This piece also runs on the website A City That Works, a newsletter about public policy in the Chicago region.
A strong transit system has long been a major asset for Chicago and its suburbs. 1 The confluence of transit lines in the Loop helped power the growth of downtown, while many of the suburbs emerged around commuter rail lines. Today, the transit access of the Loop is a major selling point as the area’s residential population grows. Chicagoland’s transit system is more complex and less integrated than it should be, but there’s a lot to be proud of. Our region has one of the very best public transportation networks in the country, delivered with a lot less state money than our peers.
Some of that has been a function of a less-involved state government than other regions (we’ll get to that later). But Chicagoland can also manage a relatively decent farebox recovery ratio (the share of revenue generated by system fares, as opposed to subsidies) thanks to Chicago's dense, transit-friendly central business district and relatively low operating costs relative to other regions. 2
Source: CMAP Plan of Action for Regional Transit, p. 71
Yet even with those benefits we’ve left a lot on the table. Schedules, fares and payments aren’t integrated, inhibiting transfers across the system. Even worse, expensive capital projects and funding are often directly in conflict with one another. The CTA’s $5.75 billion Red Line Extension, for example, intersects with Metra and South Shore Line commuter rail routes on the far South Side, but doesn’t actually connect with either service.
Then the pandemic hit. Work-from-home blew a hole in ridership. Even as most companies have returned to the office, three or four days a week of in-person work results in a lot less commuting than the old standard of five. That meant a lot less farebox revenue for the transit agencies – who face a looming projected $770 million fiscal cliff in 2026, when federal COVID-19 subsidies will run out. At the same time, the CTA’s catastrophic dysfunction has highlighted the need for structural fixes.
Now lawmakers in Springfield are trying to figure out how much money the state should pump into the transit system, and what reforms should be required alongside more money. One major idea, raised by a range of stakeholders including environmentalists, public transportation advocates, and the business community, has been to reform the governance structure of the agencies.
I’ll look closer at those potential reforms in the coming days. But I want to start by taking a deeper dive into this governance question. It’s worth understanding the connection between who sits on what board and how well trains and buses run. And getting a clear picture of the size of the problem is an important step to figuring out how aggressive reforms need to be.
The way we run public transit in Chicagoland is really, really weird
There are four agencies overseeing transit in Chicagoland, but only three of them actually provide service. Different boards oversee each of the agencies, with the CTA providing bus and rail service to the city (and also some suburbs), Metra providing train service to the suburbs (and the city), and Pace providing bus service in the suburbs (and also some parts of the city) along with paratransit service. These three entities are nominally overseen by the Regional Transportation Authority, which in theory has control over planning and funding disbursements. In reality, however, because the agencies all answer to different boards, they each fight for funding and operational control.
Board appointment authority for each transit agency. Source: Plan of Action for Regional Transit, CMAP
No one would have designed this structure from scratch. It was an accident, born out of a series of failing business models. As private rail companies started to go bankrupt in Chicago, they were rolled up into the CTA, which was founded in 1947. In the 1960s and 70s, private suburban bus and commuter railroad operators started going under as well. In 1974, the RTA was created by the General Assembly to keep operations going, starting by paying private operators to continue providing service. In 1983, a suburban bus division (Pace) and commuter railroad division (which would become Metra) were set up to consolidate operations.
But as these separate agencies emerged, they were shaped by the politics of the constituencies they served. In particular, there was intense animosity between the city (run by Democrats), and the suburbs (mostly run by Republicans). In 1984, the powerful Republican President of the Senate, James ‘Pate’ Philip, had this to say about the CTA:
The people in the suburbs don't trust the city… They know the city gets more money per capita than [they] get and they just tend to say, "Don't do anything for the city of Chicago" — whether it's the World's Fair, McCormick Place or the CTA… People say, "Hey, don't you dare do anything."
The man was nothing if not consistent. Fifteen years later, when the CTA asked for a greater share of suburban sales tax proceeds (commensurate with the share of suburban service it provided), Philip declared that the idea would go over like a "lead balloon."
There are still tensions between the city and suburbs, but that level of animosity doesn’t exist anymore. Most of the suburbs send Democrats to Springfield as well. But just as the history of railroad and bus bankruptcies gave us the CTA, Metra and Pace, the past bad blood between the city and suburbs helped create a situation where we have separate governing boards for separate agencies focused on the city and suburbs.
