Which L stop logs the most entries? The CTA’s station file answers monthly. Read whole — 43,654 station-month rows across 306 months since January 2001 — it puts Clark/Lake first for June 2026: 389,948 entries for the month, ahead of Washington/Wabash and O’Hare Airport, with the ten busiest stations taking 25.8 percent of the month’s 10,846,824 entries across 144 reporting stations. The file’s stranger truths sit further in: a station whose Saturday average beats its weekday average in 214 of its months, an all-time top five owned entirely by one station label, and four station IDs whose rows simply stop.
CTA — Ridership — ’L’ Station Entries — Monthly Day-Type Averages & Totals (t2rn-p8d7), 43,654 rows, one per station per month, January 2001 through June 2026, retrieved September 8, 2026; the whole file was downloaded and every figure recomputed · figures are station entries, per the dataset’s own name — systemwide boardings live in a different CTA file, read in our daily-ledger piece · the CTA is a separate agency publishing on the city’s portalJune 2026, top to bottom
| Station, as filed | June 2026 entries | Avg. weekday |
|---|---|---|
| Clark/Lake | 389,948 | 14,061.0 |
| Washington/Wabash | 329,941 | 11,115.1 |
| O’Hare Airport | 329,178 | 11,265.0 |
| Lake/State | 297,037 | 11,702.2 |
| Addison-North Main | 261,045 | 8,386.5 |
| Washington/Dearborn | 250,005 | 9,041.4 |
| Belmont-North Main | 249,850 | 8,099.4 |
| Roosevelt | 244,728 | 7,846.0 |
| Fullerton | 230,559 | 7,880.8 |
| Chicago/State | 213,054 | 8,381.9 |
At the other end, among stations with entries recorded, Kostner posted 7,642 for the month — about 291 a weekday — with King Drive at 8,875 and Halsted/63rd at 10,513. One row reads zero outright: State/Lake, June 2026, total 0, printed here as the file prints it, with no cause offered. And a label note the file forces: State/Lake (station ID 40260) and Lake/State (ID 41660) are two different stations in this file, two labels, two IDs — both reproduced exactly as filed.
The station where Saturday wins
Across the whole file, 1,274 station-months record a higher Saturday average than weekday average — and Cermak-Chinatown owns 214 of them, the most of any station. It did it again in June 2026: 8,556 entries on an average Saturday against 5,404 on an average weekday. Roosevelt, Addison-North Main, Sedgwick, and Washington/Wabash also ran Saturday-first that month; over the record, Grand/State has done it 150 times and Addison-North Main 147. One caveat travels with every Saturday figure, in the description’s own words: “in cases where weekday service ran past midnight, late evening fares may appear as part of Saturday tallies.” Why any station’s Saturday average outruns its weekday average, the file does not say.
The all-time month belongs to Lake/State — five times over
The biggest single station-month in the record is Lake/State, July 2015: 670,496 entries, averaging 23,812 a weekday. The rest of the all-time top five? Also Lake/State — September, October, and August 2015, then October 2016. One label, five entries at the top of a 43,654-row file, each figure as filed.
June 2001 against June 2026, matched month
For the 137 station labels with entries in both June 2001 and June 2026 — a comparison of the file’s labels across two matched months, of continuing labels only, and not a claim about any station’s physical history — the biggest riser is the label Cermak-Chinatown, from 82,179 monthly entries to 177,552, a bit more than doubled; Grand/Milwaukee roughly tripled from 30,734 to 91,601, and Roosevelt rose from 167,515 to 244,728. The steepest falls: 95th/Dan Ryan from 360,064 to 165,850 — 46 percent of its 2001 June — Jackson/State from 291,083 to 111,547, and Chicago/State from 358,340 to 213,054. The file offers the endpoints; it offers no reasons, and neither do we.
Four station IDs whose rows stop
Four station IDs appear in the file and then stop: Randolph/Wabash, whose rows end with January 2019; Madison/Wabash, ending January 2018; Washington/State, ending January 2009; and Homan, ending July 2001. This page reports last rows, not fates — whatever happened at street level, the file simply carries no later row for any of the four IDs.
- Source: the CTA’s ’L’ Station Entries — Monthly Day-Type Averages & Totals file (t2rn-p8d7): 43,654 rows, one per station per month, January 2001 through June 2026, retrieved September 8, 2026; description quoted verbatim where marked. The CTA is a separate agency.
- Units: monthly figures are the file’s monthtotal column, and day-type averages come from its own average columns; these are station entries, not systemwide boardings, and never mixed with the daily-ledger file’s figures.
- Comparisons: the 2001-vs-2026 read uses June against June, only for stations present in both months with nonzero entries — a survivors’ comparison, stated as such. Zero-total rows are excluded from smallest-station rankings and reported separately, as filed.
- As filed: station names come from the file’s name column (spelled ‘stationame’ in the schema), including the distinct State/Lake and Lake/State labels; no cause is attributed to any rise, fall, zero, or ending.
Computed by KCM Desk from the CTA’s station-entries file, retrieved September 8, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
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