NITA 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.
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. The following report cards were completed under the RTA. NITA will continue to do peer comparisons in the future.
Published in March 2025, the 2023 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.
Also published in March 2025, 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 NITA region – urban bus, heavy rail, commuter rail, suburban bus, and ADA paratransit – a peer group of five agencies has been chosen. Read the 2023 Modal Peer Agency Review.
The following report cards were completed under the RTA. NITA will continue to do peer comparisons in the future.
Published in August 2026, the latest Regional Performance Trends Report for years 2019-2024 found that the COVID-19 pandemic had a significant and negative impact on nearly every performance measure and continued to affect transit performance through 2024, though ridership recovery was significantly trending upward by then and continues to through 2026.
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. But through 2024, regional transit saw improvements in nearly every metric. The Service Boards were able to offer more coverage as bus and train operator hirings increased. Ridership improved as increasing numbers of employers mandated return-to-work policies, which in turn improved fare revenues and reduced the reliance on public funding to cover operating cost gaps.
During this time, 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 Performance Trends Report and find archived reports in the Digital Document Library.
The following surveys were conducted under RTA, but customer feedback will continue to be an important metric for NITA.
An important way to measure how the system is working is by asking our customers. For the past decade, NITA (and its predecessor , the RTA) 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 2025 Customer Service Satisfaction Survey results are now available for
Large-scale customer satisfaction surveys were conducted in 2011, 2013, 2016, and 2022.
