How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the CTA

It was very easy, really. I took a bus to work one day (back when I had a “normal” desk job downtown), and I had forgotten to take a book or newspaper so I couldn’t bury my face in it, and I didn’t have an iPod so I couldn’t create my own impenetrable sonic force-field with it. So rather than become the bus #146 pariah, I was forced to stare blankly out the window at the morning rush-hour traffic.

When I emerged from my awkward daze and started actually paying attention, I realized that nearly every one of the hundreds of carbon-emitting, oil/blood-guzzling, Earth-killing cars on Lake Shore Drive had one; maybe two people in them each. To be sure, I was very proud each time I saw a hybrid vehicle, and I did see a few.

But then I looked inside and smiled widely at the dozens of people on my bus, miserable and crammed in as they were. These were people who had surrendered up to 30 minutes more of precious sleep than the car drivers just to catch a bus that surely arrives at a different time each day, breaks down often, and stops and starts at nauseating intervals, all so that they could do their small part. It’s cheaper for some of them to take the bus than to own and maintain a car, sure. And can you imagine what traffic would be like if there were that many more cars on the road? (Answer: LA). But I like to think that Chicagoans use the CTA at least to some degree in order not to ruin my planet’s future by taking cars to work. I know that in some US cities there’s a certain stigma to taking public transit, but it seems to me that taking the CTA is an exercise in social awareness, which in many ways is equally as important as environmental awareness.

So I thanked each and every passenger on my bus that day, individually, for helping make the world and the city of Chicago a better place. I thanked them to myself, inwardly of course – if I had actually said anything to their faces, I probably would have been shunned from the CTA forever.