Op-Ed by Miguel Molina-Ventura & Amy Rynell for Truthout:
After years of organizing by a coalition of transit, environmental, and community organizing groups, the Chicago region’s transit system began an important new chapter on September 1 as the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA). The new system was created by the NITA Act, which was signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in December 2025. The new legislation raises $1.5 billion in new revenue and creates a unified agency to better connect transit service across the region. Two years ago, it seemed like the transit system could face cuts of up to 40 percent due to an end to federal COVID relief funding. Now, thanks to the NITA Act, there’s a new source for that funding that also significantly expands and improves transit across the region.
Collectively, this is the largest improvement in the region’s transit system in more than 40 years. It will help millions of poor and working people get to jobs, health care, grocery stores, recreational and cultural activities, and all of the other amenities that make the Chicago region great. In addition, these improvements will significantly decrease the climate impact of transportation in our region, as reliable and accessible public transit will give people the freedom not to drive their personal cars for every trip.
Many Chicagoans have a love-hate relationship with the region’s transit system. On the one hand, an average of a million people, or a quarter of the region’s commuters, ride buses and trains each day. Transit can be a lifeline to jobs, school, groceries, arts, culture, and more, especially for low-income communities and communities of color hit hard by the average $11,000 cost each year of driving a car. On the other hand, the system has long been rife with racism, inequality, and long-term disinvestment. Built for an era when jobs were centralized downtown and suburbs were primarily middle-class “bedroom communities” populated by people who commuted into the city for jobs, the transit system reflected the historic racial divide between white suburbs and a majority Black and Brown city. And while the CTA provides more than 80 percent of trips, it receives only 46 percent of the region’s public transit operating funding.
This played out in a segregated transit system divided between Chicago and the suburbs and not well-adapted for the current reality of suburbanized jobs and an increasingly multiracial region. The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) provides bus and train service largely within the Chicago city limits, while Metra’s commuter rail and PACE’s buses serves the suburbs, but the many areas of overlap and boundaries were messy and not well-planned or coordinated.
CTA buses often stopped at the borders of the city, and riders had to transfer to different buses to go the last miles to jobs in the suburbs. This didn’t work for the residents of the South Side commuting to factory or warehouse jobs in the northwest suburbs, for instance, whose commutes are much worse because they have to ride two to three different buses or trains run by two to three different transit agencies that have had different fare systems and uncoordinated schedules. The long and unreliable rides resulting from uncoordinated transit service severely limited access to jobs for people who could not afford cars. These long-term structural problems were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impacts on the public transportation’s budget, which led to increased delays, decreased ridership, more violence on transit, and a fiscal cliff that threatened huge cuts when COVID relief money was scheduled to run out in 2026.
Who would fight hard just to maintain this inadequate status quo? The time had come for change. As the fiscal cliff approached, an array of organizing groups, transit advocates, and legislators began assessing the possibilities for turning this crisis into an opportunity for transforming the system both by expanding funding and by restructuring the system to replace the segregated silos with a better-funded regionally unified agency.
Getting decision makers to take this vision seriously required more than four years of organizing and coalition-building, and years before that of laying groundwork. The People’s Lobby and Active Transportation Alliance joined the Illinois Environmental Council, Better Streets Chicago, Metropolitan Planning Council, GreenLatinos, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), and many other organizations in the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition.