Introduction

This set of charts uses the City of Chicago’s open data to explore trends in the Chicago ridehail system. To make the analysis more tractable, it uses the trips on the first Thursday of each month as representative of the whole month. For information about the data sets, see Dashboards home page.

This month at a glance

Table 1 lists headline numbers for June 2026, together with comparisons to last month and to a year earlier.

Table 1: Chicago ridehail drivers at a glance

Metric	Value	vs last month	vs a year ago
Average trips per day	240,398	-3.1%	-5.7%
Active drivers	58,357	-0.7%	-4.3%
Drivers full time (>= 240 trips)	16.3%	-2.2 pp	-0.5 pp
Trips by full-time drivers	48.0%	-4.0 pp	-1.3 pp
Driver starts	7,838	-2.6%	-12.1%
Driver quits	8,399	-2.6%	-7.2%

Of the 60,993 drivers active in June 2025, an estimated 55.4% are now inactive, in June 2026.

Trip volume

Figure 1 shows two calculations of daily ridehail trips in Chicago: one calculated from the Trips data set (a single sampled weekday, the first Thursday of each month), and one calculated from the Drivers data set (total monthly trips divided by days in the month).

250,000 trips per day is equivalent to just over 10,000 per hour, or about 175 per minute.

Figure 1: Average number of daily trips in each month, from two independent data sets

Active drivers

Figure 2 shows the total number of active drivers each month (drivers who have driven at least one trip).

Regarding the outliers in Q2 2018, there is a note on the City of Chicago web site:

[S]ome vehicle records for Q2 2018 (April-June) were reported for the quarter as a whole, rather than for individual months. For purposes of this dataset, those records have been assigned to 2018-06 (June). Therefore, some caution in interpreting this month and the quarter as a whole is advised.

Figure 2: Active TNC drivers in each month

Total fares

Figure 3 shows an estimate of the total fares paid by ridehail passengers (excluding tips). The estimate is obtained by calculating the total fares paid on the first Thursday of the month, and then using the Drivers data set to scale that to a monthly total.

The series starts in November 2018, when per-trip fare reporting began.

Figure 3: Estimated average daily passenger fares in each month, in nominal dollars

Trip characteristics

Figure 4 shows how average trip distance, duration, fare, and fare per mile have changed over time, calculated from the first-Thursday-of-month sample in the Trips data set. Compare to the equivalent Toronto chart, which covers the same four characteristics (in km rather than miles) plus wait time, cancellation rate, and utilization rate, none of which are available in the Chicago data set.

Figure 4: A selection of ridehail characteristics over time, from the Trips data set.

Supply and demand

Figure 5 shows the long-term trend of supply (active drivers) and demand (trips), as a ratio of monthly trips per active driver.

Figure 5: Monthly trips per active driver

Supply and demand: hour of the day

Figure 6 shows how demand varies over the course of the day, for two months of the current year.

The corresponding chart for Toronto shows the supply of drivers by hour of day as well: this data is not available for Chicago.

Figure 6: Trips by hour of day, on the sampled day of two months

Cancellations

The Chicago Trips data set records only completed trips: a request that the passenger or the driver cancels never appears. There is therefore no Chicago equivalent of the Toronto cancellation charts, which are built from the cancellation counts the City of Toronto publishes for each vehicle-hour.

Fleet efficiency

Figure 7 ranks every active driver by the number of trips they completed in the month, from most to least, and traces the cumulative share of all trips that they account for.

Figure 7: The cumulative percentage of trips completed by a given number of drivers, ranked from busiest to quietest.

The busiest third of drivers accounted for 74% of all trips in June 2026. The concentration is real but slightly less extreme than Toronto’s.

Fares

Figure 8 shows the mean and median passenger fare in each month, calculated from the individual trips on the sampled day. The City rounds each fare to the nearest $2.50, which is why the median moves in steps rather than smoothly.

Figure 8: Mean and median passenger fare in each month, in nominal dollars

Fare distribution

Figure 9 compares the shape of the fare distribution in the same month of each year.

Additional charges

Fares include additional charges (tolls and so on) that are listed separately in the data set. Figure 10 shows how these have changed over time. The City of Toronto reports a single fare total with no such breakdown, so there is no Toronto equivalent of this section.