Take a ride on one of Chicago’s Metra lines and you may wonder what decade it is. Train schedules posted on pieces of paper, gallery cars that haven’t seen widespread use since the 1970’s, and live employees to ticket each passenger on the train. These practices aren’t just antiquated novelties, either: they come at a high price. Paper schedules confuse passengers and reduce ridership, gallery cars transport fewer passengers than their more modern double-decker counterparts, and those manual ticketers cost Chicago taxpayers millions every year to fund a practice that most other passenger rail services did away with fifty years ago.
Chicagoans have never gotten their money’s worth from Metra. Singapore’s world-class Rapid Transit network transported 1.3 billion passengers with a budget of just under $4 billion USD last year, equating to about $0.34 in expenses per passenger transported. Paris, Tokyo, and other rail-based cities offer similar numbers. With its 1 billion dollar budget this year, Metra conducted just 32 million passenger trips, spending $32.12 of taxpayer funds for each trip it conducted.
But Chicagoans need not look across the globe to see Metra’s failure – look no further than our city’s other transit system, the CTA. With its budget of $2 billion, its buses and trains provided passengers with 280 million trips over the last year, equating to $7.14 per trip conducted – nearly five times as cost effective as Metra.
Attentive readers may have noticed that Metra’s budget is not out of line with other rail networks, despite its enormous per-passenger cost. What holds Metra back is its abysmal ridership. Why don’t people want to take the Metra?
The schedule for Metra’s Heritage Corridor route is reproduced below. Three trains into town on weekday mornings and three back into the suburbs in the afternoon; no weekend service. One doesn’t simply hop on these trains. You need to know the schedule – a tall order when most Metra stations lack inbound-outbound boards – and precisely time your arrival at the station to catch your intended train. If you miss that train, there’s a 40-minute wait before the next one arrives, assuming it’s not late, as Metra trains are about 5% of the time. And if you want to use the Heritage Corridor line during the weekend? Forget it. You’re out of luck.
A printable schedule of Heritage Corridor via Metra website on February 05, 2025.
Heritage Corridor is the most egregious example, but it exemplifies the problem. When trains only come every 40 minutes on a schedule that’s not clearly communicated, it’s almost shocking that anyone rides Metra.
Covid presented Metra with a special opportunity. Metra could have used federal relief funds to buy new locomotives and improve their service, but instead, they’ve decided to decommission their old locomotives and continue maintaining the same substandard schedule. It’s not 1970 anymore. Metra needs to replace their expensive and outdated ticketing staff with cheaper, automatic turnstiles, bring their decommissioned locomotives out of retirement, and start providing Chicago with more consistent service. It also needs to put inbound-outbound boards in all its stations so passengers can see how long until a train is coming without memorizing an unreliable timetable. Metra’s extensive rail network should give Chicagoans the freedom to go wherever they want on their schedule, not on Metra’s. But as long as Metra runs so few trains, the service will remain inconvenient for passengers and a burden on the city.
Metra does not lack funding, it lacks ambition. Complacency plagues the organization with an unwillingness to make simple improvements that most other passenger-rail providers implemented half a century ago. If Metra can’t grow to meet the needs of today’s passengers, it should be defunded. There is no place in Chicago’s transportation network, or in its city budget, for such a relic of the past.