It’s the last day of January and of Dorval Carter’s tenure as president of the CTA, and a group of about two dozen people are celebrating at Emporium Arcade Bar in Logan Square. On top of wooden tables lie farewell cards, snacks, and a cake with “Dynamic & Optimized Retirement” in red frosting — a nod to the kind of oblique jargon that Carter liked to use. A yellow piece of construction paper reads “Happy Retirement Dorval,” with notes written all around. “Doors open on the right at unemployment!” one says.

This isn’t Carter’s official retirement party — it’s way too low budget for a guy with an annual salary of $391,000. Rather, this is a celebration hosted by Commuters Take Action, which formed in 2022 to pressure the CTA to perform better. It has put much of the blame for the L’s woes on Carter and relentlessly called for him to be replaced.

I spot Fabio Göttlicher, a software engineer who’s one of the group’s founders. Tall and mustachioed, he is wearing a Southwestern-print hoodie and a yellow paper birthday hat. In late 2021, as concerns mounted about inconsistent service, unsanitary trains, and public safety, he wrote a program to assess the L’s performance and found that only 55 to 60 percent of scheduled trains were running — an astonishing drop in service, even accounting for the decline in demand during the pandemic. That discovery spurred him to become more of a transit activist.

It was just a few years earlier that Chicagoans could actually boast about the L. In 2017, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel gushed about the city’s transit system in a New York Times op-ed headlined “In Chicago, the Trains Actually Run on Time.” He cited a survey that found that 85 percent of Chicagoans were satisfied with local public transportation. While other cities were preoccupied with costly projects to expand their systems, Emanuel wrote, the CTA was focused on modernizing its existing capabilities to ensure reliability.

Carter was appointed by Emanuel in 2015 in large part because of his ability to secure funding for expensive infrastructure projects. Having worked for the Federal Transit Administration and briefly as the U.S. Department of Transportation chief of staff, Carter had the savvy to navigate the Beltway and drum up money, including the $3 billion in federal funding he secured for the RPM and for the extension of the Red Line south to 130th Street.

But for all of Carter’s success in securing precious federal dollars, there’s little doubt that the system decayed under his watch. The thrust of the criticism heaped on Carter is that he prioritized those pricey, splashy projects over day-to-day maintenance. The pandemic, of course, dealt the CTA a blow no one could have seen coming. Yet transit advocates believe issues arising from it — staffing shortages (before the pandemic, there were 880 rail operators; as of February, there were 825, up from 723 a year prior), crime spikes, and higher rates of homelessness on the L — could have been better addressed. Which is how Carter, who infamously rarely took public transportation, went from a relatively anonymous agency head to a frequent subject of critical news stories and social media attacks. 

Off the Rails

L ridership, which hit its peak in the mid-2010s, had begun to slip even before COVID torpedoed it. Five years on, the numbers are still well below prepandemic levels.

Even before the pandemic, some of Carter’s decisions were hard to explain. In 2019, Cook County initiated a pilot program to provide money to all three local transit agencies to alleviate burdens on Far South Side and south suburban commuters. Metra accepted a proposal to reduce fares in those areas; Pace amped up service on its 352 Halsted route, which is heavily used by suburbanites. But according to Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, the CTA snubbed the county’s offer. At the time, Carter was doing the delicate dance of trying to lock down the remaining federal money, around $1.1 billion, for the Red Line extension, and when it came to helping the far southern part of the city, the agency wanted to focus its energy on that project. The CTA also feared, as then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot publicly stated, that if the county increased ridership on Metra and Pace on the Far South Side and in the south suburbs, it would take commuters away from the CTA, decreasing its fare revenue.

Still, Preckwinkle is mystified at the logic of turning down immediate relief because of a solution a decade away. “I never got to talk to Dorval,” she tells me. “Who knows what motivated them. They wouldn’t work with us, that’s the short story. And we had money! When people are prepared to give you money and you won’t talk to them, that’s a little odd.” 

