CTA service has riders frustrated. The agency promises change

It was the day he was left by two CTA buses because they couldn’t finish their routes that set Micah Fiedler over the edge.

He was trying to get from his home in Ravenswood to a variety show near Wicker Park on a hot weekday evening in late spring, Fiedler recalled. Within a span of 30 minutes, two buses arrived. The operators of both said they could take passengers no farther because it was the end of their shift, and no relief driver had arrived, he said.

Fiedler had given himself an hour to get to the show by bus. He never made it.

The experience spurred Fiedler, 28, to team up with a group of other frustrated transit riders, who have undertaken a guerrilla campaign of sorts to put pressure on CTA over long wait times and so-called ghost buses and trains, which show up on digital trackers but fail to arrive in real life. Calling themselves Commuters Take Action, they have put up mock customer-alert signs in CTA stations drawing attention to delays, and stickers asking, “Tired of being ghosted by the CTA?” as they collect reports of riders who have experienced missing buses and long waits.

CTA has struggled with complaints of irregular service and inaccurate trackers as ridership plummeted during the pandemic. CTA President Dorval Carter is promising to address unreliable service, saying upgrades to the trackers are imminent and hiring is underway to improve a staff shortage that is behind the schedule challenges.

CTA weekday ridership is hovering at more than half of pre-pandemic levels. As CTA looks to continue drawing back riders, train and bus reliability have taken on heightened urgency.

An increasing number of CTA riders take public transit by choice, but could also drive or call a ride-share to get around the city, said P.S. Sriraj, director of the University of Illinois Chicago’s Urban Transportation Center. Many riders-by-choice have changed their commuting patterns and expectations over the course of the pandemic, which are now colliding head on with the workforce and technology challenges that have led to unpredictable CTA service.

“It will be very easy to alienate that (rider) base if problems become very systemic and long-standing,” he said.

Others continue to rely on public transportation to get to work, school and events. But if a significant number of riders with other options are driven away from CTA, it’s unclear whether enough people will remain on buses and trains to maintain current fare prices and service levels, without changes in how CTA gets funding, Sriraj said.

Already, Fiedler struggles to take CTA on weekends.

“There is no chance in any universe that I would take a Chicago Transit Authority bus on the weekends,” he said. “At this point, the service is so bad it’s impossible to plan anything unless you have a bike or a car.”

Fiedler hopes the work of Commuters Take Action puts pressure on CTA to be transparent about how they’re addressing late and ghost trains and buses and to move quickly to solve the problem. He said he is fortunate that he no longer has to commute into his office every day because he works from home, but others rely on CTA to get to work and family.

“We don’t want to sit by as people have to wait 20 minutes, an hour or more for people to access something that the city has given to us as a right,” he said.

Olivia Gahan recalled turning to an Uber to get to a work meeting in mid-February, when her Blue Line train failed to arrive. She and a co-worker were trying to get from the Belmont Blue Line to Merchandise Mart for the midmorning meeting, a trip she estimated should have taken about 30 minutes door-to-door. After waiting 30 minutes for a train to arrive, they called the ride-share.

Gahan, 29, is one of the transit riders behind Commuters Take Action, and she said the group has collected similar stories. In less than one month, they say they collected more than 250 complaints about wait times or buses and trains disappearing off trackers, according to a log provided by the group. Some people reported turning to ride-share or bike-share instead.

The group is working to collect more commuter information, in an attempt to put personal stories to train statistics and report the information to the CTA board, Gahan said. They hope to meet with community groups. And, in the meantime, she, Fiedler and others have taken to bikes and trains in their spare time to put up hundreds of stickers with a QR code — and a ghost who has taken on the name “Reprot,” after a typo printed on the stickers — where commuters can visit the group’s website and report their experiences.

“There’s a lot we can do to improve the CTA,” she said. “This is a small part of it, but to me it seems the most urgent because we can’t get to everything else until trains are on time.”

Carter said the primary reason for unreliable service is staff shortages. Job vacancies, combined with unexpected absences when people call in sick or take a day off, mean there aren’t always enough operators to staff every train or bus run.

“I’m in a situation where I have people retiring and resigning faster than I can fill them,” Carter said. “And that has created a shortage of workers to operate my buses and trains, which leads directly to the reliability issues that we’re experiencing with our service right now.”

In May, CTA had about 1,000 fewer union positions than in 2019, spokesman Brian Steele said, though recent hires will bring the number of vacancies down. The majority of open positions are for bus operators.

Carter said the vacancies are a combination of retirements and hiring challenges similar to those companies across the country are experiencing as employees decide they want to do something different. Operating a bus or train is a high-stress job, and it became even more high-stress during the pandemic, he said.

In the meantime, unreliable service has also led to problems with bus and train trackers, he said. The trackers rely on both scheduled service and real-time service, so when service doesn’t run as scheduled they become less accurate.

Carter said plans are in the works to address both problems. Upgrades to train and bus trackers are expected in the coming weeks that are intended to improve their accuracy and clarity.

CTA is hiring, and bringing on bigger cohorts to go through training at one time, he said. Recent changes to a labor contract have allowed the agency to directly hire full-time bus operators, rather than having new hires start as part-time operators. The agency is also asking retired bus and train operators to return to work part time.

Still, staffing remains below pre-pandemic levels, and CTA service continues to have long gaps and delays. Carter is working to adjust schedules to reflect rider trends and bring consistency to the length of time that passes between bus and train runs, so riders have a better sense of what to expect.

“I think that our customers, they’re willing to accept that the service may not be running as frequent as they’re used to over the course of the day,” he said. “As long as they have some sense of when that bus or train is going to arrive.”

sfreishtat@chicagotribune.com