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Here we dove into searching for the changes in ridership of the CTA overtime. The data on daily and monthly ridership from the Chicago Transit Authority reveals clear patterns in public transportation usage over time, but specifically between 2020 and the present. The analysis highlights how ridership behavior changes over time, reflecting shifts in work habits, urban activity, and commuter confidence in mass transit systems.
This graph depicts the monthly trend in ridership from January 2020 to present. September and October are highlighted in purple and yellow, respectively. This shows a decrease in ridership overall since the pandemic. Before the pandemic, ridership was much increased and has still not returned to pre-covid levels
The overall comparison between 2019 - 2021 and bus rides(the y-axis is in the millions ex: 1.0 = 1 million) by month for each year. Our goal for seasonality was to compare the ridership for CTA over the years and the major effects of extrinsic events. The description of each year in the graph would be the comparison of ridership over the years, and we succeeded in doing so. We can see how there is a dip in 2020, and this can be associated with Covid, because prior bus rides were very high according to 2019. Then 2021 is catching up slowly to prior numbers.
We were curious as to how train vs bus ridership differed, so This graph compares both train and bus ridership through the years. We can see that from 2000-2015 train ridership slightly increased and that bus ridership was stable yet then dropped a bit in 2016. Both bus and train ridership rapidly decreased in 2020, yet slowly increased back up in 2021- present. Yet, overall It looked as though bus ridership has been slightly greater than train ridership through the years.
For this graph, it showcases the difference in average ridership between weekdays and weekends through the years of 2015 - 2024, spanning before COVID hit, during the pandemic, and the aftermath. It allows us to see how there was a heavy decrease in ridership once the pandemic had started in 2020. While it is true that the weekday average has always been greater than the weekend average ridership, this graph demonstrates that the weekend average is closer to recovering from the pandemic decrease than the weekday average is. Yet in the end and as shown in the previous graph, both the weekday and weekend average haven’t fully recovered from before the pandemic struck.
The bar graph and the first line graph show the average totals for each months from 2020-2025 to see how the seasons generally affect total ridership throughout the year. The line graph shows an overall trend with a decrease in ridership during the winter months and a dip in months like April and July, this can be attributed to many factors like school breaks, weather changes
In this graph it shows how much ridership differs between school weeks and non-school weeks. We see that ridership in school weeks is more than 25% larger than ridership in non-school weeks. This shows that there is a strong correlation between school being in session and ridership.
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