Chicago Water Taxi (Wendella)
Chicago Water Taxi (Wendella) carried 538,075 boardings in FY2025 at $3.07 per ride and $-3.74 in subsidy per ride. Ten years of NTD data, by mode.
What those two numbers mean
Passengers aboard is passenger miles divided by vehicle miles: how many people are on board on average, at any moment. It is the missing term in cost per ride. A service carrying twenty people per vehicle mile and one carrying half a person can spend the same on fuel and wages and arrive at wildly different costs per passenger.
Average speed is vehicle miles divided by vehicle hours, including every stop and every red light. It is the hidden term in cost per mile, because cost per mile is cost per hour divided by speed. A bus network slowing from 13 mph to 11 becomes a fifth more expensive per mile with no change in wages and no change in service.
By the numbers
By the numbers
FY2025 unless noted. Each figure is computed from what the agency filed with NTD, and set against something to read it by.
Running 52% of its 2019 service for 130% of its 2019 riders. Riders have come back faster than the service has.
The same twelve months of 2019. Through December 2025.
Operating cost less fares, per person in the service area the agency reports. Agencies draw those areas very differently, so this is set against peers.
Revenue hours bought from a private operator or another agency rather than run in-house. Nationally, much of this is paratransit.
U.S. transit: 27% of service hours
A journey with a transfer counts as two rides, because NTD counts each boarding.
The year's boardings divided by 365. Weekdays run higher, weekends lower.
Pay and benefits
Pay and benefits
FY2019. NTD reports totals, not salaries: each figure divides what the agency spent on its own staff by the hours they worked. Service bought from contractors is left out, because a contractor's staff are in neither number.
A year, per full-time-equivalent employee, overtime and paid leave included, benefits not. Part-time hours are counted as a fraction of a job, so they do not pull the average down.
U.S. transit: $74,426.
What one full-time job costs the agency in a year, with pensions, health coverage and payroll taxes. $20 for every hour worked.
U.S. transit: $116,522.
The people driving the agency's vehicles, overtime included, benefits not.
U.S. transit: $66,839.
Hours actually worked, so vacation and sick leave are already out, and overtime is in.
A 40-hour week every week of the year, with no leave at all, is 2,080.
Pensions, health coverage, payroll taxes, and vacation and sick pay, for every dollar of wages. NTD reports pensions and health care as one figure, so they cannot be separated here.
U.S. transit: 81¢. 2017: 3¢.
Liability insurance, claims and settlements, per mile of service. It moves with local law and a few large cases as much as with how safely the agency runs.
U.S. transit: $0.33
Profile
Agency profile
As filed with the National Transit Database.
Contact
- Legal name
- Chicago Water Taxi (Wendella)
- Address
-
400 N Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL 60611 - Website
- www.chicagowatertaxi.com
Organization
- Organization type
- Private-For-Profit Corporation
- Reporter type
- Full Reporter
- Fiscal year ends
- December 31, 2025
- Reporting since
- FY2015
Service area
- Population served
- 69,764 over 89 sq mi
- Density
- 784 people per sq mi
- Urbanized area
- Chicago, IL--IN · 8.67M people
- Vehicles at maximum service
- 3
Services operated
Each mode has its own page, with its own ridership, cost and safety.
Ridership
Ridership
Monthly data through December 2025.
This year against the last five
Same months, stacked on one axis, so seasonality does not read as a trend
Annual boardings
Ten-year series
Every month since 2014
The whole series, unsmoothed
Recovery against 2019
Each month against the same month before the pandemic
Latest month at 86.8% of 2019.
Cost
Cost and subsidy
Dollar figures are shown as reported and again in 2024 dollars.
Cost and subsidy per ride
As reported
In 2024 dollars
The same series with inflation removed
Why cost per ride moved
Indexed to FY2015 = 100, in constant dollars
Cost per ride is the cost of an hour of service divided by the riders carried in that hour. It can only rise for two reasons: service got dearer to produce, or fewer people rode it.
Since FY2016, in constant dollars, an hour of service costs 195% more to run and carries 148% more riders. The rise in cost per ride is all the service getting dearer.
Across all U.S. ferryboat service over the same years, an hour costs 6% more to run and carries 27% fewer riders.
