Dorval Carter is out at the CTA.
The transit agency president announced his retirement Monday in a CTA news release, after years in the hot seat as riders complained about unreliable service, conditions on trains and buses and concerns about personal safety.
He will step down at the end of this month, according to the release.
His retirement comes as a debate brews in Springfield about whether to combine the CTA with Metra, Pace and the Regional Transportation Authority, and how to fund transit amid a $771 million budget gap looming when federal COVID-19 relief funding runs out. Some lawmakers have pushed for addressing transit oversight and leadership before tackling the funding cliff, which could hit as soon as next year.
Mayor Brandon Johnson lauded Carter in the release. “His leadership reimagined the movement of our city. His stewardship of the Red Line Extension project is just one of the notable achievements in his historic career,” Johnson said.
Carter’s departure also followed a pointed endorsement from Johnson last week, with the two of them shrugging off the threat of a potential showdown with state leaders over the future of the transit agency during a news conference announcing the final chunk of federal funding for the Red Line extension to 130th Street.
The announcement also doubled as an endorsement of Carter’s job performance, with the mayor sending a blunt message to members of the Illinois General Assembly who were mulling tying a bailout of the CTA’s finances to changes in transit leadership: “Any attempt to hold hostage the people of Chicago for anyone’s political gain, we’re certainly not going to acquiesce to those levels of constraints.”
Carter was appointed to lead CTA by then-mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2015. He had deep connections with D.C. and brought the ability to tap into federal funding, a moment that came full circle Friday when he locked in a crucial piece of federal funding to advance the long-discussed Red Line project. He also saw movement forward on another major construction project, the rebuild of a north section of the Red and Purple Line tracks.
Carter took on a national transit leadership role when he became chair of the American Public Transportation Association in 2022.
But his tenure at CTA was marked by pandemic-era declines in CTA service levels and rampant complaints about safety and conditions on buses and trains. As ridership dropped at the start of the pandemic, passengers increasingly complained of ghost buses and trains, long wait times, quality issues like smoking and fears about crime. CTA faced staffing shortages that affected the amount of service it could run.
Carter had faced pressure from city and state lawmakers. Aldermen called for his resignation, and Gov. JB Pritzker called for an “evolution of the leadership” at the CTA last spring as lawmakers first began to mull merging the region’s four transit agencies.
Carter in 2022 laid out a broad plan to address the mounting concerns, including updating bus and train trackers to be more accurate, boosting private security and Chicago police presence, and reducing schedules so the number of buses and trains the agency could run would be a closer match to what was on paper.
The efforts met with mixed success. CTA boosted security spending by tens of millions of dollars to flood the system with security and the rate of violent crime on its trains dropped, but remained persistently higher than before the pandemic through the first half of 2024.
Ridership ticked up from pandemic lows, but in October was about 71% of 2019 levels, according to the most recent available CTA data.
And after slashes to bus and trains schedules, CTA said it had restored both to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024, though a Tribune and University of Chicago analysis found the restoration of bus service was uneven across the city.
His tenure was also marked by a November 2023 crash on the Yellow Line, when a train smashed into a snowplow that was on the tracks for scheduled training, injuring more than a dozen people and causing an estimated $8.7 million in damages. The crash remains under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.
In another high-profile CTA incident, a man was charged in September with shooting and killing four people sleeping on the Blue Line early Labor Day morning.
Carter came to the CTA from the U.S. Department of Transportation, where he was acting chief of staff to the secretary. He had also previously worked at the Federal Transit Administration as acting deputy administrator and chief counsel.
Carter, the first Black president of the CTA, began his career at the agency as a staff attorney. He eventually moved over to the FTA, before rejoining CTA from 2000 to 2009. He served a s acting CTA president from January to April 2009, but left later that year after he was passed over for the post of CTA president in favor of Richard Rodriguez, who had no previous transit experience but was considered a good manager.
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