The CTA will use its share of a $1.5 billion mass transit bailout from Springfield to provide 24-hour service on the Orange Line to Midway Airport and deliver more frequent and cleaner bus and rail service, acting CTA President Nora Leerhsen said Thursday.
“We’re going to look to expand our Orange Line service to 24-hour service overnight. We’ve been looking at that for a long time, hoping to expand our Orange Line service … to reach Midway Airport [at all hours] and continue to make the CTA and Chicago the economic engine that it is,” Leerhsen told the Sun-Times.
Leerhsen’s ambitious plan also would expand — from 20 to 30 routes — the so-called Frequent Bus Network that provides service “every 10 minutes or better” between 6 a.m. and 9 p.m.
Shorter “headways,” the interval between trains or buses on a given line or route, are planned, as are more “deep cleanings” of CTA buses and rail stations in order to chip away at a sanitation issue that has slowed the CTA’s post-pandemic recovery and discouraged riders from returning to the system.
The $1.5 billion bailout has been portrayed as transformational for Chicago area mass transit. On Thursday, Leerhsen tried to put some meat on the bone.
Leerhsen said Orange Line expansion is “one of the first steps we’re going to take in 2026 with this additional money, as well as looking to increase frequency across the rail service — ultimately to more headways close to eight minutes throughout the entire day as we move into 2026 and beyond.”
Leerhsen said the agency also plans a 50% increase in “deep cleans” of buses and rail stations.
“CTA was the only agency in Springfield that put together a budget to show what we would do if we got additional funding beyond the bare minimum,” she said. “For this reason, I had faith that the legislators knew that we were ready to expand and to grow.”
Homicides, shootings and most other categories of violent crime have dropped precipitously across Chicago, but crime on the CTA has increased by nearly 10%.
Downtown Ald. Brendan Reilly (42nd) vented his anger about that surge this week when Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling and his top brass appeared before the Budget Committee to defend the Chicago Police Department’s $2.1 billion budget.
Reilly said it’s not just rampant smoking on trains that infuriates CTA riders. It’s riders “smoking marijuana and smoking crack and dealing drugs” on CTA trains, often after evading fares.
Snelling said a new Strategic Decision Support Center dedicated to solving CTA crime has helped police arrest groups of fare jumpers who sometimes ride the system all night preying on passengers.
But the superintendent acknowledged that more needs to be done — beyond the $30 million set aside in the city budget for moonlighting cops — and that Leerhsen is “very concerned” about it. Leerhsen said that improving security is “very personal to me” as someone who is “on the system constantly” and has ridden the CTA over 500 times in the last year.
That, in part, is why she ordered 40 “anti-smoking missions” that have resulted in hundreds of citations.
The mass transit bailout includes security reforms, calling for the Cook County sheriff to form a task force and create a security program. Leerhsen isn’t waiting.
She said the CTA is starting to see positive results from her decision in the spring to assign security guards to “every single Red Line station every single night, seven days a week” from Chinatown to 95th Street.
She pointed to a 30% percent reduction in crime on the Blue Line over the last year and a 14% decline on the Red Line.
New money for transit is expected to start flowing in the last half of 2026, months after the bill is expected to go into effect on June 1, 2026. Although the one-year freeze on mass transit fares does not take effect until June 1, plans for a 10% CTA fare hike are on hold at the request of legislative leaders who crafted the bailout bill.
Pressure to raise future CTA fares will be further minimized by a reduction in the so-called fare box recovery ratio, the percentage of operating costs paid for by passenger fares. It will be cut in half — from 50% to 25% — until 2029 and to 20% or less after that.
Leerhsen acknowledged that a case can be made for more frequent fare hikes. But she said, “Affordable, reliable service is the reason people come to the CTA. … This is a really transformative level of investment. … It would be appropriate for us to continue to make it the most affordable it can be and continue to expand that service.”
Contributing: David Struett.