Quote:
Originally Posted by the urban politician
Wow, this is great to hear. Standing room only buses and trains?
I don’t want to throw a banana bash too early, but I’m going to remain cautiously hopeful about the future of transit-dependent urbanity
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Well headways are the main reason for standing room only. Very frequently right at morning/evening rush on the Blue Line the headways are still 12-15 minutes where they use to be 3-5 minutes. Today my train was the first one to come by at 8:45am in 16 minutes. So it was packed but if the trains were even running at every 5 minutes it would have been completely fine. As it was it was a huge crush.
Other problem just being the extreme homelessness problem etc on the trains. Well over half the seats on this morning rush blue line to the loop had people living/sleeping across all the rows. Legs out in the aisle and someone sleeping across to seats with their legs blocking the other two seats. Hard for people to pile in and stand.
We get downtown and the platform, tracks and stairs were covered in trash and filth, salt, etc. Escalator shut down and blocked off so everyone had to stand in huge lines to try and go single-file up the stairs as others tried to come down. Been like that all week.
Took the CTA for decades now and for the first time ever it's a huge hindrance in my desire to either WFH or be back in the office. I find myself not wanting to come in just because the train takes forever and is a stressful experience, that never even crossed my mind in the past. The conductors both going and coming were extremely apologetic over the speakers, said they were trying to do their best but there simply wasn't any staff anymore that could drive the trains.