Metra

This fall, Metra has been testing its prototype Café Car on most of its highest-ridership rail lines and stations. It has coffee shop-inspired counters, tables, and seating. During the first week, September 30 to October 6, it ran on the Rock Island line. This week, the Café Car ran from Tuesday to today on the BNSF Line between Union Station and Aurora. It's the busiest route, and some runs stop in Riverside, the historic west-suburban village where I live. See next week's schedule for the pilot at the bottom of this post.

Yesterday, Trump's Federal Transit Administration chief Marc Molinaro scolded Chicago leaders about crime on public transportation in a Tribune op-ed titled, "The CTA has become a rolling symbol of abdication. Riders don’t feel safe." Read it on the Tribune website, Bluesky, or Twitter.

•"CTA gets $74M from Metra, Pace to delay 40 percent service cuts next year" (Sun-Times)

• Family pleads for answers after boy with autism dies of injuries during fight on CTA station steps (CBS)

•Maria Tampico, busker at CTA Blue Line Washington station, has died at 76 (Sun-Times)

•Delays hit Metra Union Pacific-North trains (Sun-Times)

If you're a frequent Streetsblog Chicago, when it comes to the current public transportation fiscal crisis, this ain't your first bus rodeo. Otherwise, here's our coverage of the issue since last Saturday, May 31, aka "The Night Transit Funding Didn't Go Down In Springfield":

By Micheál Podgers

I'm confident that the generally car-centric folks on the Chicago Tribune editorial board deserved the spanking I gave them on Friday for their rather arrogant editorial about our region's looming $770 million total transit budget gap. "Chicago’s transit agencies want you to panic," the headline stated. "They don’t explain the whole truth."