CTA frequency, the ‘L’, and step-free stations
How often does service actually come — and which ‘L’ stations can you use with a wheelchair, a stroller, or a bad knee? Every CTA stop is a dot, sized by how many trips serve it each day and colored by the wait between vehicles at peak. Each ‘L’ station is a ring in its line’s color, with a white center where boarding is step-free. Search your address to find your nearest stop, tap any dot or station, or filter the map to step-free stations only.
How to read this map
Each dot is a CTA stop. Its size is the number of scheduled trips serving it on a typical weekday — bigger dots are busier stops. Its color is the peak-frequency band: the typical wait between vehicles during the busiest part of the day, counting every route that serves the stop. A corner served by four bus routes gets a shorter combined wait than any one of those routes alone, which is the honest answer to “how long will I stand here”.
Frequency is what makes transit usable without planning your day around a timetable. CTA holds nearly its whole network to a 30-minute peak headway or better, so Chicago’s map has no true frequency deserts the way Columbus’s does — the story here is the gradient between the very-frequent core and the 16–30 minute edges, and where the ‘L’ does or doesn’t reach.
Step-free is CTA’s own wheelchair_boarding value for the station in its published schedule. It describes how the station is built, not whether a particular elevator is working today — check CTA for current elevator outages before you travel. Stations the feed leaves unmarked are shown as “not stated” rather than as barriers.
We cross-checked the rail layer against the City’s own ‘L’ station list. CTA’s schedule carries 143 stations against the City’s 145: the two extras (State/Lake and Roosevelt/Wabash) aren’t in the current schedule. On step-free status the two sources agree on 138 of 143; all five disagreements are stations the schedule marks accessible and the City’s older list does not (Berwyn, Bryn Mawr, Argyle, Lawrence, Racine — all recently rebuilt). We follow the schedule, because it is the feed CTA keeps current.
Source: CTA’s published GTFS schedule, refreshed on the transit ingest. Frequencies are measured over a single representative weekday from that schedule, so overlapping schedule periods can’t double-count a trip. See methodology for how frequency bands and daily trip counts are computed.