Howard Ehrman is among the many transit activists who’ve been called into the office of CTA president Frank Kruesi to hear his pitch: join the campaign to wrest more money from the state or there will be severe cuts in bus and train service. Ehrman won’t join. “It’s a ruse,” he says. “It’s a trick.”
The CTA has two separate budgets–operating and capital. Operating funds come from the state sales tax and are used to run the system–paying employees, buying fuel, etc. Kruesi, along with his mentor Mayor Daley, wants the state to change the formula by which it distributes these funds to various transit systems so that the CTA gets a bigger share of them. Capital funds come directly from the federal and state governments and are used to build new lines or buy new buses and trains.
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In other words, if CTA officials use capital dollars to build a new train line, they’ll of course have to use operating dollars to run it. And unless the operating revenues increase enough to cover the new service, existing revenues will have to be stretched–and most likely something will get cut.
Herguth’s story on the Circle Line appeared on March 11, 2002. The next day’s papers carried stories in which Daley vowed to lobby Congress to finance it. Since then neither Daley nor Kruesi has said much about it.
Ehrman says he’s looked over the plans for the connector, and he believes that bringing it online will hurt riders on the Blue Line’s Douglas Branch, which runs from the town of Cicero through North Lawndale, Little Village, and Pilsen before hitting the Eisenhower, going into the Loop, and heading out to O’Hare. He thinks inbound Blue Line trains would get diverted north to the Green Line before going into the Loop, greatly inconveniencing passengers headed for the south end of the Loop or the near west side, because they’d have to ride all the way around the Loop before getting off. “In the name of adding service for some,” he says, “the CTA would be reducing service for others.”
Payback Time
he says. “I didn’t see any no-parking signs. I didn’t have any reason to think I couldn’t park there.”
