After years of service cuts and rider complaints, the CTA has begun adding back scheduled trains, marking the first step toward delivering on a promise to restore service on the “L.”
The service increases mark a key effort for embattled CTA President Dorval Carter, who has repeatedly said he would return rail service to pre-pandemic levels by the end of the year. But efforts to add back trains in the first months of the year moved slower than riders and city aldermen had hoped, one more challenge for the CTA and Carter as criticism mounted.
Now, the CTA says it has boosted scheduled service by 9% since April — most of that in recent weeks — including more trips on every line except the Yellow Line. The most recent service increases are expected to affect the Red, Blue, Brown and Purple lines on weekdays, and the Blue Line on weekends.
They include wait times of 4.5 to 8 minutes during morning rush on the busy Red Line, 7.5 minutes in the middle of the day and evening on the O’Hare branch of the Blue Line, and 15 minutes midday and evening on the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line.
The CTA could not immediately say how the new wait times compare with pre-pandemic wait times.
But the CTA still has a way to go to reach pre-pandemic levels. In fall 2023, the Tribune found the CTA slashed schedules on some train lines by as much as 25% to 30% compared with 2019 service levels.
Since then, the CTA has added 788 weekly rail trips. The CTA said it will need to boost service by another 19% to reach pre-pandemic levels
Hitting that target will be key for Carter, who has come come under fire as ridership, service and the perception of personal safety on the CTA lagged. A groundswell of politicians have called for him to resign, including a majority of City Council members, as Carter has blasted attacks against him as racist and unfair.
Carter and the CTA also face an existential challenge, with a regional $730 million fiscal cliff looming once federal pandemic aid dries up in early 2026. Tied to the financial challenges is a bill pending in Springfield that would consolidate the CTA with the region’s other three transit agencies, a concept the heads of the agencies have pushed back against.
“I believe that the city of Chicago and the CTA are both of the opinion that the governance model is not the problem here,” Carter told a panel of state lawmakers at a hearing this week. “It doesn’t need to be adjusted. The issue is getting the funding levels to work the way they’re supposed to.”
As Carter sought to quell the criticism against him, he promised to add back service. The agency began adding back bus service earlier this year, and in the first six months of the year boosted service on 48 of its 127 routes.
But the efforts stumbled when new train schedules were released earlier in the spring that included few service additions, prompting outcry from some critics.
The CTA has tied service cuts to challenges hiring and retaining enough employees to operate buses and trains, and has said adding back service depends on the agency’s ability to add operators. Carter has previously said he plans to add 200 rail operators this year, and the CTA said that 79 have finished training so far in 2024.
In May, the number of CTA train operators was down about 15% from pre-pandemic levels, and bus operators were down about 2%, agency data shows.
The announcement Thursday marked a change in CTA schedules, but for much of the pandemic the agency struggled to match the service actually running to what was scheduled, leading to a phenomenon known as “ghosting.” Since then, the CTA began updating trackers and cut back on schedules as part of an attempt to match actual buses and trains running to scheduled service, which meant riders were less likely to get ghosted but that listed wait times increased.
The CTA recently was consistently able to fill more rail trips than what is listed on its schedules, so the agency felt confident formally updating the schedules and train trackers, Carter said in a statement.
“CTA is putting reliability at the forefront of what we are doing. We will not announce new rail service being added until we are confident in our ability to deliver those additional rail trips with consistency,” he said.
