CTA Passenger Counts Data

This is data I received from the Chicago Transit Authority through an Illinois FOIA request. It covers bus stop and passenger load data for all buses in the CTA system. It does not include rail data. Contact me Steven Lucy slucy@parallactic.com.

Data is as-is: The CTA included a letter with this data emphasizing that they do not know if this data is any good. It is gathered from automated counters and there may be malfunctions or obviously spurious data. It has not been vetted or reviewed by the CTA, just provided as-is under FOIA.

Big files: do not open these in a spreadsheet program, they are way too big. You will need to load them into a database.

A note about dates: Dates and times in this data require some careful attention. As far as I can tell, "survey date" means the date the whole bus trip is scheduled for, even if the trip spans a midnight. So a bus may stop on 1/15/2015 at 11:59pm and then next stop at 12:01am would still be listed as 1/15/2015 even though the stop actually happened on 1/16/2015. Similarly a bus run scheduled for 1/16/2015 at 12:05am that starts 10 minutes early due to operational reasons may show a stop at 11:55pm but still show the 1/16/2015 date, even though that stop actually happened on 1/15/2015. This has to be dealt with in any analysis of the data.

I received two files from the CTA under different FOIA requests, in slightly different formats. Here they are: