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Daleys last pipe dream: A high-speed rail between OHare and the Loop Will Rahm fight for cyclists like his predecessor did?

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One farecard for CTA, Metra and Pace?
June 2011

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Davis Street station on Metras UP-N line

CTA, METRA, PACE AND THE REGIONAL TRANSIT AUTHORITY ALL SPEAK OF WORKING TOWARD A UNIFIED FARE CARD. PROGRESS IS YET TO BE SEEN. STORY, PHOTOS AND DESIGN BY AUSTIN B. SMITH

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ith gas prices north of $4 and parking costs sky-high, driving to work is expensive for DAnne Burley of Schaumburg. Her alternative is a variety of complex, time-consuming and expensive public transit options to get to her consulting job in the Loop. Burleys best option is to call her local Dial-A-Ride agency, which picks her up at home and drops her at a Pace Bus stop in Schaumburg. The bus takes her to the Rosemont stop on the CTA Blue Line for the ride into the Loop. The process can take more than three hours each way, and it costs $10 on multiple fare cards. Another option adds Metra (and another fare card) to her commute. Burley knows that commuting from Schaumburg to the Loop will never be simple. But the process would be slightly less complicated if she could use one fare card for the entire trip. We live in an age of open-road tolling and paperless airline boarding passes. We can buy books and deposit checks from cellphones. Must the public transit systems be so complicated? No. Theoretically, its possible to create a unified payment system for the Chicago areas sprawling mass

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transit lines. All parties involved say they are working toward it. So should we expect hassle-free transfers from Pace to Metra to the CTA in the near future? No. said Aaron Renn, of urbanophile.com. This is Illinois. Transit organizations are fiefdoms. The CTA is controlled by the mayor while Metra and Pace answer to suburban Republicans. The politics make it extremely difficult. At a panel discussion on public transit in Chicago last month, Chris Robling of Jayne Thompson and Associates, a local consulting firm, touched on this issue. We need to take the CTA, Ro-

bling said. We need to put them in a new RTA, and then we need to make the heads of those agencies report to the RTA. And not to the Mayor in one case and the suburbs in another. Robling compared Chicagos situation to that of New York where commuter rail lines answer to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. In New York the MTA can fire the head of Long Island Railroad, he said, and thats why Long Island Railroad [works with] Metro North. Thats why the whole system holds together. Were nuts in this city. Renn is confident that Forrest

Claypool, whom Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel plans to appoint as president of CTA, will be a good administrator. But his plate will be too full with the agencys day-to-day workings, Renn said, to be able to focus on large-scale, forward thinking. While Renn has grand visions but little confidence in the system, the Regional Transit Authority is more optimistic. We are working closely with all the service boards, trying to improve and upgrade their fare collection systems, said Mark Minor, RTA spokesman. There are still a lot of unknowns. How can we do this in a cost-effective manner?

A Purple Line CTA car travels east along Van Buren Street in the Loop

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Representatives from each agency said they are working toward a single payment medium. Compared with getting separate agencies from separate municipalities with separate interests to work together, other barriers are mere technicalities. On the CTA, you pay to enter and you can ride as long and as far as youd like, said Michael Gillas, spokesman for Metra. But on Metra, you are charged based on the distance you travel. Metra has conductors collecting fares and monitoring where people board and exit. The agency has not yet determined the best electronic

fare collection system that also tracks the distance traveled, Gillas said. (The South Shore Electric line between downtown Chicago and Indiana issues distance-based fare cards electronically.) Another issue is the cost of using a new, single fare card. Splitting the cost of changing existing fare collection systems could become complicated and contentious. The CTA is working on a project called open-fare payment, which would allow riders to touch a credit card to a sensor at a turn style, entirely eliminating the need for any Open-fare payment is the vehicle fare card. This system could facili- most likely to make that possible, tate a unified system. said Noelle Gaffney, spokeswoman for CTA. She added that the CTA is in the bidding stage for that project but has no projected time frame for adopting it. Minor said the RTA looks at the way other transit systems handle the single fare-card issue, but theres no city to model the Chicagos system after. Boston, Philadelphia, New York-were all in the same spot, he said. As an industry, were all muddling through this at the same time. No specific agency or region has accomplished what we are looking to accomplish. CTA, Metra and Pace are all on board, with RTA providing general oversight. So when might DAnne Burley actually be able to ride public transit from Schaumburg to Chicago with a single fare card? According to all of the agencies spokespeople, stating a precise time frame would be mere speculation.

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