At the November meeting of the Chicago Transit Board, CTA President Dorval Carter Jr. addressed public concerns about the staffing challenges that have contributed to a continuing decline in rail service and reliability since 2020 and a lofty goal under his proposed budget for 2024.
Carter said his staff gave him a plan that would “more than double the number of rail operators that we will have next year,” increasing the CTA’s rail operator training capacity from 100 to 200 slots.
In early January, the Active Transportation Alliance published an email from the board, sent to community members and advocacy organizations that provided feedback on the rail operator shortage. Their email reiterates the CTA’s goal to double its training capacity from 100 rail operators to 200 this year.
However, the CTA’s own data reveals that the agency cannot meet this goal due to its current training requirements, recruitment and retention levels.
We used the Freedom of Information Act to request the number of flaggers the CTA has employed since November 2021 — plus how many flaggers were terminated, promoted, transitioned or transferred to other roles each month since then.
The CTA requires prospective rail operators to first spend at least 12 months working as flaggers. According to the CTA, working as a flagger helps future rail operators learn essential safety procedures and fundamental skills. After 12 months of service, flaggers become eligible to enroll in rail operator training classes. The CTA may be able to work with the Amalgamated Transit Union to waive the 12-month flagger requirement — or shorten it — but agency leaders have repeatedly said they are against doing so for safety reasons. Most recently, Carter confirmed at the November board meeting that he plans to keep the 12-month requirement in place.
This means that in order to put 200 employees into rail operator training classes in 2024, the CTA needed to have a minimum of 200 flaggers employed by Dec. 31, 2023. In December, there were 143 flaggers working at the CTA. This makes it mathematically impossible for the agency to fill 200 rail operator training slots this year.
To make matters worse, the CTA is not recruiting flaggers fast enough to keep up with how many it claims it will enroll in rail operator training classes — plus the number it loses each month due to terminations, promotions, transitions and transfers. Based on a four-month average of its hiring-to-churn ratio, the CTA was gaining net 1.13 flaggers per month as of December. At that rate, the agency would be on track to increase its flagger head count by about 13 — for a total of 156 — in 2024.
At this growth rate, it would take the CTA until May 2025 to gain enough new flaggers to fill just one rail operator training class without reducing its overall flagger head count. The only way for the CTA to keep enough flaggers to support day-to-day operations and fill all the training classes it has planned is to hire a lot more flaggers — and quickly.
But since at least Nov. 1, the CTA has not posted any job listings for flaggers on its website. Between Nov. 1 and Dec. 31, the agency hired only two new flaggers — and lost 18 to terminations, promotions, transfers and role transitions.
That’s the other disheartening side of the CTA’s flagger workforce data: attrition.
The CTA lost more flaggers than it gained in 2023 — 133 were fired, promoted, transferred or transitioned to other roles, while only 108 were hired.
Rather than restart the 12-month clock each time an experienced flagger leaves, the CTA needs to better support its hardworking workforce. Flaggers should not feel like they need to leave their positions because of poor working conditions so they can pursue higher-quality positions. The sooner the CTA can stop flaggers from leaving, the sooner the agency can actually train 200 new rail operators.
Chicago’s transit riders continue to face a struggling system with a dysfunctional president who deflects blame, misrepresents data, rarely rides the system and hasn’t given a public news conference since December 2022. The board refuses to hold him accountable and instead praises his performance and regularly raises his pay — all while the CTA falls further into crisis.
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And now the CTA is promising Chicagoans progress it simply cannot achieve.
Over the last few years, we’ve become used to a CTA whose leadership dodges transparency and obfuscates the truth. But promising to train 200 rail operators this year without nearly enough employees to do so is an astounding act of deception, even for the CTA.
It should never take a FOIA request to get to the truth behind a public agency’s intentions. This deceit shows how far CTA leaders — including Carter — are willing to go to hide the true state of the system and try to get a rightly concerned public off their backs, even temporarily.
But Chicagoans deserve — and will find — the truth. The CTA is too important to let fail.
Editor’s note: An earlier version lacked clarity about the CTA’s plans to double its training capacity. The Tribune regrets the error.
Nik Hunder and Christina Marfice are organizers with Commuters Take Action, a collective of frustrated Chicago commuters.
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