Pace History & Facts

Pace is governed by a 13 member Board of Directors comprised of current and former suburban mayors and the Commissioner of the Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities for the City of Chicago.

For its first few years, Pace focused on the unification efforts and renewing its bus garages and fleet, but rapid population and employment growth in the suburbs led to multiple strategic planning and long range planning efforts that took place in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. In 2002, Pace launched the biggest transit initiative ever proposed for Chicago's suburbs, called Vision 2020: Blueprint for the Future. The innovative plan is creating a faster network that is more convenient and simpler to understand.

Accessibility has always been a hallmark of Pace service. Pace provided ''Section 504'' service to people with disabilities several years before this type of service was required by the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2006, Pace had established itself as a leader in providing efficient, quality service to people with disabilities, and the Illinois legislature designated that Pace would assume responsibility for ADA paratransit in Chicago from the CTA. The move made Pace the largest providers of paratransit service in the United States.

Pace established one of the largest vanpool programs in the nation and became the regional ridesharing administrator for Northeastern Illinois in 2006, bringing coordination of carpools into the program. PaceRideShare.com is the outlet for these services, offering commuters the ability to create a profile and gather information on others with similar travel patterns in order to form carpools or vanpools.

Photo Credit: Ballogg - Ballogg Photography of Chicago