The story
History
The CTA was formed through the Metropolitan Transportation Act passed by the Illinois General Assembly on April 12, 1945. It started operations on October 1, 1947, upon the purchase and combination of the transportation assets of the Chicago Rapid Transit Company and the Chicago Surface Lines streetcar system. Over the next few years CTA modernized the "L", replacing wooden cars with new steel ones and closing lightly used branch lines and stations, many of which had been spaced only a quarter-mile apart.
In 1952, CTA purchased the assets of the Chicago Motor Coach Company, which was under the control of Yellow Cab Company founder John D. Hertz, resulting in a fully unified system. By 1960, the CTA replaced all of its streetcars with buses. The CTA system for decades also included a large number of trolley bus routes, and in the 1950s had one of the largest such networks in the country, but trolley bus service was phased out between the late 1960s and 1973.
On March 20, 2026, CTA sued the Trump administration for freezing $3.1 billion in rapid transit rail project funding. The funding was previously approved for upgrading and expansion of the Chicago "L"
On September 1, 2026, CTA's parent agency, the former Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), was replaced by the new Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA).
2023 MCA installation
In 2023, as part of an exhibition titled "Forecast Form: Art during the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990s-Today" by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the CTA temporarily installed 20 copies of Felix Gonzalez-Torres' Untitled (1995) at "L" stops across Chicago.
From Wikipedia’s article on Chicago Transit Authority, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5