Sheridan Fitzpatrick stopped taking the bus to work some two years ago when the waits became too long and passengers on board became too disrespectful.
She recalled one instance when, with snow on the ground, she waited an hour for a bus that never arrived.
So she bought a car and now drives to her job at Daley’s Restaurant in Woodlawn.
“I rode the bus for years and years before that, because I had to,” she said.
In the two years since Fitzpatrick stopped taking the bus, the CTA continued to struggle to provide frequent, reliable service. The agency first cut bus schedules to try to boost reliability and then began adding back service. Officials said scheduled service returned to prepandemic levels a few days before Christmas.
But a new analysis shows that some neighborhoods were slower than others to get back planned service — and many of the neighborhoods that fared the worst have particularly high unemployment rates and low household incomes. They were slow to get back service even though a CTA-commissioned report noted that these are the kinds of neighborhoods where the benefits of transit are clearest.
“Transit expands many people’s freedom by allowing them to reach places they otherwise couldn’t,” the report said[cq comment=”noted” ]. “The positive impacts are clearest in areas where people have the lowest incomes.”
The neighborhoods among the slowest to get service back include Woodlawn, where Fitzpatrick works, and Oakland. In Oakland, not only are underemployment and unemployment key issues, but elderly residents and students also rely on public transit, said Shannon Bennett, executive director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization. With service slow to return, riders who gave up on transit because they found it unreliable are also unlikely to return, he said.
“You get so accustomed to not having the proper service and resources that it becomes a new normal,” Bennett said.
The analysis, from the Chicago Tribune and the University of Chicago Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, compares the median time between when buses were scheduled to arrive in a neighborhood — in other words, how long a rider would typically wait if they’d just missed the bus — in November 2022 to November 2024.
It offers a window into how the CTA and President Dorval Carter navigated the recovery from the pandemic and the complaints about service that have become a key sticking point of Carter’s tenure. The data also provide insight into how service is distributed throughout the city, as the CTA undertakes a wholesale review of its bus network.
CTA officials have acknowledged that returning service to prepandemic levels doesn’t mean every route and schedule will look the same as it did in 2019. But the analysis shows where bus schedules had not yet returned even as the CTA said it was at 98% of prepandemic levels in November.
CTA Chief Innovation Officer Molly Poppe pointed to a different measure the agency looked at when reviewing service. Before hitting prepandemic service levels, the CTA had brought back schedules on 79% of routes considered below poverty, meaning they generally run through many below-poverty areas as defined by the Federal Transit Administration, she said. That includes routes along Western Avenue, which runs through swaths of the North and South sides, and Madison Street, which runs through downtown and the bustling West Loop, but also the city’s West Side, she said.
In comparison, the CTA brought back schedules on 71% of above-poverty-level routes, which include several lakefront express buses.
“We did clearly prioritize routes in those areas of persistent poverty and those low-income areas,” she said.
But the Tribune and University of Chicago analysis showed that among the 10 community areas that in November still had the biggest cuts to schedules, six neighborhoods had higher unemployment rates than citywide and seven had lower median household incomes, according to the Chicago Health Atlas. Communities with lower incomes are among those that can benefit from bus service, a CTA consultant found in a December 2023 report examining city bus service.
Transit cannot overcome geographic inequality in Chicago, but “transit multiplies the number of jobs low-income people in Chicago can access many times over,” according to the report.
Of the communities slowest to get service back, in Woodlawn schedules added three minutes to the typical time a rider would wait between buses in November compared to two years earlier — a 30% increase. Buses were typically scheduled to arrive at stops in the neighborhood every 13 minutes.
Nearby, in the Douglas, Hyde Park and Oakland neighborhoods, waits between buses also rose by about three minutes, leaving typical waits of 12.5 to 15 minutes in each neighborhood — each also a jump of more than 25% from two years earlier, the analysis showed.
Typical times between buses in West Englewood rose by nearly two minutes to reach 12 minutes. In wealthy North Center the median wait time was 14.5 minutes, about two minutes longer than two years earlier.
In other neighborhoods service improved, including some that also had higher unemployment rates, like North Lawndale and Roseland. In North Lawndale, the median time scheduled between buses was about 10.5 minutes, a drop of 1.5 minutes from two years earlier, or an improvement of about 12.5%.
Schedules in Roseland improved by one minute, leaving buses to arrive typically every 14 minutes. In Beverly, where incomes are higher, median waits for buses improved by 1.5 minutes, leaving residents to wait, typically, 16.5 minutes between buses.
In more than 40 of the city’s 77 community areas, bus service was comparable to two years ago, showing no change or changes of less than 30 seconds.
Even where service returned or improved, riders often still had long waits for the bus, the analysis shows. In some dozen neighborhoods where service was restored or improved, buses were often scheduled to come every 15 minutes or longer. At that point the usefulness of the city’s grid-shaped bus network drops off because the time it takes to transfer between buses becomes too long, the consultant told the CTA board in September.
The bus schedule findings are based on an analysis of each Chicago community area from the Mansueto Institute.
Institute students and researchers, working with the Tribune, reviewed both CTA schedules and the actual locations of buses since 2022 to determine when every bus was supposed to reach every stop in the city and when every bus actually did. To determine the historic actual locations of buses, they used data compiled as part of a project by a group called Chi Hack Night that collected real-time bus locations using a CTA data feed.
