Maggie Sivit

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Many South Side residents are used to long waits for buses. But for members of five Southwest Side neighborhoods, the wait is going on its 14th year.  In April 2008, the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, as part of their 30-year plan for the city, held a series of meetings in Little Village, where residents vocalized their need for better transit. Soon afterwards, the community decided it was time to restore east-west bus service along a main commercial corridor in their neighborhood that was cut by the Chicago Transit Authority in 1997. Organizers from Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO) met with community members who both remembered a historic 31st Street bus and expressed interest in bringing back the service. They worked with the CTA to locate a source of funding. That summer, the CTA received a federal grant earmarked for the 31st Street bus totaling $1,067,659.

But today, there is no bus along 31st Street. In the neighborhoods the street cuts through—Bronzeville, Armour Square, Bridgeport, McKinley Park, and Little Village—east-west bus service is lacking. Between Cermak Road and 47th Street, Chicago’s grid system of bus service breaks down, leaving large areas of white space on the CTA system map and roughly 200,000 people without a direct route. The #35, #39, and #60 buses provide service along 35th, 39th, and parts of 26th Streets, but the #35 and #39 terminate near Kedzie Avenue, and the #60 diverts north to the loop at Western Avenue. No bus provides a straight route from the lake to Chicago’s western boundary. “You have to hopscotch—go past where you need to go to get where you’re going,” says Bridgeport resident and community activist Maureen Sullivan.

The grant the CTA received in 2008 as part of the Job Access Reverse Commute (JARC) program of the U.S. Department of Transportation was a victory, but it came with a catch. The program requires that 50 percent of the transportation project’s operational budget be provided by state and local funds.

This has proven to be a major roadblock for the 31st Street bus campaign. The implementation and operations costs for the proposed route are estimated by the CTA to be approximately $2 million, not including the portion of the expense to be covered by fares. The CTA must match the $1 million grant in order for the bus to become a reality, at least for the trial period. In an e-mailed statement, the agency stated, “Currently, there are no local match funds identified to implement the project.”  Residents have waited for this to change for the past three years.

The CTA has drafted a route to connect to the Red and Orange ‘L’ Lines as well as the new Rock Island district Metra stop at 35th Street, though the proposal has not been finalized. It would provide transportation for working, transit-dependent residents of the West and near South Side to major workplaces such as Domino Sugar, Prima Plastics, and Dearborn Produce. Teens and families could access parks and the 31st Street beach. The route would end at Cicero Avenue, traveling north a few blocks through a commercial center to Target. LVEJO has also proposed that the route extend north on its eastern end, running express on Lakeshore Drive to McCormick Place and the Museum Campus. Mike Pitula, a community organizer and LVEJO’s director of public transit, claims that currently, “this area has no direct bus access from the West or South Side.”

Although the grant specifies that the 31st Street route provide access to jobs, Pitula argues that this service is important for two more reasons: to contribute to environmental efforts and to create safe routes to local schools.

The proposed bus route would service De La Salle Institute and Illinois Institute of Technology in Bronzeville, as well as Holden Elementary School in Bridgeport. And, more urgently, the 31st Street bus would provide safe transportation to a school in dire need of it. According to a survey conducted by LVEJO, Little Village-Lawndale High School is the only high school in Chicago that does not have CTA service within 2.5 blocks. According to Pitula, approximately one-quarter of the students who attend LVLHS must cross a gang boundary while walking to school. Violence has spiked along 31st Street since 2009. One of two closest CTA stops to the high school is on Cicero Avenue, but Pitula says there have been reports of young women being sexually harassed after school on a nearby bridge. “While it wouldn’t be a magic bullet, having a bus route would be one way to prevent these interactions from happening,” he says.

Schoolchildren aren’t the only population the bus would impact. Older residents have struggled with the lack of bus service for a long time. Senior citizens with limited mobility, who can’t get to checkups at Mercy Hospital or to the senior club at Piotrowski Park, have been particularly vocal in the 31st Street bus debate. Tom Gaulke, a pastor at the First Trinity Church in Bridgeport has heard his parishioners complain and summarized their dissatisfaction: “all these little old ladies at the senior home can never make it out anywhere.”

In May 2011, after three years, LVEJO decided to take action once again. “This spring, we realized there was a deadline coming up,” said Pitula, “you don’t just get a grant and sit on it forever.” The CTA claimed in an August community meeting and in an e-mail statement this past week that the $1 million will not expire. But according to the Federal Transit Authority’s website, JARC funding is available only for a total of three years after apportionment.

