Riders for Better Transit: A new voice for Chicagoans

I take the L to work most days. And for the most part, I love it. (There is still something fun about hopping a train...) But on my travels, I hear plenty of riders complaining about the Chicago Transit Authority. Usually, it is superficial stuff---but often it relates more to frustration about how powerless riders feel in regards to this town's transit system. With the ongoing fights over funding and service, I totally understand and hope a new NRDC partnership with the Active Transportation Alliance will help address the issue.

Riders for Better Transit will inform and engage transit riders—but more importantly it will give us a voice.

The program is intended to channel transit messages to legislators, transit agencies and other officials—messages about the critical importance of and need for convenient, reliable transit service. Riders for Better Transit is also for people who don’t use transit regularly but know that transit helps reduce congestion pressures on roads and parking, or those who might take it if it came a little more frequently, moved a little faster, etc. 

And it all starts with a survey so that we can get a baseline of what Chicagoans are thinking and feeling about transit. The survey closes October 5, so if you have opinions, please visit the Riders for Better Transit site pronto to participate.

We’re hoping the program will help to fill a void in the local advocacy landscape. Chicago has seen a number of short-lived efforts to fight doomsday service cuts, but unlike New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and many other cities, it has not had a sustained advocacy effort to help win funding and reforms for transit riders. A while back, urban affairs analyst Aaron Renn produced a series of essays on how to bring Chicago’s transit system from “Good to Great,” in which he made a provocative opening statement:

“I think Chicago doesn’t have a great system because its citizens don’t want one.  If there were greater citizen demand for a better system, that’s what we would have.  Absent that demand, we get at best a good system.” 

There are certainly other factors that come into play, and Renn expands on some of them. But this first point is well taken.  Politicians find political will to fix something when their constituents make them, and when it comes to transit they won’t do it for environmentalists’ reasons alone. 

This is why we’re excited to partner with Active Transportation Alliance, an organization that has a long track record of grassroots organizing of transportation users in the Chicago region. Until recently this work was focused on cyclists, but several years ago their mission expanded to pedestrians and transit users—a natural expansion given the overlap in environmental, economic, and public health benefits, and the fact that so many of the land use patterns, neighborhood design features, and policies that benefit one group benefit the other two. In addition to a great staff and volunteer base, Active Trans brings relationships with localities throughout the region, community and neighborhood organizations, and a history of working on state and local transportation legislation.  Meanwhile, NRDC brings a longstanding institutional commitment to the issue of transit and staff with wide and deep policy expertise; we have worked on federal transportation legislation for decades, and we can leverage our experience in state-level policy development and implementation in California and New York.

So if you live in Chicagoland, we hope you will visit the Riders for Better Transit webpage, take a look at the policy agenda, sign up for future updates, and take the survey to tell us what transit-related issues matter most to you.

Chicago is a world-class city. We deserve and should demand a world-class transit system. This is your chance to speak up and help to create one.

 

CTA image by -Tripp- via Flickr

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