Just under 1,200 people climbed onto CTA tracks in the first eight months of 2023, risking death or injury from the train system’s electrified third rail.
CTA leaders worry that riders feel a sense of “complacency” around climbing onto the tracks, chief safety and security officer Nancy-Ellen Zusman said.
Zusman and the CTA hope to bring rail trespassing, and the harms that can result, onto a downward trajectory with a new rail safety campaign launched Monday.
It’s more common for people to climb down onto the tracks to retrieve objects than because they’re intoxicated or suicidal, Zusman said. In fact, suicide is the least common reason, followed by intoxication.
But it’s most common for riders to climb down for no known reason at all.
Fifty-three percent of people who have climbed onto CTA tracks this year as of August had no known reason for doing so, according to CTA personnel.
CTA trains are powered by an electrified third rail, which carries 600 volts of electricity — a potentially lethal amount.
“Unfortunately, we do see cases in which people are just goofing around,” CTA spokesperson Brian Steele said. “… They’re not retrieving an item, they haven’t fallen, they just make the decision to go down there.”
The CTA’s first rail safety campaign launched 10 years ago last month. Trespassing incidents on CTA tracks dropped 17% the following year, Steele said.
“Was the campaign solely responsible for that? Hard to say,” Steele said. “However, there’s no question that the campaign really raised awareness and began a lot of dialogue.”
Though the CTA has not tracked trespassing consistently since the first rail safety campaign in 2013, Steele said, reduced rail service during 2020 led to a recent annual low of 1,584 trespassing.
In 2021, about 1,900 people stepped onto the CTA tracks and 1,860 in 2022. Steele says the CTA expects another slight drop in trespassing incidents by the end of this year.
Service interruptions due to trespassing on the electrified CTA tracks, also known as rail right of way, are most common on the Red and Blue lines, Steele said. So far this year, 350 trespassers climbed down onto Red Line tracks, with 323 trespassers on Blue Line tracks.
The Yellow Line, traveling between Rogers Park and Skokie, sees the fewest rail right-of-way delays, with 30 trespassers so far this year.
Service interruptions due to rail trespassing have caused 93 hours of delays through August of this year, Steele said.
The CTA does not track what proportion of delays overall are caused by trespassing, though rail right-of-way delays are most common during weekday rush hours, Steele said.
“It’s basically just a function of the ridership — when more people are there, there are more instances,” Steele said.
When someone climbs onto the rail right of way, CTA personnel cut power to large sections of track so that tracks are not active or electric during rescue attempts, Zusman said.
“There’s a whole ripple effect,” Zusman said.
While the CTA does not track the demographics of people who come down onto the tracks, Steele said the organization hopes to reach more young people with the new campaign. Some ads parody music streaming service Spotify with fake song titles like “Severe Burns,” “Sudden Impact” and “Everybody Hurts.”
CTA platforms rise 4 feet above track level, a distance some riders find deceivingly short, Steele said. The amount of electricity running through the tracks can be fatal, but conductivity — factoring in conditions like clothes and the weather — determines climbers’ fate.
Track shutdowns happen fast when people are spotted on the third rail, Steele said, and CTA workers are trained to climb safely onto the tracks to get riders’ things if alerted.
“Sometimes people go down to the tracks thinking, ‘I’ll just get my phone,’ and then realize, ‘I shouldn’t be here, it’s difficult for me to get back up,’” Steele said.
Riders have been known to climb down onto CTA tracks and try to walk the rail from one station to another, Steele said.
Graffiti artists are also frequent trespassers on CTA rails, accounting for 24% of recorded incidents through August 2023. Train yards at the end of the Red Line at Howard, and on the Green Line at Ashland and Midway, are graffiti hot spots, though graffiti-based climbers are most active on Orange Line tracks, Steele said.
Metra struggles with similar graffiti issues, Zusman said — though tracks at Metra train yards are not electrified.
“A lot of people will go into where we store our trains, typically in the nighttime, to try and graffiti a train,” Steele said. “When they’re there, they’re around live tracks.”
The campaign, which also features a looping audio message and a series of PSAs in the style of graphic novels, can be seen on every platform and in train cars, focusing on high-traffic stations such as Belmont, Steele said.
When tracking why people trespass on CTA tracks, CTA staff rely on data collected at the scene, Zusman said. Staff are not required to follow up on police or medical examiner’s reports when someone appears intoxicated, for instance.
“Basically we look for the signs of impairment — any type of impairment — and that is what is reported in our system,” Zusman said.
The CTA also tracks when trains collide with people or brush people while pulling into a station. Though not every contact between a train and a rider ends in injury, the CTA investigates every time it’s reported by a rider or train operator or shown on security cameras, Zusman said.
Though it’s rare for a rail right-of-way incident to end in death, “it’s doubly tragic knowing that the circumstances could have been avoided,” Steele said.
“The number of fatalities every year is extremely low compared to our ridership,” Steele said. “That said, one fatality is one too many.”