According to Pitula, the CTA has applied for a one-year extension of the grant. “It’s a fairly routine procedure,” he says, but the current phase in LVEJO’s campaign is to put pressure on the Federal Transit Administration to approve the extension. They expect to hear back before the end of the year.

This summer, working under pressure of an imminent deadline, the campaign expanded to encompass other communities along the route. In fact, some groups were already vocalizing their concerns about the bus route’s progress independently from LVEJO. According to Pitula, the campaign began in two places simultaneously three years ago: Little Village and Facebook. The Facebook page was created by lifelong resident of Bridgeport and video store owner Joe Trutin as part of his campaign for state representative in 2009. He and the Little Village activists have since joined forces, with Trutin rallying residents of Bridgeport and McKinley Park. He’s also taken on the task of gathering data to bolster their case—over the last few months, Trutin has been measuring the width of streets in attempt to refute one resident’s claim that 31st Street is not wide enough for bus service. He and Pitula have fought all opposition, however small, but Trutin says only two members of these communities have publicly voiced it.

Though much of the organizing has been centered in Little Village and Bridgeport, the issue crosses many neighborhood boundaries and has engaged many people. In late August, the CTA held a meeting with community members at the McKinley Park library. In addition to residents of Little Village, Bridgeport and Chinatown, senior citizens from Armour Square and McKinley Park came to emphasize their dependency on transit. “We showed them that we were a diverse group of people who had a common goal,” says Connie Ma, who works at the Chinese American Service League in Chinatown. Many community organizations have signed on to the campaign, from church groups and cultural clubs to the more extreme Citizens Against Terrible Transit. Pitula expressed that his goal this summer was to build “a cross-town coalition composed of residents along this route,” and it appears he has been successful.

At one point in this process, some residents—bus drivers and mechanics who could contribute their skills to the community—tossed around the idea of providing their own bus service. Pitula summarized this project as a “worker self-managed bus cooperative” that would be organized by the Chicago chapter of the Industrial Workers of the World. “It would be a demonstration for the CTA, but also an alternative model of transit to provide work and service for people in the community,” he said. The idea, added Ma, would be “to utilize the people the CTA has laid off.” While progress on this alternative has stagnated over the past few months, the idea of an independent bus service is not foreign to Little Village. Pitula remembers a free shuttle service along 26th Street that was disconnected a few years ago—a single school bus that residents could flag at street corners, funded by advertisements on its exterior.

The push for a 31st Street bus is a fight to provide South Side residents with easier mobility, a need that other Chicagoans recognize. Sullivan, who lives and works in Bridgeport, points out that the major expressways are easily accessible from the near South Side, but there are many people in these neighborhoods who do not own cars and their movement is, as a consequence, limited to their own neighborhoods. To some extent, a 31st Street bus would unite the neighborhoods it serves and reduce this isolation. “Once people travel, they start exploring,” Trutin explains.

The people behind the 31st Street bus campaign realize that theirs is an uphill battle—to add a route at a time when CTA trends have tended towards increased fares and cutting service—but pressure on the CTA is building. The project has received letters of support from one state senator, two state representatives, and three aldermen, according to its Facebook page. The $1 million needed to implement this route is less than one tenth of one percent of the  CTA’s annual budget, but Pitula nonetheless has taken them at their word that the agency does not have the identified funds.

Residents of these communities will not stop fighting for the 31st Street bus—some have already been fighting for 14 years. In the meantime, local organizations are simply asking for acknowledgement by transit officials. The CTA claims that service along 31st Street was originally cut in 1997 due to low ridership, but Ma argues that the people who the decision affected were the people who needed it most. “If one person needs the bus more than someone who has a car, shouldn’t it be more important that the first person receives this service?” she asks. While a bus would be a major victory on many levels, the immediate issue is a lack of communication between the CTA and the people it serves.

“We just want a confirmation that the CTA sympathizes with us on a human level,” Ma reflects, a sentiment she said many expressed at the August meeting. “But they kind of stared blankly at me.”

A new project from University of Chicago graduates Max Shron and Luke Joyner aims to create just such a picture. Their “heat maps” of the service changes are now online at their website Picturing Transit (picturingtransit.com). Two maps chart the mean travel time differences by neighborhood, comparing averages taken from the CTA website from before and after the service changes; the first map displays the changes that affect the morning commute to the Loop, while the second displays how the reverse commute in the early morning has changed. A second pair of maps presents the same data arranged block-by-block. “Everyone was talking about these cuts as these huge, deep cuts,” Joyner says. “It’s surprising that the effect to the morning commute is basically negligible…In some places it’s even gotten better.” The neighborhoods around the end of the Red Line at 95th and the Dan Ryan are especially well-served by the service changes.

