Pace Proposes 50% More Suburban Bus Service, With Doubled Saturdays, Tripled Sundays and 15-Minute Frequencies on Key Routes

Pace has unveiled a draft ReVision plan aiming to boost suburban bus service by 50% across its six-county region, featuring doubled Saturdays, tripled Sundays, 15-minute frequencies on major routes, and new airport connections, currently open for public feedback.

Chloe Jenkins

October 22, 2026 · 5 min read

Pace Unveils Ambitious ReVision Plan for Suburban Bus Service

Pace announced the Draft ReVision Plan on October 21, 2026, describing it as a proposal to transform suburban bus service across its six-county region "for the way people travel today." The plan calls for a 50% overall increase in service across three of Pace's service types: Pulse lines, fixed routes, and On Demand service, with more frequent, connected, and accessible options, particularly at night and on weekends.

According to Pace's project materials, the goal is to make transit more useful to more people throughout Northeast Illinois: bus routes would be more frequent, would serve more places, and more buses would run every day and later in the evening. The agency summarizes the rider-facing promise as the ability to "go more places, in less time," which it says would bring Pace in line with its closest peer agencies.

The ReVision effort has been years in the making. Pace launched ReVision in late 2023, and planning work continued through 2024, a period the Chicago Tribune's Marni Pyke notes coincided with a transit funding crisis. During that period, Pace surveyed riders on options such as running buses every 15 to 30 minutes seven days a week and expanding routes across the suburbs. The draft plan released this week is the first comprehensive public proposal to emerge from that process, and it reflects what the surveys suggested riders wanted: service that fits trips beyond the traditional downtown commute.

Pace ReVision: Breaking Down the Proposed Service Boost

The headline "50% increase" is an aggregate figure, and on its own it tells a rider little about what would actually change on the street. Deconstructed into its components, the draft plan proposes improvements in several distinct categories, drawn from Pace's announcement and news reports of the plan:

Proposed components of the Pace ReVision draft plan
Type of Improvement	Specific Change Proposed
Overall service	A 50% overall increase in service across Pulse lines, fixed routes, and On Demand service
Weekday frequency	Buses every 15 minutes on major routes such as Touhy Road, and every 30 minutes on a number of busy corridors
Saturday service	Suburban bus service on Saturdays would double
Sunday service	Sunday service would triple
Evening hours	More buses would run later in the evening, with improved options at night
Route destinations	Routes would be extended to enable more direct travel to destinations including O'Hare and Midway international airports
Geographic coverage	Every county in Pace's service area would receive at least a 45% increase in service, officials said

For a rider, the frequency changes are the most tangible piece. A bus every 15 minutes, as proposed for major routes like Touhy Road, means a missed bus no longer derails a trip, because the wait for the next one is short enough to plan around. The 30-minute headways proposed for a number of busy corridors represent a similar shift from schedules riders must consult to service they can largely show up and use. The weekend changes are proportionally the largest: doubling Saturday service and tripling Sunday service would address what has historically been the sparsest part of the suburban schedule, and Pace's announcement specifically flags nights and weekends as areas where it wants more frequent, connected, and accessible options.

The Daily Herald's report on the plan provides the most specific quantified examples, including the weekend doubling and tripling and the 15- and 30-minute frequency targets. Pace's own materials add an important caveat: "Many routes would change; a few would be removed." That means the network restructuring would not be purely additive for every existing rider, and some riders could see their current route altered or discontinued even as the network as a whole grows.

Pace Executive Director Melvin Gerber—identified in the Daily Herald's report as Metzger—framed the plan as a response to shifting travel behavior: "Travel patterns have changed, and fewer people commute downtown every day. Public input and ridership trends show growing demand for nontraditional transit trips — and when we increase frequency and make our service faster, ridership grows."

Plan Scope: Who and Where is Affected?

The plan covers Pace's entire six-county service area: Cook, DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties. Officials said every county would receive at least a 45% increase in service, a projection intended to spread the benefits broadly rather than concentrate them in a few corridors. That floor matters for riders in the outer suburbs, where service today is thinnest.

Reporting on the plan describes its aim as increasing ridership with more frequent buses and reducing "transit deserts" in far-flung communities from rural McHenry County to south suburban Cook County. The 50% growth target applies across the three service types named in the announcement: fixed routes, Pulse lines on corridors such as the Dempster Street Line and Cermak/22nd Street Line, and On Demand service. Pulse is Pace's arterial rapid-transit product, while On Demand provides flexible, reservation-based trips, so the proposal spans both high-ridership corridors and lower-density areas where traditional fixed routes struggle.

One significant condition attaches to all of this. The Tribune reports that the expansion options surveyed in 2024, including the 15-to-30-minute frequencies and expanded routes, would be contingent on additional revenues. The draft plan describes what Pace wants to build, not a funded, adopted service change.