CTA Plays the Percentages

Before the CTA "reluctantly" accepted an advance payout of $25 Million of your tax dollars last week (money the state hasn't yet received), they ran a flurry of propaganda posters all over town. (You gotta wonder how much the cash-strapped CTA spent on that union print job!)

The posters included the one shown here, with a bar chart showing how much, in percentages, various cities' public transit systems received from their respective states. But the numbers leave something to be desired. Namely, numbers.

"The CTA is underfunded compared to many other transit systems," the poster bleated. "Becuase of insufficient state funding...." blah blah blah. Then, above the ominous bar chart, "Public Funding as a Percentage of Operating Costs."

The "many other transit systems" that the CTA poster compared Chicago's to numbered a mere five. Hardly a comprehensive comparison. But the truly telling thing about this is that CTA chose to present this in the easily misleading form of percentages, and not in the form of real, hard dollar amounts.

An anecdote: Many years ago, I was a copywriter for Spiegel Catalog. We quickly learned the percentage trick for selling things. Suppose you had a bath towel that regularly cost $10.00. Now suppose Spiegel puts it on sale, marked down by $2.00 to $8.00. The best way the write the sales copy is to say "20% Off!" or "Marked Down by 20%" Telling the customer that he's saving "20%" sound better than a measly savings of two bucks.

But it gets worse in the case of CTA's posters. At least Spiegel, in our example, is telling us what the original dollar amount it, so that any idiot with a calculator can figure out that the 20% discount is a two dollar markdown. But what the CTA did was, probably, an intentional attempt to mislead or, at least, fuzzy up the numbers.

According to the poster, Chicago receives 48% of it's funding from the State of Illinois. By comparison, the transit system of L.A., we're told, gets 74% from the State of California. Okay, so who can tell us, from this information, how many dollars Illinois gives to CTA, and how many dollars California gives to the LA transit system?

Nobody can, because - to go back to the towel example earlier - we have not been told how much the towel originally cost. Put another way, suppose (for the sake of discussion) that CTA's total budget is $100 Million. 48%, then, would be $48 Million. However, if LA's total transit budget is $50 Million, then it's impressive sounding 74% from the state comes to a less-than-impressive $37 Million. That would be less in actual dollars than what CTA gets from Illinois.

Now, the numbers I used in the preceding paragraph were for example only. The actual numbers for the other states, I'll admit, are difficult to find. But if CTA was getting less actual dollars than, say, Los Angeles, why not state the actual dollar figures? Probably, we'd guess, because the percentages sound more impressive - and do not actually tell the truth.

A footnote: After living in Los Angeles for 10 years, and keeping in constant touch with people there, it is sadly laughable that any real city would compare its real transit system to the pififul joke that Los Angeles calls a transit system.