Just days before the 2008 Summer Olympics, Richard M. Daley, Chicago's Mayor-For-Life, was in China taking test rides on Beijing's new state-of-the art subway.
With dreams of the 2016 Chicago games dancing in his head, Mayor Daley wanted to have a first-hand look-see at the modern marvel of the Beijing subway lines so he could augment his planned plea for help from Washington to rehabilitate his city's century-old creaking and cranky transit system.
As
it turned out, the day after I'd watched TV reports about the mayor's
magical transit train trip 7,000 miles away from home, I happened to be
downtown, descending into the Chicago Avenue station at the early end
of the evening rush hour. I had barely cleared the bottom step before I
bumped into a mob of CTA passengers lined up as they waited to feed the
transit card machines.
"What's going on?" I asked one of the 15 riders ahead of me in my line.
The
woman I stood directly behind shrugged. I looked at the machines. Out
of the six, four had out-of-order stickers slapped on them in the area
where the money should have been going. I
stood there puzzled, slowly shuffling forward, fighting that feeling I
get when I'm stuck in traffic on the toll way braking my way towards
the booth for those without an I-Pass, when a uniformed CTA employee
showed up within earshot.
"Why are so many of the machines broken?" I asked.
"They're
not broke," he said, stopping and approaching me with a body language
that said he loved taking on customers with a beef.
"They're not." I said in a questioning sort of way.
"No. They're full. They can't accept any more cash."
"What?"
"These people they got in charge don't know what they're doing. They come in from out of town thinking they're so smart, ha."
Listening
to the rumble of the Red Line train having come and now going while I
was still waiting in line left me missing the humor of it all.
"Gas
is up to four bucks a gallon. It cost too much to drive so everybody's
taking the train," he said. "The geniuses in charge haven't figured
that out yet, so they only send a collector once a day. They ought to
be sending somebody out here twice a day to get the money."
"I see," I said.
So
that was it. The always broke and begging Chicago Transit Authority was
so incompetently managed that it wasn't bothering to collect the money
it needed so that it could be sure it collected more of the money it
needed. On
Friday, I was reminded of my up close and personal observation of the
CTA management's business acumen when Mayor Daley made a failing
attempt to broker an agreement between his CTA officials and labor
union leaders.
Obviously,
the CTA's union leader knows the same thing the Chicago station CTA
employee knew. After the mayor's futile effort, this is what Darrell
Jefferson, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union, local 241 had to
say about CTA bosses: "Outside of Enron, they probably have mismanaged
themselves more than any corporation in America."
To
the casual observer like myself, Jefferson's pronouncement applies to
small things such as the rehab of the Armitage Avenue L station where
the track platform was extended to allow longer trains while the
outdoor heater was left some distance away from the new boarding area.
But it also applies to much more important things such as the 13 L
derailments in the past five years. That grand sum amounts to more
accidents than the New York City subway and Washington Metro combined
during the same time period.
Of
course, for the irregular CTA rider like me, tomorrow's bus route
eliminations and schedule cutbacks is no great big deal. But it will be
for the 1,100 CTA employees who will be laid off to cover the systems
$95 million budget shortfall.
There is, however, more than one sign of hope. Out
of curiosity, I went underground Saturday afternoon at the Chicago
Avenue station for a reality check. Only two of the six cash collecting
machines had out-of-order stickers slapped on them.
This column was cross-posted on the Huffingtonpost.com and Newsvine websites.
