Posted to “Chicagoist”:http://www.chicagoist.com/archives/2005/03/10/cta_threatens_imminent_doomsday_crappy_lives_for_passengers.php regarding the CTA cuts:

EVERYONE: If you’re as ticked off by the situation as I am, call your state legislator. Go to vote-smart.org and enter your zip+4 (look at your junk mail) to find out who. In most of America, the entire metropolitan region jointly funds mass transit. In most of the rest of the world, mass transit is a national priority and everyone, especially drivers, pay taxes for it. Here in Chicago, city taxes (mostly) fund CTA and suburban taxes go to suburban transit. This is completely stupid, since transit benefits the entire region: by keeping cars off the roads, by making the Loop a central place to do business, by getting people where they need to go, by allowing many of us to live car free. This way of funding things is stupid, and it’s time for all of us to bang down the doors in Springfield and tell them so.

Sure, CTA could fix some problems within its own house — but $55 million is a lot of money, and CTA runs an almost break-even operation these days (so making up a small deficit requires deep cuts). Even if Wilson Yard sold for an extra million dollars (which it wouldn’t; $30 a square foot wasn’t out of range when the deal was struck), that’s still only a tiny fraction of the amount of cash needed. In fact, CTA runs a tight ship relative to other transit agencies: among American transit agencies, it has the lowest per-hour rail operating costs and the second-lowest taxpayer subsidy per passenger (second-highest farebox recovery ratio, after NYC Transit).

Furthermore, it isn’t just CTA. Several other large cities (those with equally stupid funding mechanisms) are also facing transit funding crises: in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, state cutbacks are threatening equally severe measures: in Philadelphia, the transit board actually passed a budget with $2.50 base fares and NO service on weekends or nights, before the state rushed a bailout. Boston recently completely revised its transit funding, resulting in substantial fare hikes. And Washington’s Metro is threatening vastly higher fares if it can’t secure more dedicated operating funding. Even in the suburbs, Pace and Metra have warned that they face similar cash crunches within the next few years if the situation doesn’t improve — that is, if tax funding continues to decrease in real terms (adjusted for inflation), as it has for the past 20 years.

Most of the money for capital projects comes from the federal government and is earmarked as such; it really can’t be spent elsewhere. The state or local funds in the capital pool are there to “match” the federal money 50-50: divert it and an equal amount of federal money disappears. Yeah, it’s stupid, but Washington is like any big money donor: they like to build things, but don’t care about maintenance. Or you could blame it on the Republicans, who eliminated federal operating subsidies in 1997, and of course want to cut deeply into capital funds today.

Keith: trains, simply put, are much cheaper to run than buses, especially when carrying hundreds at a time. The biggest single cost of running transit is labor — a train can carry a thousand people with one driver, while the same number would have to take ten buses. Plus, the electricity from the rails is cheaper than gas, and rail cars require less maintenance. There are many cases where buses are cheaper than trains, but CTA’s train lines aren’t them.

Katie: the ridership numbers are counted at the farebox. The supplemental paper surveys that are distributed on buses from time to time are not what the ridership numbers are based on.