The CTA is planning no changes to fares in its 2024 budget, as it looks to continue drawing back riders from pandemic lows and to address employee shortages that have left the agency struggling to provide frequent, reliable train and bus service.
Agency officials said they plan to add back service in the coming year — after cuts from pre-pandemic levels — but the budget contained few details about when or how they plan to do so. CTA spokesman Brian Steele said the specifics of how service will be added will depend on hiring.
The CTA’s nearly $2 billion budget, up 9.2% from the spending plan for 2023, focuses on continued efforts to tackle some of the agency’s most pressing challenges in recent years, including concerns about service, safety and conditions on buses and trains. It includes funding for ongoing efforts to hire and retain operators, and security measures, including Chicago police officers, unarmed private security and K-9 teams. Funding will also continue to go toward outreach programs to work with people living on CTA vehicles and property.
The plan also includes new measures, like testing upgrades to the Ventra fare system and adding a customer service chatbot. On the bus service side of the operation, the CTA plans to undertake a study of its bus network, and work with the city on a plan to prioritize buses on some streets.
“Some of our peers have been more successful in terms of recovery and others have struggled, but I believe CTA is on the right track to establish a new normal that will ultimately serve our customers well,” CTA President Dorval Carter wrote in an introductory letter to the budget.
No administrators are slated to get raises as part of the budget. That includes Carter, whose salary will remain $376,066.
The budget relies on federal pandemic aid to make up for lost fares from lower ridership, which in August was about 65% of 2019 levels. The CTA, like other transit agencies around the country, has relied on this funding since 2020, and this year the agency is planning to use $472.5 million of the relief funds.
But the agency is projecting those funds will run out in 2025, leaving the CTA with a $50.4 million gap that year and a nearly $577 million gap in 2026.
Other transit agencies in the region are planning for similar scenarios, and the Regional Transportation Authority projects the Chicago-area’s three transportation agencies could be staring down a collective $730 million budget hole once federal funding runs out. Regional planners have been drafting ideas to send to lawmakers about what the future of public transit should look like, including suggestions about service, ideas to plug the funding holes and a suggestion to consolidate the three transportation agencies into one.
But while the region waits for lawmakers to consider the ideas, the CTA is looking to address the concerns that have plagued the agency since the pandemic first forced many riders off public transit. Among them are a shortage of bus and train operators, which has limited the number of buses and trains the agency can run.
The CTA remains below the numbers of both bus and train operators the agency planned for in 2023, though the CTA said it had exceeded its new bus operator hiring goal, and was on track to train bus mechanics and rail operators at a faster-than-usual pace.
In September, the agency had some 3,500 bus drivers, down from the 3,707 operators planned for, and about 721 rail operators, compared with the 839 it had planned for. Steele has said the CTA recently finished training additional rail operators, with more expected to graduate in December.
The hiring of new operators will be key to adding back service. The amount by which the CTA increases service and where the increases take place have not yet been determined, and will depend partly on which areas have seen schedule reductions and where ridership is growing fastest, Steele said.
“We did not downsize our service (in the budget) because our intention is, and the demand from our customers is, that we want to get back to 2019 service levels,” said Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Fine. “But we’re wrestling with the same problems that almost every industry in the country is wrestling with, with regard to employment base.”
The CTA is also planning $3.61 billion in capital projects through 2028. That includes the long-planned extension of the Red Line south to 130th Street, for which ground could be broken in 2025.
Other plans in the construction budget include making 14 more CTA stations compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act, part of ongoing efforts to make all of the agency’s 145 rail stations accessible to people with disabilities. The agency also allocated money to electrify bus garages as it plans to shift from diesel buses to electric, an overhaul of older rail cars and bringing online more of its newest series of railcars, which are running on the Blue Line.