CTA is the best choice for summer events, from neighborhood festivals, concerts and games and getting around to all the city’s beaches, Navy Pier, museums and more
It’s no secret that Chicago is the best big city for summertime fun and travel – with millions of area residents and tourists from all over the world heading out to enjoy Chicago’s iconic lakefront and beaches restaurants, theaters, concerts, sporting events surrounding neighborhoods. When it comes to getting around there’s only one option that’s easy to navigate, access and travel: the CTA.
To ensure the best summertime experience for Chicagoans and visitors, CTA has been hard at work to provide riders with a safe, clean and reliable transit experience:
Providing service 24/7
Every day, the CTA provides as much service as possible with its available workforce. Currently, CTA is providing 95% of scheduled bus service and 85% of scheduled rail service and has greatly reduced long wait times on both trains and buses. Further service improvements are coming as CTA hires more workers to address a nationwide transit worker shortage.
Cleanliness
The warmer months allowed the CTA to step up cleaning measures, including:
- Enhanced station cleaning: Hired more janitors so that dedicated personnel are tending to and cleaning each station multiple times a day.
- Overnight Power Washing: Created dedicated, overnight crews tasked with power washing stations so that each location is washed and scrubbed clean at least once a month.
- Ongoing Station Improvements: Complementing these efforts is our ongoing cyclical maintenance program, ‘Refresh and Renew’ which allocates $6.5M to make improvements at 29 of our rail stations.
Safety
Customer and employee safety is our number one priority. The CTA is a safe system when compared to overall ridership. Currently, we provide roughly 900,000 rides a day – more than the entire population of Seattle – and more than 5 million rides each week, and incidents of crime are very low. That said, one crime is one too many. CTA works closely each day with the Chicago Police Department, which provides law enforcement for CTA and has officers patrolling the system around the clock. Thanks in part to these efforts, violent crime at CTA locations is down 38% month to date and 12% year to date. Overall crime on the CTA system is down 11% year to date.
The CTA is working hard to ensure to make the Summer of 2023 one filled with memories that visitors and Chicagoans will cherish.
For more information on CTA Summer service to Chicago’s beaches, lakefront parks, museums and Navy Pier, click here.
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