Shron and Joyner also created maps of transit time independent of service changes, showing which blocks have the longest and shortest morning commutes to the Loop. Unsurprisingly, blocks next to the El stand out in a bright star pattern against the darker surrounding areas, representing a commute that is on average 15 minutes to a full hour shorter than their neighbors’. A bar graph below the map reveals that the majority of commutes take between 45 and 75 minutes.
The maps are in flux just as much as the state of the service cuts. The block-by-block maps show that late-night travel times are getting better on the South Side, but “I don’t think that anything’s getting better anywhere at night,” Joyner says. He attributes the error to a bug in the CTA trip planner. Overall, though, Joyner trusts their results. “You can look at the map and read how the city is actually built.”

“We will call it the Gold Line because many Olympians will ride it, and because the South Side deserves a gold medal transit system,” said Rev. Michael Russell. The Gold Line proposal aims to increase the frequency of Metra service from once every hour to once every ten minutes, running the line from Millennium Station to 93rd street. It also aims to create a new stop in Bronzeville, and the whole line will accept CTA fares. While Metra CEO Bill Tupper refuses to approve the proposal, SOUL remains confident it will succeed.

The proposal is part of the broader 2016 Community Benefits Agreement, which advocates that, if Chicago is chosen to host the Olympics, fifty percent of the construction jobs go to local residents of the South Side and that the city keep at least thirty percent of the housing affordable for original residents. Drafting of the agreement is being completed in part by state representative-elect Will Burns, and will be ready by April, in time to be presented to Chicago officials during the International Olympic Committee’s visit to the city.

At the event, Rev. Sirchester Jackson emphasized the importance of “creative and holistic solutions to violence,” such as a new gun law mandating the immediate reporting of stolen or lost firearms and educational, employment, and recreational activities for youth. “We have no future without the children, but I would argue that we have no present without them either,” she said, referring to the many youth shootings that have taken place in Chicago recently.

Rev. Booker Vance summed up the essence of the evening when he said, “We must start playing to win and stop playing to not lose,” expounding on SOUL’s continued and effective efforts to organize the “power in the pews” and achieve for its community.

Chicago’s first elevated train went into operation in 1892, and since then the system has been constantly shifting. Today, few remember how it looked at its peak, before the formation of the CTA in 1947 out of the privately owned Chicago Rapid Transit Company and Chicago Surface Lines. Since the consolidation, the CTA’s rail network has declined from a high of 227 stations to only 144. Today, however, the tide is turning the other way: although the CTA’s economic difficulties led to the recently announced fare hike, capital projects, like new facilities, stations, and tracks, are often eligible for millions of dollars in funds from the federal government. With Olympic hopes on the horizon, environmental concerns and volatile gas prices driving people out of their cars, and the city once again seeing positive population growth, now is a good time to take a look at a few ways our transit system might expand in the near future.

Orange Line Extension

Above: One potential route of the Orange Line south of Midway Airport

When the Orange Line was constructed in the early ’90s, the original plan had it extending south past its current terminus at Midway, all the way to the Ford City Mall at 76th Street and Cicero Avenue. Unfortunately, financial constraints caused the plan to be scaled back, but the Midway stop was planned out to allow possible future extensions. Today the CTA is applying for government money to extend the line as part of the Federal Transit Administration’s multi-step New Starts program. This program contributes to qualifying capital projects in cities across the country, although 20 percent of funds must be matched by state, local, or other federal agencies. Currently the project is on the Alternatives Analysis step, which solicits input to determine the “Locally Preferred Alternative” (LPA).

At a public meeting in the mall’s basement on August 19, CTA representatives explained the goals of the extension. For one thing, Midway’s transit center is currently congested with thirteen CTA and eight Pace bus routes, not to mention cars. Moving the Orange Line terminus two miles south would relieve some of that congestion, as well as shorten bus routes that carry passengers to the CTA from the south. The extension would also accommodate new growth around Ford City since the Orange Line was first built. “A lot of the new hotels, commercial [businesses], restaurants have opened up,” attests Ronald Shimizu, a consultant hired by the CTA. “We also have a lot of industry in the area as well.” Shimizu cited projections that show thirty-six percent growth in employment in the area by 2030.

The first stage of the Alternatives Analysis narrowed down the possible modes of transit between Midway and Ford City from an initial eleven options (including monorail and MagLev train) to a more reasonable two: heavy rail (like the existing CTA trains) and Bus Rapid Transit (a nebulous concept that might involve separated bus-only lanes). The Alternatives Analysis project should be completed within a few months, and if all goes well construction may be finished within five to ten years.

Gold Line

Above: The proposed route of the Gold Line, along what is currently the South Chicago branch of the Metra Electric

The proposed sites for the major Olympic venues in 2016 stretch along the lakefront, from Soldier Field and the Olympic Village south to Jackson Park. Unfortunately, none of these spots are particularly accessible by CTA trains. Hyde Park resident James Withrow has a solution: the Gold Line. Withrow’s proposal would take the South Chicago branch of the Metra Electric line, which runs from Millennium Station downtown past the waterfront venues to 93rd Street, and turn it into a line of the CTA. In practice this would mean running trains every ten minutes and providing integrated fares, so you could transfer to or from other CTA buses and trains for only twenty-five cents. Withrow hopes the trains would be branded as CTA and appear on CTA maps, but Metra would continue to operate them through an agreement with the CTA. “It’s just important for people looking at Hyde Park to realize that operationally they’re on the El grid,” he explains.

Although the name “Gold Line” is a nod to the Olympics, Withrow’s idea was not originally built around the games. “I’ve been working on this for five or six years, or at least talking to people about it, promoting it as something we ought to do,” he says. If Chicago beats out Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, Withrow believes the Gold Line would be “vital” for transportation to run smoothly in 2016, but its utility will continue beyond then. “I think the best way to put it is that people see this as a good excuse to do the right thing,” he says.

Recently Withrow’s proposal has been adopted by Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL) and Communities for an Equitable Olympics (CEO) and endorsed by Aldermen Toni Preckwinkle (4th) and Leslie Hairston (5th), as well as Hyde Park’s state senator and representatives. A few weeks ago Withrow got a favorable response from Doug Arnot at Chicago 2016, and he has high hopes that the Gold Line could be up and running as soon as two years from now. The CTA, which has not historically been known to oppose Mayor Daley, should go along with the plan, although Withrow is a little less optimistic about Metra. “You always hope that they will cooperate and actually want to help out, and I look forward to the first piece of evidence that that’s happening,” he says diplomatically.

Withrow has looked into the potential cost of the Gold Line, and it’s not clear yet where the funding would come from. “I never for a minute thought they’d be cheap, but basically the price we were quoted was something like three and a half million dollars per [rail] car,” he says. “I notice that when Governor Palin sold her jet, she only got 2.1 [million] for that, so we’re talking about something that’s more expensive than a jet.” Still, he’s optimistic that the federal government will chip in half the cost. “This is definitely the most pro-public transportation administration we’ve ever had,” he says. And given the clean electric technology and the lasting benefits, he hopes to get funding at the state level too. “This area, especially the area south of here, it was built for streetcar trolleys, it wasn’t built to accommodate a lot of cars,” he points out. “If you have a transit method that people enjoy using, I would certainly hope that both Hyde Park’s retail district and the retail further south of here would be helped out quite a bit by this.”

South Loop Green Line Station

Above: A possible Green Line stop at 18th Street

The almost three-mile gap between Roosevelt and 35th-Bronzeville-IIT on the Green Line used to have a stop in the middle at Cermak Road, long before there was a Green Line, even before Anton Cermak was elected mayor. That stop was part of the original South Side Rapid Transit line, but by the ’70s it had fallen into disuse, partly because of the new Cermak-Chinatown stop nearby on the Red Line, and the CTA decommissioned it in 1977. Now, with the South Loop booming as the Green Line rushes past without stopping, the CTA may wish it had a stop there once again. Since 2002 the agency has been studying that possibility on and off, and last month it received a grant from the RTA to look into a potential new station at 18th or Cermak. Both sites would have their ups and downs: a Cermak stop would help people travel to and from McCormick Place, but an 18th Street stop would be farther from the Red Line stop and closer to the center of the South Loop. No plans are in place yet, but look for future public meetings to be held.

