Pilot plan to slash certain Metra fares gets final green light without CTA participation
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s pilot program to galvanize public transportation on the South Side and south suburbs will chug ahead without participation just yet from the Chicago Transit Authority after more than a year of failed attempts to get the agency’s participation.
Cook County commissioners voted during a Thursday board meeting to approve a pair of intergovernmental agreements that would officially kickstart the South Cook Fair Transit pilot.
Starting in January, the three-year program will slash fares on Metra Electric, which runs through Chicago’s South Side and south suburbs, and Rock Island Line, which serves areas of the Southwest Side and southwest suburbs, by 50%. It also boosts the hours and frequency of the Pace 352-Halsted bus route that runs from the CTA 95th/Dan Ryan station to the Pace Chicago Heights Terminal.
“Parts of the county (are) underserved by public transit and, as a result, hampered in their economic development because good public transit is the foundation of economic development,” Preckwinkle said in a call with reporters, outlining a vision of correcting those “transit deserts” that exist in southern Cook County.
Preckwinkle unveiled the idea last year to bring “equity investments” to those areas that lack public transportation access compared with the rest of the county despite households there spending a disproportionate amount of income on transportation. The goal is to boost ridership on southern Cook public transportation by offering more affordable fares and service improvements for the thousands who rely on Metra and Pace in the region. The county is funding the program with about $35million, some of which will offset the fare reductions.
Originally, the plan was to also bring CTA on board for coordination purposes such as Ventra cards eventually being used for free transfers with Metra, and the county offered to subsidize revenue losses that would happen. But Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot balked at the initiative, saying last fall that it would have a “dramatic effect” on CTA revenue.
“This particular proposal I think causes problems for the CTA and I’m not going to support something that would have the effect of diminishing ridership at the CTA,” Lightfoot said at the time.
Preckwinkle responded to a commissioner’s question about CTA’s participation with hints that she is not giving up.
“We are continuing our conversations with CTA,” she said during the board meeting. “We’ve decided that we were going to go forward with the two partners that were willing to work with us, Metra and Pace, on this pilot.”
Her former superintendent of the Cook County Department of Transportation and Highways John Yonan, who led much of those talks, swatted away the narrative that there was any discord between Cook County and CTA. He said it simply was not the right time for the city’s transit agency to jump on board.
“There’s a little bit of misinformation about them not wanting to work with us,” Yonan said. “There were just some other priorities set in how they viewed their role in this fair transit (pilot).”
A CTA statement Thursday said the agency will closely follow the results of the pilot and echoed Preckwinkle’s comments that discussions are “still ongoing.” Any movement forward, however, needs to be financially sustainable in the longterm, the statement said.
“CTA continues an ongoing dialogue about this pilot with the service boards and the County,” the statement said. “Given how complex coordination of the transportation network is, the service boards are collaborating closely to analyze and understand the operational changes and impacts across the regional transit system.”