Terror Train
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“Every transportation system has occasional problems,” he says. “If you’re on the highway and a semi jackknifes, you’ll be stuck for an hour and there’s nothing you can do about it. But on the CTA it happens so regularly. Every time you get on a train something happens. Just these little problems. It could be a malfunctioning door, or a fare-card machine, or your train could go 30 miles an hour for no reason when it could be going 50 miles an hour. There’s always something.”
By January of 1998 Renn had started publishing the “Weekly Breakdown,” a Web newsletter that chronicles his frustrating life as a CTA passenger (www.urbanophile.com/breakdown). He intended to describe, as he writes on-line, “the sort of ‘death of a thousand cuts’ experience that is making riders flee the system in droves.” His format was set early on and it hasn’t varied. The first section is a summary of CTA-related news from the week, and the second is his unofficial journal of CTA mishaps. It’s written from the perspective of a bemused outsider.
Of late, the “Weekly Breakdown” has claimed a mole inside the CTA, a bus driver writing in to describe how the system really works. In a recent issue the driver told of a memo to garage supervisors from CTA management forbidding overtime. This forced the supervisors to hold buses in the garage during rush hour. The driver offered a paragraph that could serve as the newsletter’s thesis statement: “It is a constant source of amazement to me how the CTA concocts all this propaganda about on-time, clean service and how they are service orientated, and yet they turn around and sacrifice that service to save a few bucks. They spend $100,000 to design a new website, several hundred thousand to hire an outside firm to determine which service to cut, and an unknown amount of money to stage a contest with fancy prizes. They spend gobs of money making fancy system maps and brochures, conducting studies concerning changing bus route numbers (which Mayor Daley pulled the plug on, thank God) and other wasteful expenditures. And yet, they turn around and do stupid things like holding buses in the garages to save money, while the whole time crying about how they have no money. Well, CTA has money. CTA management just doesn’t want to spend it on the most important product that this company sells–service.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