They then examined bus service for each neighborhood when all service in that neighborhood is factored in, including calculating the median time until the next bus was scheduled to arrive. They looked only at trips from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., excluding late-night and early-morning service that can be infrequent.
During the time analyzed, a shortage of drivers had the CTA struggling to provide the service it had scheduled, leading to mismatches between when buses were arriving and when they were scheduled. The agency sought to correct the problem by first cutting schedules, then adding back service as it hired more operators. The Tribune focused on the service CTA scheduled, or intended to provide.
Residents suffer when bus schedules are cut and waits get longer, even by a few minutes, said Nedra Sims Fears, executive director of the Greater Chatham Initiative. In Chatham, typical waits between buses were still longer by about one minute in November, reaching 11 minutes.
Running through Chatham are key bus routes that allow workers to connect to the Red Line and jobs downtown and students to reach their high schools, she said. An uptick of just one or two minutes adds up for people transferring between multiple buses or the train.
“It becomes a cascading effect,” she said. “And it just increases stress. It’s stressful enough just getting up and commuting, let alone wondering if you’re going to make it on time.”
In fact, Ricky Johnson stuck to riding buses when he commuted to work, rather than adding the train, in an effort to minimize the number of transfers he had to make, he said. Waiting at a Woodlawn bus stop, he said he left himself plenty of time when he used to ride the bus to work in the morning. Still, he described the frustration of long waits for the No. 39 bus that runs along Pershing Road.
Sammikia Lord, a custodian at Friend Health in Woodlawn, prefers to be dropped off at work by a friend rather than take the bus, though she does ride transit a few days a week. Though conditions on buses have left her concerned, she, too, prefers the bus over the train because it’s her most direct route.
Sometimes would-be passengers turn to the community health center building when the wait for the next bus outside gets too long. Lord recalled a bitterly cold recent day when the bus failed to arrive at the stop for what seemed like 20 or 30 minutes, prompting riders to try to move into the warmth of the building. Days later, a sign on the entrance to the building reminded customers that people who are not visiting the health center are not allowed to wait inside.
Poppe said routes set to get more service at the end of December would directly help some of the neighborhoods that until then had failed to see wholesale service improvements. That included additional planned service on the Jackson Park Express and Stony Island routes, and the busy No. 4 bus that runs along Cottage Grove. The CTA added service via a Cottage Grove express bus in 2022, but the local bus remains a major route.
The CTA considered access to job centers, hospitals and schools when looking at bus service, Poppe said. When paring back schedules, the agency looked at routes that came very frequently during rush hour, like express buses, and often focused on weekdays, so that those who were dependent on transit could still access service at other times, she said.
When adding to schedules, the CTA sought to ensure service was coming back across various parts of the city and looked at routes that retained more of their riders during the pandemic, Poppe said. Part of the goal was to address crowding on buses, she said.
“Coverage and equity of access is always our north star,” she said. “It’s how we think about delivering service, but ridership does come into play because of the way we are funded and because of the funding challenges that we have.”
When public transit agencies review service, social considerations like the ability to access jobs, family and other types of transportation should be key considerations, said Emmanuel Dommergues, head of mobility governance at the Brussels-based International Association of Public Transport.
“It’s good to have a nice bus, it’s good to have clean bus,” he said. “But we should look at whether people have access to things.”
But routes that address needs aren’t always the ones that provide the most financial benefit for an agency, he said. Though other factors also play a role in how often buses should run — like how much of a hassle it is to use a car and whether a route is a key backbone of the system or a secondary route — sometimes the decision comes down to a political one, he said.
Poppe said the way the CTA is funded leads the agency to factor in ridership when deciding how much service to run, but she said that’s not the same as considering how profitable routes are because many of the highest-ridership routes are frequently used by passengers paying nothing or reduced fares. Rather, it involves looking at the density of housing and jobs in an area, she said.
The CTA has also acknowledged at times pursuing riders who will generate more money, writing on a website dedicated to an ongoing bus study that “historically, limited funding and regulatory structures have driven CTA to pursue the highest potential full-fare ridership to generate specific levels of farebox revenue mandated by the state.”
Limited public funding and historic requirements that the region’s transit agencies generate about 50% of their own revenue, called farebox revenue, have limited the CTA’s ability to run more service in less dense neighborhoods, the agency wrote on the website. Lower-income residents who rely on transit often live in those places.
These are factors the CTA is considering as it undertakes a review of its bus routes and pushes for more public money to help tackle a looming financial crisis once federal COVID-19 relief funding runs out. As part of the agency’s ongoing “Bus Vision Project,” the CTA will consider adjustments to schedules and routes.
In the meantime, Arthur Mickle has noticed a decline in bus service in recent years. He takes the bus to the Red Line to get to work at Daley’s Restaurant and, while service got better after the severe driver shortages of the pandemic, it didn’t seem to be as good as it was before 2020, he said.
He gives himself an hour and a half to get from 109th Street to the restaurant at 63rd. He started leaving himself significantly extra time during the service challenges of the pandemic and has kept up the practice, just in case. He also allows himself a few days a year to take a ride-share to or from work instead, especially when it’s cold outside.
“If the bus or train, something happens, I’ll be prepared,” he said.