” on a train system. “It’s better than expansion.”

And yet expansion is what the CTA often has opted for under Mr. Kruesi.

The CTA is spending $130 million building a super-station under the Block 37 development on State Street that would anchor express service to O’Hare. The idea behind the station, which is also getting $42 million in city subsidies, is to let air travelers check their luggage downtown before being whisked to the airport. To help pay for it, the CTA shifted money from equipment purchases and viaduct work in Evanston, transit sources say. But that service will never begin unless a private operator can be found to bring up to $1.5 billion of its own capital to the project.

CTA Chairman Carole Brown replies that the Block 37 project provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to build a spur connecting the Red Line, under State Street, with the Blue Line, which uses the Dearborn subway, thereby providing operational flexibility. “For us, Block 37 is a tunnel project that happens to have a station on top of it,” says Ms. Brown, who herself has questioned the wisdom of the current proposal.

But Jacqueline Leavy of the Neighborhood Capital Budget Group, a coalition of community and economic development organizations, considers the episode an example of the CTA’s focus on glitz over grit — “gilding the lily instead of taking care of immediate needs.”

She points to the Brown Line expansion, which has grown in cost from the $298 million estimated by the CTA in 1998 to $530 million today — not including $250 million needed to upgrade signals, structural steel and electrical substations. “There’s no one looking over their shoulder on cost containment,” Ms. Leavy says, arguing that too much is spent on things like station design and not enough on the signals, switches and trains that are keys to reliability. (One Brown Line station was to include a clock tower before the item was cut, CTA sources say.)

The CTA asserts that the Brown Line project always was about expanding platforms to accommodate more cars, not structural renovation, and that the costs rose as federal officials agreed to more substantial station work.

Another example cited by CTA critics: the recent, $37-million reconstruction of the “Paulina connector” on the Near West Side. It’s being used for the CTA’s new Pink Line but, more significantly, would anchor the proposed $3-billion Circle Line that has been a top priority of Mr. Kruesi’s.

Federal funding for the Circle Line is nowhere in sight. Meanwhile, the rail union’s Mr. Harris says the Pink Line has overstretched crews and equipment that are needed elsewhere, causing delays.

Mr. Kruesi was not available for comment. Other CTA officials say the Pink Line has attracted new riders and has not caused operational woes.

CUNY’s Mr. Paaswell says he learned a critical lesson while running the CTA: “You can’t expand a bad system.”

Beyond the glamour projects, the CTA also has been spending precious capital dollars on non-capital items.

For instance, the agency recently began borrowing in anticipation of receiving federal grants — a practice that puts the cash in hand faster but also adds costs. In the next four years, the agency will spend $143 million on interest, according to CTA documents.

And in the past two years, political pressure forced the CTA to shift $56 million from capital accounts to operating costs.

COUNTING ON SPRINGFIELD

Some transit insiders also say the CTA’s current difficulties are related to a long-standing tendency to move slowly in deploying available funds. Mr. Kruesi tried to address such difficulties several years ago when he announced that the CTA would begin outsourcing management of capital spending on projects.

But as of August, the CTA had $1.5 billion in available but unspent grant money — $495 million of that not even under contract. The CTA blames overly restrictive rules by the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT), which provides a share of most CTA capital projects. IDOT officials dispute that.

Ms. Brown notes that many of the CTA’s current and imminent train delays stem from renovation plans, efforts that eventually will improve service. Indeed, slow zones virtually have disappeared on the Dan Ryan leg of the Red Line since the agency spent $282 million renovating the line last year.

The CTA hopes its successes will persuade state lawmakers this spring to provide the funds to match federal capital grants. The agency must also hit up legislators to pay unmet operating costs, like $200 million in unfunded pension obligations. The CTA is likely to get something, but how much depends on whether Gov. Rod Blagojevich agrees to new taxes or fees. Fares have been raised a total of 33% in two hikes over the past three years, making another increase unlikely.

Meanwhile, back on the O’Hare leg of the Blue Line, Ms. Brown says she’s still trying to figure out why ties that were supposed to last half a century are falling apart after 24 years, creating slow zones. Asked if a little Chicago-style procurement magic took place, she says all that’s certain is that the unidentified supplier “used a different (preservative) compound” than is used elsewhere in the CTA system.

