Mystery Train

It's tough to be a monopoly.

Without having to craft marketing campaigns that sway consumers to your brand or sussing out new and better ways of doing things that keep you one step ahead of the competition or monitoring expenses to ensure that you remain lean and mean, what the hell do you do all day?

Calculate the extent of your monopoly? 

With obesity at epidemic proportions, shouldn't you be concerned that the sedentary lifestyle afforded you by your monopoly places you at risk? 

And so it is for METRA, the government-created railroad which operates Chicago's commuter trains.

In ways that would make Karl Marx proud, METRA is routinely unable to convert a rail monopoly in the nation's third-largest metropolitan area into profit. Despite the fact that 300,000 people pack their trains every day, it is not enough.

Students of history may recall the struggles of Cecil Rhodes and John D. Rockefeller to make their monopolies profitable.

I guess this monopoly business isn't all it's cracked up to be.

With its feckless brain trust unable to conceive of any other option, METRA looks to the private sector for inspiration. Like them, it takes the path of least-resistance: for the fourth time in four years METRA has raised the cost of a ticket. And cut service.

The fourth time is always the charm, isn't it? Or something like that. (When you operate a public sector monopoly, close is good enough. Precision and accuracy are not required.)

Besides, what are commuters going to do? Ride the competition's trains?

Back in 2011, METRA tried to get out of its own way. It hired a two-hundred seventy-five dollar an hour consultant to observe its operation and draw a conclusion or two. The consultant reported that scores of riders were riding for free, with METRA's very well-paid conductors more interested in newspapers than in the inconvenience of collecting fares.

Four fare-hikes later, I wonder if anything has changed.

As a bus driver who delivers riders to METRA stations five days a week, I am told that riding under radar still isn't the anomaly paying riders would hope. It certainly seems fair to ask what portion of these incessant increases cover conductor ineptness?

And if not that, what do they cover?

With unemployment at a twenty-first century low, ridership should be booming. METRA's cash flow should resemble the torrential flash floods seen in California. And yet it does not. Again, for the fourth time in four years METRA has its hand out.

Four times. Four years. You can't turn a profit with a monopoly? Seriously?

Having only its long-term health at heart, we the people should be demanding that METRA be placed on a low-fat diet; one rich in transparency and accountability and low in avoiding potentially unpleasant face-offs with employees and board members.

As an ardent believer in unions and mass transportation, I wince at the damage METRA does to the public perception of both.

The fraud at METRA must stop. Without the demands private sector businesses face, god knows they have the time.

Forced Busing

There is a critical personnel shortage where I work. Hence the paucity of posts. Twelve-hour days spent behind the wheel are not conductive to creativity.

Only those of us too old or too far down the road of long-term unemployment remain; the younger and more employable of us having taken advantage of the rebounding economy and ditched the high-stress squalor of public transportation for greener pastures.

There is a dream-like quality to logging nearly three-hundred miles in urban traffic. Details and individual stops blur and become part of a larger, impressionistic canvas of repeated motions with no specific time or place.

Only the next address on your computerized manifest exists.

Then come the jarring intrusions of reality.

Dispatch, equally-stressed by a shortage of operators, is flooded with angry calls. Responding to outraged patrons, they insert themselves in your manifest and alter your course.

On a good day, this presents an opportunity to play hero as you swoop down out of the sky like the proud bus-eagle you are and rescue a rider from the social embarrassment of tardiness.

On a bad day, this saddles you with still-more stops you can't possibly perform in a timely manner without breaching the time-space continuum or altering the laws of physics. (Like any other bus driver-slash-physicist, I regularly search for wormholes.)

It is a frustrating little drama which finds the aggrieved customer playing the squeaky wheel and you an insufficient dollop of grease. This is likely the reason I am unusually fond of individually packaged moist towelettes.

Then the noisy thrum of the diesel engine and the mechanical whir of the transmission as it slogs through its gears yet again distances you from the evolving crises coming over the radio and the incessant stream of road construction.

You are once again a single, anonymous cell in the vast bloodstream of humanity. You set about delivering your passenger to their desired destination, not unlike the bit of oxygen headed to a muscle which ensures its continued function.

There is a brief sense of purpose.

Getting from Point A to Point B with Bruce Rauner

Cousin Brucie is at it again.

His latest proposal to alleviate Illinois' budget crisis is to gut government subsidies to mass transit, including the Chicago Transit Authority, METRA and the Regional Transit Authority up to sixty-percent.

