What's killing CTA train ridership? Two four-letter words.
Reprinted Crain's Chicago Business | Greg Hinz on Politics
Published: January 25, 2018
What's killing CTA train ridership? Two four-letter words.
One of the bigger bets Mayor Rahm Emanuel has placed in his seven years in office has been on public transit. To cheers from lots of folks, including me, he has invested billions of dollars in rebuilding aged track and modernizing signals, refurbished entire rapid transit lines while opening brand-new el stations at places like Uptown and 95th Street on the Red Line, and even snagged a $1.1 billion goodbye gift from his ex-boss, Barack Obama, on his way out of the White House.
The investments have paid off. Projects like the new Wintrust Arena near McCormick Place where DePaul University plays basketball and the revived Fulton Market area that soon will house McDonald's world headquarters would not have blossomed without new el stops nearby.
But now those investments and that prosperity are in some jeopardy from those ubiquitous ride-share services whose vehicles seem to be everywhere. Signs are growing that Uber, Lyft and their peers have begun to cut significantly into Chicago Transit Authority business, with overall ridership now declining after two decades of steady increases. Though the companies deny it, the phenomenon is particularly apparent on late nights and weekends, periods when the CTA has lost as much as 20 percent of its riders on some lines in just two years.
Officials say a variety of things are going on, with some of the decline caused by Uber and friends and some due to lower gasoline prices, which tend to shift people from transit to their cars, though pump prices actually have been climbing since early 2016. But the ridership downturn is starting to draw attention—one of the reasons the new city budget included a tax hike on ride-shares, with proceeds going to the CTA.
CTA officials have begun talking with counterparts in other cities who are seeing the same trends. "We strongly suspect that this (shift to ride-shares) is where the market is going," says Scott Wainwright, director of ridership analysis.
"This is not the future that Uber and Lyft sold us," says Ron Burke, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, an advocacy group for bikes, transit and other nonauto transportation. "It is cutting into transit ridership and causing congestion on the street."
The data are clear. In the first 11 months of 2017, average boardings on CTA trains dropped 12 percent on Saturdays and 13 percent on Sundays from 2015. Compared with 2014, the weekend drops are 15 percent and 13 percent, respectively. That's striking because, since the early 1990s, train ridership had been rising fast enough to offset a decades-long decline in bus traffic.
Uber says it is not the bad guy; it says its research shows that a fair number of its riders, particularly on the South and West sides, use both transit and Uber for the same trip. A spokesman for Lyft makes the same "first mile/last mile" argument, adding, "Working with public transit, we hope to reduce the number of single occupancy vehicles on the road, which will reduce congestion and car ownership."
But Ed Zotti, a researcher for the Central Area Committee, notes, for instance, a 19.9 percent decrease in Saturday ridership on the Red Line's north leg from 2015 to 2017. With downtown service employment still growing, that means the CTA increasingly is financially dependent on moving passengers in rush periods, and will have to find the capital funds to expand capacity then with less ability to spread that overhead on weekend riders.
Heaven knows the CTA could use competition. But to say that quick and easy auto travel is the future is, well, what they used to say about moving to the burbs.
Meanwhile, in my North Side neighborhood, officials have floated a plan to ban parking on weekend nights along a four-block stretch of North Halsted Street. One of the reasons, according to Ald. Tom Tunney, 44th: so many Ubers and Lyfts are double-parking to pick up passengers that traffic comes to a near halt. Call it an omen.