Chicagoland Food Pantries & Transit Access

Food access and transit access are the same question for a lot of people: it doesn't matter if a pantry exists if there's no practical way to get there. This project maps food pantries across a 90-mile radius of Chicago and checks each one against real CTA, Metra, and Pace route geometries to flag what's actually reachable on foot from transit — not just what's nearby on a map.

Real data, not a curated sample

The pantry list comes from scraping and deduplicating listings across 156 Illinois cities from a public food-pantry directory, then geocoding every address through the Census Bureau's official batch geocoder (with an OpenStreetMap fallback for the addresses it couldn't resolve). Hours of operation were extracted from freeform description text and normalized into consistent formatting — a messier, more honest process than it sounds, since real-world pantry listings are anything but standardized.

Transit data from the source, not guesswork

CTA, Metra, and Pace route geometries come directly from the RTA's own official ArcGIS feature service — the same authoritative source the agencies themselves use. Clicking any transit line pops up its current fare and a link to its real, live schedule page. Clicking a pantry shows its hours, phone number, and whether it falls within a half-mile walk of any of those lines, calculated as an actual spatial join, not an eyeballed estimate.