With the decline of the L under Carter came a surge of activism. As people like Göttlicher began to use data to document the train system’s unreliability, they formed Commuters Take Action to organize their efforts. In September 2022, members demonstrated outside CTA headquarters before a Chicago Transit Board meeting, the first of several protests they’ve staged. They’ve written op-eds in local publications, been quoted in The New York Times, and relentlessly posted daily reports on their social media accounts of how many L trains run on schedule. Members are getting involved in other ways, too: Morgan Madderom, Göttlicher’s fiancée, is director of transportation policy and planning on the City Council’s Committee on Pedestrian and Traffic Safety, while Caroline Pavlecic sits on the CTA’s Citizens Advisory Board.

Despite the festive atmosphere at Emporium, Göttlicher remains apprehensive about the future of the L. He argues that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s appointment of Michael Eaddy, a pastor with no prior experience in public transit, to the CTA board isn’t reflective of a person with a serious commitment to public transit. “Considering that the mayor defended Carter for so long and was on Carter’s side, I hope we don’t end up with another Carter-like person at the helm,” Göttlicher says. 

Earlier in January, the CTA appointed Nora Leerhsen, the agency’s chief of staff, as interim president. Leerhsen has pledged to address smoking on the L trains and the cleanliness of them. As for Carter’s permanent replacement, whether it’s Leerhsen or someone else, Pavlecic is hoping for a leader who is more involved — who actually rides the trains and buses, who talks with frontline workers to understand their experiences, and who interacts with the public to hear their concerns and suggestions. “I would like to believe that CTA is going to look for somebody who embodies those qualities,” she says.

For all the ire directed at Carter, the issues facing the L are much larger than any one person. “The biggest problem is just lack of willpower to change anything,” Pavlecic says. “We famously had Lori Lightfoot say that Chicago is a car city while she was in office a couple of years ago. And that’s just ridiculous because so many Chicagoans, especially in more densely populated neighborhoods, get around primarily by walking or biking or taking transit.”

Dani and Emily, two women in their 20s, are wearing costumes for the occasion. Dani is dressed in khaki coveralls with a CTA logo pasted onto her arm and has a mock jet pack and raygun — a “ghost BUSter,” like a Peter Venkman tasked with eliminating delinquent buses. Emily sports a slapdash pageant queen outfit, with a tiara and a sash reading “Miss the Bus.” 

Dani and Emily both follow Commuters Take Action on Instagram, which is how they heard about the party. They explain that their frustration with the CTA primarily has to do with infrequent service, especially as a safety issue. Emily tells me that she waited an hour and a half for a train on New Year’s Eve and regularly experiences 25-to-30-minute lags if she just misses the L or a bus. Neither of them has a car, so the CTA is critical to their ability to traverse the city. 

We’re interrupted by Pavlecic, who tells us it’s time to cut the cake. Everyone gathers around, amid the hubbub of the growing crowd at Emporium, and Pavlecic is momentarily at a loss for words. As we all raise glasses of craft beer, she shouts, “To Dorval Carter’s retirement!” No one really seems sure what to say. After all, no one really knows what’s next.

During City Council hearings, Carter argued that the central issue facing the CTA was a lack of funding. This is a complaint the agency has lodged for decades. It dates back to 1973, when the Illinois legislature established the Regional Transportation Authority to address the financial troubles of the CTA and various declining suburban rail systems. But their huge deficits proved too much of a problem for the RTA to address, so in 1983 the state restructured things: It stripped the RTA of some powers — including setting fares and overseeing operations — and created two new agencies in the suburbs, one for buses (Pace) and one for rail (Metra).

The state legislature devised a formula to funnel funding to the (now four) agencies, money that the RTA would distribute. How funds are disbursed gets a little complicated, but it ends up being disproportionate to the realities of local transportation. Last year, the CTA accounted for 84 percent of all trips in the region but received only 46 percent of state funding, whereas Pace accounted for only 5 percent but received 21 percent. The upshot: The CTA is one of the most poorly financed transit organizations in the country, ranking second to last among comparable agencies in funding per trip in 2022.

When I met with Preckwinkle, she came prepared with more figures to illustrate local transit’s underfunding. The state contributes 17 percent of northeastern Illinois’s public transit budget. For comparison: New York City gets 28 percent from its state; the Boston metro area, 44 percent; and Philadelphia, 50 percent. 

