Month: June 2020

Diverging Approach: Commit to the Commute

Posted on by The Yard Social Club in #CommitToTheCommute, Diverging Approach

As Illinois and Chicago barrel forward into Phase 3 of the coronavirus recovery, our world is slowly starting to get back to normal – or at least, our new normal that will follow COVID-19 is coming into clearer focus.

Unfortunately, despite our hardest efforts, transit has become something of a public health punching bag, with a common sentiment that public transit (and/or those who use it) are unclean or unsafe in light of the ongoing pandemic. Even worse, just when there was a light at the end of the tunnel, Chicago executed its first-ever citywide shutdown of all transit in an (ill-advised) attempt to quell protesting and looting following the George Floyd murder: CTA and Pace stopped running entirely overnight, while Metra shut down for over 60 consecutive hours.

This can be – or possibly will be – a fatal one-two punch for our transit network as we know it. Metra has straight-up abandoned off-peak service on three of its 11 lines and the rest of the system has ridership losses north of 95%. Additionally, Metra seems content to let ridership drive service restoration rather than vice versa; in planning parlance this is known as a “death spiral”: less service means fewer riders, which means less service, which means fewer riders, and so on.

While Metra’s long-term strategy should be acknowledging a new normal with much more work-from-home for their white collar commuter base and adjusting schedules accordingly to flatten the peak while adding off-peak service to attract new non-traditional commuters (or riders who travel for reasons unrelated to commuting entirely), even systems like the CTA and Pace, who have had far fewer service reductions during the pandemic, will continue to struggle getting ridership back as riders stay home and as commuters have less reason to commute with work-from-home opportunities.

Work-from-home can be great on occasion, and as workplaces reopen it’s likely that many will still require workers to work from home several times a week. Transit’s recovery – if it ever comes – will be a slow, drawn-out, painful affair.

But work from home has no shortage of downsides, too. Beyond issues of distractions and productivity, it’s healthy to have some distance – figuratively and literally – between your work life and your home life. Whether that’s the idea that you can get just one more task done before calling it for the night, or that your boss now feels comfortable calling or texting you on your personal cell phone whenever, or just a little spike in anxiety you get whenever you pass your laptop during your “off” hours, some sort of buffer space is good for you and your health.

That’s why The Yard Social Club and Star:Line Chicago is finally launching our Commit to the Commute campaign. Commuting – especially on foot or on transit – shouldn’t be a chore as much as it is a release: catch up on a podcast, read Twitter, dive into a book, or just stare out the window and daydream. Commuting is “me” time, and the best part is at the end of the day, you can leave work at work and disconnect once more on your way home.

Our Commit to the Commute campaign has three prongs:

  • Tag us on social media. Show us what you enjoy about your commute! What can you do on transit that you can’t do while working from home or when you’re driving? Tag us on Twitter or Instagram (@StarLineChicago), use the #CommitToTheCommute and #LeaveWorkAtWork hashtags, and we’ll share.
  • Join us for Happy Hours. Once indoor bars get rolling again (hopefully later this summer), we’ll be hosting a few regular downtown meetups to connect commuters and grab a quick one before heading home.
  • Hop on a train crawl. When Illinois moves into Phase 4 and groups of up to 50 are allowed again, we’ll help ease you back into a comfort zone using transit with our famous train crawls throughout the city and suburbs. Get reintroduced to our region’s transit system with a safe, fun way to explore where the buses and trains can take you.

These are challenging times, but here at The Yard Social Club and Star:Line Chicago, we want to do whatever small things we can to bend the commuting curve back and remind everyone in Chicagoland how vital our transit network is to everyone.

#CommitToTheCommute

Diverging Approach: Blackout

Posted on by The Yard Social Club in Diverging Approach

I will try to be brief.

This blog’s “lane” is suburban transportation, but we cannot discuss transit service disparities and regional inequities in infrastructure without recognizing the systemic racism inherent in our region’s society, in our region’s history, and in our region’s geography.

While the events of recent days were ostensibly kicked off by the murder of yet another unarmed Black person at the hands of police in Minnesota, the resonance these protests have had right here in our own backyard is a testament to the ongoing failures in equity and tolerance right here in Chicago.

And right now, our city and our transportation agencies are letting us all down, at this time when we need them most.

As a pandemic continues to ravage the state of Illinois with over 5,000 lives lost and an estimated unemployment rate of nearly 17%, disproportionately affecting the poor and communities of color, it is absolutely unconscionable for our leaders to shut down our public transit network entirely in some misguided effort to quell civil unrest that still reaches as far as Waukegan, Aurora, and northwestern Indiana anyway.

A map of current Metra service in June 2020.

At 6:30pm on May 31, for the first time at least since the South Side Elevated started 24-hour service in 1893, and possibly dating as far back as the 1871 Chicago Fire (or even earlier), there was not a single transit vehicle in revenue service in Chicago, despite decades of fires, floods, blizzards, frigid cold, sweltering heat, 9/11, and even the last round of riots in 1968. After nearly three months of what is now clearly just kabuki theatre of “the importance of serving essential workers”, our transit service was – and in many areas, still is – nowhere to be found when workers and residents most needed safe, reliable passage through our region. Three days later, transit access to the urban core still does not exist, with CTA providing no bus or rail service in the area bounded by Fullerton, Western, 47th, and the lake; and our commuter railroad has ceased operations entirely.

A sign at Metra’s Ogilvie Transportation Center on Sunday, May 31 denies entry to Metra riders (despite trains still operating normally at the time).

I do not pretend to know who made the call to cancel service, but I do know that it doesn’t matter: in this moment when so many are in the streets marching to protest a system that has failed to protect them, our transportation system is letting them down once more, and they will not forget. To add insult to injury, in some communities of color the only buses local residents see on their streets right now are filled with police officers dressed in full riot gear, traveling to square off with mostly-peaceful protesters.

Three articulated CTA buses full of police officers make their way northbound on Michigan Avenue the afternoon of Sunday, May 31.

After decades of structural racism and systemic disinvestment, we owe it to our region’s most vulnerable residents to declare that mobility is a right: public transit is not some commodity to be rationed, but rather a public utility that is essential to the well-being of all. Pulling the rug out from these residents right now, during an ongoing pandemic and with the wildest future uncertainties most of us have experienced in our lifetimes, is nothing short of negligence. The absolute last thing we want to do is give people one less certainty they can count on.

In the short-term, we’re just encouraging people to drive more, which just fuels the existing perpetuating cycles of inequity, as the “haves” can continue to self-segregate away from the “have nots” while contributing to existing pollution and health impacts that continue to plague the most vulnerable among us. But in the long-term we are not only continuing but exacerbating the disinvestment in these communities, with inevitable deferred maintenance and service cuts “due to low ridership”.

Our transit agencies need to immediately restore service to all parts of our region and assert that mobility is a right for everyone in Chicagoland.