It was 8:58 pm one Thursday night. I was waiting for bus 184 to take me back from Hradčanská to my girlfriend’s apartment in Prague 6. As usual, I checked the crisply printed timetable first and saw the next bus was due at 9:10 pm, 12 minutes from now. Relaxing a little, I munched on a cookie bar and some milk, confident that the bus was coming.

Yup. 9:10 pm, on the dot: the bus came. This is fairly typical in Prague.

What’s fairly typical in Prague is a f***ing miracle in Chicago. There’s no timetable – the very idea is laughable. Buses routinely come ten, fifteen, twenty minutes late; often, when they do, two, three or four come at once. I used to take 4 Cottage Grove up to work at Donoghue Charter, but quit doing that and started biking instead – not only because I saved $4.50 by biking, but also because I actually outbiked the bus by a good five to ten minutes – and that’s not even counting waiting time at the station. Even in the dead of the winter, with piles of slushy snow on the street, I could usually outpedal or at least match the 4.

And not to harp on the CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) any further, but hell yeah I’m going to harp on it more: When I came back from India to Prague in February, I came from the airport to the 55th Garfield L station and waited for the 55 bus. And waited. And waited..

I’ve waited ten minutes for a bus. Fifteen. Twenty minutes, most memorably when a schizophrenic women clearly on some colorful combination of drugs accosted me on a street corner in front of a liquor store in Englewood, alternating between threatening to kill me, kiss me, and offering to have sex with me for a dollar. Even thirty minutes.

…An hour and ten minutes. New record, folks. Yes, it took the 55 an HOUR and TEN MINUTES to come – and of course when it came two more were hot on its tails. It was Tuesday, early evening, it was something like -10 and I was freezing, at one of the most dangerous L stations in Chicago, one where I got mugged three years ago, and it took over an hour for the bus to come when it should have taken at most fifteen minutes.

So, like most Chicago commuters, I could vent my frustration at the CTA, rant about their incompetence, praise the public transports of other cities across the world and bemoan how the CTA can’t get their act together. But the truth is, I suspect it’s not really the CTA’s fault – nor does Prague’s CTA equivalent get all the credit.

Instead, my pet theory is that this is mainly because of the payment system.

Uh, what?

No, seriously, hear me out. In Chicago the way you pay is fairly standard: As you get on the bus, you take your money and feed the payment station, or you take your CTA card and tap it on the reader. In Prague, on the other hand, you buy your ticket beforehand – there’s no card reader, no cash machine, nothing. You just get on and off the bus! Theoretically, ticket inspectors come around every so often to make sure you have a pass or ticket, but in practice I’ve been here over a month and I’ve seen them only once.

The key difference is that in the Prague system, there’s no downtime when the bus is at the bus station. Regardless of how many passengers are waiting to get on, the bus will stop at the bus station for a fairly predictable, short length of time – maybe 20 seconds. In Chicago, on the other hand, it’s a wild card. If a station has three people or less, maybe it’ll take 20 seconds. If it has a dozen, it might stop for a minute or two. If there’s a huge crowd of people waiting to get on – as is often the case because of the bunching that I pointed out above – then the bus might be stuck there loading passengers for five minutes.

What’s the big deal, you ask? It’s only a few minutes.

Sure, but those few minutes add up and quickly have a cascading effect. It turns the CTA system into unpredictable chaos, in stark contrast to the tight schedule Prague’s buses run on. Because Prague’s buses have such predictable downtime, they can have a schedule which they follow down to the minute. Because buses come so regularly, commuters aren’t left stranded for thirty minutes, during which more and more passengers come, clogging up the system like they do in Chicago. In Chicago, because downtime is so unpredictable, you can’t have a schedule, and if a bus starts to get bogged down by large numbers of passengers, it goes slower and slower, causing the stations ahead of it to accumulate even more passengers, slowing it down further – a vicious cycle creating huge delays. One minute turns into five, turns into ten, turns into twenty minute delays. Meanwhile, the buses behind it start to catch up to the bus that’s bogged down, especially because they have no passengers to pick up since the bus ahead of them has got them already! Hence, three buses arriving at once, no predictable timetable, and enormous delays.

Who’d think that such a small detail could have such major effects? Though I can’t back this up solidly with data, I’m pretty certain the payment system is a major, major reason why Prague’s buses are so much better organized than the CTA. And that’s also probably a reason why Prague has the world’s second highest public transportation ridership per capita, after Hong Kong.

…So. Solutions?

Well, the obvious thing to do would be to switch the CTA payment system to make it like Prague’s. But hold on a moment. Doesn’t that mean you can ride black, i.e. without a ticket? Doesn’t that mean an already chronically underfunded system that’s facing even more budget cuts would lose even more money?

Well, two things. First, check the “riding black” article on Prague. Sure, a quarter million people were caught riding black — but that also translated into $5.4 million in fine revenues for Prague public transport! And that’s with a relatively paltry 800 (or 1500) crown fine, $32 or $60. Imagine if Chicago fined people a flat $150 for skipping out on buying the ticket – that would not only mean large fine revenues, but also a much greater incentive for people to buy the ticket and ride clean.

Second, why not just make public transportation in Chicago… free? I’d argue it’d be a great social good – facilitating mobility throughout the city, indirectly making various services cheaper (any kind of delivery or in-person service), reducing the number of cars on the road and reducing traffic, and serving as a form of progressive redistribution aiding the poor in Chicago who can’t afford to drive a car. It’d increase incentives for greater density and accelerate the de-suburbanization trend, both of which have been shown to be economically and socially beneficial.

Sure, it’s a radical idea, but I think it’s one worth exploring.

[Disclaimer: These two photos (the Prague Tram, the CTA Bus) are not mine. I got them from wikimedia commons.]