Diverging Approach: Keep Up the Pace

Today is October 1. It’s the first day of Halloween month, that classic holiday where people either try to scare their peers, try walking in a different set of shoes for a day, or they simply don’t like having fun.

Today, I did all three of those things: I commuted. From a suburb. To another suburb.

On Pace.

Okay, pick your jaws up off the floor. This is important, because according to the Census, in 2015 a full 2.3 million people in the Chicago region live in the suburbs and commute to a different suburb for work. That doesn’t even include reverse commuters who live in Chicago proper and work out in the suburbs. Combine those statistics with Metra’s lackluster reverse-commute offerings in much of the region, and the simple fact that most suburban job centers are far from Metra stations anyway, and it’s easy to see how important a successful suburban bus network is to allow suburban workers to commute if they don’t (or choose not to) own a car.

Today I put my money where my mouth is and commuted to IDOT’s District 1 office in Schaumburg, where I had some early morning meetings. (I’m usually at that office once a week, but generally I use a state vehicle to commute between the Chicago office and the Schaumburg office.) The office is located a little bit west of Roselle Road off Central Road, immediately north of Interstate 90. It’s in a great location if you’re driving there from almost anywhere in the region, although ironically it’s not directly accessible from state highways — Roselle Road and Central Road are both Cook County highways, and that stretch of Interstate 90 is part of the Illinois Tollway. There is a single Pace bus line nearby: Route 696 serves the intersection of Roselle and Central Roads, and it’s a tolerable seven-minute walk to the office.

On the map, a transit commute between my home in southern Forest Park should be a slam dunk: the 696 serves the Northwest Transportation Center off Martingale Road, and I live not far from the Forest Park Blue Line terminal. Find the route that connects the two transit terminals and it’s easy as that.

But of course it’s not actually that easy. I completed my workday with round-trip commuting on Pace — but to do so, I had to ride NINE different Pace buses throughout the day. For both commutes, I actually was pretty fortunate transferring between lines: I never had to wait more than about five minutes at transfer points. (Pace, unlike some other transit agencies, understands how a conscious effort to have coordinated transfers greatly extends the reach of your network when frequency is low and headways are high.) Some of my experience is almost certainly unique to my individual situation: the District 1 office is basically on an island when it comes to lunch options, so I was back on the 696 to get to and from somewhere  to grab food. But there are plenty of areas of Schaumburg (and Oak Brook, and the Lake Cook Road corridor, among others) with similar issues, and I was fortunate enough that Pace was an option at all.

So here’s how I commuted today. Here’s the regional RTA map (that will open in a new tab) if you want to follow along.

