Rep. Buckner Addresses Ventra Transit System Outages, Invites Officials to Springfield to Pursue Solutions

CHICAGO – State Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, responded to last week’s rash of outages in the Metra transit system’s app Ventra, by inviting officials from the company to Springfield to speak to state lawmakers.

“Last week many Chicagoans faced major disruptions to their daily commutes due to a technological failure of the Ventra app used as a payment facilitator. This extended and substantial problem is an unacceptable standard for Chicago’s transit system,” Buckner said. “In addition to these disruptions, Metra incurred a major loss of revenue that will now have to be corrected. I am inviting officials from Ventra to Springfield to brief the House and Senate and help craft solutions to these problems so we can prevent similar disruptions from happening again.”

The Ventra app was not working properly for days last week, either by crashing, freezing, not scanning at card readers or not debiting an account following a successful scan, and affected thousands of Metra riders. These problems are surfacing again after similar issues came up earlier this month.

“A reliable public transit system is absolutely vital to life in Chicago, problems like this cannot happen,” Buckner said. “I have pushed for substantial legislation to reform various aspects of Chicago commuter transit already, and will continue to work with officials to put guardrails in place to prevent similar disruptions.”