Office of the Independent Blogger

I ride a bus, a train and a bus to get to my school and it’s a hassle. Not just because I’m traveling across the city and have to wake up extra early to get to school on-time (which I always manage) but because trains are never on time. They’re often early, and by being early, they’re late. That’s one of my gripes on the Orange Line, which is the one that leads me to school — it’s often early, and when it’s just two minutes early, but I’m there on time or a minute early, it sets me back about fourteen minutes while I wait for the next train.

That’s a problem, though it’s not as bad as, say, the deteriorating conditions on the Blue Line and the Red Line — but the thing that’s galling to me is, they have less ground than the New York transit agencies but the NY agencies do more with the same fares, and the CTA is always crying poor. Every spring, like clockwork, they cry poor and beg for money and threaten to shut everything down which they might as well do because with the success that they operate, you might never notice.

You know what bothers me most, though? I firmly believe that nobody in the journalistic world cares about CTA besides Going Public in the Red Eye newspaper and that feature isn’t so much a journalistic endeavor as it is a short column where people complain that a train smelled like urine.

They do, believe me, but I have a suggestion.
Maybe somebody at Red Eye’s daddy newspaper should research fraud in the CTA.

I guarantee you all that there is major embezzlement and fraud in that organization and I only wish that someone would go out and expose it instead of writing puff pieces or the opposite: minor criticisms about petty things. You don’t go after a murderer for stealing shoes: you go after him for murder. You don’t go after crooks because their cars stink — you go after them for being crooks. And please do not let me see anymore news like this about how the CTA and Chicago plan to make great changes for the Olympics.

How about we make changes for Chicago? And for journalism.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 8:56 am and is filed under Outside Retort (Current Affairs).