Waiting for the ‘el’ or a bus, the quintessential Chicago experience

We’ve all endured it, getting drenched by the rain or pelted by snowfall while standing at a street corner waiting for the damned bus that just doesn’t seem to ever want to arrive.

The concept of mass transit in Chicago is a wonderful way to get around the city. It makes it possible to avoid owning an automobile (and dealing with the expense) without being reduced to the life of a shut-in.

BUT WE ALL know how unreliable those Chicago Transit Authority buses and elevated trains are when it comes to showing up on time. The great uncertain is figuring out how much time to allot for the actual commute because you don’t know how long it will take to complete – particularly if a bus or train transfer is involved.

I know I have read those alleged schedules that claim buses on many lines run every 15 minutes, and that there are times of the day when ‘el’ trains are supposed to come along every seven minutes.

It’s supposed to be the endless system where one can just show up at the street corner or ‘el’ station whenever and catch the next train or bus. It is the reason many city residents claim they could never live in the Chicago suburbs, where the trains and buses run on set schedules once an hour (or sometimes even more infrequently).

Yet those suburban Pace buses and Metra trains at least have set schedules, and people know when the train or bus is late. City residents are expected to just cope with the delays, and hope they don’t work for the kind of boss who looks for reasons to rant against his employees.

WHICH IS WHY I found it amusing to learn of a new survey by a mass transit app called Moovit that says the amount of time people spend waiting for their bus or train is less in Chicago than it is in other cities.

Thirty-one minutes is supposedly the amount of time we spend each day waiting at the street corner or train platform, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.

By comparison, New Yorkers wait an average of 38 minutes a day, 39 minutes a day in Boston and 36 minutes in San Francisco.

Supposedly, Los Angeles residents wait an average of 41 minutes per day. Although my understanding of LA mass transit is that it isn’t as extensive as what other cities try to do, which means many people avoid it and turn to the freeways where they cause those daily traffic backups that can be just as frustrating as getting drenched by rain while waiting for a bus.

I’M SURE CHICAGOANS don’t feel comforted in the least by learning their average commute is less than other U.S. cities – particularly since we all have memories of incidents where we waited at least an hour for the bus to show up.

And whenever there’s a mechanical problem or a heavy weather-related storm, all bets are off in terms of getting to work on time – or even at all if things get particularly bad.

If anything, it is memories like this that make me remember fondly the summer some 30 years ago when I lived in an apartment on Damen Avenue just three doors south of the Brown Line ‘el’ station, which also was a bus stop.

Living in such proximity (I could see the ‘el’ platform out my bedroom window), I developed an inner sense of knowing when the trains and buses would arrive so I could avoid the waits – a sense I haven’t had at any other point in my life and one that I (along with many other Chicagoans) wish I could get back.

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How “local” are Chicago schools? How many of them are really worth saving?

I can’t help but see all those hundreds of people who protested in the downtown area this week against the closing of their neighborhood schools as being a big misguided.

I understand they feel like their neighborhoods (many of which are lower-income) are being slighted. There’s also the very real factor that the street gangs have too strong a hold on their neighborhoods, and that the shifts brought about by these closings will cause some of those students to have to venture through hostile territory just to get to school.

I SUSPECT THAT will wind up being yet another factor used by students to decide to ignore school altogether – which causes so many long-range problems that it’s not funny.

But the bottom line is that many of these schools being cited for shutdown are troubled facilities that may well be far beyond redemption.

They probably are too far gone to ever amount to anything that could provide an adequate education. Expecting anything in the way of reform at those facilities may well be a pipe dream.

Totally unachievable.

I CAN’T HELP but wonder if those people who are picketing to keep their decrepit local schools open ought to be fighting instead for improved facilities – even if they have to be elsewhere.

Could the desire to maintain an aging local school wind up leaving those parents and their children with nothing of substance?

Now in the interest of disclosure, I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the best person to be commenting on this issue. In my case, my parents moved out of Chicago just two months prior to my being old enough to begin school.

The explicit reason was that my parents did not want me in the Chicago Public Schools. And my mother, a product of the school system maintained by the Catholic Archdiocese, had her own bad memories that made her not want either my brother or I to attend a Catholic school.

WHICH MEANS MY brother and I (who moved back to the city proper later in life) were in a position where our parents could afford to move about in search of communities where the local public schools were at an adequate level that our educational opportunities were acceptable.

Unlike many of these parents who were in the streets of the Loop on Wednesday to express their opposition to what they see as Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s callous disregard for their interests.

Many of them are in life circumstances where they are stuck in whatever particular neighborhood they happen to reside, and where shipping the kids off to a distant school just is not a realistic option.

Because the reality for many urban kids is that going to school is all about a sizable trip every day – off to a facility that has nothing to do with their neighborhood so that they can have the same chances that youths of upper-scale suburbs take for granted.

I HAVE A pair of cousins who are a couple of decades younger than me, which makes their experiences closer to relevant to today’s youths. I remember being amazed at the trip they would make when in high school from the Beverly neighborhood to the Whitney Young Magnet High School just west of downtown.

Such a trip is not at all unusual. Children who are circumstances where they can be choosy often elect to make a lengthy commute to avoid the problems that exist at many of the neighborhood schools that Emanuel would just as soon obliterate – as though closing the schools makes the children and their problems go away!

They won’t. While I think the parents are short-sighted if they think things should remain at the status quo, my fear is that city officials are merely trying to blotch out evidence of the problems that confront our young people without doing anything to resolve it for the long-term.

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