What does this all mean for riders? Look no further than how two previous financial crises affected the CTA. In 1997, with a drastic reduction in federal funding, the agency had difficulty meeting its operating costs; a private consulting firm, Booz-Allen & Hamilton, was brought in and proposed a slew of cuts to the city’s bus service. Then in 2008, the Great Recession’s effect on the state budget led to fare hikes and layoffs of more than 2,400 workers. 

Pennie McCoach, the president of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents the rail employees, told me these cuts have had a lasting impact. Before the Booz-Allen staff reductions, L trains had “motormen” driving, plus conductors in other cars, which meant there were always people in the middle and back of the train monitoring passengers. But now, she points out, a driver is often the only CTA employee on a train. “If there’s an incident, sometimes that one person has to come all the way from their head car, where they’re operating, walk back to the seventh car, see what the incident is, deal with it, communicate to the control center, and see if you’re going to get some type of help or assistance.” To do this, of course, the driver has to stop the train, which exacerbates delays.

Even acknowledging that the CTA is underfunded, it’s fair to wonder whether the agency could be doing more with the resources it has. Stephen Schlickman, the head of the RTA from 2005 to 2010, recalls that in 2007 his agency faced a $400 million shortfall, so he requested that the Illinois auditor general conduct a review to ensure that the problem wasn’t mismanagement. He questions why the CTA doesn’t undertake a similar probe. (The CTA says it conducts its own audit annually and is subject to triennial audits from both the Federal Transit Administration and Illinois Department of Transportation.) And he can’t make sense of how the CTA spent its COVID relief money: “I’m sorry, they got billions of dollars from the federal government, and why the service, crime, filthiness of the CTA became so bad is beyond me.”

The short answer is that the money was used to keep trains and buses running even as fare revenue dropped sharply. (The CTA releases an annual budget report with broad categories of costs and spending but doesn’t provide a line-by-line breakdown.) In 2020, coinciding with the height of the pandemic, the L saw a 65 percent decrease in ridership. But the CTA didn’t cut service, at least not proportionally to the decline in ridership, because essential workers needed public transportation. And the agency didn’t lay off a single rail operator.

Yet despite the agency’s efforts to maintain its frontline personnel, staffing has been an issue. Kyle Lucas, the executive director of the advocacy group Better Streets Chicago (he was also at Carter’s retirement party), tells me that hiring challenges are as much the CTA’s doing as the pandemic’s. The requirements to become a rail operator here are far stricter than in other cities. Before you can even train for that role, you have to work as a flagger — someone who directs and signals trains on the tracks — often for several months. (The CTA says there is no minimum time requirement that someone must be a flagger before they can move to rail operator training, and that this prerequisite “allows us to maintain the highest safety standards for both riders and employees.”)

That job, which puts you at risk of electrocution or a fall, pays barely over $23 an hour. “It’s horrible expectations,” Lucas says of this prerequisite. “And they’ve just been really resistant to actually revisiting that, when other agencies and systems have even before this crisis.” Understaffing also means that drivers must put in more overtime, working shifts as long as 13 hours, which contributes to burnout and resignations.

Just as with riders, safety is a chief concern of train operators these days. McCoach says there aren’t enough Chicago Police Department officers working the CTA — fewer than 100 are assigned to the whole system, she said at a recent state senate hearing. One operator, who asked to remain anonymous, told me that since the start of the pandemic, the level of harassment and violence toward frontline CTA employees has escalated. The agency hired more unarmed private security guards in 2022 to supplement CPD efforts, but the operator says those guards have little impact, spending much of their time standing around, looking at their phones. The operator described a recent meeting between CTA employees and an official from the security force. The operator asked why the guards don’t have handcuffs or hold people in custody until CPD officers arrive. The executive responded, “You don’t want one of our guards to get jumped, do you?”