Despite my fondness for public transportation, I'll be the first to admit these bodies suffer undue difficulty in making ends meet, even as they enjoy large-market monopolies as providers of their respective forms of transportation.

But crippling them isn't the answer.

All three agencies have warned that deep service cuts and steep fare hikes loom if these suggestions are enacted.

And that, of course, is the operative word—enacted.

This could be nothing more than a political maneuver, a red herring meant to divert attention. Or a stratagem designed to scare constituents and make whatever budget cuts follow appear benign by comparison.

It could also be a genuine expression of contempt for what Rauner has repeatedly called “the welfare state” of public transportation in Illinois. Of course, in light of his stated goal of creating jobs and bringing business to Illinois, it's a curious beginning.

Chicago-area job postings regularly make mention of a maximum distance the successful applicant will reside from the job, an obvious cop to the outrageous congestion and commuting times which plague the metropolitan area.

It's hard to see how making a potential labor pool less—and not more—mobile, increasing, rather than decreasing, commuter's reliance on cars and adding to the burden already shouldered by Illinois' brittle motor vehicle infrastructure will improve anything, aside from spiking gasoline tax revenues.

It's also difficult to walk away without feeling that while Cousin Brucie may well want to make Illinois business-friendly and create jobs, he is not quite so interested in people actually getting to them.

Lions and Tigers and Unions! Oh My!

You have, in the optimistic parlance of the day, reinvented yourself as a bus driver. There is great exposure to risk and liability. Stress. And a wondrous assortment of unusual smells. There are no benefits—unless you count the olfactory stimulation.

Applicants must undergo extensive background checks, as you have regular contact with children, the elderly and the developmentally-disabled. 

It would be a public relations disaster to have a sex offender stopping by the local high school or assisted living facility. Or someone with domestic violence complaints collecting residents at a shelter for battered women.

And who wants that? 

Not you.

So yes, it's tough getting in—like a country club.

Not surprisingly, the help wanted sign out front is permanent. But despite the rigorous entry requirements and the risk, the pay is low. Turnover is high. There is a very peculiar dynamic at work here.

If there is such a thing as a living wage, yours would be on life-support. It is a frequent topic of discussion, or more specifically, grousing, among your co-workers.

While the grizzled types with whom you work enjoy the semi-autonomy of being on the road, they wonder why call-takers, nestled inside cozy cubicles with very little exposure to risk or liability aside from the occasional raised voice, make more money.

It doesn't add up.

But neither does your co-worker's refusal to consider the union option—until you realize the majority of them are pick-up-truck-driving, climate-change-denying, dyed-in-the-wool Republicans.

And if unions aren't the first step to a socialist hell, they are mafia-run crooks. Just ask a teacher. Or a cop. Or LeBron James. They'll tell you.

In the eyes of your co-workers, it is better to accept the status quo. Or continue to grouse. Either is preferable to incipient socialism. You wonder if they recognize the similarity between their circumstances and the income disparity ravaging the country.

You doubt it.

The important thing is you/we/they don't unionize. That would be destructive. And socialist. Just ask Rush Limbaugh. Or Fox News. Or the boss. They'll tell you. 

You attempt to impart the idea there is no prison so confining as closed-mindedness. But despite your co-worker's demonstrated ability to receive information on evolving traffic conditions over the company-provided radio, this falls on deaf ears.

Owing to the nature of the position, it appears that for the time being you have little choice but to take this sitting down.

Ten-four.

Nickel and Dimed

Traditionally, Illinois has been known as the Land of Lincoln. And while the association with a revered public official is certainly laudable, one has to wonder how representative it is nearly one-hundred-fifty years after his death.

To provide a more appropriate picture of twenty-first century Illinois, I propose a new slogan. Call it The Kama Sutra State. Or Land of Kama Sutra. Does the sexy tingle of State of Kama Sutra do anything for you?

OK. You might wonder what the Kama Sutra has to do with Illinois, especially since the former is an ancient Indian sex manual and the latter is smack dab in the middle of the Midwest.

Let me explain.

Within the Kama Sutra are a staggering variety of male-female couplings in all manner of positions. Many of them require an almost inhuman degree of flexibility.

As a resident of Illinois, it’s only natural I would be reminded of the Kama Sutra when I see the torturous contortions citizens attempt in order to meet the needs of state and municipal agencies.

Let me share two small, everyday examples.

Example number-one is our state lottery, which was recently privatized in the belief that the golden hand of business would reduce costs, increase efficiency and send profits soaring.