• 6:40am: Leave home. ($0.00) Without doxxing myself, I live in the southern half of Forest Park, about halfway between the Eisenhower and Roosevelt Road, and halfway between Harlem and Desplaines Avenues. If I was lazy, I could’ve walked down to Roosevelt and grabbed what would end up being my 10th bus of the day to get to the Forest Park Blue Line station, but instead the weather was decent so I walked the 15 minutes or so to the station to grab the bus.
• 7:00am: Board Pace #757 at Forest Park. ($2.00/$2.25) I travel on a 30-day CTA/Pace monthly pass, but for kicks I’m going to keep track of how much today would’ve cost me if I didn’t have a pass. The blue figure shows how much it would cost using pay-as-you-go on a Ventra card; the green figure shows how much it would cost using cash. The 757 is really the only long-distance express bus that serves the Forest Park station, which seems like a potential missed opportunity for people who live and work out in the Oak Brook area. (The 301 serves this connection, but it’s a local bus that slogs down Roosevelt Road.) The 757 shoots up Interstate 290, then serves the Route 83 industrial corridor in Wood Dale, Bensenville, and Elk Grove Village before cutting up Higgins and Arlington Heights Roads to serve the random corporate buildings on Golf Road in Rolling Meadows before heading to the Woodfield area.  Well, most buses continue to the Woodfield area: there are only five round-trips offered each weekday, and a single westbound trip ends at Golf and New Wilke Roads instead of continuing onto Woodfield. Take a wild guess which bus fit in my schedule.
• 7:55am: Transfer to Pace #208 on Golf Road. ($2.30/$4.50) I opted to get off the bus at “Golf/Traffic Signal/Wal-Mart” (the official name of the bus stop) to wait for the next westbound bus, which would be either the 208 or the 606. It really doesn’t matter, since both routes end up at the Northwest Transportation Center; the 208 came first. The 208 does some heavy lifting for Pace, linking the Woodfield area to Evanston via Golf Mill mall and three Metra lines. With half-hourish headways seven days a week from early morning through evening, it’s basically as good as a more traditional suburban arterial bus route gets. This is also a good time to point out that transfers cost 30 cents on Ventra but aren’t available at all if you’re paying cash, which means it’s extremely important to have a Ventra card for suburban bus trips. And, of course, Ventra retailers aren’t exactly common in the suburbs: all of Elk Grove Village, for example, has only one retailer that sells Ventra cards: ironically, a gas station.
• 8:19am: Transfer to Pace #696 at the Northwest Transportation Center. ($2.60/$6.75) I’ll end up on the 696 three more times before the day is done, since it’s the only bus that comes close to the IDOT office. The 696 is basically the opposite of the 208: a low-frequency bus that just kind of meanders around to cover a lot of ground at the expense of travel time. It checks a stereotypical list of suburban destinations — a courthouse, a community college, a commuter university, one Metra station, and two malls.
• 8:35am: Exit the bus and walk to the office. I end up arriving around 8:40am, close enough to my 8:30am start time and definitely in time for my 9:00am meeting, so mission accomplished.
• 11:45am: Leave the office for lunch. I was a bit concerned when I left the office at 11:45am: I wanted to leave five minutes earlier but got caught up wrapping up a few emails. The 696 was scheduled to be back at Roselle/Central at 11:52am, and the following bus wouldn’t arrive until around 1:30pm, which is far later than I was willing to wait to get food.  Interestingly, the District 1 office was built with a fully-functioning kitchen and cafeteria on the first floor, but decades of belt tightening combined with, well, everyone has a car and there’s no shortage of places to grab lunch in Schaumburg reduced the cafeteria to an odd unstaffed convenience store setup where cameras watch you self checkout whatever bagged snacks or any of the handful of pre-made sandwiches and salads you wanted. Either way, sticking around the office wasn’t really an option for lunch, so I was back on the 696.
• 11:54am: Board Pace #696 at Roselle/Central. ($4.60/$9.00) Correction: now I’m back on the 696.
• 12:00pm: Arrive at Portillo’s on Golf Road. When in Rome.
• 12:45pm: Leave Portillo’s. Unfortunately the bus doesn’t come for another half hour or so, but the weather is nice so I decide to walk along Golf Road and wait for the bus to catch up to me. Golf Road in Schaumburg is a pretty crappy place to be a pedestrian, by the way. Since I’m on Pace time, I have to take a long lunch and will be losing out on a half hour of comp time. A small price to pay for my art, I suppose.
• 1:10pm: Board Pace #696 at Roselle/Remington. ($6.60/$11.25) The bus took longer than I expected, so I walked a little further than I expected and sweated a little more than I expected as well. Feet are a bit sore.
• 1:13pm: Exit the bus and walk to the office. Glad I have a 30-day pass, otherwise I’d be a little pissed about paying $2 for a four-minute bus ride. But it covered a lot of ground and crossed over the tollway, so I suppose it’s worth it. Hashtag suburbs. Also, here’s a quick panorama of the signalized crossing at Roselle and Central.

• 4:30pm: Leave the office to head home. My workday officially ends at 5:00pm, but the 696 schedule is having none of that: the bus comes at about 4:37pm or around 5:55pm, so choose wisely.  I choose to burn another half hour of comp time and try to get home at a decent hour.
• 4:38pm: Board Pace #696 at Roselle/Central ($8.60/$13.50) I notice two people on this bus who were also on the 208 and transferred to the 696 with me this morning. The bus is surprisingly crowded with people headed back from Harper College.
• 4:56pm: Transfer to Pace #600 at the Northwest Transportation Center ($8.90/$15.75) Now, if I wanted to, I could’ve hopped back on the last 757 of the day, which departs the Northwest Transportation Center at 5:00pm. However, (1) I’d rather try a route I didn’t already try; (2) I wouldn’t mind checking out Pace’s new I-90 services (although the 600’s been around for awhile); and (3) I wanted to see what my options were if the 696 ran late and didn’t allow for the 757 connection. The 600 is a great route: express between the Northwest Transportation Center and the Rosemont Blue Line. That’s it. No weird loops, no long gaps in service, just a straight shot down the tollway, every 15 minutes, all day long. I don’t make a habit of complimenting our suburban transit options too often around here, but I must say I was definitely impressed by the special fleet Pace uses on the I-90 corridor now. Comfy seats that recline, reading lights and vents at every seat, and a USB charger (although it’s a little hidden, so you kind of have to know it’s there).

