RTA aims to put Metra, Pace, CTA on same track

The Regional Transportation Authority laid out long-term plans Thursday to meld service and operations at its three transit agencies, in proposals ranging from implementing a universal fare card to unifying lobbying efforts.

Executive Director Joseph Costello gave the RTA board a five-prong approach to rethinking public transportation, but the unifying theme was making sure that Metra, Pace and the Chicago Transportation Authority pull together wherever possible and not compete against one another.

Two of the main concepts were to increase ridership by improving the customer experience, for instance by adding Wi-Fi, an initiative being led on Metra trains, and creating a universal fare card, being led by the CTA.

“We want to move on that as fast as possible,” said Board Chairman John Gates Jr.

Gates said the RTA also was at the forefront nationally of creating a trip-planning system across all three services for riders to determine the fastest way to get from here to there via computer or cell phone, an idea that has grown out of the CTA’s bus-tracker system.

“We’re almost there now. ... We have most of the pieces. We just have to bring them together,” Gates said.

Yet for the most part those were long-term plans that could take years to become reality. Costello also laid out how strategic capital investment, economies of scale and lobbying and marketing could be coordinated and implemented relatively quickly within the RTA bureaucracy.

Gates said the RTA could prioritize capital projects across all services on a cost-benefit analysis. “That is something we can implement immediately,” he said. “Other things may take several years,” he added, such as the universal fare card.

Costello said they could readily gain economies of scale in purchasing fuel and insurance, and that it was time for RTA agencies to speak together in Springfield and Congress.

“Broadly, our goals are all the same,” Costello said.

Costello said the objective was to come up with concepts in the spring, coordinate them over the summer and implement them in the 2012 budgets for all agencies.