Of course, the only people who believe business has a golden hand are those who have never been employed by one.

Our new and improved lottery has mostly succeeded in missing revenue targets and failing to pay agreed-upon penalties. As of this writing, Northstar Lottery Group owes the state of Illinois roughly twenty-million dollars for not boosting lottery sales to the heights promised.

As a result, Northstar has taken the path all businesses take when they need to increase revenue. With no appreciable payroll to cut, they have raised the price of their product.

They didn't devise an irresistible lottery game that has Illinoisans lining-up to play. Or initiate a clever and attention-grabbing marketing campaign that has us seeing the lottery in a fresh new light.

No. They just doubled the cost of a lottery ticket.

This is the inspired business acumen for which the state ponied up one hundred twenty-five million dollars.

For those who play the lottery, this means ten bucks now buys half as many numbers as it did before privatization. Or ten instead of twenty. Five instead of ten. You get the idea.

I’m guessing you’ve been waiting as anxiously as I for just the right opportunity to cut your chances of winning the lottery in half.

What I really want to know is how long it’s going to take for Northstar to cough-up the twenty mil it owes the state. According to my calculations, it should be half as long as it was before the increase.

But that’s just me. And this, after all, is Illinois.

And then there’s the Chicago Transit Authority and their no-change ticket dispensers, which pocket surfeit cash from hapless riders unarmed with exact change.

But even the retention of unearned money hasn’t kept the CTA from declaring yet-another cash shortfall, necessitating yet-another round of talk about service cuts and rate hikes.

You’re already keeping my change! What more do you want? My socks?

We could always drive, but after the giveaway of the city’s parking meter revenue in a seventy-five year contract to Chicago Parking Meter LLC, the CTA is definitely the lesser of two evils.

(Unless of course you take some kind of perverse pleasure in paying the nation’s highest parking rates.)

None of this would be so irksome if Illinois didn’t boast the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation. Or if Chicago’s wasn’t stuck at ten percent.

Or if our thirty-dollar-an-hour bus drivers were occasionally a tad more polite and understanding of those who don’t ride their bus five days a week.

But it is. And they aren’t.

So yes, the comparisons are apt. We are the Land of Kama Sutra.

Because like the figures in that text, we invariably get fucked.

Continuity

In a world that becomes more unrecognizable every day, there is a certain comfort in the realization that some things are as eternal as sunrise and Lego. I speak of the recently-announced Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) fare-hikes and service cuts (the latter of which was cunningly announced after the fare-hikes were approved).

One of the things I relished most about Chicago was its largely-functional network of buses and trains, which allowed you to navigate the city without the hassle and expense of finding a place to put your car at the end of a trip.

Even in the eighties and early-nineties, parking a car was an expensive and time-consuming proposition. The uncluttered ease of arriving at a destination sans automobile was one of life’s small joys. As was catching up on reading and sleep on the way home.

Sadly, the CTA is probably the best argument against government-run health care in the nation.

Here is a government entity with a virtual monopoly on public transportation in a metropolitan area of eight million people, yet one which seemingly needs an inhaler at the mere mention of black ink.

In the hyphen-happy language of the digital age, the CTA is profit-averse.

Unless you’re one of the unfortunate folks waiting at a slushy bus stop on a grey morning with a wind chill index of about ten, it’s almost the stuff of a Coen Brothers movie, with red ink replacing the blood.

It would be understandable if their monopoly were on curling equipment rentals. Or concert appearances by nineties boy-band 98 Degrees. But public transportation? In a metropolitan area recently named the third-most congested in the nation? Please.

I suspect the CTA is top-heavy, encrusted with dozens and dozen of politically-expedient appointees who draw six-figure salaries for being able to show up at the same address five days in a row and not much more.

And like our domestic automobile manufacturers, the CTA has perhaps been a tad too generous to its unionized employees.

The CTA rolls out its bi-annual argument that ridership is declining. But to anyone who’s ever waited on a subway platform or stood in line at a bus stop only to find standing room only on both, this argument is unconvincing.

More likely, the CTA is one of the city’s few remaining profit centers, and CTA patrons are paying-off Mayor Daley’s civic excesses, which include his bungled (and very expensive) Olympic bid.

Just when it's needed most, Chicago's public transportation is disappearing. And like so much else, this impacts the poor disproportionately. At the current rate, you have to wonder how much CTA riders will be paying to go nowhere at all.

Which, when you think about it, sounds like the CTA itself.