Pro Bono Partners in
Transit:
Chicago is thriving, one of the few American cities where most people take transit to work. Much of this progress will fade away if we become mired in congestion. Expanding public transit is essential for Chicago to meet its environmental goals as a region, to retain and attract businesses, and to improve the quality of life for all.
As a result, in May of 2007 CCA made a commitment to help the Chicago Transit Authority become the most innovative, fastest growing transit system in the nation. Since then, CCA and our partners have worked with CTA leadership on more than a dozen initiatives - Click here to view videos featuring the CCA in CTA Connections - and the Authority has made great progress. More than 10 partners have made significant contributions to improve the reliability of service, maximize efficiencies, and deliver more customer-oriented services.
In 2008, the CTA provided over 526 million rides, up 5.4% from the previous year and eclipsing 500 million rides for the first time since 1991. This growth exceeded most other major transit agencies on both an absolute and percentage basis. In 2009, the CTA was named the "Most Improved Metro" at the Metro Awards, an international competition celebrating excellence in the global mass transit industry. Projects with the CTA include:
- Performance Management
- Rail of the Future
- Customer Communications
- Rail Reliability
- Bus Bunching
- Bus Cleanliness
- Bus Maintenance
- Operational Turnaround Strategy
- Market Demand Study
- Technology Functional Review
Performance Management
Building on the model CCA developed with Ron Huberman and his team at the City, CCA and its partners helped develop a system to measure and manage performance at the CTA. A team of consultants, with Alliance staff, helped each department draft measures, set targets, develop baselines, and write improvement plans. This process spawned many improvement efforts, including: reducing bus accidents at the worst intersections; improving safety at the most dangerous construction sites; introducing new materials and techniques for cleaning L stops; and more. With a handful of rider-oriented measures, the performance management process helps management hold the operating units accountable for meeting the CTA's goal to be safe, clean, on time, courteous, and efficient.
Partners: Booz & Company
Rail of the Future
Five-hundred-thousand riders a day depend on the Chicago L, yet years of deferred maintenance now require billions in repairs. Faced with such a large, yet required, investment, CTA asked, "If you could build any rapid transit system in the world, what would it be?" Along with its partners, CCA identified the requirements, characteristics, and costs of "the rail of the future." This research has enabled numerous elements of the ideal system to be reflected in current projects.
Partners: Deloitte Consulting
Lack of timely, friendly, and understandable communication has long been a complaint of CTA riders. IDEO, an innovative design and research firm, conducted a study in the summer of 2007 and provided simple guidelines for customer communication along with suggestions for long-term improvements. The team developed three case-studies to highlight the CTA’s customers and their communication needs: Scott, the experienced commuter; Chantal, going with friends to the July 3rd fireworks; and Leslie, a tourist visiting from the suburbs. Using these case studies, CTA staff and other interested participants drafted nearly 100 improvements to customer communication.
Partners: IDEO
Rail Reliability
Leave on time. Arrive on time. This is the expectation of customers riding the CTA’s rail system.
CCA is helping the CTA establish a performance management framework for evaluating and improving the performance of the rail system for customers. Thanks to recent reductions in slow zones, the CTA is in a position to improve significantly the quality of service provided by the rail system. By focusing on performance, the CTA should be able to deliver more rapid, reliable rides.
Partner: Bain & Company
Bus Bunching
Standing at a bus stop and waiting for a half-hour only to see three buses arrive together (bunched) is one of the most frustrating experiences for a public transit customer. Bus bunching creates gaps in service and highlights inefficient use of resources. CCA is leading a long-term effort with the CTA to eliminate bus bunching and improve bus service quality.
The “bus bunching” work involves an agency-wide performance improvement effort targeting the routes, times and locations causing the biggest disruptions in service and developing innovative solutions to address the problem. As a result, as of March 2009 the number of “big gaps” in service had decreased by more than 50% across the bus system, and ridership on routes with the most improved service had grown at four times the rate of the other routes (12% vs 3%). See CTA President's report here. From a customer standpoint, these improvements translate to one minute and 15 seconds saved in waiting time for every ride, or nearly 20,000 fewer hours of waiting time every day.
Partners: Bain & Company, Kellogg Graduate School of Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, University of Michigan
Bus Cleanliness
Previously, one of the most frequent complaints of CTA customers was the condition and appearance of buses. While each CTA garage had goals for cleaning and deep cleaning the buses, these goals had proved increasingly unrealistic as the fleets increased in size and mileage, while the servicing staff was reduced. To ameliorate the situation, Alliance partner Katzenbach helped identify new technology, set work standards, and identify the "soft" practices that would help each garage increase productivity of its servicing staff. As a result, busses today are cleaned more often, and more thoroughly, than before.
Partners: Katzenbach Partners
Bus Maintenance
Working with line and management personnel, Alliance partner McKinsey developed techniques to improve significantly the effectiveness and efficiency of maintenance across all of CTA. As a result, older busses are being retired sooner, reducing the number of in-service breakdowns, and enabling more preventive maintenance, further reducing break-downs and increasing service quality.
Partners: McKinsey & Company
Operational Turnaround Strategy
CTA had already undertaken multiple initiatives to improve operations, with the goal of reducing costs, improving service, and increasing ridership. To sequence future initiatives strategically, CCA and its partner took an outside-in as well as bottom-up assessment of CTA challenges and opportunities. The operational turnaround strategy was made public as the President's Transformation Plan. The goals orient CTA around customer satisfaction, increased ridership, and sustainable revenue and cost per service mile, positioning the Authority to be a model transit agency for decades to come.
Partners: McKinsey & Company
Chicago and the surrounding area have a large and growing demand for transportation (30 million trips per day) but currently transit has a small share (6%). Research by CCA and our partner identified pockets of opportunity for the CTA to capture a larger share of the transportation market over the next 5-10 years.
Partners: Kellogg Graduate School of Management
The technology department at CTA oversees a wide range of technology processes, from fare media system processing almost 2 million transactions daily to the business needs of an organization with a $1.2 billion operating budget. The functional review identified overlaps and gaps in current practices and skills and provided recommendations to add additional security and PMO expertise while reducing overall operation costs.
Partners: Alvarez & Marsal