This is a sequel to the video our good friend Josh recorded back in 2019, which can be found here: • CTA 'L' - Blue Line tr...
The CTA's Blue Line has been talked about a whole lot lately by many transit advocates across the city. In light of a pandemic and many issues the city and the CTA are facing, there have been a number of growing problems affecting our transit system in recent months. Two of those are ridership and staff shortages. Ridership is indeed increasing as people are coming back to using public transit. But due to staffing shortages caused by a city-mandated vaccine requirement for city workers and safety concerns, the whole rail and bus system has been deemed unreliable by the general public.
Currently across the 'L' network, the train schedules have been modified to "reflect" the current number of operators CTA has available. This was heavily suggested by a group by the name of "Commuters Take Action", which are known for calling out the CTA for "ghost trains" and "inaccurate train trackers". Their claim is because the trackers are programmed to display both scheduled and live runs. They claim the scheduled runs that aren't filled due to any sort of manpower absence are "ghost trains".
As a result, service has worsened rather than improved with trains scheduled to run every 10-12 minutes. Before this current schedule, which took effect October 23rd, 2022, trains on the Blue Line were scheduled to run about every 5 to 7 minutes. This "solution" has only worsened the situation because employee availability can vary day by day. This has left gaps between trains easily becoming a 15 to 20, even 30 minute wait in some cases, rather than a 10 minute with the previous schedule.
This video showcases the amounts of ridership and capacity issues on the Blue Line at Clark/Lake during the PM rush hour, under this current schedule. This was filmed on various dates during February 2023. Special thanks to Josh Burns for filming the entirety of this video!
We pray that with a new mayoral administration coming to city hall in May, the CTA will return to normalcy with being as busy and frequent of a system it was back in 2019!
Bonus clips at the beginning of the video show 2600 series work trains on the move at 18th and Polk on the Douglas branch, now with brand new work motor stripes.
Follow @joshuaxposure here: www.instagram....
Thumbnail edited by @ncsrailfan7460 : / @ncsrailfan7460
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21 окт 2024
