The One Man Battle To Find Out Where Ventra Came From

  Jason Prechtel was troubled by Ventra.



  Cubic was a familiar name. It was responsible for the Chicago Card too.



  I recently spoke with Prechtel about his battle to find out more about the privatization of the CTA’s fare collection system.



  It’s like, “Wait a second, Chicago media—why not connect the dots further? Why are we looking at Ventra as this Chicago-specific thing when this company has a very searchable track record?”



  How come this was public knowledge for the citizens of Philadelphia, but we had no knowledge of who else bid for the CTA contract? Combined with the involvement of the people from the meter deal, I thought, “We need to find this information.”



  We filed it in July 2014, and about two weeks later the CTA reached out to Matt and said it was an innocent oversight, and they would produce the documents on a rolling basis.