Transit access by community area
How many homes can actually reach frequent CTA service — and where can’t they? Citywide the answer is about 90% of homes, within a short walk of a stop running every 15 minutes or better at peak. Half of Chicago’s community areas are above 95%, so most of this map is one shade of green; the story is the fourteen areas that fall below 75%, out at the city’s edges. Search your address or click any area. Looking at individual stops and ‘L’ stations instead? See the CTA frequency map.
How to read this map
Homes near frequent transit is the share of a community area’s homes within about a 400-metre (¼-mile) walk of a CTA stop — bus or ‘L’ — that runs at least every 15 minutes at peak. It’s a resident-centric measure: it counts how many people can reach reliable transit, which is the question that actually matters, rather than how many stops happen to be frequent.
Read the tail, not the ranking. The median community area sits at 95%, and forty of the seventy-seven are above that — so among the dark-green areas the differences are fractions of a percent and mean very little. What does mean something is which areas fall out of the pack: O’Hare (2.6%, almost entirely airport) and Edison Park (4.5%) at the extreme, then Norwood Park (35%), Forest Glen (46%), East Side (51%), Ashburn (58%), Garfield Ridge (59%), Beverly (59%), Jefferson Park (65%), Hegewisch (65%), West Pullman (66%) and Morgan Park (70%). The far Northwest and far Southeast: low-density, bungalow-and-industrial edges where the bus grid thins out.
For scale, the same measure in Columbus is about 22%. Chicago’s bus grid is the difference — which is why so much of this map is a single color, and why the edges are worth looking at.
Frequent-stop share flips to the supply side: of the stops inside a community area, how many run every 15 minutes or better. It’s even less discriminating here — CTA holds nearly its whole network to a 30-minute peak headway or better — so treat it as a check on the first view rather than a ranking. Areas below a minimum stop count show as “insufficient data.”
Distance is straight-line to the nearest stop, so access is slightly overstated wherever the river, the lake, a rail embankment, or an expressway blocks the walk — which in Chicago is often. Read it as “a stop is close by,” not “a stop is a 5-minute walk.”
Source: CTA’s published GTFS schedule and a precomputed parcel-to-nearest-stop accessibility table, refreshed on the transit ingest. Homes are assessed residential parcels from the Cook County Assessor. See methodology for boundary and suppression details.