Chicago Is Tired of Waiting for Trains, and Thinks It Knows Who’s to Blame

Until recently, Dorval R. Carter Jr. was another relatively unknown bureaucrat, a man who had quietly worked under three mayors as the president of the Chicago Transit Authority.

These days, in the eyes of his many critics, he is the face of all that is wrong with the city’s public transportation system.

“Yes, C.T.A. chief Carter needs to go,” Crain’s Chicago Business wrote in an editorial last month, saying that his agency was in a “shambolic state.” Gov. J.B. Pritzker, Democrat of Illinois, said recently that there “needs to be an evolution of leadership in order for us to get where we need to go with the C.T.A.” Since the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Carter has drawn the ire of public transportation advocates, who have called him out for failing to fix the system’s financial problems, sluggish service and thefts and assaults on L trains and buses.

On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council is expected to introduce a resolution calling for Mr. Carter’s ouster — with a majority of council members in support of what is essentially a vote of no confidence.

The fury directed at Mr. Carter and his agency is emblematic of the struggles that cities like Chicago are now facing. With the pandemic largely in the past, travel and tourism on the rise and concerts, festivals and entertainment in full swing, city residents expect most aspects of public services to be restored to their prepandemic state.

But across the country, getting public transit to flourish again has been complicated, a logistical and financial puzzle with no solution in sight.

“Chicago’s recovery has lagged, and people are endlessly frustrated,” said Joseph Schwieterman, a transportation professor at DePaul University in Chicago. “Everyone’s pointing fingers, and, in some cases, wanting change for change’s sake. I’ve been watching transit my whole life, and I’ve never seen issues becoming this personal.”

In an interview at C.T.A. headquarters on Monday, Mr. Carter, 66, said that he had taken the disapproval to heart — but that he was not ready to leave his job.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t care about the city,” said Mr. Carter, who wore subway token cuff links and was surrounded by train memorabilia on his office shelves. “When you face this level of criticism in a very public way, it can’t help but make you feel hurt.”

Mr. Carter, who grew up riding city buses in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago and now commands a $376,000-a-year salary, pointed to signs that the agency was making progress: Transit crime is down 6 percent so far in 2024 over the same period last year, and ridership is increasing, with a post-pandemic record of more than one million rides in a single weekday on May 8. (In 2019, 1.47 million rides were typical for a weekday, the C.T.A. reported.)

That is not enough, said transportation advocates, who argue that New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have made more progress restoring public transit than has Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city.

“The reality is that he has had over four years to bring back the system already,” said Kyle Lucas, a co-founder of Better Streets Chicago, a group that presses for improved streets and public transit. “C.T.A.’s problems are not just a funding problem. There’s a lack of public accountability within the agency and a culture that is dismissive of public concern.”

Mayors of Chicago appoint a majority of members on the C.T.A.’s board, the body that could remove the president at the behest of Mayor Brandon Johnson, a Democrat who took office last year. Ronnie Reese, a spokesman for Mr. Johnson, said that the mayor did not comment on personnel matters.

Mr. Carter’s supporters as well as his critics say that he has been instrumental in securing federal funding for C.T.A. projects. Phil Washington, the chief executive of the Denver International Airport who is a former transit leader in Los Angeles, said he had worked with Mr. Carter on transportation issues and believed he had the expertise for this difficult moment in the industry.

“When I look around the country, almost every other big transit agency is going through the same things,” he said.

Critics and advocates agree that hiring and retaining employees — particularly train operators — has been the crux of the problem in Chicago.

During the pandemic, the C.T.A. rapidly lost employees, with many leaving for jobs that had higher salaries or more favorable working conditions. Hiring has gone slowly since, and a long training process to become a train operator has deterred applicants.

According to the C.T.A., at its lowest employee head count, in July 2022, the agency had 9,644 employees; at the end of March 2024, that number had ticked up to 10,606, still below 2019 numbers. Without enough train operators, the agency has struggled to ramp up service.

At the same time, the agency is facing a severe budget gap in the coming years. Federal relief funding that helped transit agencies in many cities survive the pandemic is drying up, leaving the three transit agencies serving the Chicago region with a $730 million fiscal cliff looming in the coming years.

Transportation experts said that the failure to keep up Chicago’s transit system was a missed opportunity.

Before the pandemic, the C.T.A. had attracted national praise for modernizing its system, tapping federal funding for improvements and rebuilding stations with sleek, modern exteriors.

And Chicago remains one of the few American cities where it is easily possible to live without a car — one of Chicago’s strengths in attracting younger people, who often want a car-free lifestyle.

“We have a lot of working-class folks who don’t own a car because they can’t afford it, and a lot of people who choose not to own a car,” said Fabio Göttlicher, a software engineer who helped create the group Commuters Take Action to challenge Mr. Carter’s leadership. “You cannot have a city of 2.7 million without a well-working transit service.”

On Monday morning, commuters on an L platform downtown said that the system had improved since the days of the pandemic, when trains arrived inconsistently and the dearth of riders gave the experience a dangerous, eerie feel.

Esteban Sanchez, 43, was waiting for a Green Line train, heading to an interview for a janitorial job.

Mr. Sanchez, a resident of the Pilsen neighborhood on the West Side, said that in the last couple of years riding the L had not been the same as before Covid-19.

“It’s gotten worse,” he said. “A lot more crime, especially people smoking weed. You have to be vigilant. I feel like it’s been a long time since the pandemic. It should be better by now.”