Making Commuting Bearable

I have long said that if Chicago wants to get the Olympics in 2016, it will have to completely refurbish the CTA. Spending time abroad only confirms that. Despite both systems being roughly the same age, the Paris Metro is leaps and bounds ahead of the CTA:

1) With 14 train lines, I have yet to find a place in the city that is more than a 10 minute walk from a station, though there probably are some on the city's outskirts. (The picture is of my nearest station, Mouton Duvernet. As you can tell by the lack of foliage, I didn't take the picture.)

2) During rush hour, you never have to wait more than 2 minutes for a train. The longest you might have to wait on a weekend is 7 minutes, if you're unlucky enough to arrive at a station right after a train left.

3) Despite the weak dollar, it's still a little cheaper.

4) No embarrassing accidents (at least that I have heard of).

5) Despite Chicago being a far cleaner city than Paris, and the Metro here not nearly as tidy as, say, Washington DC's subway, the Paris Metro does manage to have slightly cleaner stations than Chicago. In other words, I will occasionally sit down on the benches they provide.

6) The quality of the busking musicians. There may be a few too many accordions in use on the Metro, but this is much, much better than the song and, um, interpretative dance I witnessed on the CTA earlier this year. I would say more, but I am trying to keep this a family-friendly blog.

There is one major drawback in Paris that I have fortunately avoided: strikes. My co-workers were telling me of one particularly annoying kind of strike that the transit workers here have done a few times in the last few years: the afternoon strike. In other words, you take the train to work in the morning, but then can't get home.

Due to geography, politics, and the fact that Brazil is already hosting the 2014 World Cup, I think Chicago has an excellent shot to win the right to host the 2016 Games. I am willing to put up with all the construction, traffic, and annoyances that residents have to suffer if it just means that we finally get a world-class transit system (though I have no idea how they can pay for it).