by Harjas Sandhu
This is a post that Harjas Sandhu pitched to Streetsblog Chicago before #TransitFundingIndecision2025 drama really kicked in last week. The 'L' platform dust seems to have settled a bit for the moment, so I'm taking this opportunity to post his piece before I hear about more urgent news. Harjas is a fourth-year at the University of Chicago who writes on Substack for Hardly Working. - John Greenfield, editor
Earlier this year, I did a case study of CTA management under former president Dorval Carter Jr. during Chicago's recovery from COVID-19 pandemic. I dove deep into the agency's organizational structure, spending months trying to understand the brokenness of Chicago’s busiest transit operator, and learned a lot in the process. Here’s what I found.
The CTA’s upper management is notorious for not actually using their service much. Two years ago, Streetsblog Chicago's John Greenfield filed a Freedom of Action Information request, asking for details on Carter's and board members' 2022 ridership. The results speak for themselves.
Despite Neema Jha and Michele Lee only joining the board in 2022, together they used their Ventra cards more than every other board member combined. And those two board members swiped their cards only 85 times total that entire year.
By comparison, most people who commute to work on the CTA tap their Ventra cards at least twice per day. In only 43 weekdays, any one of these people will use their transit card more than 85 times.
And it would only take our hypothetical rider 12 weekdays to use their Ventra card more than the 23 times than Carter did in all of 2022.
If that wasn’t bad enough, records obtained by Block Club Chicago showed that Carter swiped his work pass only a single time in 2021. All CTA employees are given unlimited free card uses. So Carter and most of the board went out of their way to avoid taking advantage of this privilege, which means they probably avoided using the very system they manage.
Instead of experiencing what it was like to ride on transit, CTA upper management focused heavily on numerical, quantitative metrics, and deflected blame as often as they could. During his tenure, Carter was notorious for cherry-picking statistics to make his performance look better, and insisted on euphemistically referring to schedule cuts as "schedule optimizations" to avoid having to admit to cutting frequency. But despite increasingly frequent calls for him to step down, Carter remained CTA President for ten years before finally resigning last January.
The overly long tenure of a widely unpolar CTA chief was due to transit users having few ways to influence the CTA’s upper management. Our line of influence runs through the Chicago mayor, who appoints both the CTA president and four-sevenths of the CTA board members.
(The Illinois governor picks the other three. The current proposal in Springfield for reforming Chicagoland transit governance would shrink the CTA board to six members, including three chosen by the mayor, two by the Cook County board president, and one by the governor.)
In theory, current Mayor Brandon Johnson’s incentive to manage the CTA well is simple: He has to do a good job, or else Chicagoans will get upset, which won't help him keep his job. Unfortunately it doesn't always work that way in practice.
For example, in 2024, Mayor Johnson selected for the CTA board Pastor Michael Eaddy, a clergyman and political ally from the mayor's native West Side with zero transit expertise. The City Council confirmed Pastor Eaddy on April 17 without a single "no" vote.
Later that year Mayor Johnson chose Reverend Ira J. Acree, a person with similar credentials as Pastor Eaddy, for the Regional Transportation Authority board. But after Reverend Acree admitted that he rarely rode transit, and had never even heard of the looming Chicagoland transit fiscal cliff, aldermen objected, and he withdrew his nomination. Hopefully this embarrassment will positively influence the mayor's decisions on transit board staff picks in the future.
On the other hand, while last month Johnson's approval rating in polls were at best in the low 20 percent range and at worst in the single digits, he indicated that won't necessarily influence his decisions. "I don’t give much attention to polling," he told the Sun-Times. Johnson said. So perhaps there's no guarantee he won't make other dubious picks for transit boards.
And the CTA board and president have generally been fairly impervious to public outcry. Despite his poor performance delivering reliable transit service, Carter’s salary climbed more than 60 percent in eight years—from $230,000 in 2015 to $376,065 in 2023. In July 2023, Mayor Johnson’s salary was a mere $216,210. Carter had a track record of skipping hearings, ghosting the City Council for months with no consequences.
A majority of Chicago’s alderpeople signed a resolution calling for Carter to resign or be fired, but the document lacked any real power, since only the mayor has the authority to replace the CTA president. Even Governor Pritzker called for "new leadership" in the CTA. But Mayor Johnson evaded questions from the media about Carter’s employment prospects, stating that he "[doesn’t] discuss personnel details publicly".
The CTA board has no formal accountability measures in place – no written contracts, no formal performance reviews, nothing. And the board is full of political insiders. Over the past 40 years and more than 50 CTA Board appointments, only three were transportation experts, and none of those qualified candidates were appointed by the mayor. According to a report by the Eno Center for Transportation, Chicagoland transit stakeholders widely understand that the CTA is under the mayor’s control, and that the staff and board are full of "patronage jobs".
While CTA board members are compensated $25,000 a year, none of them really has any incentive to make the system run better, other than it being the right thing to do. We have no way of tracking their performance.
On the bright side, current CTA Acting President Nora Leerhsen appears to be doing a good job. During the public comment portion of a mysterious special board meeting last month, Kyle Lucas, executive director of Better Streets Chicago, argued that there was no reason to replace Leerhsen. "Over the past four months, CTA made strides in rebuilding trust and rolling out improvements such as shortening headways on several major bus routes," he noted.
On April 18, a group of transit advocacy organization had sent a letter urging Mayor Johnson and the transit board to take their time with the search for a new CTA chief, waiting until the fiscal cliff and governance issues are resolved. Streetsblog posted that document on Twitter, Bluesky, and Facebook.
However, Crain’s Chicago Business had previously reported that Mayor Johnson planned to appoint John Roberson, the City's current chief operating officer, to be CTA President. And at the regularly scheduled May 14 transit board meeting, South Side Ald. David Moore (17th) outrageously told the directors they would be "backbiting snakes" if they didn't vote for the mayor's choice. Perhaps not coincidentally, Roberson is Moore's former chief of staff.
As it stands, Leerhsen is still in the (bus or train) driver's seat. But shenanigans like "Snakegate" are a good example of the challenges involved in appointing competent CTA leadership.
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