Chicago group raises awareness of Chicago Transit Authority’s delays

CHICAGO – One afternoon Frank Hickey from Lincoln Square was going to tour apartments north of Wrigley. He decided to take the Clark bus there. According to his transit app there would be three buses coming within that time frame. He waited 25 minutes. Those three buses never showed up.

That’s the definition of a ghost bus. 

Hickey said it’s frustrating when three buses don’t show up when they’re supposed to.

This issue has become all too common for bus and train riders in Chicago.  

Joe Karamanski from Edgewater said he’s seen noticeable delays in trains and buses ever since the lockdown ended. 

“Even though there aren’t any restrictions here anymore, service has not returned to the levels it was pre-pandemic,” said Karamanski. 

He also has been affected by ghost trains and buses. 

He said it makes commuting more stressful. It happens enough to where he has to expect a bus to be late or not show up at all when commuting.

He tried another way to combat the ghost buses.

Biking has become an alternative way of transportation for Karamanski to visit friends nearby due to the unreliability of the buses.

He said he biked to Western Avenue and took the south bus to Wicker Park but he was also ghosted by that bus as well. 

Michaela Minx from Lake View decided to ditch public transit all together in favor of a car. She said she was so fed up with the constant delays that she purchased a car. She said waiting for a bus or train with a young child and then trying to find alternative transportation options when it did not show up became challenging.

“[The CTA] was so unreliable that I decided I needed to purchase a car,” said Minx. “With having a five year old, waiting for a bus or train and then having to figure out other transportation when a bus didn’t arrive just became too much of a struggle.”

If a bus didn’t arrive when it was supposed to, the delays were from 15-25 minutes, sometimes even 35 minutes, said Minx. The delays even caused her to be late for work on multiple occasions. 

The CTA trains have also had the same problem.

Hickey said he experienced delays with the trains as well. 

He was enjoying a night out with friends at the Music Box theater near Lake View. Afterward they continued the night at the bar. He decided to take the Brown line back home. The train he was supposed to take said it was going to arrive in 9 minutes, then 20 minutes and then 35 minutes and then it disappeared from the tracker app. He ended up walking home after the multiple delays.  

He said these days [the CTA] is an absolute disaster. 

If you take the train outside of rush hour you have to be cautious because you might get ghosted by the train, he said.

Tracking the bus or trains is also a problem.

The CTA tracker app will say a bus or train is coming soon and you’ll get to the stop and wait but it will never show up, he said.

“It’s so frustrating,” he said.

The Commuters Take Action group is helping raise awareness about these constant delays and ghost trains and buses. They are going as far as posting stickers on local bus stops around Chicago. There have been over 1,300 stickers placed across Chicago 

Micah Fiedler, from Ravenswood is involved with the Commuters Take Action group. 

The campaign started two months ago with fake change of service posters on train stops, said Fiedler. 

“It ended up turning into these stickers that we put on as many bus stops and train stops as we can in the city of Chicago,” he said. 

Each sticker has a QR code and a link that leads to their page. Riders can report a late bus or train or a ghost bus or train on the group’s bus or train tracker and input their complaints. 

The form asks for the bus or train you were taking, the direction you were taking it, how many minutes you were late as well as comments you would like to add. 

The CTA gave some clarity on its service disruptions in a press release nn August 11. CTA President Dorval R. Carter announced a new action plan to address challenges brought on by the pandemic. The press release cites unplanned absences due to illness COVID infections including caring for family members and quarantining and the great resignation as a result of not enough manpower to reliably deliver their scheduled service. 

In their few months of outreach, they have had 194 bus complaints and 94 train complaints. Fielder said the goal is to aggregate and present these complaints every month at the Chicago Transit Authority’s monthly board meetings and logged as an official comment. 

The group has already submitted one official complaint. 

Their next step is to put pressure on aldermen and other public officials within the city of Chicago.