The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) is facing some major budget crises and has been contemplating various ways to deal with it. This week, the CTA decided to propose a plan that would cut dozens of bus routes AND the Evanston Purple Line express that runs during rush hours on weekdays. This would be extremely unfortunate for those of us in Evanston who use the Purple express.. and pretty much anyone between us and our destinations. I suspect those of us who have the alternative of getting into our cars will opt to do so. This will cause increases in traffic.. obviously not just in Evanston but to and from our destinations as well. It will be especially unfortunate for parking at Northwestern, which is already in a bad state. I foresee more and more people deciding to drive to work instead of taking the El. Overall, the environment won’t thank us for these changes either.

One of the most shocking parts of all this is that the one area in which the CTA decided to recommend no changes is charges to tourists! That is one of the most likely populations to go along with whatever changes are implemented so why leave them out of the plans?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 6:02 am and is filed under Chicagoland, Products/Services, Soc/Pol/Econ. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.