Meanwhile, the RTA is hobbled by a requirement that its decisions must be approved by a supermajority (12) of its 16 board members. That means the five voting members from the City, Cook County, or the collar counties can prevent any substantive action. That’s an effective way of protecting the interests of each political unit against the others, but it makes it difficult for the RTA to assert authority over the whole system.
This governance structure creates enormous problems
For almost as long as lawmakers have been fighting for control, experts and researchers have been bemoaning the results. Prior to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s 2024 Plan of Action for Regional Transit study, which I’ve cited extensively above, reports in 1994, 2007, 2013, and 2014 (twice!), all highlighted these governance problems. 3 The 2014 Eno Transportation Center study put it best:
RTA either needs to be strengthened or eliminated. Either one would be preferable to the current situation where RTA is just strong enough to be an obstruction, but too weak to have any real planning influence over the region. The existence of multiple service boards, plus an RTA board, is one layer of governance too many.... Based on the experience of Chicago, it is clear that the middle ground does not work.
Those reports, along with a lot of on-the-ground examples, highlight three big problems with the current governance structure:
1. Competing projects and underused assets
The CTA, Metra and Pace all fund their own capital projects without cooperating or using assets efficiently. Exhibit A here is the Metra Electric District line, which runs from downtown through Hyde Park to the South Suburbs. With electric trains (enabling faster acceleration than diesel locomotives) and closely placed stops, the line used to offer CTA-like service across the South Side.
What happened? The predecessor to Metra took over as part of a funding agreement with the RTA in 1976 and started treating the line like another low-frequency commuter line. And Chicago, hostile to any effort to support transit that didn’t involve the CTA, has been fighting a turf war with Metra ever since, rather than working together to boost service and address the higher operating costs associated with Metra’s onboard conductors.
Integrating the Metra Electric into the CTA network would have huge benefits for transit access on the South Side. Source: Vero Ramos Kuzuhara
If Metra and the CTA weren’t caught in an insane turf battle here, we could turn the Metra Electric (or at least the parts of it running through the city), back into a high frequency train line. In the process, we could get the equivalent of another CTA line linking downtown, McCormick Place, the growing South Lakefront, Hyde Park (including the new Obama Presidential Center) and the far South Side at minimal cost.
2. Disconnected fare payments and service
We talk about separate transit agencies serving the city and suburbs, but transit users just want to get from point A to point B. In 2023, more than 40 percent of Pace rides included a transfer to or from the CTA. The transit agencies themselves don’t even start or stop at the Chicago’s boundaries: CTA buses running outside of Chicago provide a third of all suburban bus service, and there are more Metra Stations than CTA rail stations on Chicago’s South Side. But in the current operating model, CTA, Metra and Pace are actively hostile to working together.
The most glaring deficiency is payments. You still can’t transfer between Metra, CTA, and Pace without paying twice. Transfers are the lifeblood of a functioning multi-modal system (think last-mile Pace service taking you from a Metra station to a job in the Collar Counties, or CTA integration with Metra trains arriving downtown). You can’t even pay the same way – good luck handing your Ventra card (CTA/Pace) to a Metra conductor. (You can pay your Metra fare using the Ventra app.) Rich Miller at Capitol Fax points out that that’s something the RTA was supposed to fix in 2015, but never delivered on.
Routes and timetables are also less coordinated than they should be. Back in 2006, the CTA revamped its bus routes on the West Side to improve service quality. Pace cried foul because it was afraid the changes would hurt service on its lines, and asked the RTA to step in. The RTA asked the two agencies to play nice, was rebuffed by the CTA, and promptly gave up. There has been gradual progress over the years, but the service boards continue to view each other as competitors, instead of transfer partners.
In 2018, Streetsblog's John Greenfield cataloged a range of service conflicts between the agencies, including a reticence on the part of CTA and Metra to cooperate in areas where the two systems have nearby stations, like Oak Park and Evanston. But the most egregious recent problems have again been on the South Side. In 2019, Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced a South Cook Fair Transit Pilot to match Metra fares to CTA ones and increase service on the Metra Electric and Rock Island District lines. But, under then-mayor Lori Lightfoot, the City of Chicago refused to play ball, citing fears that it would shift passengers from the CTA over to Metra service. So while the County funded the pilot on Metra (and offered to reimburse the CTA for lost ridership), riders couldn’t benefit from free or reduced transfers between Metra and the CTA.
It's a shame that the city didn’t cooperate. But it’s easy to see how these problems emerge from our governance structure—if ridership had leaked from the CTA to Metra, that would serve as a political win for the County (a faster recovery for Metra), and a problem for City Hall (a bigger financial hole for the CTA to fill).
