CTA is One Giant Slow Zone

By Louis in News on Mar 19, 2007 4:42PM

Chicagoist wants to love the Blue Line. Really. Despite the fact that the CTA has diligently continued work in front of our residence for almost 2 years now, we always convince ourselves that surely the work is almost complete. Surely falling asleep to the sound of jackhammers is temporary.

Unfortunately, we are only lying to ourselves. In fact, we will be lying to our children, and possibly our children's children.

Without help from the State government, it looks like the CTA has a very long track ahead of it, full of slow zones, track fires, and derailments. In fact the CTA is now saying that even if it got $100 million today, it would take three years to repair all of the slow zones (there are currently over 65,000 feet of slow zones) However, the CTA isn't anywhere close to that amount, they have only budgeted $63 million through 2011.

Until then the CTA will continue to make short term repairs, which may up the speed in some 6mph slow zones to a blistering, mind blowing, knock your socks off 15mph. That is double the slow zone speed, but it is nowhere near the 55mph the Blue Line is supposed to reach in some areas.

This news doesn’t help to assuage the growing fury of the City as commute times on the Blue Line continue to increase with track repairs, unexplained daily service interruptions, and the recently decided negligence of the CTA in last year's track fire. Additionally, this is only for track repairs, so we assume that this means any station renovation or cleanup is on hold until the trains are actually running.

Image via Steven Crane