A controversial bid to make some seniors pay again to ride CTA, Metra and Pace failed yesterday in the Illinois Senate.
Promoted by the Regional Transportation Authority as a measure that could bring Chicagoland’s transit agencies closer to solvency, the bill would have allowed only low-income seniors to ride for free, making others to pay half fare.
The RTA said the measure, known as “means testing,” would have brought $37 million per year back into the system’s coffers — not enough to restore all of CTA and Pace’s recent service cuts, but enough to make a difference.
“We viewed the legislation as a well balanced solution to reform the seniors ride free program by maintaining the benefit for those that are low income while still enabling all other seniors to resume riding for a reduced fare,” RTA Executive Director Steve Schlickman said in a statement. “This is an especially challenging time financially in our transit system’s history, and means testing would have helped us manage long-term program costs and contribute to our future financial stability.”
The bill passed the House in February before losing a 6-7 vote Wednesday in the Senate’s Executive Committee. Sen. Rickey Hendon (D-Chicago) had previously vowed the bill would never pass.
“It’s outrageous that in these tough economic times that we would allow anybody — CTA, RTA, the rest of them — to come and try to take this one… itty bitty little thing away from our dear, poor, struggling senior citizens at a time of economic crisis,” Hendon said, according to the Sun-Times.
The free rides measure was originally a last-minute addition from former Gov. Rod Blagojevich tacked onto a 2008 bill intended to save transit funding in Illinois.