Daily Herald opinion: Harsh realities of transit: Agencies again offer grim picture of impending crisis — but little else

Doomsday scenarios have become common from Chicago’s public transportation agencies lately. So common that you can start to think we’re just hearing background noise in a program that seems to be doing just fine.

The busses and trains are running mostly on time, or at least with no more disruptions than we’re used to. Metra just announced that the installations of its new high-class train tracking signs and ticket vending machines are proceeding according to plan. What do we have to worry about?

Plenty.

For if lawmakers and the transit agencies — Metra, the Chicago Transit Authority and Pace — don’t come up with a reorganization plan by June, that background noise is going to sound like a deafening roar to anyone who uses public transportation.

The agencies’ leaders laid out a worst-case scenario last week that added to the dire tone they’ve been sounding ever since the announcement that they would face a $770 million shortfall when COVID relief money runs out next year. The latest predictions?

• No more early-morning or late-evening Metra trains, with regular trains limited to one an hour on weekdays, two on weekend days.

• No weekend Pace bus service, with late-night service cut on 62 routes and wait times for buses increasing to an hour from the current 30 minutes.

• More than half the CTA’s 127 bus routes would be eliminated, affecting half a million Chicagoans.

• Service eliminated on all or part of four of the CTA’s eight lines.

• Paratransit for riders with disabilities operated by Pace would scale back by two-thirds on weekends.

These details add to a grim picture outlined as long as two years ago in the Regional Transit Authority’s five-year strategic plan. We fretted even then that the potential solutions to the impending financial crisis focused too heavily on an infusion of revenue and not enough on streamlining and reorganization.

Over the course of that two years, the most common themes the public has been offered include a legislative proposal to merge the CTA, Pace and Metra under one RTA umbrella and a more-recent RTA proposal to bolster its own funding authority while allowing the individual agencies to manage their operations independently. Neither proposal has offered much in the way of specific savings, and — now as then — the loudest call has been a promise from RTA that with a $1.5 billion boost from the state, it could manage the situation just fine.

As Des Plaines Democratic state Rep. Marty Moylan, chairman of the House Transportation Committee on Regulation, Roads and Bridges, said in a story our Marni Pyke reported Friday, that’s hardly the message lawmakers want to hear.

“I’m not going to give them a dime,” Moylan said, “until we get some reforms. If they’re going to threaten me with layoffs, they can lay off starting from the top.”

The crisis facing the transit agencies is real. And the “harsh realities” — to quote RTA Executive Director Leanne Redden on Wednesday — it may impose are ominous indeed. Effective, safe, comfortable, efficient public transportation is a major attribute to the quality of life in Chicago and the suburbs.

But a billion and a half bucks is a harsh reality, too. Metra Executive Director Jim Derwinski said Wednesday that “it’s all going to depend on what the legislature does … in the next 75 days.” But maybe not all.

So far, the transit agencies have been eminently capable of showing what will happen if they don’t get a huge financial shot in the arm from the state. As Moylan suggested, it would be more encouraging — and it’s long past time — to hear from them what they’re going to contribute to the solution.