I checked some of the schedules and they seem much worse than they used to be. Every 12 minutes is fine for maybe the Yellow Line or another suburban route, but it seems that most lines are operating far less frequently, especially important lines like the Brown Line. The Green Line is down to a pitiful 24 minutes on its branches in South Chicago. What happened to make the frequencies so bad?
Government agencies have some of the hardest time hiring in a labor crunch because their payroll budgets are so inflexible. They don't have the latitude to just raise prices to compensate whenever they need to. Combine that with lower ridership from the pandemic and work from home changes and it's not at all surprising that they are struggling to get back to normal.