After experiencing ‘ghost’ buses firsthand, mayoral challenger Kam Buckner unveils transportation plan

Mayoral candidate Kam Buckner has released a plan for rehabilitating public transportation in Chicago that puts a focus on safety, reliability, affordability and making transit more sustainable for the future.

Buckner has made it a point in his campaign in recent months to focus on the troubled public transportation system in Chicago that has been riddled with crime and unreliable service in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

It is one of the more comprehensive transportation plans released by a mayoral candidate in the crowded field looking to unseat Mayor Lori Lightfoot next year. While it rehashes many ideas previously shared with city officials or transit advocates, it also looks to other cities for inspiration.

Buckner said he often takes the Green Line downtown from Bronzeville when he’s not riding his bike.

But he never rode the CTA “from one end of the city to the other” until Saturday. That’s when he experienced firsthand the security and service problems that everyday riders have been complaining about for some time.

Sun-Times photo

While walking along Chicago Avenue he was “ghosted” by the CTA’s bus tracker — that’s when buses that appear on digital schedules don’t actually show up at a stop — and a second bus was delayed for nearly 30 minutes. When he tried to take a bus from West Lawndale to Little Village, delays were so bad he gave up and called a ride-hailing service.

The passengers he met along the way shared similar troubling stories about poor service with him.

One rider at Chicago and Homan avenues in Humboldt Park told him how she relied on the bus to get to and from her three jobs to support her two kids.

“Literally, as we were standing there, the tracker said the bus had come and passed us,” Buckner said. “The bus never showed up.”

CTA officials, who have been dealing with a bus operator shortage, have vowed to fix the problem of ghost buses with updated routes, but issues have persisted.

Buckner’s plan would improve services and frequency throughout the city by establishing dedicated bus lanes in areas with more riders. He also said there is a need for an integrated fare system that would allow riders to easily transfer between the CTA, PACE and Metra.

Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

He said he would start by hiring so-called “transit ambassadors” trained in “de-escalation techniques” and by establishing a system that allows riders to text the crime, intimidation and sanitation problems they see so security personnel can “respond in real time.”

He also would “restore CTA rides as part of police beats” and dramatically upgrade the CTA’s vast network of 32,000 security cameras that he claims are more like expensive window dressing than deterrents to crime.

On the service front, Buckner said he wants to improve bus service and frequency by establishing bus rapid transit lanes in “high ridership corridors.”

Looking to Boston

He even talked about following the trail blazed by the Chicago-born mayor of Boston, Michelle Wu.

“She took the analysis and the data and said, ‘These are the routes with the highest ridership numbers. These are the routes that get people into the center of the city. These are the routes that make it seem like we’re coming back from this pandemic,’” Buckner said. “For some of those routes, she actually made ’em free for two years just to kind of increase ridership.”

Buckner is also looking to build public transit in the future, which won’t necessarily have immediate returns but will sow the seeds for success in the decades to come.

Some of these bold ideas have been getting lip service from city officials for years, including the Red Line extension, which Buckner’s campaign said would cost $2.3 billion, and would help “fill in what many of us have for years known as a ‘transit desert’ on the South Side.”

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

The city has recently made strides toward beginning the work to extend the rails that would stretch to 130th Street. It now estimates it will cost $3.6 billion and use almost $1 billion in property taxes to complete — along with federal funding.

The plan also discusses the need to completely electrify the CTA’s bus fleet, which the agency announced earlier this year it is already working toward. The CTA said it plans to have a completely electric fleet by 2040.

More ambitious plans include creating a new Metra line that connects McCormick Place, Union Station, the West Loop and O’Hare.

“That’s not a tomorrow thing, obviously. It’s about the future,” Buckner said. “And it’s not necessarily even about this next [mayoral] administration. It may be about the administration after that.”

Pat Nabong/Sun-Times