The Chicago Transit Authority recorded an average of 1 million weekday riders in May for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated ridership.
The announcement Tuesday comes as CTA boss Dorval Carter faces calls to resign from a large contingent of City Council members. It’s been over a week since he defended his record before Council critics.
CTA isn’t the only public transportation system seeing more riders. Major metropolitan areas across the country recorded an average 4% increase in year-over-year ridership in the first quarter of 2024, according to the American Public Transportation Association. The CTA was slightly higher than average at 10%, according to the analysis.
But CTA ridership is a fraction of what it was before the pandemic. The CTA recorded an average of 912,749 weekday riders in March, compared with more than 1.4 million in 2019. That’s about 62% of pre-pandemic ridership.
The CTA also boasted that more people are riding bus routes where service was recently added to meet pre-pandemic levels. An average of 10% more people were riding those beefed-up routes, while other bus routes saw gains of 3%.
In a statement, Carter said he expected all bus and rail service to reach pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year. He said he was optimistic that average weekday ridership would consistently hit the 1 million mark soon.
So far this year, the CTA has had 22 days when ridership exceeded 1 million, 12 of which were in May. In 2023, the CTA had 27 days that hit that mark.
May 31 was the highest ridership Friday since the start of the pandemic, with a little over 1 million rides, the CTA said. Ridership on Friday is typically 5% lower than other weekdays.
The CTA still doesn’t have as many bus and train operators as it did before the pandemic, but said it is making strides to address the worker shortage. The CTA had about 3,700 bus drivers in April, compared with more than 3,800 in 2019, according to CTA’s performance dashboard. Rail operators numbered 735 in April, compared with 880 in 2019.
