CLEVELAND, Ohi0 -- When Darius Stubbs started riding the Red Line rapid after moving to Cleveland in 2006, it usually rumbled along without a hitch from West 117th Street to downtown.

Lately, not so much.

Stubbs said the start-and-slow pace of the train Friday morning on the West Side of Cleveland happens a lot. His two-car train picked up speed after leaving rail platforms at West Boulevard and West 65th Street, only to unaccountably drop to speeds of 5 to 10 mph on straightaway sections of track.

"It just seems like between every station, we're stopping or slowing down," said Stubbs, an actor and teaching artist headed to PlayhouseSquare for a symposium on screen writing. "When those slowdowns happen, they add quite a bit of time."

The culprit: Aging track ties and instability in the track bed, or ballast, that force operators to apply the brakes in order to proceed safely.

Culprit No. 2: A gap of $150 million that it would take to bring the Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority's 63 miles of Red, Blue, Green and Waterfront track to an excellent or good state of repair.

Here are orders to RTA train operators last Wednesday on where they were to slow the speed of trains. Almost all the orders reflect track problems on the heavy rail Red Line. The slow-downs generally were for 1,200 feet and involved speed reductions of 20 to 40 miles an hour.

RTA said train operators currently cut speed limits on about six miles of track scattered across the system, slowing trains that normally would travel 35 mph to 55 mph by 20, 30 or 40 miles an hour.

Operators follow daily "slow orders" that say where to reduce speeds and by how much. On Wednesday last week, 19 sections of the Red Line and one section where the Red, Blue and Green lines run together had restrictions. Most of the restrictions are expected to be lifted between August and November, according to the day's operator advisory.

RTA officials say no part of RTA's network is unsafe. Construction superintendents regularly walk the lines, assessing the condition of ties, rails and the underlying granite ballast.

Dan Haefele, a waiter at Ristorante Chinato on East Fourth Street, said he doesn't notice the delays along the Red Line route too much. "Even with a slowdown, it's still one of the easiest ways to get downtown," he said.

But RTA is well aware that some riders are frustrated.

"We're paddling as fast as we can trying to fix stuff," said Joseph Shaffer, RTA director of engineering and project development. "We keep trying to get more funding for transit, and this is why."

The agency removes about 6,000 wooden ties each year and replaces them with concrete ties that last longer - 35 to 40 years. With a total of 160,000 ties in the network, overhauling the entire system takes about 25 years, RTA General Manager and CEO Joe Calabrese said.

"We would love to replace more ties than we're replacing, but we have a schedule that we're adhering to," Calabrese said.

Some commuters weary of the intermittently sluggish pace think RTA is slighting its rapid system and sinking money into its buses.

RTA says it has big funding gaps on both sides of the house.

The agency says it's spending about half its $55 million capital budget (the part of the budget that goes for property upgrades and acquisitions) on rail this year, even though rail accounts for just 1 in 5 customers. (The Red Line has 12 percent of customers, the Blue/Green Lines 8 percent and buses 80 percent.)

To overhaul all of RTA's light and heavy rail network would require $150 million, Calabrese said.

In between whole-track rebuilding, which RTA contracts out to rail tie specialists, in-house crews handle emergency fixes.

Most of the current slowdowns are on the Red Line between West Boulevard and West 25th Street.

Work is expected to get underway in September to replace the track bed and rail from 117th to the top of the "S curve." There will likely be a 14-day shutdown of rail during the $1.4 million construction, with buses used between West Boulevard and Tristkett.

"We still have a lot more work between West 98th and the (Superior) Viaduct," Shaffer said.

Already completed is a $7 million restoration of the S curve between the West 98th and West 117th street stations, and $10.3 million in improvements to the rail tunnel under Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, both in 2013.

East of downtown, RTA replaced 7,400 ties over 2 1/2 miles of double track between East 79th Street and the Cedar-University Station and laid new ballast and realigned track at other East Side locations last year. Crews are almost done with a $2.6 million rejuvenation of the Shaker Square junction.

"We're putting as much money as we can into rail," Calabrese said.

A report commissioned by the Ohio Department of Transportation found that Ohio will have to spend roughly double its $900 million current annual outlay on public transit, or $1.8 billion, to meet expected demand. The ODOT study recommends that the state portion of the budget rise to 10 percent instead of today's 3 percent.