Where the money goes
Operating cost by function
Who pays for it
Federal, state and local funding, 2017 to 2024
Operating and capital money together, in the dollars of each year. Fares are not in this file — FTA took them out of the funding series in 2022 — so "directly generated" here means advertising, concessions, park and ride and taxes the agency levies itself. The farebox is charted above.
Capital
Capital spending
What was spent on building, rebuilding and replacing, shown beside the cost of running the service rather than folded into it.
Capital spending, 2019 to 2020
In 2024 dollars, so the years can be compared. This is the series the estimate above is built from.
Operating and capital, per ride
Stacked, but counted separately. The two are different kinds of number.
Who pays for what
FY2025. Running the service and building it are funded by different governments.
| Spending | Total | Federal | State | Local | Fares and own revenue |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| operating | $1.83M | 0% | 0% | 0% | 100% |
| capital | $0 | — | — | — | — |
Fares offset the cost of running the service. They do not meaningfully offset capital, which is why subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays one.
What these capital figures are not
- Spending is not the same as cost
- NTD reports what an agency spent on capital in a year, not what its capital cost it that year. Those differ: a system opened in 1904 spends almost nothing on tunnels while consuming an enormous inherited asset every day, and an agency that bought a fleet last year spent a fortune once and will spend nothing for a decade.
- Vehicles can be depreciated. Everything else cannot.
- FTA's capital series runs from 1992, which covers a bus fleet's working life more than twice over, so averaging rolling-stock spending across one replacement cycle gives a defensible figure for what the fleet costs each year. Track, tunnels, bridges and stations last forty to a hundred years or more. Thirty-three years of spending on those measures recent investment policy, not consumption, so no figure is published for them.
- The vehicle figure is an estimate
- Cost per ride including vehicles is arithmetic on published spending rather than a published number, and it assumes the agency has been replacing vehicles at roughly the rate it wears them out. Each agency's page says how far that assumption holds for it. It covers vehicles only: no track, no tunnels, no stations.
- Year-by-year capital is lumpy
- Capital arrives in bursts. A single year of it says more about where an agency sits in its replacement cycle than about the cost of carrying a passenger, which is why the per-ride averages here run across every year available.
- Fares do not pay for it
- Fare revenue offsets operating cost. It does not meaningfully offset capital, which is funded almost entirely by government. Subsidy per ride on this site is an operating figure and stays that way.
Capital spending by year and use
| Year | Guideway | Stations | Vehicles | Maintenance buildings | Fare collection | Other | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 2024 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| 2023 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
Peers
Compared with similar systems
2 agencies serve an urbanized area of similar size, carry a similar number of riders, and run ferryboat as their main service.
Cost per ride against peers
This agency in blue, peer median dashed
Rides per resident against peers
How much the place uses what it has
Peer detail
| Agency | Urbanized area | Population | Boardings | Rides / resident | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chicago Water Taxi (Wendella) this agency | Chicago, IL--IN | 8.67M | 538.1K | 7.71 | $3.07 | $-3.74 | 221.6% |
| North Carolina Non-UZA | 4.51M | 1.3M | — | $40.61 | $38.83 | 4.4% | |
| California Non-UZA | 4.36M | 180.7K | — | $6.45 | $2.82 | 56.3% | |
| Peer median (2 agencies) | — | $23.53 | $20.82 | 30.3% | |||
By mode
By mode
Each service this agency runs, for FY2025. Directly operated and purchased service are summed.
Boardings by mode
Annual, stacked
Cost per ride by mode
FY2025
Mode detail, FY2025
| Mode | Service | Boardings | Passenger miles | Revenue hours | Operating cost | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferryboat | Directly operated | 538,075 | 1,016,961 | 5,993 | $1,653,866 | $3.07 | $-3.74 | 221.6% | Detail → |
Safety
Safety
Collisions, fires, derailments and security events reported to NTD. Only complete years are shown.
Events by year
All event types, all modes
Events per 100 million revenue miles
Against the U.S. rate for the same mix of service
The dashed line is not the national average. It is what the national rate would be for this agency's own service: each mode it runs, charged at that mode's U.S. rate for the year, in proportion to its miles. Rates differ tenfold between modes, so a railway read against a national figure made mostly of buses and vans would look dangerous for running rail.
