The L’s Best Year Was 2015, Not 2019. A Quarter Century Of Ridership In Three Charts.

Ask when the L emptied out and you’ll hear one word: COVID. The city’s own turnstile data, with daily counts for every station that add up to 3.8 billion entries since 2001, tells a more interesting story. The L’s best year was 2015, and it had already given back a tenth of its riders by the time the pandemic arrived. What happened next, and what’s happening now, reshuffled which corners of Chicago actually use the train and shifted the system’s center of gravity away from the weekday commute. This article uses three charts to trace twenty-five years of change.

See the whole system breathe: The Living L draws every line and station from the city’s coordinates, trains in motion, stations sized by real ridership.

Table of Contents

How L ridership changed over the full period

All figures are KCM Desk computations from the CTA’s daily station-entry dataset (City of Chicago Data Portal), pulled July 17, 2026. Hover over any point or bar for exact numbers.

Look up your own stop: We turned this dataset into an interactive station lookup. It draws every station’s quarter-century on demand.

From 152 million entries in 2001, ridership climbed for a decade and a half to the 198 million peak of 2015. The RTA celebrated at the time that record year. Then came the slide nobody remembers: entries fell to 179.1 million by 2019, a -10% drop over four years when the economy was booming, gas was cheap, and ride-hailing scaled up across the city. The data can’t assign blame among Uber, service levels, and fare changes, but the timing is clear. The L’s decline began in 2016, not 2020. The pandemic then brought a cliff: -65% in a single year. Recovery has now run five straight years, reaching 117.5 million entries in 2025. That is 66% of 2019 and 59% of the 2015 peak.

How station ridership shifted across Chicago

Zoom from the system to the stations, and the quarter-century looks less like decline than redistribution. We compared average weekday entries in 2001 and 2025 at the 124 stations that operated normally in both years. Stations closed or rebuilt during the period sit out this comparison rather than distort it. That includes the four Red-Purple Modernization stations that reopened only this past July and the Forest Park branch rebuild zone.

The gainers map the last two decades of development. Grand/Milwaukee in River West more than doubled, from 1,190 to 2,461 weekday entries. Clinton-Lake sits at the edge of Fulton Market, and Cermak-Chinatown went from 2,764 to 4,126. It is the same station our recovery analysis found running above pre-pandemic levels. The Pink Line corridor’s big percentages need an asterisk: those stations got a new, more frequent line in 2006, so their gains combine service change with neighborhood change.

The declines follow two distinct patterns. Downtown subway stops such as Jackson/State, which fell from 11,592 to 4,298, lost their five-day commuters. This is the office story. On the far South Side Red Line, 95th/Dan Ryan fell from 14,239 weekday entries to 5,577, while 69th, 79th, and 87th followed the same trajectory. That pattern tracks the area’s long population decline, the same trend our county analysis shows finally turning around since 2023. Those stations are also where the Red Line extension is betting billions that the trajectory bends.

How weekends became a larger share of L ridership

In 2001, weekends and holidays were 15.1% of all entries, and the L was a machine for getting to work. In 2025, they account for 22.3%, the highest share in the dataset’s history. Some of that change reflects weekday commutes failing to return, while some reflects weekend ridership genuinely growing back faster. The composition has changed. The L now carries a larger share of its riders on weekends than at any point this century. Entries can’t say what anyone was riding toward, but the shift lines up with what our recovery analysis found at the station level, where the fullest-recovered stops serve destination neighborhoods rather than office towers.

Why the ridership trend matters for transit decisions

Illinois overhauled the region’s transit funding and governance last year, and 2026 fares were held flat after the funding bill passed. Those decisions were shaped by the fact that ridership, and the fare revenue it carries, sits at 59% of its peak. Whether the next decade looks like 2004–2015, a long climb, or 2016–2019, a slow leak, is one of the region’s biggest open infrastructure questions. The answer will depend partly on what is in motion now: the rebuilt North Side stations that opened in July, the extension crawling south, service levels, and fares. The turnstiles will keep score, and we’ll keep reading them.

How to read the station-entry data

These are station entries. Transfers inside the system aren’t counted, which is why the CTA’s celebrated 2015 figure of 241.7 million rides is bigger than the 198 million entries here. The figures describe the same peak year but use two different measures. Stations that opened after 2001 (Morgan, Cermak-McCormick Place, Damen-Lake) aren’t in the 25-year comparison because they have no 2001 baseline. Construction exclusions are listed above. Field definitions come from the dataset’s published documentation, and the analysis script is committed alongside this article’s data.

Sources and data for this analysis

City of Chicago Data Portal provides CTA L station entries and daily totals from 2001 through May 31, 2026. Annual figures use complete years 2001–2025; the data were pulled July 17, 2026.
RTA identifies 2015 as CTA rail’s record year and provides an external check on the peak.
Block Club Chicago documents the RPM station closures (2021) and reopening (July 20, 2025), which are the basis for excluding those stations.

Computed by KCM Desk as of July 17, 2026. Annual figures update each January; we’ll extend the arc then. If you spot an error, Corrections come first.

The L’s Best Year Was 2015, Not 2019. A Quarter Century of Ridership in Three Charts.