To maintain safety, public transit needs investment
I write about “Metra’s wild glitch” ( March 13), in which a Metra train operated by the BNSF pulling out of a station had a door pop open and then automatically close three seconds later. Metra’s top priority is always safety, and the door’s electrical circuit was repaired immediately. The cause is extremely rare.
Readers should know the American Society of Civil Engineers last week rated public transit a D- minus, the lowest of all infrastructure categories. It’s amazing that the CTA, Metra and Pace perform as well as they do in an environment that doesn’t provide our transit system roads or bridges the funding they desperately need.
Our fleet is safe, an issue I take personally since I am a daily Metra and CTA commuter myself. Chicago mass transit has the fewest mechanical breakdowns among its peers per mile even with Chicago’s weather, aging equipment and financial challenges. Metra’s ontime performance last year was 96 percent, above its 95 percent goal, though it operates at the mercy of seven complex private railroads and Amtrak.
We at the Regional Transportation Authority estimate that Chicagoland mass transit requires $ 37 billion over the next 10 years to achieve a “state of good repair” for our existing network. Much like your personal vehicles, our aging fleet is more expensive to maintain as cars and locomotives get older. More than 30 percent of our assets are beyond their useful life, including rolling stock, stations and guideways. The Metra car in the Sun- Times story was delivered in 1961. Metra rebuilds and repairs cars continually, but BNSF riders still travel on some cars delivered during the Eisenhower administration.
The RTA has set an annual funding target of between $ 2 billion to $ 3 billion per year to address the backlog, maintain the system and undertake limited modernization enhancement and expansion. Unfortunately, the RTA has no state construction money due to Springfield inaction. Illinois has not had an infrastructure spending plan since 2009, leaving us with no funds to match President Donald Trump’s trillion- dollar infrastructure vision.
Nationally, in the fall elections, other cities and states passed more than 70 percent of referendums increasing mass transit outlays. Those voters know where transit goes, the economy grows!