The RTA tracks and evaluates the effectiveness of public transit in the Chicago region along key metrics. Read below to see how the region is performing and how we compare to our peers. View the latest data on the Chicago Region Transit Dashboard.
Published in April 2022, the latest Regional Report Card found that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant and negative impact on nearly every performance measure and will likely continue to affect transit performance for years to come. The report, which looks at data submitted to the FTA’s National Transit Database, found that ridership in our region, which had declined for seven consecutive years before the pandemic, dropped dramatically in 2020. Annual Systemwide ridership for 2020 totaled 230.9 million, a 58 percent decrease from 2019.
In better news, capital investment saw a positive shift following the passage of Rebuild Illinois, a 2019 capital construction bill that allowed new funding streams to pay for transit investment. Regionally, capital expenditures in 2020 increased 19 percent to $900 million, the highest level since 2013.
Read more in the Regional Report Card and Sub-Regional Report and find archived reports in the RTAMS Digital Document Library.
Chicago has one of the largest public transit networks in the country, but to understand how well we are serving the region, we must compare ourselves to our peers.
Published in February 2024, the Regional Peer Review compares performance of our transit system to those in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Read the 2022 Regional Peer Review.
Also published in February 2024, the Modal Peer Agency Review (formerly known as the Sub-Regional Peer Review) compares Chicago transit to peers carefully selected to allow for the closest possible match of operating characteristics. For each service mode operated in the RTA region – urban bus, heavy rail, commuter rail, suburban bus, and ADA paratransit – a peer group of five agencies has been chosen. Read the 2022 Modal Peer Agency Review.
An important way to measure how the system is working is by asking our customers. For the past decade, the RTA has sponsored a collaborative effort to offer a region-wide customer satisfaction survey that produces a consolidated, comprehensive view of the system by asking a set of common questions to customers of CTA, Metra, and Pace.
The 2022 Customer Service Satisfaction Survey results are now available for
Large-scale customer satisfaction surveys were conducted in 2011, 2013 and 2016.
Federal infrastructure dollars are flowing to the RTA system, with needed capital projects underway
Approximately $250 million in federal capital funding, largely from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)...
Pace and RTA investments in ADA services help reach regional transit goals
Each quarter, the RTA provides an update about progress toward the three goals of the Invest in Transit strategic reg...
Although ridership on the Chicago region’s transit system has dramatically declined during the COVID-19 pandemic, mor...
