The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) announced because of continued, aggressive recruiting, hiring, and training efforts, it has added 8.5% more scheduled rail service in recent weeks for a total of 9% more scheduled service added since April 2024.

The news marks a major milestone in CTA President Dorval R. Carter Jr.’s commitment to deliver pre-pandemic levels of rail service by end of year. Since early April, CTA has added 788 weekly rail trips when compared to the fall 2023 schedule.

“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,” said Carter. “As promised, thanks to our ongoing recruiting and training efforts, we are now at a point where we have been consistently filling more rail trips beyond those listed on our schedules, and we are now updating our rail timetables and Train Tracker data to reflect these improvements in service.”

Continuing to Build Rail Through Hiring

CTA continues to make significant progress in hiring new bus and rail operators to address workforce shortages and the usual trends of attrition. This year, CTA plans to train up to 200 new rail operators, which is double the number in 2023.

So far this year, 79 employees have successfully completed rail operator training. The next training course commences soon, at which time there will be more than 80 employees in training and are expected to begin qualifying for rail operator status over the next several months.

CTA’s rail operator training courses allow for at least 20 participants per class, with up to three classes in training at a given time. Additional rail service improvements are planned as part of the upcoming fall schedule, which will be announced in the coming months.

Still Building Bus Service

On the bus side, CTA has also made notable progress in its goal of delivering pre-pandemic levels of bus service by the end of the year.

Through June, service levels have been improved on 48 bus routes throughout the service region, with all these routes having returned to near pre-pandemic scheduled service levels.

An additional 28 bus routes are expected to receive improvements this fall and winter to meet the goal of providing pre-pandemic service levels.

The bus routes that received additional service in the Spring 2024 schedule were up 21% in June year-over-year for weekdays, far outpacing the other routes, which grew by 11% year-over-year.