Chicagoist / March 16, 2007
You Dirty, Dirty Train, You
Chicagoist wants you all to go to this story and look at the expression on CTA Board President Carole Brown’s face as she rides a bus this February. Classic. The picture accompanies an article detailing Brown’s plan to have the CTA’s Office of Inspector General do an audit to see if buses and trains are cleaned as often and thoroughly as they should be.
At a board meeting Wednesday, Brown was given the party line that buses and trains are cleaned and swept daily, but she said it didn’t make sense given the growing number of complaints she gets from riders (you can read and comment on Brown’s blog here). The CTA says that more extensive cleanings are done every 18 days for buses – nearly twice as often as reported in 2005 – and every 33 days for rail cars. Brown and some other board members also thought it was pretty sketch that for a system that provides more than 1 million rides a day, there were only 197 complaints about dirty trains and buses combined for 2006.
Chicagoist is normally on trains that are neutrally clean/dirty. Then there is the very rare sparkling train, which must have just got the mega-sanitation. Then, a little more frequently is the exploded train, filled with chicken bones, empty hulls of sunflower seeds and candy and food wrappers galore. We wholeheartedly subscribe to the Broken Window theory: if a train or bus is allowed to remain dirty, people will continue to add to the chaos and decay.
CTA President Frank Kruesi said they’re assigning more cleaning crews to the Red Line, but also that “trash doesn’t come out of thin air,” in reference to people breaking rules and bringing food and drinks on the el. Chicagoist would like everyone to go to this