During Dennis Mondero’s first week as the CTA’s deputy chief of staff, in 2009, he toured the agency’s West Loop control center, a wide room with one wall covered nearly floor to ceiling with surveillance screens. It looked like a scene in a Michael Bay movie, a giant eye keeping watch over all of the L stations. But Mondero’s attention was drawn to something else: an adjacent wall with a grid of blinking red lights resembling the L system map. What he saw nagged at him. “The No. 1 compliment that the CTA got when I first arrived was, ‘Hey, you guys finally have a bus tracker [for riders]. Great job, CTA,’ ” he says. “And the No. 1 criticism was, ‘You knuckleheads, how come you don’t have something for the trains?’ ” 

The agency’s explanation: Buses were already equipped with GPS, and outfitting the trains, most of which were built in the 1980s, would be too expensive. Yet this grid on the wall was somehow tracking trains. “It’s so accurate that the supervisors are talking to the operators,” Mondero remembers. “And I’m like, ‘How the heck do we know where the cars are if we don’t have GPS?’ And they’re like, ‘Because of the electric circuit, we have an approximation.’ ” The readings weren’t precise, but they were reasonably accurate. Mondero knew the technology could serve as the basis for a tool that could track trains for riders. He just had to sell the idea to the CTA. He called the arrival times “estimated” and the system “a beta product.” With around $100,000, his idea led to the tracker the CTA still uses today on its platforms and apps.

The point of this anecdote, explains Mondero, who left the agency in 2013 and is now on the RTA’s board, is that the CTA has to constantly find solutions to its problems on the cheap. This is primarily the purview of Molly Poppe, the CTA’s first chief innovation officer, who started at the agency in 2019. Her department is tasked with figuring out how technology can address the challenges facing public transit. Two days before Poppe and I spoke in mid-February, the CTA’s board approved a pilot program to install cameras at two L stations to detect objects or people on the tracks. Such obstructions result in service delays, and the CTA gets 2,000 reports of them annually.

Poppe was also behind the visionary proposal that Dorval Carter talked about in a speech he delivered to the City Club of Chicago in September: a map showing how the agency would broaden L service with more investment. I’d seen something like it before. In 2014, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and another local nonprofit, the Active Transportation Alliance, launched a campaign called Transit Future, offering a proposal for what expanded rail service in Chicago might look like. Unveiled at a press conference with bigwigs like Rahm Emanuel and Toni Preckwinkle, the map was tantalizing. Just imagine: the Brown Line connecting to the Blue Line at Jefferson Park, easing North Side residents’ commutes to O’Hare; a brand-new Lime Line, running along Cicero Avenue, to bridge the 95th/Dan Ryan and Jefferson Park stations and make public transportation much more accessible to West Siders; and a high-speed connection between Midway and O’Hare. 

Jacky Grimshaw of the Center for Neighborhood Technology conceived Transit Future. She explains that nothing in the map was particularly bold or new; it was all based on plans that the CTA or Metra had previously pitched. (Mayor Richard J. Daley advocated nearly 60 years ago for the Red Line extension, which has yet to break ground.) The key was the timing. Preckwinkle had recently repealed her predecessor Todd Stroger’s sales tax hike of an extra cent on every dollar spent, and Grimshaw hoped to persuade her to reinstate it to match the federal funds for local rail projects. 

So why did Transit Future never come to be? Preckwinkle contends that it was more important to try to get the county’s finances (including its pension obligations) in order before committing to a big spending plan such as Transit Future — and that there was no state budget for the project anyway. 

Like Transit Future, Poppe’s proposal tries to tackle a rider coverage gap that has long plagued local transit, one that could be fixed with a circumferential train line that starts in the Far South Side, curves westward through the Southwest Side, provides a north-south route through the West Side, and then extends eastward to the Far North Side. There have been pushes in the past to make this arcing railway a reality, first in the early 2000s with the Mid-City Transitway, which would have used the rights of way intended for the canceled Crosstown Expressway, and then a few years later with the Circle Line (a compressed version of that earlier plan). Both failed because, as the CTA and the City Council slowly tried to hash out the planning and proposals with residents, the cost of heavy rail increased alongside the agency’s financial troubles.

The circumferential line would be especially useful in postpandemic Chicago. By design, the L has traditionally served one function extremely well: shuttling people into and out of the Loop. But as more people work from home or in facilities spread across the city and suburbs, that design has become less apt. And since public transportation can no longer move everyone around efficiently, more and more commuters are getting around by car. 

