Civic Worth
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Civic Worth is in beta. It’s assembled automatically from public records and can be wrong. Check the official source before you rely on it, and tell us what’s wrong, or see what we’ve corrected.

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.