Red Line Extension

Above: Three potential routes of the extended Red Line south of 95th Street

The Red Line extends farther south than any other CTA rail line, but it terminates at 95th Street, a good thirty blocks north of the city limits. According to the CTA, residents of the Far South Side experience twenty percent longer commutes than the rest of the city, and expected job and population growth will only increase congestion in the area. Since 2007, the CTA has been conducting an Alternatives Analysis study in the hopes of receiving funding from the FTA’s New Starts program, which may also fund the previously mentioned Orange Line extension and has in the past funded reconstruction of the Pink and Brown Lines. A meeting in April 2007 solicited public input on three proposed routes: Bus Rapid Transit or heavy rail running along Halsted, Michigan, or the Union Pacific railroad tracks from 95th Street south to about 130th Street. All of these alignments would better connect Pullman, West Pullman, Roseland, and the south suburbs with the rest of the city. According to comments submitted to the CTA after last April’s meeting, heavy rail along the Union Pacific route was the favorite, although the Halsted and Michigan routes were also supported by some. Specifics including station locations will be discussed at the next public meetings for the Alternatives Analysis, scheduled for December 3 at the Historic Pullman Visitor Center (11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave.) and December 4 at the Woodson Regional Chicago Public Library (9525 S. Halsted St.). Both meetings will take place from 6-8pm.

Graphics by Ellis Calvin

“A large church is pretty much like a small town,” says Bishop Arthur M. Brazier, and he should know. Brazier is the pastor of the Apostolic Church of God (ACOG) in Woodlawn, whose congregation numbers around 22,000, more than any other church in Chicago. By any standard, this qualifies the ACOG as a megachurch, which Brazier says is a label he would embrace.

The ACOG’s humble beginnings lie in two different churches. The ACOG itself was founded on the third floor of a building on West 57th Street in 1931 and only moved to Woodlawn in 1952, settling at 6344 South Kimbark Avenue. In 1960, the church found itself without a pastor and decided to merge with the Universal Church of Christ, which shared the same building and was headed by the young Reverend Brazier. Seventeen years later the congregation had grown from about one hundred to about five hundred parishioners, enough to justify the move to a new building at 63rd and Kenwood. By 1992, the church had again outgrown its space and moved east again, settling at its current location at 6320 South Dorchester Avenue. The church had over 14,000 members in 1999, and it has continued to grow at a rate of close to 1000 new members per year.

The tremendous size of a modern megachurch creates both advantages and disadvantages over the traditional smaller church. “We have a fairly large membership of everyone that is saved and walking with the Lord,” says Brazier, “but also some people who haven’t committed their lives to Christ.” In addition to spiritual problems, parishioners often come to Brazier with other crises ranging from marital to financial. The church has found that some unusual solutions are made possible by its size and resources. “We have on retainer a clinical psychologist to whom we refer people whose problems are more profound and difficult” than a pastor can handle alone, explains Brazier. The psychologist’s services are paid for by the church’s ample funds.

Brazier cites these resources, both human and financial, as the main advantage of the church’s size. The large congregation provides a constant supply of volunteers and “an income substantial enough to help a lot of people in need,” which Brazier emphasizes as a constant concern of the ACOG. “You can’t think in terms of helping people just in your church.”

In its early Woodlawn days, the ACOG’s small congregation must have closely resembled the larger neighborhood: poor blacks, most of whom had moved in during the 1950s after being “urban renewed” out of their former neighborhoods. Their new neighborhood was no sanctuary from that threat, and in 1960 the University of Chicago announced a plan to turn a mile-long strip of mostly residential land between 60th and 61st Streets into a new South Campus. Many of the houses occupying the land at the time belonged to elderly homeowners unwilling to be forced out of yet another neighborhood. At the instigation of several Woodlawn pastors, The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) was founded to unite the community behind a single voice. A large part of that voice was Brazier, who served first as the organization’s spokesperson and later as its president. TWO’s mostly successful struggle to shield Woodlawn from outside attempts at urban renewal, satirically called “Negro removal,” has become a textbook example of what community organization can achieve.

Brazier has continued to be an active and influential participant in Chicago politics after his stint as head of TWO. In the mid-1990s, he was one of the most prominent Woodlawn leaders to argue for the demolition of the 63rd Street El between Cottage Grove Avenue and Jackson Park. This section of track was one of the oldest in the entire CTA system, and parts of it had been unused for over a decade due to structural defects. The CTA had just completed a multimillion-dollar project to renovate the track as far as Dorchester, where a new station was being built that would provide transfers to the nearby commuter rail. Brazier argued that rather than completing the new station, located immediately next to the ACOG, the city should tear down the track east of Cottage Grove and remove a blight preventing development on 63rd Street. In September 1997 the CTA finally settled on demolition, and ten years later Brazier defends his controversial success. “The El structure gave the community a sense of disharmony,” he says. “It only darkened the street and gave the impression that there was a lot of crime.”