If you drive in Chicago, the effects of these changing patterns are plainly visible. Traffic is worse than ever, and not just on expressways but also on major arterial streets like Western and Ashland. In early January, the transportation analytics firm Inrix published a widely circulated and alarming report: Chicago is tied with New York City for the second-worst traffic in the world, with drivers spending an average of 102 hours a year in gridlock.

As someone who was involved with both the Mid-City Transitway and Circle Line proposals, Schlickman thinks expansion is a pipe dream. “It’s unaffordable,” the former RTA chief says. “Unless we get politics to change and give mass transit equal priority as highway investment money-wise, it’s just not going to happen.” And he’s not talking about local financing only. The CTA’s budget is roughly split in two: half for operations, which are largely covered by the city and state, and half for capital projects (infrastructure and service improvements), which are highly reliant on federal funds. If you’ve been keeping up with current events, you know that Chicago can’t count on more money from the feds anytime soon.

Joseph Schofer, a longtime transit expert who recently retired as a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, takes Schlickman’s reasoning a step further: Is it even prudent to keep building rail in Chicago? “To intensify and extend an extraordinarily expensive technology in a point in history where everything about technology is changing, when you’re losing population in the city, it wouldn’t be a good investment if you had the money, and you don’t have the money.” The other problem, he points out, is that upgrading rail keeps getting pricier. “I’m really fed up with reading articles where some idiot says, ‘You know, everybody wants this.’ Does everybody know what it costs? Tell me if China’s losing its shirt on running high-speed rail. Spain has more high-speed rail than any place else in Europe, and they’re crushed by the subsidy costs. Does it make any sense? Not to me.”

That said, he stresses that the L is critical to the city. Many people still depend on the train, and it remains irreplaceable as a means of getting to the Loop. But he believes that local government and the CTA should be focused on trying to maintain the system at peak performance, budgeting for nothing beyond that, including rail expansion. He thinks the CTA would be smarter to shift its priorities toward bus rapid transit, or BRT: dedicated lanes with roadway priority for buses and nicer, larger stations. Chicago already has around 15 miles of such lanes, but that pales in comparison with the more than 100 miles in the much smaller city of Minneapolis. To Schofer, the Red Line extension is money that could have been better spent. Not only would BRT be a lot cheaper, but technology is on its side: Automation is coming. “I’m not talking about Teslas and Elon Musk,” he says. “I’m talking about a really fully automated, very individualized system, which is maybe 20 years out at best. If I build heavy rail transit, I ought to be building that for 50 to 100 years, and it’s gonna go south before I get to the end of its life.” 

When I ask Poppe about this line of argument, she laughs gently. “Regardless of whether you have all the autonomous technology, there’s always going to be speed limitations when you are operating on the street with pedestrians and bikes and other vulnerable road users,” she says. The reason she favors the Red Line extension over BRT along the same corridor is simple: It’s all about the distance. A fast, unobstructed mode of travel from 130th Street to the Loop, which still has the highest concentration of jobs in the city, provides the best return on investment.

Poppe and her department are studying how AI and automation could help the CTA mitigate issues with staffing, efficiency, and safety. She emphasizes that implementing new technology wouldn’t mean a loss in jobs — it would mean imagining new ways to make the trains more efficient. In the next few years, the CTA will be rolling out more of its latest cars, the 7000 series, which come not only with GPS, making the Train Tracker more accurate, but automated people counters that can direct passengers to less crowded cars and aid with weight distribution, helping trains move more smoothly. The agency is in the very early stages of studying autonomous braking technology that would allow trains to stop at stations more precisely and reduce the technical requirements for operators. And last year the CTA instituted a somewhat controversial pilot program with the software company ZeroEyes to scan surveillance footage for guns using AI. 

But no matter what technological advances are made, Schofer points out, there’s no escaping that the L’s troubles aren’t just the province of the CTA; they’re symptomatic of the city’s long-standing issues: poverty, segregation, and local politicians’ inability to deal with them in an effective manner. “Chicago has a truckload of social problems that are driving people out,” he says, “and building better trains isn’t going to bring them back in.”