Replacing the ties will cost more than $54 million. Unless the state ponies up, Blue Line riders will face “permanent” slow zones, according to Ms. Brown, who says, “We’re trying to do w¬hat we can with very, very limited resources.”

Things are looking very dismal for the CTA. With all the recent media coverage of this issue(alderman calling it 3rd world and whatnot), I really hope this becomes an important election issue. I am happy that Crain's has been hammering this point pretty hard of late. Daley needs to make fixing the CTA the top priority of this next term, and Blago had better deliver some matching state funds, or we will soon be screwed. As much as I want to host the Olympics, I would trade it in a second for some momentum to fix the current system and funding for the circle line and the downtown connector.

^
Me too. Screw the Olympics. CTA problems will effect our city for years, if not a few decades. All the subway stations need to be rehabbed and modernized ASAP. You dont think visitors notice the grunge down there? Please.

Daley's plan is to have the CTA all fixed by then...he is expecting lots of outside money for that. This was stated at the very beginning of our attempt for the Olympics.

Glad someone (note it wasn't the Sun Times nor the Tribune) had the balls to put the problems in print!

Where is the fare money going? If ridership is up 25% since '99, shouldn't the CTA have the money it needs?

If ridership was down, I'd understand how they could have problems. But with ridership up, they should have more money for repairs today than they did in '98.

Here's an idea for CTA funding though. How about for FAR bonuses for all the downtown development, we cut back on funds to landscaping and instead have an L repair fund?

Funding this, funding that. Blah blah blah. Screw all these "ideas" for funding. The damn federal government could fix the entire CTA, plus build 2 new subway lines for what it costs them to spend ONE F-ING MONTH in Iraq. We don't need "ideas," we need money. 15 billion may sound like a lot of money to me and you and the guy down the street, but it's not. It's chump change, boys. We need to tell the government to stop wasting it in the Middle East and start investing within the borders of the USA.

And please stop helping the cause of those that would shut us down by constantly jawing about how expensive everything is. Just stop. It's not expensive AT ALL. We just need to change priorities. And oohing and aahing over the pricetags doesn't help us with this effort in the slightest.

+++++

This is quite complicated. Boiling it down:

The CTA takes in from fares but a fraction of the money it needs to keep running. Most of the money comes from sales tax from the city and county. The CTA runs as a bit of a charity due to pressures from mayors, legislators and community groups. Until the latest round of fare increases, the pace of CTA fare raises was FAR below the rate of inflation. Fare increases are REALLY unpopular. As is the idea of cutting trains during off hours, on underperforming lines, or reducing coverage to areas that don't use it.

There are a lot of external expectations and pressures on the CTA that basically cripple them in terms of funding. Combine that with questionable management and city, county, state and federal governments that just don't give a shit and you have the current CTA situation. The crains article gave a lot of weight to CTA critics, but I think it is overall a fair assessment of the problems the CTA has.

Taft

The idea of using the TIF districts for transit instead of tulips seems like a good one. In the end though, we need 6 billion dollars to fix the system, and no TIF district or fare increase is going to cover that. We need the feds to give us money and right away. Daley needs to push for transit and make the same kind of effort the mayor of LA is making to try to get funding. We can only hope that democratic victories in the past election may give Daley some more clout in the IL legislature. Obama getting elected may help.
What do you guys think of the idea of corporations ponying up money for rail lines in order for naming rights. Like McDonalds station, or the walmart line. Personally that makes me want to vomit, but I would rather have the walmart circle line than no circle line at all.

Norsider is the man of the hour right now :cool:

Also, kudos to Crains for continuing to hammer this important issue, and making it TOP priority.

I am respecting this particular publication more and more over time, even while my respect for the Tribune and Sun Times plunges into the toilet.

Screw the stations too, the only think I care about is that the tracks and trains work.

SSDD

Very true. In fact, they could also cover the Circle Line, Carrol Ave, and possibly a new LSD light rail with all that money. Whoever becomes the next president should ditch Iraq ASAP and focus on our country's infrastructure stat. We are getting left behind and we shouldnt be.