It seems that Brazier’s influence has grown along with his congregation. Since his victory in the fight over the 63rd Street El, his name has appeared more and more often in the newspapers, and his endorsement has been sought and won by political figures from Mayor Daley to Barack Obama. Upon Rod Blagojevich’s first election as governor in 2002, Brazier served on his transition team, and his current posts include commissioner on the Public Building Commission of Chicago and chairman of the Woodlawn Preservation and Investment Corporation, which he founded. He also served as head of the 6th Episcopal District of Illinois for the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World until the ACOG left that body in November 2007 over doctrinal differences.

Brazier’s dedication to his work has not gone unnoticed by his congregation. A recent Sunday afternoon service, presided over by Evangelist Ivory Nuckolls, included tributes to Brazier and his family, several of whom also serve as church leaders. Brazier’s son Byron is also an ordained minister who serves as assistant pastor and church administrator at the ACOG. Byron and his sister Lola are also on the Board of Trustees. Meanwhile their mother Esther Isabelle Holmes Brazier has been involved with the church alongside her husband since they first met at a church picnic in 1947. At the time Brazier, who had recently returned from overseas service during World War II, was not particularly religious and had told his mother he was only going to the church picnic to find a wife. He and Isabelle married less than a year later. In celebration of the couple’s 60th wedding anniversary, the ACOG’s Drama Guild is putting on a three-weekend production of “Destiny…Designed by God,” a play about the Braziers’ life.

At 86 years old, Brazier is still going strong and displays the energy of a man half his age. In addition to preaching two morning services every Sunday, he leads more than 1000 people in a Bible study class every Wednesday. “Not too many men my age are still working every day,” he admits, but says he has “no plans to retire and go home and look out the window.”

Hyde Park Urbanist: Written by James Withrow, a resident of Hyde Park since 2001, the HPU has a split purpose. It seeks to promote urbanism in Hyde Park while keeping up with fellow blog, Hyde Park Progress. A big issue that Withrow addresses concerns an improved transit system in the area, since the Establishment is so hesitant to bring in its own businesses. In this way, the HPU endorses an inverse of the Hyde Park Progress approach toward urbanization. It seeks to begin small by first increasing community accessibility and promoting its interaction with other neighborhoods, and from there, the commercialization should be able to make its way in. (Elise Biggers)

I Hate My Developer: This blog recounts the Woodlawn Wonder’s list of grievances within her condo association, previously left a mess by its developer. The blog is full of witty complaints that include post-snow sidewalk conditions where transport by dogsled or e-mailing the alderman seem to be equally plausible solutions. Despite the Wonder’s light-hearted humor, she writes as a homeowner who, since moving into her place in 2001, has had to struggle along with the rest of her association in order to keep her Woodlawn home from literally falling apart. Since documenting her frustrations and course of action, she has become a source of inspiration for others struggling in the same developmental situation. (Elise Biggers)

General Carlessness: Jennifer, a Chicago-bred University of Chicago Press employee, started General Carlessness in 2006 in order to promote bike transportation as a primary means of transportation. Throughout her entries, she presents herself as both a source of inspiration for bike enthusiasts looking for places to ride and a fellow victim of biking circumstances particular to the Chicagoland area. The most notable entries are her brushes with death. Although new destinations are good to pick up from her blog, the near-death escapades offer some serious insight about where to direct your attention while peddling around, especially for those in the Hyde Park area. (Elise Biggers)

Lumpen: The Lumpen blog surfaced this year as a way of expanding the political art collective’s already vast network of information in their magazine, website, message board, and MySpace. With concerns to get out information about culture, politics, and art, Lumpen’s blog promotes upcoming events like film screenings and exhibitions, makes calls for contributions to and participation in projects, and puts up some other mildly amusing miscellanea. Ridiculous pictures of people dressed up as smurfs or Princess Leia getting felt up by Chewbacca are dispersed in the midst of earnest calls to action for supporting significant political leaders. (Laura Harmon)

Bridgeport Seasoning: Charming Charlie, a 38-year-old and self-proclaimed “last of the all-night, do-right, sit-beneath-your-window-till-daylight hardcore troubadours,” offers up his contemplations about good food and drink, politics, culture, thought, his personal dalliances with opening a checking account, getting in near-bar fights, and dating. Alongside his daily entries, the blog lists the best places to eat, bike, listen, think, and discuss in Bridgeport. With comments from readers giving feedback about his recommendations or just wanting to know how his day went, Charming Charlie has quite a reputation in the Chicago blogging and review spheres, writing as a freelance critic and serving as the go-to man for opinions on the best spots. (Laura Harmon)

