Chicago's Cruel Holiday Message to the Homeless

by Shannon Moriarty · 2008-11-26 13:02:00 UTC
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It's the holiday season! Time to string up lights, wreaths, and other holiday decor.

The Chicago Transit Authority has already been hard at work decking the halls for winter. They recently installed signs proclaiming "continuous riding of trains prohibited," a message that is undoubtedly directed towards the city's homeless population. This selective enforcement of policy is thinly veiled discrimination of the homeless... and comes just in time for the cold winter holidays.

Mike Doyle broke the story on the Huffington Post earlier this week:

The message on the signs is clear, and a bit ominous: they demand an additional fare from any rider who wants to depart the terminal in the opposite direction from which they arrived.

The reason for the signs is a lot murkier. A rider arriving at a rail terminal and immediately departing again without exiting obviously hasn't made a constructive trip. However, it's hard to see who they'd be harming by such "continuous riding", as the CTA calls the practice.

Unless, of course, that rider is a homeless person. Any regular 'L' rider can attest to the wave of homeless Chicagoans who take to the warm interiors of CTA rail cars during the city's brutal winter months. Although generally a benign presence in the system, their downtrodden visual appearance--and in many cases odor--earns them the ire of many fellow, more fortunate passengers.

The CTA insists that these signs are not intended to target homeless people. According to their PR department, "the signs were posted as a customer service reminder to all CTA customers that the payment of fares only entitles them to a one-way ride and/or transfer."

Something doesn't smell right.... why post signs that state something completely obvious? If you ask me, there's no question that this message is intended for the city's homeless population. Why else would someone continuously ride the trains unless they were without a home and in need of a place to stay warm?

Could it be, perhaps, that these signs have something to do with Chicago trying clean up its image to become an Olympic host-city?

In any case, Chicago citizens must insist that the city re-evaluate this discriminatory policy. Forcing homeless people off the trains and into the cold will do nothing to address the city's greater homelessness issue.

Shannon Moriarty has worked in various homeless shelters and service organizations around the country. She is a graduate student studying housing and urban policy at Tufts University.
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