A comprehensive longitudinal study published this week by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has concluded that the average Chicago worker who commutes via the CTA Brown Line will spend approximately 4.7 years of their life waiting on platforms, a figure that researchers say accounts for scheduled delays, unscheduled delays, “delays caused by other delays,” and what the study terms “phantom trains”—trains that appear on the tracker app but never actually arrive.

The study, which tracked 2,300 Brown Line commuters over a five-year period using GPS data, CTA records, and what lead researcher Dr. Angela Park described as “an alarming number of diary entries from participants that we did not ask for,” is the first to calculate the cumulative lifetime cost of waiting for a single CTA line.

“We expected it to be bad,” Dr. Park said at a press event at the Kellogg campus in Evanston. “We did not expect to discover that waiting for the Brown Line is, statistically, a more time-consuming life activity than showering, cooking dinner, or being on hold with Comcast, which was previously believed to be the upper bound of human waiting.”

The 4.7-year figure is an average. Commuters who board at the line’s northern terminal stations, such as Kimball and Kedzie, logged significantly higher wait times due to what the study calls “first-mile despair”—the experience of watching a full train pass without stopping because it reached capacity three stops ago. Those commuters averaged 5.3 years of cumulative waiting, a figure that rises to 5.9 years if winters are “particularly vindictive.”

The economic implications are substantial. The study estimates that Brown Line wait time costs Chicago’s economy approximately $340 million annually in lost productivity, with an additional $28 million attributed to “rage-related consumer spending”—impulse purchases made on phones while waiting, including but not limited to noise-canceling headphones, moving boxes, and one-way flights to cities with functional public transit.

CTA spokesperson Linda Marcos responded to the study by noting that the Brown Line “provides reliable service to over 100,000 riders daily” and that “wait times are within our published service standards.” When asked about the 4.7-year figure specifically, Marcos paused for several seconds before saying, “That does seem like a lot.”

The study has resonated with commuters, many of whom have taken to social media to share their own Brown Line wait stories. One viral post, from a user claiming to have commuted from Francisco to the Loop for twelve years, read simply: “4.7 years? That’s just this winter.”

Dr. Park said the research team plans to conduct similar studies for other CTA lines, though she noted that the Red Line study has been delayed because “the data is too depressing to analyze all at once.” She added that the Brown Line remains, despite everything, “one of the most scenic commuter rail experiences in the country,” a compliment she delivered with what attendees described as “genuine warmth undermined by visible exhaustion.”