Spurious Bastard: Snezana Zabic offers scattered entries on poetry, shows around Chicago, and her reactions to TV, radio, and film. Born in Serbia, she currently lives in Humboldt Park as a PhD student in creative writing at UIC, but makes frequent trips to Pilsen. Her poetry, written in both Serbo-Croatian and English, sometimes makes its way into the blog, but mostly she offers stories or thoughts about her reactions to different cultural encounters around the city, such as a bike ride in Pilsen to see Czech landmarks or a depressing realization that the young audience at a Stooges show was only there to sport the “punk” clothes they had bought at the mall. (Laura Harmon)

CTA Tattler: Can’t get enough of the ridiculous, awkward, maybe even frightening encounters you have on the CTA? This blog, started up by a working dad, documents the stories of public transit riders, covers the politics surrounding the CTA and its funding, and even offers practical information about closed lines, accidents, and construction delays. You can post your own crazy stories, debate about the recent funding and property tax issues, figure out the best strategy for getting somewhere when your line lets you down, or share pictures that capture the essence of the CTA in all its glory. (Laura Harmon)

Chicago Carless: Contrary to what the title implies, Mike Doyle does not wander around Chicago encouraging people to drop their keys and jump on the CTA. Chicago Carless merely categorizes his current residence in the Capital of the Midwest as that of a New Yorker who refuses to learn how to drive. Throughout the blog, Doyle writes on behalf of social justice and offers opinions on the kinds of issues that have attracted the eyes of notable publications such as the RedEye and the Chicago Tribune. His love for Chicago combined with his insightful comments on current Chicago affairs provides his readership with a straight-forward approach into what we may have missed while going about town. (Elise Biggers)

The hoped-for $110 million, which made up ten percent of the 2007 budget, has yet to arrive. Meanwhile, one year and several postponed doomsdays later, the CTA’s new 2008 budget asks for a total of $158 million in bail-out funds from the state. If the Illinois General Assembly doesn’t pony up by January 20, 2008, the CTA will eliminate eighty-one out of 154 bus routes, lay off more than 2,400 employees, and raise fares. On top of that, even if the tragicomic dogfight known as the Illinois legislature were to come up with the $158 million, the CTA would still be short more than $6 billion required for vital modernization and repairs. So what happened? How did the CTA fall from the top of the world to the brink of disaster?

The CTA was never on top of the world in the first place. In fact, its fortunes have been falling almost continuously for the past half-century. For over a decade after its creation in 1947, the CTA actually made money. Then came a series of interrelated challenges faced by mass transit systems across the country: the advent of the Eisenhower interstate system, the sudden dominance of the automobile, and white flight from the city proper to the suburbs. By the early 1970s, it was clear that something had to be done to save the CTA, which at the time derived its entire operating budget from fares. In 1974 a referendum approved the creation of the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), which would be entrusted with direct jurisdiction over suburban bus and rail lines as well as supervision of the CTA. The RTA was also granted the power to fund itself through a tax on gasoline. The referendum establishing the RTA passed because of strong support in Chicago and despite strong opposition in the suburbs, whose mostly white and middle-to-upper-class occupants saw mass public transportation as an urban issue that had little or nothing to do with them. This historical suburban-urban hostility is responsible for the structural problems that have sent the CTA through so many doomsdays over the years.

The revenue from the RTA’s gas tax proved inadequate, and several more rounds of major service cuts led up to the 1983 deal that restructured Chicagoland mass transit into its current form. Pace and Metra were established under the umbrella of the RTA, side by side with the CTA, and given responsibility for suburban buses and commuter trains, respectively. A formula for funding the CTA was also established. From then on, the CTA was to receive a yearly minimum contribution of $3 million from the City of Chicago and $2 million from Cook County. In addition, one-percent of the state sales tax collected in Chicago and three-fourths-percent of that collected in Cook County outside Chicago would be earmarked for the CTA. However, the suburbanites, ever wary of being required to fund urban mass transportation, forced the inclusion in the deal of a “farebox recovery ratio” of fifty-two-percent; in other words, fifty-two-percent of the operating budget had to come from fares, as opposed to governmental subsidies.

