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Health Care Bill Heads To U.S. House Floor For Debate, Vote
As expected, the Regional Transportation Authority board agreed this week to slash public funding for Chicago-area transit services by $67 million over the next six months. The nine board members in attendance voted unanimously for the cuts, in the hopes that they will bring the transit agencies' growing budget deficits in line with lower tax revenues.
Previous threats of service cuts are almost certain now. The CTA will reduce spending by $35 million by the end of the year, Metra will cut $19 million and Pace will cut $7 million. In addition, Pace needs to reduce spending on its paratransit program -- which serves people with disabilities -- by $7 million.
To make matters worse, it seems the CTA and RTA are in disagreement about when service cuts can go into effect. CTA President Richard Rodriguez said a specific plan for service cuts could not be outlined until after the vote when CTA received a full briefing on RTA's financial outlook. But on Thursday -- the day of the vote -- RTA Executive Director Steve Schlickman said for weeks CTA has had all the information it needs to go ahead with service and budget adjustments.
While it's impossible to know exactly what will be cut, Pace is expected to reduce service during late night, early morning and weekend hours and CTA could nix entire bus routes. [WGN]
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As much as we can all agree there is some (a lot of?) waste and inefficiency under the RTA umbrella... I can't help but feel a little disappointed when I hear about cuts like these.
We have already stretched our decades old expressways past capacity and there is no end in sight to the growing population (both in the city and suburbs). As service decreases or worsens due to budget cuts more and more people will have little choice but to start driving, myself included. So the problem is further exacerbated as we regress by replacing buses and trains with cars.
It's not difficult to see that everyone driving their own car everywhere is not a sustainable long term strategy for a city of our size. The bottom line is, at some point we are going to have to start really embracing public transit in our region on all levels, from funding at the government level to choosing to take it whenever possible even if it's slightly inconvenient at the individual level. I just wonder how much worse things will have to get before we start to see this happening.