The Chicago Transit Authority’s state subsidy hasn’t really increased since 1983 and that’s what really led me to my blog.  We were faced with a funding crisis last year and were thinking about cutting our service by 30 percent.  That was going to have a real detrimental effect on the regions we serve.  Obviously, we got lots of press coverage, most of it bad.  Most of it was skewed toward, “what’s the CTA doing” and, “look at the mismanagement,” not really focused on what we thought was our structural problem of how we are funded.

After we announced our budget cuts, it was a pretty stressful day for me.   I had done every media show. I was sitting at a bar waiting for a friend and I was reading the [Chicago Tribune’s] Trib West Side on my mobile phone, and the Trib had allowed customers to write in what they thought about what we were doing.  And one customer had said they should close it down.  And I was reading every comment and one of them called me the Angel of Death.  I was so hurt.  I called our chief of staff from the bar and I said, “I’m not the Angel of Death.  This isn’t my fault.  Why don’t they understand what the problem is?”  And he said, “Why don’t we start a blog and we’ll tell them what the problem is.”  I said, “Okay, what’s a blog?”  And that is really how it started. http://ctachair.blogspot.com/

It started for me to try and talk directly to people we serve and explain to them what our problems were.  And so we started back in April.  We talked to our customers every day through our funding crisis, answering their questions, posting the progress we were having in Springfield. 

And this wonderful tool I didn’t even know existed before.  Suddenly I had a way to get information unfiltered from the people who use our service.

Suddenly, I had a way before it got to staff, before it got spun by the media, to figure out what were the issues really affecting the customers and how can I address those issues and offer them better service?

For example, when we decided to change our fare structure, we posted it on our blog and one of my readers came back and said, ‘Why do you have these antiquated turnstiles that take coins?’  Frankly, I didn’t know we had antiquated turnstiles in some of our stations.  So, it allowed us to remove them to save maintenance costs on those turnstiles and to stress our fare structure and our proposal.

What was really a reactionary thing for me, we didn’t talk to general counsel, we didn’t see if we could legally do it, we didn’t talk to our media and marketing staff to make sure the message was clear.  It’s my blog and Carole just happens to work for CTA.  The results were the ability for me to talk directly to my customers.  It allows the CTA, which doesn’t have the most transparent culture, to be more transparent, to be more accountable.

I don’t know what I would do without it now.  It is a tool that we have used to help enhance our communications, to help move forward our policies, to manage our business better.  I want to close by saying someone asked me what the Lehman Brothers policy on blogging is and that’s easy.  It’s DON’T.