IL: Acting CTA chief lays out priorities after dodging fiscal cliff
When she was named acting president of the Chicago Transit Authority, Nora Leerhsen made a call to the agency’s first female train operator.
Leerhsen, the first woman to lead the CTA, said she thanked Lena Phillips for breaking her own barrier on the rails in 1975. “Just being able to call her and tell her that there was a woman leading CTA was the most powerful aspect,” Leerhsen said.
Phillips, who is now 81 and still a CTA rider, said she wished Leerhsen well. “Being the first for everything, it’s a bit overwhelming at times,” Phillips said.
Leerhsen, 43, has been at the CTA for more than a decade, starting as a legal intern before working her way up to chief of staff under former President Dorval Carter in 2018. A year ago, she took the wheel from Carter, who left the agency under pressure as it faced a looming fiscal crisis and years of rider complaints about bus and train service in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Though Sunday marked a full year at the helm of the agency, Leerhsen has yet to receive a nod from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to take the job on a permanent basis, and it remains unclear if he plans to tap her for the role.
Leerhsen sat down with the Tribune for a wide-ranging interview last week as she wrapped up her first year on the job.
The CTA’s future in many ways looks brighter than it did a year ago. Most notably, state lawmakers last fall approved a massive transit funding package that will raise $1.5 billion for public transportation each year, averting a fiscal catastrophe that could have required the CTA to institute drastic service cuts and lay off thousands of workers.
But though most daily riders would agree that CTA service has improved significantly since post-pandemic lows, many are still frustrated by the frequency and reliability of buses and trains and nuisance issues such as smoking on the system.
The CTA has also found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, which froze nearly $2 billion in federal grant money for the agency’s marquee Red Line Extension project before seizing upon high-profile violence on the system in threats to withhold millions more in federal dollars.
And though CTA ridership has improved since the years immediately following the pandemic, it is still only about 70% of 2019 levels. Missing fares from riders that still haven’t returned to the system were a key contributing factor to the fiscal crisis the CTA almost fell prey to.
New York’s subway system, by contrast, reached 85% of pre-pandemic ridership in 2025.
Leerhsen said she sees matching the primacy of New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority as a goal in Chicago.
“CTA is fascinating in terms of where it sits in a city of our size, where car ownership is much more common than it would be in New York,” she said. “So people arguably have a choice that they don’t have (in New York).”
She said she wants Chicagoans to see the CTA as the same kind of “central, first transportation option” in the way New Yorkers see the subway.
“Getting Chicago to a place where CTA is that,” is a goal, she said.
Improving service
In the immediate post-pandemic years, a shortage of bus and train operators led to overpacked trains, long waits and dreaded “ghost” buses — buses that appeared on transit trackers but never showed up.
According to public data, the CTA has about 470 more bus operators than it did in 2019 and the same number of rail operators as it did that year — 880.
Leerhsen said that rather than staffing, the factors limiting service delivery now are “multidimensional.” She cited passenger disturbances and aging tracks that require trains to travel at crawling speeds in so-called slow zones.
When asked about riders who remain frustrated by the frequency and reliability of bus and train service — and who are clamoring for more in the wake of last year’s transit funding bill — Leerhsen cautioned that most of the new dollars expected to come in later this year will go toward sustaining current service levels.
When it comes to increases in service, she pointed to an announcement she made last fall of planned 24-hour service on the Orange Line to Midway International Airport. Currently, only the CTA’s Blue and Red lines run 24/7.
Leerhsen said there is no date for when overnight Orange Line service will start, although she suggested it won’t happen until after the new transit bill takes effect in the middle of the year.
Leerhsen also said the CTA would use additional transit bill funds to add six more bus routes, which have not yet been selected, to its frequent bus network. The CTA launched that program — which promises that certain bus lines will run every 10 minutes or less throughout the day — in 2025.
Leerhsen said that improvements on the Forest Park branch of the Blue Line — where slow zones now make up almost 82% of the branch, up from almost 63% in 2019 — are also a priority. “It’s not a secret that we have lost riders who feel the Blue Line is too slow,” she said. The agency plans to undertake design work this year to prepare to replace track in the future, according to the CTA.
Leerhsen previously said that in a post-transit funding world, the CTA hopes to decrease the time between trains across the system to eight minutes. That remains a goal, she said.
The CTA would also look to hire more operators above its current level to add additional rail service, Leerhsen said.
Smoking and safety
Leerhsen’s predecessor, Carter, was criticized by transit advocates for infrequently riding the system he led.
Leerhsen said she is a daily CTA rider who commutes on the Green Line.
She points to her personal experience as a rider as something that informs her work leading the mass transit agency, saying she understands the frustrations around issues such as smoking.
Under her leadership, the CTA has tried in various ways to address the problem — although riders can attest that cigarette smoke remains prevalent on trains.
“The environment on large urban transit systems really changed, and you had much lower ridership,” Leerhsen said, when asked why smoking has been so hard to address post-pandemic. “That may be a contributing factor in terms of some behavioral differences.”
Leerhsen also pointed to $1.6 million the agency socked away in its 2026 budget to pay for shelter beds. The money, which is to be administered by the Department of Family and Support Services, will go toward providing accommodations for homeless people who had been sleeping on the CTA and are open to accepting temporary shelter.
When asked if she thought funding shelter beds should be part of the job of a mass transit agency, Leerhsen said, “I think we have to play some role.”
“The reality is that we are a stage upon which these very complex issues play out,” she said. “And it has been important to me as someone that has been here for a while, and has seen an approach that might say that’s not our job, that it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for our riders.”
Violent crime on the CTA is down 10% since 2022, but it remains elevated from pre-pandemic levels. High-profile incidents of violence — including a particularly horrific November incident in which a young woman was set on fire in an apparently random attack on a Blue Line train downtown — have led to renewed attention on CTA safety in recent months.
Some of that attention has come from the Trump administration, which has seized upon the November attack in threats to withhold millions in federal funding from the agency.
In December, the feds demanded the CTA quickly implement a plan to boost security to avoid losing federal dollars. The CTA upped the number of police and privately contracted K-9 security guards on the system. The feds swiftly rejected that plan, calling it “materially deficient,” and gave the agency until the middle of March to submit a new plan or risk losing $50 million.
Leerhsen described the agency’s in-the-works safety plan as “a very specific exchange with a regulatory agency that’s asked for very specific information.”
“What we look at on a daily basis, much more broadly, in our focus on safety and security, is aspects like continued police visibility, and increased police visibility,” she said, pointing to a program launched in January that involves police officers traveling in groups across the CTA, getting on and off trains to interact with passengers.
Privately contracted K-9 security guards and police who volunteer to patrol the system on their days off work alongside members of CPD’s public transportation units, which number about 180 officers.
When asked whether she thought the CTA needed more police officers in that unit — a decision which would be the purview of the Police Department — Leerhsen demurred. “My focus is more on targeted, smart deployment of all the resources we have on our system,” she said.
Leerhsen, an attorney by training who also has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, started working in mass transit after time spent teaching in underserved schools in Compton and Philadelphia.
In a recent speech in front of a packed luncheon hall, Leerhsen said her time as a teacher left her with “that kind of furious energy 20-somethings have, eager to investigate the historical roots of the poverty, segregation, and inequality” she’d witnessed.
When she was appointed to lead the CTA, Leerhsen said, she wanted to stay close to that version of herself.
“Age, and the grind of life, can make us stray from that side of ourselves,” she said.
In her interview, Leerhsen said the “mere existence” of the CTA “is an act of equity, and access, and justice, and opportunity,” referencing the ability of mass transit to connect people with jobs and health care.
Leerhsen also pointed to the agency’s planned Red Line Extension, which will run from 95th Street to 130th Street Officials have defended it as a long-overdue promise to enhance transit access on the Far South Side despite its price tag of $5.75 billion.
But in October, the Trump administration froze $2.1 billion in grant funding awarded mostly for the Red Line Extension, citing the CTA’s diversity requirements for contractors as the reason for the freeze.
Early work on the project started last year. But the CTA risks running out of money to make project payments if the funding freeze isn’t resolved soon.
Last year, the federal government told the Tribune the CTA would need to “eradicate” diversity practices in contracting to unfreeze the funds. Leerhsen last week said the CTA is “being fully responsive” to the federal government and hopes to reach a resolution over the funding issue “soon.”
Leerhsen indicated that a lawsuit over the funding freeze — first floated as a possibility by Mayor Johnson in the fall — was likely off the table at this point. “Our focus is the exchange that we’re in with the federal government,” she said.
An interim title
Though she’s become popular with transit activists and insiders alike, it’s not clear if Johnson plans to appoint Leerhsen, who is one of just a few women leading a major U.S. transit agency, to head the CTA permanently.
Last year, the mayor tried to install his former chief operating officer, John Roberson, to the top job, but never brought Roberson’s appointment to the CTA board for approval, indicating he did not have the votes to do so.
Johnson also claimed last year his office had conducted a “national search” for the top CTA job — something transit advocates and some CTA board members had called for. Records obtained by the Tribune revealed that a national search never happened.
Additional uncertainty abounds because of governance reforms mandated by the mass transit legislation, which takes effect June 1.
The legislation requires increased oversight of the CTA by a new body, the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, and takes away some of the Chicago mayor’s control over the CTA.
The new legislation requires NITA to be involved in any search or appointment process for the CTA president. Still, the mayor could choose to make a permanent appointment before the legislation takes effect. His office did not respond to a request for comment about the appointment.
When asked if her “interim” title had affected the agency’s work — and whether she wanted the top job — Leerhsen said she had “not looked at the position differently than the permanent position.”
“The agency deserves a leader that looks at it that way, given the variety of issues that we face and the opportunities that await us,” she said. “And I will continue to be committed to this job.”
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