The CTA has No Choice but to be More Efficient

CTA bus routes might get cut. We can either make the system leaner and more efficient, or we can let public transit bleed out.

On May 31, 2025, the Illinois State Legislature failed to pass legislation that would make up for the Chicago Transit Authority’s budget shortfall. It’s possible that the legislature can come back and find some money, but it’s looking more likely than not that the CTA is going to need to make some deep cuts. Deep as in 40% cuts to service.

These cuts are looking somewhat inevitable, but the harm they are going to cause is still in the air. For the busing system specifically, if done well, the CTA can manage these cuts to have minimum disruption to its riders and maintain the vast bulk of its ridership. This could even inspire confidence in Springfield that the system is worth more investment, making the system better than ever. If mishandled, these cuts could be devastating, kickstarting a death spiral for public transit in Chicago from which it cannot recover.

The only way forward for the city is to make the most of the resources it still has, which means a strict focus on efficiency. To accomplish that, the CTA should prioritize the following three reforms for its busing system: (1) maintaining the most used parts of the most used routes at the expense of less used routes, (2) favoring express buses over local buses and eliminating stops altogether, and (3) raising fares to its market equilibrium.

MAINTAIN WHAT IS WORKING, CUT WHAT IS NOT

What is the point of the CTA? The CTA serves a number of purposes - it creates working class union jobs, it’s a valuable service for our city’s indigent and elderly, and can be an investment in otherwise underinvested areas. These are all noble outcomes, but they’re not why the CTA exists. The CTA exists to get the greatest number of people from point A to point B in the most efficient manner possible. Its other positive externalities, as nice as they are, are not essential to the mission of the CTA. If the CTA cannot take the greatest number of people from point A to point B in the most efficient manner possible, then all the other things we appreciate about public transit amount to nothing.

With this axiom in mind, CTA administrators should first and foremost, in every single tradeoff it makes from now on, focus on preserving services in the most densely populated areas with the heaviest ridership, and keeping them as close to pre cut levels of services as possible. Naturally, this is going to require that bus service is going to be reduced, or even eliminated in less dense areas with lighter ridership

Examples of bus routes that the CTA should emphasize maintaining at current levels, especially in areas of the route with the heaviest traffic.

This really is the only viable option. There are only two alternatives to prioritizing the heaviest routes over the lightest routes: (1) prioritizing the lightest routes over the heaviest routes, or (2) equal, across the board reductions in service across routes and neighborhoods. Neither of these options are better than focusing on the heavier routes.

The first alternative fails for obvious reasons. The CTA is going to be hurting for funding enough as it is - destroying its greatest revenue generators to focus on its least productive routes is tantamount to suicide, and will only hasten the transit system’s demise.

The second alternative, equal cuts in service and increases in headway across all routes and all neighborhood has a certain hardheaded appeal. After all, this is a city wide problem, why shouldn’t the city bear the burden equally? This, in reality, is the worst option, and the most likely to destroy or cripple the CTA permanently. Long, often unpredictable headways, shared equally or not, simply make taking the bus unattractive or even unviable. A bus that used to come once every 15 minutes coming once every 45 or even 30 minutes is not all that different than no bus at all. People can and will make alternative plans for their transit needs, making the bus the refuge of absolute last resort, not the dependable manner of getting from point A to point B that it should be.

It certainly offends our sense of fairness that during city wide cuts, some people, particularly people in already well off areas, will be unaffected, while others are left empty handed. But it’s essential to remember that with cuts this drastic, the choice is going to be between a busing system for some or no busing system at all. If we can salvage the buses now, we at least have a chance to bring it back to everyone, hopefully in a stronger form.

MAKING RIDES MORE EFFICIENT

In addition to making sure that CTA bus routes are designed to serve the greatest number of people, policy makers should make sure that these routes provide their services efficiently. Assuming Chicago does not make dramatic reforms to its bus lane and signal priority policies, the bus is obviously going to be slower in traffic than a car. However, this difference can and should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, and the best way to do that is to focus on express routes and eliminating a large chunk of stops on the remaining local routes.

Although no route has specifically been designated for cuts as of writing, if history is any guide the city is likely to cut express bus routes and keep the local routes, as it did during the last budget crisis in 2010. This was a mistake then and it would be a worse mistake to repeat it now. From 2008 to 2013, bus ridership in Chicago fell by 4.2%, while CTA rail ridership decreased by less than 1%.

Express buses work by dramatically reducing the number of stops along a given route, typically stopping once every half mile or so rather than once every tenth mile that a local Chicago bus will. Express buses also prioritize stopping at major destinations, such as at train stations or the intersections of major streets, rather than stopping at every block.

