Brutal Wind Chills Make For Painful Morning Commute For Many
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Arctic air has a hold on the Chicago area, so if you go outside on Thursday, make sure to layer up.
Temperatures were at a frigid 2 below zero in Chicago at dawn, with a brutal wind chill of 18 below, meaning commuters had to endure a teeth-chattering wait for buses and trains as they headed out Thursday morning.
Thanks to the CTA's bus and train tracker apps, commuters can time their walks to bus stops and train stations and limit the amount of time they must spend outdoors. Metra has a similar train tracker feature on its desktop and mobile websites.
"If you don't time your bus right, it ain't good. You'll be out here too long," said Mark Harvey, who was waiting for the bus before dawn at 95th and Ashland. "It's cold out here, bro."
Christopher Flores got to his bus stop at 95th and Halsted just a minute or so before his bus did, but that did not make him feel any warmer.
"It's too cold for me," he said.
He was wearing a winter coat over his clothes and long johns underneath, just enough to keep him warm for his walk to the bus.
At the Metra station in Franklin Park, commuters were huddled inside the ticket office Thursday morning to avoid the dangerous cold outside.
Kristi Nawrocki said things will get rough after she arrives at Union Station, and has to make her way to work outside.
"I have to take a shuttle, so I'm going to have to stand outside and freeze. It's not going to be fun," she said.
Metra said its trains, tracks, and equipment have been winterized to handle the extreme cold. In previous years, switches have frozen in the extreme cold, creating a ripple effect for the morning commute, so Metra has been using flames to heat switches and keep trains running on time.
Even with those preventive measures, some Metra trains were running 15 to 20 minutes late Thursday due to signal failures or other mechanical problems; specifically, on the Milwaukee District-West, the Union Pacific-West, the Union Pacific-Northwest, and Heritage Corridor lines.