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CTA To No Longer Accept Pace Transfers

Could this be true? This is a terrible decision. CTA To No Longer Accept Pace Transfers For those not familiar with transit in the Chicago area, CTA is our Chicago-focused agency. They run busses and the el trains. PACE is the suburban bus service. When I comute to work from Regula’s house in Wilmette, I sometimes take a PACE bus for $1.50 and then transfer to the el for $0.25. After work if I do the reverse, it’s $1.75 for the el and then $0.25 for the tranfer onto PACE.

Recently I started leaving a bike at the Wilmette Metra (the 3rd of our 3 agenies, they run commuter trains) station in Wilmette and then ride to her place. That’s necessary because Metra doesn’t place nice with the other agencies. Seems CTA is going that route. This will make it much less likely that I’ll be ever taking the el to Wilmette again, since it’s a mile walk to my bike, and I’m sure as heck not going to pay full fare for just that distance, or walk it very often. Much faster to take the Metra in the first place. So PACE loses bigtime with this decision, and CTA loses as well. Ugh.

edited to see if I can ping CTA Tattler’s story about CTA and paratransit which doesn’t mention this Pace/CTA transfer issue.

updateI wrote about this at the Chicago El livejournal and the answers that came back indicate that if a rider is using the Chicago Card (which I am) proximity card, then there is actually no change in policy. So that’s good news for me.