Visualizing Service Cuts With StoryMaps: Background & Methodology

By: Hugo Coronado

By: Thomas Bamonte

January 14, 2025 / Blogs

January 14, 2025 / Blogs

Envisioning the service cuts facing transit users in the Chicago region if the fiscal cliff is not addressed: background and methodology

Introduction

Transit ridership plummeted in the Chicago region during the pandemic and has yet to fully recover. Ridership is growing but is currently roughly 30 percent below 2019 levels, with significant variances among the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Metra, and Pace Suburban Bus (Pace). (These three transit service providers are often referred to as “service boards.”)

Lower ridership means that transit agencies receive less fare revenue. The federal government provided COVID relief funding for the transit agencies to help them fill that gap in operating funding. The Chicago region received approximately $3.4 billion for its transit agencies through three COVID relief funding programs. That funding will run out in early 2026. The three service boards are facing annual deficits totaling about $730 million in 2026 and growing steadily from there even as ridership gradually recovers.

Service Cuts

If this funding gap is not closed, the service boards will have to reduce service levels by up to 40 percent. At the August 15, 2024 meeting of the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA) Board of Directors, RTA staff made a presentation on the many adverse impacts of such service cuts on the region. (Source: The RTA staff presentation on the impact of transit service cuts on the Chicago region is found at slides 46-59 of the meeting materials)

The RTA’s analysis assumed that the service boards would keep all of their current routes in operation and cut the number of bus and train runs by 40 percent. This would mean, for example, that a bus route with bus service every 15 minutes along a corridor for 15 hours a day (60 runs a day) currently, would have buses running every 25 minutes (36 runs) after the cuts. Alternatively, service might be reduced from 15 hours daily to 9 hours daily while keeping the 15-minute headways. Such cuts would make transit a far less viable travel option, prompting many people to opt to travel by car, increasing traffic congestion and pollution. Transit service cuts will prompt many people to forgo trips to access school and other life opportunities and responsibilities, increasing inequality and undermining the economic competitiveness of the Chicago region.

When faced with funding gaps, transit agencies, however, typically cut entire routes to cut costs. This is more effective than keeping all routes in operation and cutting service on all of them by the same percentage. For example, in response to a looming $158 million funding gap in 2008 the CTA proposed eliminating 82 bus routes, over half of its bus routes, in order to reduce its overall transit service level by 20 percent. By eliminating their lowest performing routes—routes with the fewest passengers per mile of vehicle service—transit agencies can spend their operating funding more effectively and focus their limited resources on the bus and train routes that carry the most people.

MPC’s Service Cuts StoryMaps

While recognizing the value of the RTA’s service cut impacts study, MPC believes it is important to visualize the impact on transit riders and their communities if the service boards cut their service by 40 percent through route eliminations rather than an across-the-board reduction of service on all routes. This route elimination scenario illustrates the potential impact of using route eliminations to bridge a big funding gap. It is not intended to be a prediction of where the transit agencies would actually cut routes; nor is it a set of recommended service cuts.

Planners at the RTA and the service boards have access to far more data about service levels, costs, and transit usage patterns than MPC. It is possible that if the service boards must reduce service levels substantially, they will opt for a mixture of route eliminations and reductions in runs or hours of service on the remaining routes. In addition, transit service reductions will have to comply with the requirements of Title VI, which is intended to protect disadvantaged communities from being burdened with a disproportionate share of transit service reductions.

StoryMaps Methodology

MPC’s methodology for its route elimination StoryMaps is as follows. For Pace and Metra, MPC started with the mileage for each Pace and Metra route. Using Pace and Metra’s posted schedules MPC next multiplied the number of runs on each route to calculate the weekly service mileage for each route. From there, using RTAMS data MPC divided the number of weekly passengers on each route by the route’s weekly mileage to calculate the number of riders carried per mile of vehicle service on each route. This number of riders per mile of vehicle service was used as the measure of each route’s productivity. MPC then eliminated routes from the least productive to the most productive until routes accounting for 40 percent of the service board’s vehicle service mileage were eliminated.

For CTA, MPC started with the list of eighty-two bus routes that CTA proposed eliminating in 2008 to achieve a 20 percent reduction in service and used routes and ridership numbers from the 61 routes that are still in operation. Because of these route eliminations, the number of routes the CTA would have to cut to reach a 20 percent or even a 40 percent reduction in service would be much higher. likely. MPC used CMAP’s assessment of CTA rail service cuts for its CTA service cut scenario. This is a very conservative assumption because if the fiscal cliff is not addressed CTA might have to eliminate up to 40 percent of its service. The route eliminations would be even more draconian and would include closure of rail lines in addition to the 82 bus lines that were on the chopping block in 2008.

MPC’s findings are consistent with CMAP’s assessment of the magnitude of service cuts required if the General Assembly fails to address the fiscal cliff. CMAP’s Plan of Action for Regional Transit briefing book (pg. 46) notes:

MPC again stresses that this methodology is necessarily less nuanced than what the service boards would use if forced to make deep service cuts in 2026. MPC assumed, for example, that service on any portion of a Pace bus route counted as service on a whole route, a simplifying assumption that the service boards would not make when cutting routes. Likewise, the service boards surely have more refined cost-of-service information than MPC’s assumption that a service board’s bus or rail service has a uniform cost per mile of vehicle service on every route at every time of day.

Nevertheless, MPC believes that the service cut scenarios visualized in the StoryMaps linked above give a reasonable preview of the magnitude of the route cuts that would be required if the service boards must deal with the fiscal cliff with their existing resources once COVID relief funding runs out. These service cuts across the three service boards add up to:

• Elimination of 83 Pace routes carrying approximately 58,024 weekly riders and 61 CTA bus routes carrying approximately 331,000 weekly riders currently.
• Elimination of CTA’s Yellow, Purple, Green, and Brown Lines, which together carry approximately 300,000 riders weekly.
• Elimination of six Metra lines carrying approximately 236,152 monthly riders.
• Approximately 1,862,000 people losing convenient access to suburban bus and 2,137,150 people losing access to bus routes in the city.
• Approximately 41 higher education institutions losing convenient access to bus or rail transit service
• Approximately 568,520 older adults in the region risk loss of their right to receive ADA paratransit service because of the elimination of bus routes in the vicinity of their residences

Conclusion

As shown above, closing the looming transit funding gap through elimination of the least productive bus and rail routes until 40 percent of transit service is cut will be devastating. The region’s transit system will be a shadow of its current self and transit will not be an affordable and environmentally friendly travel option. As previous studies have demonstrated, such transit service reductions will have big negative impacts on the region’s economy, environment, and equity.