• 5:35pm: Transfer to Pace #303 at the Rosemont Blue Line ($9.20/$18.00) As great as the 600 was, that’s as bad as the 303 is during rush hour. Seriously, what an awful experience the 303 was. It felt like most of the trip was spent standing still: it took at least three signal cycles for the bus to make the right turn from southbound River Road to westbound Irving Park Road in Schiller Park; we got stuck for a freight train in Franklin Park (not unusual); and it took a good five minutes to make a single left turn from southbound 25th Avenue to eastbound North Avenue. It was a solid hour of grinding through the inner tier suburbs, and served as a constant reminder of why people hate traveling on buses.
• 6:45pm: Transfer to Pace #301 at the Forest Park Blue Line I left off the prices for this trip because honestly it was a transfer of convenience: I was hungry, there’s a Portillo’s at Desplaines and Roosevelt (I know, Portillo’s twice, living the dream) that’s definitely walkable, but it was a cross-platform transfer and I have a monthly pass, so why not?

Takeaways over take-out

I ended up getting home around 7:30pm after grabbing a quick dinner. It dawned on me that I had spent about four and a half hours to work a six and a half hour shift that cost me an hour of comp time to make the buses work. I live in an area pretty well-served by transit, and I was going to an area just outside a major suburban job center, and my workday was 70% longer because of my commute. This was a one-off occasion for me, but as we previously discussed, it’s not exactly unheard of for people to live in one suburb and commute to another: statistically speaking, it’s the norm. Transit agencies wonder why telecommuting continues to become more and more common and why transit is hemmorhaging ridership, especially on the bus side of the house. “Must be Uber and Lyft!” the thinking goes. Or — and bear with me — it’s because service is lackluster, travel times are too long, reliability is sketchy, and frequency is crap.

I’ll admit, as a transit advocate who also happens to be an IDOT employee — but not speaking on behalf of IDOT, of course — our agency is working on becoming a better partner for transit, but we still have light years to go. (“It’s a big ship, and it’s hard to turn around,” Secretary Blankenhorn said at last week’s American Planning Association state conference, “but I hope we’ve at least gotten it to the point where it’s harder to turn it back in the direction we used to be headed than it is to keep moving forward.”) Things that make bus service more reliable and easier to operate, such as dedicated facilities and improved signal coordination or pre-emption, fall squarely in our wheelhouse. While we’ve made some progress with bus-on-shoulder throughout the region, it’s good to see Pace is reaching out to other partners such as the Illinois Tollway to get more progressive transit infrastructure in more innovative ways.

But, as usual, there’s other issues that we can probably make incremental progress on right now. First and foremost, let’s check back in on the cost for non-pass holders. If I didn’t have a 30-day pass on my Ventra card, I would be out $9.20 for a single day’s worth of trips. And then the cash price was almost double that! Someone who doesn’t have a Ventra card would be out $18 just on transit fares alone. A 7-day pass is only $15 more expensive, but you’d need to have a Ventra card first. Even still, $9.20 is not a small amount of money for a daily expense, but it’s still easier for some people to spend $9.20 daily (imagine a server making the $4.95/hour minimum wage plus tips) than plunking down $105 all at once for a 30-day pass. This is where fare capping would be useful. We already have a “smart” system with Ventra; fare capping would be incredibly easy to roll out. In this case, a fare capped system would basically have everyone move over to using transit credit on their Ventra cards; no more dedicated passes. Then, fares are automatically deducted until you reach a certain price and time threshold. For instance, with a $33 7-day pass, instead of charging $33 at once, riders would be charged the same $2 per trip as they’re charged now, but when they hit $33 their rides are free for the rest of the week. Or a similar system for the $105 30-day pass. Or somewhere in between, where the first $33 is full-price and the next $72 has a per-ride discount of some sort. Fare capping is useful for two key reasons: first and foremost, it’s more equitable for lower-income workers who may not be able to afford the upfront cost of a pass but end up paying more with pay-as-you-go than the pass is valued at. But secondly — as I think I showed today — when you stop worrying about per-ride charges, you’re more inclined to use transit more often.

I’ll dive into more Pace-related discussions in future postings, I’m sure, and if you want to send me your ideas, go yell at me on Twitter. But in the meantime, I’m happy to say that I walked in the shoes of a Pace supercommuter today… although like most Halloween costumes, it’s a good experience to endure once a year and can be kinda fun if you’re in the right headspace, but it’s important to remember that being able to take the costume off at the end of the night is a luxury not everyone has.