One Reason Chicago is Broke

The CTA is giving away services for free:

• Cook County Sheriff’s Police have spent the last three months patrolling Chicago Transit Authority trains and platforms, the result of a state legislature mandate to assess what’s really happening on Chicago’s rail system.

  [ couple of paragraph of crime stats - go read it at the link]

  One of the most striking findings: on some CTA lines, 80 to 90 percent of riders were not paying their fares. Sheriff Thomas Dart says the problem goes beyond crime — it’s a culture of disregard for basic rules.

Eighty-to-ninety percent of people (and folks) not even paying the fare? We're going to take a wild guess and say, "Red Line." We're also going to wonder why the CTA isn't looking at those ten-foot iron and plexiglass barriers that reduced San Francisco subway crime by nearly 50% and vandalism costs by multiple millions of dollars.

We'll leave the guess about "culture of disregard for basic rules" to you, the readers.