F the GD CTA

Imagine this scenario: You walk into your boss's office and say, "Boss, I don't know how to balance my own checkbook. You already pay me well, but I spend like a drunken Congressman and so, Boss, I need you to give me a huge raise so I can have a balanced budget. If you don't give me a huge raise, I will have to cut my work output by 13 percent." That is what the CTA is doing. Yesterday, Rogers Park Bench wondered whether the CTA's latest predictions of doom and rider hardship was nothing more than a threat (see Again?!? CTA Predicts Doom and Gloom). Today's Chicago Sun-Times front page (the print edition, not on the web), has a banner headline that asks the same question. Excerpts from today's online Sun-Times (added emphasis mine): The CTA will end the Yellow Line and Purple Line Express routes and increase fares to as much as $3.25 by mid-September unless there is new funding to balance its budget, CTA President Ron Huberman warned Thursday. More than 63 bus routes and 840 jobs also would be cut under the plan....in case state lawmakers don't come through with $110 million in extra funding to plug the CTA's budget shortfall by July 1. The CTA's latest doomsday threats came hours before the RTA unveiled a plan to raise $452 million a year in operating funds for the CTA, Metra and Pace with a quarter-percent sales tax hike for Cook and the collar counties, and a 0.3 percent increase in Chicago's real estate transfer tax. Without additional funding, the CTA will have to cut bus and rail service by 13 percent, including bus routes now offered as alternatives for North Side L tracks under construction, Huberman said. Your boss would probably tell you to grow up and go straight to Hell. And that is what we should tell the CTA.