There was little that was satisfactory about the 1983 deal, and the CTA’s savechicagolandtransit.com website claims it was “seen as a temporary solution and expected to expire after a few years.” The City of Chicago has consistently interpreted its relatively minuscule $3 million dollar minimum commitment as a ceiling rather than a floor—although City Hall likes to claim the one-percent of state sales tax collected within the city’s borders for the CTA (over $200 million per year) is the city’s contribution rather than the state’s. Furthermore, the powers granted to the RTA by the 1983 deal are insufficient to make it more than a brief stopover point for cash destined for the CTA, Pace or Metra. The RTA has no power to set fares or force its three subordinates to work together, resulting in useless competition between the three, redundancies, and the continued lack of an integrated fare card.

Things have only gotten worse in the decades since the restructuring deal. The rigid formula established then didn’t take into account the rapid rate of inflation or the rise in cost of fuel and security. It also failed to foresee the end of federal operating assistance in 1990—the federal government now contributes occasionally to capital improvements, but no longer provides any part of the RTA’s operating budget. Perhaps most importantly, though, the 1983 plan didn’t foresee the increasing regional integration of Chicagoland. The polarization between the poor, minority-dominated city core and the surrounding ring of wealthy white suburbs has been all but erased. Commuters from the suburbs to the city, commuters from the city to the suburbs, immigrant families with branches all over the area, and a major restructuring and decentralization of the regional economy have led to a much greater interdependence—but the CTA still doesn’t get a cent from the collar counties.

So how should the CTA crisis be fixed and doomsday averted? Answers to this problem tend to focus only on the immediate issue: how the state should raise the funds to bail out mass transit. The two main tools for fundraising under consideration are tax increases and gambling expansion. Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) and his allies favor the former option, specifically a plan introduced by Rep. Julie Hamos (D-Evanston) that would increase the sales tax across the region. On the other side are Republican leaders in the State House and Senate together with Senate President Emil Jones (D-Chicago) and the increasingly unpopular Governor Rod Blagojevich, who favor at least one new riverboat casino somewhere in Illinois, a new land-based casino in Chicago, and slot machines at horse-racing tracks. Thus far neither side has had enough votes to settle the issue, but Madigan has shown signs of budging recently, acknowledging on October 29 that “political conditions” may leave gambling as the only viable solution and stipulating a revamped and strengthened Illinois Gambling Board as a condition of his support. Meanwhile a gambling bill has already passed the Senate, though it has yet to pass the House.

Both sides’ proposals also attempt to address the long-term problems with Chicagoland transit. Hamos’s bill, SB 572, was drawn up in collaboration with transit leaders and includes reforms on pensions and retiree health benefits wrung from unions. If passed it would also restructure RTA’s Board of Directors, increasing the number of members from thirteen to sixteen and diversifying its composition to include five members from Cook County and one member from each collar county, in addition to the five members from Chicago. This is important because it would give the suburbs more of a stake in the region’s transit, but that would be next to useless without a corresponding increase in the RTA’s power. Fortunately the bill takes that into account with various reforms, including authorizing the RTA to withhold twenty-five percent of revenues from a subsidiary until a satisfactory budget is submitted and requiring it “to develop a coordinated regional sales, marketing, advertising and public information program for all transit in the region,” according to Hamos’s summary. Meanwhile Blagojevich’s plan focuses much less on the structural problems and relies on higher fares and a redirection of about $300 million in gasoline taxes. The support from downstate Republicans is reflected in the plan’s subsidies for projects outside Northeastern Illinois.

The provisions for reform included in the Hamos bill—cutting wasteful employee benefits, giving the RTA more power and increasing the collar counties’ stake in regional transport—are a good first step and should be passed regardless of whether the funding comes from a tax increase or from gambling. The burden of paying for public transportation should be spread more evenly across the region. The farebox recovery ratio of fifty-two percent forced upon the CTA by suburbanites in the 1983 deal should be reevaluated. If the City of Chicago and Cook County are to contribute to the CTA’s budget—and they should—those contributions should be much greater than the current negligible levels of $3 and $2 million, respectively, and they should take inflation into account. The CTA should work to increase transparency as a first step to winning back citizens’ trust. Most importantly, local governments should pay closer attention to the voices of their constituents, who are increasingly positive towards public transportation. From proposed suburb-to-suburb Metra lines to increasing environmentalism even among car-driving consumers, suburbanites have plenty of reasons to join with their urban brethren in supporting mass transit. Chicagoland’s increasing integration demands a stronger network of public transportation, and a failure to fix its endemic problems will only lead to more apocalyptic doomsdays down the line.