By Neal Pollack
Back on the street, Surratt waited for the Harrison bus. And waited. And waited. It was 1 AM, then 1:15. She began to panic, and when she panicked, she knew, her asthma could act up again. A “homeless man” approached, she says, and told her the Harrison bus didn’t run overnight. She needed to walk back up the street to Jackson and wait for the 126 bus, which would take her to State.
David Mosena was untouched by controversy when the CTA named him its new president in June 1996. He had served as the city’s aviation commissioner and planning commissioner and as the mayor’s chief of staff. Mosena had been handpicked by Mayor Daley to succeed Robert Belcaster, who resigned after it was disclosed that he’d bought stock in a company doing business with the CTA. Mosena joined CTA chairman Valerie Jarrett at the top of the agency. Jarrett was also a former Daley cabinet member; she and Mosena were counted among the mayor’s most competent people and were quickly touted by the press as the CTA’s new “dream team.” Putting them at the head of the CTA was compared to the mayor’s putting Paul Vallas and Gery Chico in charge of the Chicago Board of Education.
Mosena knew that he had to cater to Metro Seniors in Action. He promised to seek more money from the state. He pledged to form a task force on improving CTA service and to provide more accessible service for people with disabilities. He also said he and the mayor would hold a citywide transit summit. “The last thing I want to do is cut service and raise fares,” he told the seniors, “and I’ll do everything I can to not go down that road.”
Daley said he had introduced a bill in Springfield that would, if passed, raise the state subsidy for student and senior fares. He said he wanted to create a tax credit for employers who encourage their employees to take public transit. He proposed a state gas tax to help fund the CTA. He also said he would lobby the federal government for assistance. At the beginning of the 1990s, Daley pointed out, the CTA’s federal operating subsidy was around $41 million. This year it was $17 million. Next year it would be cut to zero. “The climate in Washington and Springfield has changed in recent years,” Daley said. “We have to make a strong case for getting a fair share of funding for CTA.
Booz-Allen tried to justify the proposed cuts by saying that the city’s population and job base have both been shrinking since 1980 and that certain neighborhoods have shrunk more than others. It simply doesn’t make sense, the consultants said, to run transit service to all places all the time. “While the level of the CTA’s service and its geographic coverage has remained relatively constant, the face of Chicago, in terms of development patterns, has not.” The CTA, Booz-Allen concluded, was way behind the curve, which had swerved far away from the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The best move for the CTA would be to concentrate on improving service in its rail system and in its “key bus network” of 46 routes that provide two-thirds of all bus rides. The proposed savings from these service cuts added up to about $25 million a year, a small fraction of the CTA’s annual budget.
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Olsen and Fernandez began riding the Douglas in their spare time. They were joined by two other teachers, Sebastian Robins and Seth Patner. To spread the word, they passed out homemade flyers–English on one side, Spanish on the other. “No one would know about the cuts when we told them,” Olsen says.
