Chicago Bus Route Ridership Daily Totals Since 2001

CTA Ridership - Bus Routes - Daily Totals by Route contains daily passenger counts for Chicago Transit Authority bus routes. Data includes route identifier, date, day type, and total rides, with records dating back to 2001. The dataset is published by the City of Chicago's open data portal.

Use Cases

• Analyze ridership trends over time for specific bus routes using the `route`, `date`, and `rides` columns.
• Compare passenger volumes between weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays/holidays using the `daytype` and `rides` fields.
• Model daily ridership for a given route as a function of date and day type for service planning.
• Identify seasonal or long-term growth/decline patterns in bus usage by aggregating the `rides` column by `date`.

Strengths

• Daily temporal granularity for detailed trend analysis.
• Time series spans over two decades, starting from 2001.
• Includes a categorical `daytype` column for distinguishing service days.

Limitations

• Unknown total row count and dataset size.
• Lacks geographic coordinates or stop-level detail for spatial analysis.
• Sample data is unavailable for preliminary inspection.

Provenance

Source

data.cityofchicago.org

Time Range

From 2001 onward

Freshness

Updated as of March 2026.

Geography

Chicago, Illinois, USA