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Love is patient—unless it is waiting for a CTA bus. Just ask Crystal Carrazco.

Carrazco, 22, used to take the No. 9-Ashland bus from her Ukrainian Village home to catch the No. 73-Armitage bus to her boyfriend’s place in Hermosa on the Northwest Side a few times a week last year.

Carrazco said she was frustrated by regularly waiting 20 minutes for an Armitage bus. Also, that bus stops running by 11 p.m. on weekdays and by 8 p.m. on weekends. After those times, Carrazco would take a cab to get home or to her boyfriend’s place.

When Carrazco and her boyfriend moved in together a few months ago, they chose to live in Logan Square near the Blue Line. Carrazco said she rarely takes a CTA bus these days.

“We decided to be closer to good transportation,” Carrazco said. “It’s nice to sit down and read” on the train.

Ridership on Carrazco’s former bus, the No. 73-Armitage, has declined nearly 30 percent this year through June compared with the same period in 2013, from 945,900 riders to 664,800 riders. The Armitage bus is not the only line seeing a decrease.

Bus ridership in the city has been down year-over-year for the past
19 consecutive months while rail ridership has increased. For example, there were 22.6 million bus rides logged in June, down 12 percent from 25.7 million rides in June 2013.

And CTA officials don’t know the exact reasons behind the bus ridership dip. At a CTA board meeting in July, officials said they were asking riders in focus groups to figure out the answer. One CTA board member, Ashish Sen, said the CTA should use census data to determine how riders are commuting.

“That is a very good idea and we are actually holding some focus groups with bus riders in order to get some better insights,” CTA chief financial officer Ron Denard told Sen. Bus riders in a recent focus group said they rode less because of personal reasons including a change of relationship status or a change in a job, a CTA spokeswoman said.

Some reasons for declining bus ridership CTA officials have given over the past year and a half include cooler-than-usual weather such as this year’s polar vortex, which caused school cancellations. Students tend to take buses to school, not rail.

The CTA also saw a record year for ridership—on buses and trains—in 2012, the best in 22 years, according to the transit agancy. The following year, the CTA increased the cost of unlimited passes and expected ridership dipped compared with 2012.

But some riders who talked to RedEye said they have stopped taking the bus because of service. They complained of infrequent service and sometimes when the bus does arrive, more than one show up at the same time, bringing service to a crawl as the buses leapfrog each other.

Others complained about slow bus service and a lack of amenities at bus stops like heat lamps, which are at outdoor rail stations. Also, more transit options have become available in recent years including car-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft and the city’s bike-share program, Divvy.

In an average day, bus rides typically comprise 54 percent of CTA ridership while rail rides comprise 46 percent, according to CTA data this year through June.

Since 2008, the bus-rail split has been shifting to rail. Six years ago, more than 62 percent of CTA rides were on buses while nearly
38 percent were on trains.

Much has happened to the CTA system in the past six years. The agency rebuilt the southern portion of the Red Line last year to improve train speeds in that area, and added stations on the Green, Pink and Yellow lines in 2012. Work is expected to be completed this year on a new Green Line stop near McCormick Place.

Meanwhile, express bus service has stalled. The CTA cut nine express bus routes in 2010, and future plans for bus rapid transit, a system that typically relies on bus-only lanes and traffic signal priority for buses, have slowed.

The Chicago Department of Transportation was expected to begin work this year on implementing bus rapid transit in the Loop, which would speed up service on six bus routes. That plan has been pushed back. A similar plan for Ashland Avenue hasn’t moved forward either.

The Ashland Avenue proposal would improve the speed of the No. 9-Ashland bus from 8.7 miles per hour to up to 16 miles per hour, but some critics have complained that the proposal would cut the driving lanes in half, down to one lane in each direction.

Bus rapid transit has been implemented on a portion of Jeffery Boulevard on the South Side in increments since 2012—but the main component of the system, green-light priority to buses, wasn’t installed until earlier this year.

The No. J14- Jeffery Jump, which travels between the South Side and downtown, saw an increase in riders last year during the shutdown of the southern portion of the Red Line.

Vukoni Lupa-Lasaga, of Pilsen, said he’s found the Jeffery Jump to be the most reliable route among the CTA’s more than 120 lines.

Other lines are not as dependable. Lupa-Lasaga said he recently waited more than 30 minutes for the No. 8-Halsted bus, which caused him to miss an Amtrak train to Champaign.

He said he uses the CTA bus tracker to gauge when he should arrive at bus stops but finds the tracking service spotty. Sometimes buses don’t appear on the tracker when he knows there is service. So he waits for the bus—sometimes for more than half an hour.

“I find myself running into these extreme CTA delays with increasing frequency, especially when traveling to South Side destinations,” Lupa-Lasaga, 49, told RedEye. “My impression is that while the Red Line has improved dramatically, the CTA buses, especially South Side ones, are another thing.”

Both buses and trains have been subject to service cuts—though buses have taken the brunt of the recent reductions.

In 2010, the CTA cut rail service by 9 percent and bus service by 18 percent (including the nine express routes) to save money.

In 2012, the CTA added trains to nearly every rail route during rush hour to reduce crowding on trains.

While the CTA also increased service on
48 bus routes, about a dozen partial or full routes saw cuts including the popular No. 11-Lincoln and No. 145-Wilson/Michigan Express routes.

Bus service was discontinued on a portion of the No. 11 route—on Lincoln Avenue between the Western and Fullerton Brown Line stops on the North Side.

Ald. Ameya Pawar (47th) has been pushing to restore service on the eliminated section, but CTA president Forrest Claypool said there are no plans to re-instate that service. The CTA has encouraged riders to use the Brown Line instead; stations near the No. 11 have seen jumps in ridership.

In terms of quality of bus service, the CTA hasn’t been scoring high on its own score card. The agency said it has made its standards more difficult since Claypool became CTA president in 2011.

The CTA has not met its targets on bus bunching (when more than one bus shows up to a stop at the same time) in five of six months this year through June, the most recent CTA data available. In all six months, the CTA didn’t meet its standard for gaps in bus service.

Devonna Phillips, 34, said waiting 20 minutes for the No. 53-Pulaski bus in the polar vortex was the last straw for her and the CTA bus system.

She used to take the Pulaski bus to the Green Line to the Loop for her government job. Now she hitches a ride from a friend to the Kedzie Brown Line stop in Albany Park to ride the Brown Line to the Loop—a route that requires her to leave her home half an hour earlier but involves less waiting for transit.

“Having to wait out in the open cold air, it was unacceptable,” said Phillips, who lives in Hermosa. “There’s plenty of Brown Line trains to the Loop.”