The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) broke ground early in the morning on April 1st as Stage 3 of the Red Line Louder Project (RLLP) began, the CTA’s newest project as part of its community-receptive initiatives.
Starting in November of 2025, faculty and administrators at the Illinois Institute of Technology began sending repeated complaints to CTA customer channels about the lack of disturbance caused by the Green Line, which directly runs through Illinois Tech’s Mies campus, throughout the day.
“It’s great that [the McCormick Tribune Campus Center] already shakes as the Green Line passes over, but frankly, it just doesn’t happen enough,” an anonymous faculty member shared. “If your campus center doesn’t feel like a construction site, I mean, how could you say you support a good student life?”
On January 15th, 2026, then-President, now Supreme Leader, Raj Echambadi of Illinois Tech, formally sent a letter of complaint to the CTA. Echambadi argued that Illinois Tech’s students still managed to sleep and weren’t losing their hearing fast enough, which was a problem that the CTA needed to rectify in order for university functions to continue. In light of the CTA’s renewed initiative to become more responsive to Chicago communities, the CTA obliged and green-lighted a new construction project.
After weeks of intense debate and funding discussions, CTA planners and members of the community voted to reroute the CTA’s Red Line, which boasted over 100,000 riders per weekday in 2024, through Illinois Tech. The Red Line’s longer trains and increased traffic were deemed viable candidates to rectify the lack of noise Illinois Tech was experiencing from CTA operations. The project involves construction of new rails that lead from the Red Line’s Cermak-Chinatown station over to the Green Line’s elevated rail on State Street, new signs at the CTA’s 35th-Bronzeville-IIT station for Red Line service and transfer, new rails that lead off of the State Street elevated rail back onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, and a process to convert the Red Line’s Sox-35th station into a community garden. The one billion dollar project is to be funded by a temporary fare increase on the Brown Line and a tuition hike at Illinois Tech, whose Supreme Leader stated in an online post on LinkedIn, would “definitely one-hundred percent be reversed once funding is done, totally, trust guys” in the hours after construction began.
Chicago residents around the city have had a mixed reaction to the project.
“I don’t get why the Brown Line has to get the fare increase,” regular Brown Line rider Charlie Brown shared over the phone. “Why not the Orange Line? My mother-in-law regularly takes that one.” When asked whether the Red or Green lines were viable picks for the fare increase, Brown stated that the idea was preposterous, since, according to Brown, neither the Red nor the Green lines had anything to do with the project.
“Personally, I think this is a great call,” Cubs fan Jared Johnson says. “Not for any specific reason related to the Rate Field being less accessible. Obviously.”
Many students at Illinois Tech have also submitted complaints, but they have been dismissed due to lack of relevance.
The RLLP is only one of many new construction projects the CTA has initiated, standing alongside a new Azure Line that will lead straight into Lake Michigan and terminate in open water, a Northside Red Line extension to link up with the Purple Line at its South Boulevard station, and a new bus route that goes through every street, for the tourists.