Miles rather than boardings, because this series covers 2020, when service kept running and riders did not come. And sitting above the line is as likely to mean careful reporting as dangerous operation.
The longer record, 2016 to 2024
FTA's threshold-adjusted time series, which reaches back further than the incident file and is built to be compared across years
NTD's reporting threshold changed in 2010, 2015 and 2023. FTA publishes this series adjusted for those changes so the years can be read against each other; the unadjusted counts jump by a third in 2015 on the rule change alone.
Fleet
Fleet, workforce and reliability
How old the vehicles are, how many people run them, and how far they get between breakdowns.
Workforce by mode, FY2025
| Mode | Service | Hours | Operators | Vehicle maintenance | Administration | All staff |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferryboat | Directly operated | Full Time | 48 | 5 | 1 | 54 |
| Ferryboat | Directly operated | Part Time | — | — | — | 1 |
Staff, 2017 to 2024
The agency's own employees on operations. Staff on capital projects and a contractor's staff are not counted.
How the fleet has aged, 2017 to 2024
Average vehicle age, weighted across every mode the agency runs
A rising line is not automatically bad and a falling one is not automatically good: a fleet gets younger the year an agency takes delivery, and older every year it does not. What the shape shows is whether replacement is steady or comes in bursts. The table below says how many vehicles are actually past the life FTA expects of them.
Vehicles, and how many are accessible
Active revenue vehicles against those meeting the ADA standard
Fleet age
FTA's default useful life benchmark for each class, from the Transit Asset Management rule
| Vehicle type | Count | Average age | FTA benchmark | Past FTA benchmark | Past own benchmark |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferryboat | 3 | 21.33 yrs | 42 yrs |
|
Miles between failures
Revenue miles divided by mechanical failures. Higher is better.
NTD counts a failure as major when it stops the vehicle finishing its trip.
Reliability by mode
| Mode | Service | Revenue miles | Major failures | All failures | Miles between failures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferryboat | Directly operated | 22,904 | 0 | 0 | — |
Fuel and energy
What the fleet burned in FY2025.
Miles by fuel
Comparing miles avoids any energy-equivalence assumption
Fuel by mode
| Mode | Diesel (gal) | Gasoline (gal) | CNG (gal eq.) | Electric (kWh) | Diesel mpg | Zero-emission |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ferryboat | 22,610 | — | — | 0 | 1.01 | 0% |
All years
Full annual series
Every year this agency reported, as published.
| Year | Boardings | Passenger miles | Revenue miles | Revenue hours | Operating cost | Fares | Cost / ride | Subsidy / ride | Fare recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 538,075 | 1,016,961 | 22,904 | 5,993 | $1,653,866 | $3,664,145 | $3.07 | $-3.74 | 221.6% |
| 2024 | 384,914 | 691,607 | 25,701 | 7,628 | $1,195,055 | $2,213,502 | $3.10 | $-2.65 | 185.2% |
| 2023 | 14,850 | 26,730 | 1,916 | 528 | $124,545 | $59,909 | $8.39 | $4.35 | 48.1% |
| 2022 | 16,936 | 30,484 | 600 | 300 | $211,296 | $142,473 | $12.48 | $4.06 | 67.4% |
| 2021 | 10,763 | 20,281 | 673 | 333 | $225,243 | $193,793 | $20.93 | $2.92 | 86% |
| 2020 | 14,924 | 26,565 | 1,458 | 318 | $193,026 | $24,023 | $12.93 | $11.32 | 12.4% |
| 2019 | 412,966 | 782,406 | 44,378 | 11,182 | $1,263,641 | $1,589,761 | $3.06 | $-0.79 | 125.8% |
| 2018 | 403,032 | 743,343 | 45,397 | 11,366 | $1,207,070 | $1,519,533 | $2.99 | $-0.78 | 125.9% |
| 2017 | 400,896 | 633,093 | 41,901 | 10,772 | $1,064,991 | $1,359,692 | $2.66 | $-0.74 | 127.7% |
| 2016 | 414,841 | 738,417 | 51,791 | 11,456 | $800,258 | $1,224,886 | $1.93 | $-1.02 | 153.1% |
| 2015 | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — | — |