D Day for Transit Town
Who among us hasn’t cursed the CTA bus that is slow to arrive or a not-so-occasional delay on the El. Recently Crain’s Chicago Business highlighted the mounting problems with the CTA in Chicago. The article revealed problems such as “crippling infrastructure, funding shortfalls, questionable choices by CTA management” as some of the conditions overwhelming Chicago’s rail system.
This investigation is timely given two very important discussions set to begin on February 6. We at CNT hope these discussions will raise the bar on what Illinoisans and Chicagoans demand from the state’s plan for transportation.
One discussion will take place at the start of the 2007 Illinois General Assembly session that will take up mass transit reform. Also on that day, the new Chicago Metropolitan Agency on Planning (CMAP) is bringing in the “best and the brightest” in transportation from around the country to show us how the Chicago metro area stacks up against other region’s that have the highest performing transit and how those regions got to be the best. The event, “Innovation + Integration” is a summit co-sponsored by CMAP, Chicago Metropolis 2020, the Metropolitan Mayor’s Caucus, the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the Metropolitan Planning Council (for registration information, visit www.chicagoareaplanning.org). The summit’s national and local speakers will address the intersection of jobs, housing and transportation planning.
CNT is urging Illinois policymakers to closely monitor the proceedings of the CMAP event and to consider how their choices affect the cost of living and doing business in Illinois. Our research has shown that those places that enjoy good, frequent mass transit with lots of local shopping have households who own on average one car less per household than do their surrounding communities. As a result, these households-at all income levels-are saving 10 percent on their cost of living. Working families earning $20,000 to $50,000 who no longer can afford to live in Chicago find that when they move beyond 10 miles out to find the “affordable” home, their savings are wiped out by the extra transportation costs. For these families, their transportation actually costs more than their housing. This in Chicago where between 1850 and 1900 a series of decisions made us the hub of the nation’s transportation system and a city that could plan on availability of a collective asset-mass transportation-to keep everyday travel expenses at 3-5 percent of a family expenses. Today the average is 20 percent, and for those working families (no longer a minority population when poverty is now more prevalent in the suburbs than in the city), it can be as high as 30 percent of their income.
We expect to learn on February 6 that the best regions are the ones in states that don’t treat mass transit as an adjunct to highways, but as a core asset. They don’t just manage toward the vague goal of “congestion mitigation,” but pay attention to what good transportation choices actually do for a region’s households, businesses and the economy. Finally, the best of the best are in places that actually plan-for coordinated city-suburban service and for connectivity between buses and trains and airports. These best models collaborate with their regional planning bodies to ensure that development around transit stations occurs in the most economically advantageous way to create value for the riders and for the community, which in turns guarantees reliable and steadily increasing patronage.
We encourage you to join us on February 6 and to help make the case to lawmakers that we must demand performance, coordination, and accountability from our transit system.
