Today is June 30, and right now I’m onboard a fairly crowded Saturday BNSF train heading into the city. It’s one of the hottest days of the year, and unsurprisingly a handful of cars don’t have working air conditioning. This is the last of the Saturday morning hourly inbound trains; from here on out, trains will run only every other hour.
Today is my last official day riding Metra on a monthly pass. I’ve been a monthly pass holder since I moved from Portage Park to Itasca in March of 2014; since summer 2015 I’ve lived in LaGrange and I have been spoiled by frequent peak-period express trains to and from work downtown. But on Monday, my wife and I are closing on our first home. We’re buying a small bungalow on the south side of Forest Park, a ten-minute walk from the Blue Line.
Obviously we’re not moving closer to the city just because it’s increasingly frustrating to rely on Metra. But I can’t say that switching to the CTA instead of Metra didn’t have some impact on our decision.
If you’re reading this, you know that I have plenty of ideas on how to improve Metra; and if you’re reading this, you probably have some ideas of your own as well. Fares continue to increase as Metra keeps duct-taping their vintage fleet together as the credit card gathers dust. Schedules that adequately handle Monday-through-Friday 9-to-5ers but barely provides basic service for anyone else. The disastrous rollout of the new BNSF schedule and the self-inflicted damage control wounds.
While Metra has plenty of financial challenges ahead of them, the inverse Laffer Curve where Metra can keep nudging fares up with no clear return on investment for their riders because it’s still cheaper than driving into the city for work keeps any sense of agency urgency at bay, even as ridership stagnates or declines in most of the region and straight up bottoms out on the South Side and in the southern suburbs.
Work schedules are shifting to allow more workers to stay home, while demographics are changing as Millennials and Gen Xers (and even some Boomers) favor on-demand, responsive, reliable non-driving transportation throughout the day, not just for work trips.
In the face of all these changes, Metra makes the bold choice to just keep grinding on with the same model the commuter railroads have used since the 1950s. Well-dressed conductors punch paper tickets on train cars specifically designed around the conductors’ ability to check every ticket, every time. Never mind that most other transportation agencies have figured out how proof-of-payment ticketing works, dramatically lowering manpower costs, or that newer vehicle designs have wider, lower doors that allow faster, easier boarding and alighting. Entire outings need to be planned around the limited number of times trains run, and those schedules make transferring between lines extremely difficult with long layovers.
This week, my wife commuted with me downtown since she had a week-long intensive class at Roosevelt University to wrap up her master’s degree. On Monday, in the rain she stumbled on the stairs stepping into the car, since the floor is high relative to ground level. On Tuesday, the train was so crowded I had to stand in the aisle on the other side of the car from her. On Wednesday, she took a later train since they were meeting in Pilsen; she missed the train because it left LaGrange Road early. On Thursday, her train left early again, but she planned ahead and reworked her schedule to get to the station sooner.
Friday was fine though, so there’s that.
On the way home yesterday, she told me, “I don’t know how you do it every day.” And now I won’t have to.
I’m going to keep this blog going, of course; I’ll still be a frequent Metra weekend rider, planning train crawls, exploring the suburbs, and all that good stuff. I fully understand I’m in a position of privilege to be able to pick up and move; I still believe that there are plenty of common-sense improvements Metra can make relatively easily to make the suburbs a more attractive place for people who choose to live car-free.
This is my shot across the bow. I never thought I’d say it, but I’m looking forward to no longer being a regular Metra commuter. I want Metra to do better for the suburbs; for better or worse, I’m a suburbanite for life, and Metra remains an underutilized asset for the entire region. I want Metra to succeed. I want Metra to be a stronger amenity for everyone in the suburbs, not just white-collar 9-to-5ers five days a week. I want to want to ride Metra again.
But in the meantime, I’ll see you on the ‘L’.
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