In effect, the express bus works exactly as advertised: they go faster to major destinations than the local. This efficiency comes at a cost, however: they are much less convenient than local buses. Passengers will often have to walk upwards of half a mile to their stop, and then often have to walk a similar distance to their final destination. For these reasons, local buses are much more convenient for shorter trips, and often have greater ridership than express buses.

This greater ridership and convenience were the main factors in Chicago’s decision to favor local buses over their express counterparts in 2010, and are the primary reasons why Chicago officials will likely prefer keeping local routes to express routes in 2025. However, ultimately, this is the wrong choice.

Express buses are certainly less convenient than local buses, but are going to be less sensitive to the reduction in services and potentially drivers likely to hit the system. With fewer stop, express buses are much less likely to be delayed over the course of their route, are less impacted by traffic, and less likely to fall victim to grouping.

Furthermore, although it’s true that express buses have less ridership than local buses, that is only because local buses are more convenient if they have the same headways and reliability. It is certainly easier to walk a block to a bus stop than a half mile to a bus stop, but none of that matters if the bus does not come in a reasonable timeframe. The vast majority of local bus riders will take on the additional hardship of walking to a farther station and walking farther to their destination, and a far fewer number will continue to use the bus if they can’t rely on it, regardless of how conveniently the stops are located.

Going even further, the CTA should begin eliminating stops even on local buses. Chicago has the most stops per mile of any public bus system in the United States. These stops slow down the overall transit experience, and are a major contributor to delays and long headways. Sure, given enough resources these can be overcome by simply throwing more buses at the problem, but these cuts will only exacerbate the underlying issues. Headways, delays, and ghosts buses will become worse. Reliability and convenience are now mutually exclusive, and the CTA should learn from the past and chose reliability over convenience this time.

Additionally, even if the CTA gets more funding and no cuts happen at all, Chicago simply has too many bus stops. As you can see above, Chicago has the most frequent bus stops of any major city in the United States, and should eliminate about 50% of its stops to follow European best practices. These frequent stops might be convenient for us on an individual level, but it’s a classic tragedy of the commons scenario where we are all making the system worse as a whole.

RAISING FARES

Finally, the CTA should raise fares. It currently costs $2.25 per ride on a CTA bus, a price set in 2018. The previous fare was $2.00 per ride in 2009. Real income for people in the Chicago MSA has gone up considerably more than the 12.5% CTA fares have gone up in that time, even accounting for inflation. I’m not sure exactly what the fare should be, but it seems obvious that it could be higher than it is now.

Comparing the cost of riding the CTA to the cost of using other forms of transportation illustrates this point. Assuming a CTA rider takes 14 rides per week, almost certainly an overestimate, they would spend $1,638 per year on transit. According to a few back of the napkin estimates, the average American spends about $2,500 per year on gasoline alone, and the average Chicagoan almost certainly spends more than that, considering that gasoline is more expensive in Chicago than in the rest of the United States. This is not accounting for the monthly car payments, upkeep, insurance, parking, and so on. Similarly, the minimum cost for an Uber in Chicago is $6.15, so it would cost approximately $4,500 per year to use the service twice per day at the absolute minimum. And as anybody who has ever used Uber can tell you, it is not often you are only charged $6.15 for a ride. All this to say, the CTA can raise fares considerably before it gets even close to the expense of using alternate modes of transportation.

The common retort to this proposal is to point out the inequity of raising rates, and to argue that public transit is often the bastion of the most oppressed and downtrodden among our citizens, who might not be able to afford the increased costs. This almost certainly true. People living at the margins will likely not be able to afford to use the bus as much as they ideally would, which is a tragedy. But the other option is to not have the CTA at all. The CTA cannot rely on state funding to maintain its budget, so it should look to alternative sources, the most obvious of which are the users themselves.

CONCLUSION

Ultimately, this is a grim post. I am proposing cutting areas off from transit services, making people’s lives more inconvenient, and making taking the bus cost more. But it is absolutely essential that we realize that there is no proposal out there that is going to be less grim than this one. There is a material reality here: there are going to be fewer resources going further. However, if marshalled wisely, these resources should enough for the CTA to survive and live another day. If we bury our heads in the sand, and treat the CTA as something that it is not, Springfield may never regain its confidence and the CTA will become a relic of a bygone era.

With some creative policy making and compromise, there’s no question that these tragic cuts could be ameliorated. Chicago could find a way to identify low-income riders at the margins and keep their fares at a reduced rate, it could find viable paratransit systems such as last mile shuttle services for disabled people who cannot make the walk to their new stops, and it could build housing more aggressively in areas near major express stops, and reserve some units for people whose bus routes were eliminated. With some ingenuity and will power, a lot of unnecessary suffering can be avoided.

But that does not change this fact: we have to make tough choices. But the choices themselves are clear.