Theoretically, the RTA is supposed to manage service coordination across the various branches. When the transit agencies last faced a fiscal reckoning during the 2008 recession, the Illinois General Assembly pushed through a prior set of reforms. Those changes gave the RTA control over service coordination and capital budgets. They also gave the RTA authority to withhold funding from the service boards, and even impose budgets on the CTA, Metra, and Pace if they didn’t comply with the RTA’s Strategic Plan.
But the RTA did nothing of the sort. Why not? Well, as Thomas Bamonte over at the Metropolitan Planning Council notes, the reforms didn’t fix the RTA’s supermajority voting requirement. That means that the City, Cook County, and Collar Counties can all block efforts to withhold funds from 'their' transit agency. And because the RTA doesn’t actually operate transit service, and has long deferred to service boards, it’s not clear that it would have the capability to assert control even if it wanted to.
3. Less money from Springfield and Washington
The four transit agencies spend a lot of time asking Springfield for money, and they have some justification for doing so. But since they can’t manage to sing from the same hymn sheet, they end up with a lot less political heft than they otherwise would. Collectively, the RTA's service area (Cook plus the collar counties) accounted for 66 percent of the state’s population as of the 2020 Census. No political coalition is perfect, but that should translate into enough legislators to award the region real political clout in Springfield.
But instead of one winning coalition, divisions between the service boards create two losing ones. When the CTA is out competing for capital funding against Metra, the only elected officials likely to care are Chicago’s legislative delegation, which accounts for 21 percent of the state’s population. Metra and Pace can’t go it alone either – suburban Cook and the collar Counties account for less 45 percent of the state’s population. Legislators in suburbs are likely to be less committed to public transit than legislators in the city. Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that we get less state funding than other regions.
A similar dynamic applies when it comes to Washington, D.C. Each agency applies independently for Federal New Starts grants, meaning that Chicago transit systems are competing directly with other Chicago transit systems. That’s the opposite of what the federal government would like to see. The Federal Transit Administration (and federal law) stresses that local planning efforts must be “continuing, cooperative and comprehensive.”
Unsurprisingly, our performance attracting federal funding is nothing to write home about. The FTA’s discretionary grants for mass transit are focused on capital projects. Roughly 75 percent of those funds go to nine states that make real investments in mass transit (i.e., Massachusetts, not Florida). Given that the CTA has historically been the second largest mass transit system in the country, Illinois should be near the top of the list. But we’re actually below average on a per capita basis.
A better path forward
There are certainly contexts where governance reform can be overblown. It’s clearly visible, and sometimes structures are convoluted, so it’s easy to write reports or call attention to the structure of a thing rather than pinpoint the political or management issues that are the real problems. 4 But capital projects, day-to-day operations, and external funding are core to a functional public transit agency. It’s clear that our current structure puts severe limitations on transit in the region.
The good news is that, thanks to the fiscal cliff, something is going to change. Lawmakers have been holding listening sessions across the region and negotiations behind the scenes. Crucially, leaders including Senator Ram Villivalam (D-8th) and Representatives Eva-Dina Delgado (3rd), Kam Buckner (26th), and Mary Beth Canty (54th), have been crystal clear that no additional state funding is arriving until after governance changes are agreed upon, using the slogan, "No funding without reform." The question is whether those reforms will be ambitious enough to change the trajectory of public transit in Chicago. In the coming days, I’ll take a deeper look at the proposals on the table.
None of this will be easy. There’s a lot of money at stake, and nobody likes giving up political power or independence. But the current governance structure is a big part of our public transit headache. This is a fight worth having.
1 Strong by American standards, at least.
2 We have also had a relatively high farebox recovery ratio (50%) that has become untenable for the transit agencies to meet (at least in their current form) since the pandemic. Changes to that ratio are one of the many issues under discussion by lawmakers now.
3 The Metropolitan Planning Council has a nice summary of all of these various PDFs, if you’re interested enough to learn more, but not quite interested enough to wade through them all.
4 To cite one example, good government advocates have long criticized the Forest Preserve’s board structure. But after Toni Preckwinkle put Arnold Randall in charge and gave him a mandate and the flexibility to improve operations, the Forest Preserve District made enormous progress while leaving its board untouched.
Did you appreciate this post? Streetsblog Chicago is currently fundraising to help cover our 2025-26 budget. If you appreciate our reporting and advocacy on local sustainable transportation issues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here. Thank you!
