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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CTA is gonna struggle with energy/fuel costs and huge shortage of staff from drivers/operators to mechanics. It's gonna get worse before it gets better even if ridership is ticking up. CTA buys fuel in bulk at pre-negotiated rates, so right now the increased costs are falling on the speculators. When it comes time to negotiate fuel for 2023, it's gonna be bad.
I imagine CTA will have no choice but to pay more for fuel and pay higher salaries to attract workers, and we will end up in another revenue crisis (aka "doomsday" scenario) like in 2010. Only this time politicians and the public have a pile of other doomsdays going on. With the discourse around WFH, will there be political support for pouring more taxpayer money into CTA?
One bright spot is that electric buses may finally be ready for prime-time. They are still far from perfect, but CTA can scale up their deployment of electric buses to blunt the impact of gas prices. Depends on what the Feds do as well, it would be great if they worked with bus manufacturers to scale up production and supported the training of new electricians to install/maintain all the charging infra.