The Suburban Case for Transit Reform

Trips don’t end at the city limits, so why do our transit agencies?

Star:Line Chicago is the social media handle of a Chicago-area transportation advocate based in suburban Forest Park. While they requested anonymity for professional reasons, the City That Works editorial team (Conor and Richard) can confirm that the author is extremely qualified to write this article and lacks any conflicts of interest that would require disclosure.

As the transit fiscal cliff looms, and as our state legislators return to Springfield this fall to address the issue in the veto session, much of the debate has devolved into an argument that pits the City of Chicago against suburban taxpayers. To date, articles approaching the fiscal cliff from exclusively a suburban perspective have been lacking.

As a long-time suburban resident, and as an outspoken suburban transit advocate, A City That Works has kindly offered me the pixels to present the suburban case for transit reform. Suburban transit riders actually have more to gain from the governance reforms included in the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) legislation than city ones. And while it is true that the CTA will be the first agency to go over the fiscal cliff in mid-2026, Metra and Pace will follow shortly thereafter.¹

A static, city-centric network

Far too often, transit is framed as a distinctly urban issue. In Chicagoland, we have made that a self-fulfilling prophesy. Our three transit agencies are explicitly delineated along city-vs-suburb lines. In some cases, this is a century-old legacy dating back to streetcars and “municipal franchises”, or permissions issued by individual municipalities that determined where and how private operators could operate what we would now call public transit. These constraints calcified over time, and have become part of a cycle of conflict between Chicago and the suburbs that has lasted for decades. As a result,our transit map in many ways still looks a lot like it did when our parents, and our grandparents, and even our great-grandparents were using the system decades ago.

Figure 1 West Side, Oak Park, and nearby municipalities; CTA and suburban bus service continue to largely terminate at the city limits, except for CTA bus connections to (or historic replacements of) CTA rail lines. 1954 CTA map (left), 1985 CTA map (center), 2025 CTA map (right). 1954 and 1985 maps courtesy of Chicago-L.org.

In the suburbs themselves, the suburban transit “network” is a network in name only: suburban trains run into and out of downtown once an hour if one is lucky, while the suburban bus network – especially outside of Cook County – does not provide any meaningful regional connections. Traveling from one suburb to another suburb via transit almost always requires taking one Metra train all the way into downtown and taking another Metra train all the way back out. Even when buses and trains do interact, the schedules are rarely aligned.

This city/suburb dichotomy is not grounded in our physical infrastructure. The CTA serves 35 suburbs (including seven with direct ‘L’ service); nearly one-third of Metra’s 243 rail stations are within the city proper; and Pace oversees paratransit for the entire region, including all of the City of Chicago. Unfortunately, even during the RTA era, many of our capital investments in infrastructure have gone the wrong direction, creating new barriers to effective service:

• In 1981, LaSalle Street Station – adjacent to the LaSalle/Van Buren ‘L’ station – was demolished and moved one block south, without a direct CTA ‘L’ connection,² to allow construction of One Financial Place.

• In 1989, the “Northwest Passage” that directly connected Metra trains at the Chicago & North Western Terminal (now known as Ogilvie Transportation Center) to CTA ‘L’ trains at Clinton/Lake was closed and later demolished.

• In 1996, despite preliminary construction work being already completed to allow for a Dorchester station on the CTA Green Line in Woodlawn adjacent to the 63^rd Street Metra Electric Line station, at the behest of local neighborhood leaders, the CTA opted to truncate Green Line service and entirely remove the elevated structure on 63^rd Street east of Cottage Grove.

• Currently, the CTA’s Red Line Extension project will cross over the Metra Electric and terminate adjacent to the South Shore Line, but despite a $5.75 billion price tag will not include direct connections to either service.

Politically, we’ve created these silos ourselves: the CTA board is effectively controlled by the Mayor of Chicago with no regard to the suburban areas served by the CTA,³ Metra’s board is overwhelmingly controlled by the suburbs, with ten out of eleven seats, and Pace’s board doesn’t even have a city appointee.⁴

The world has changed

As a result, while our region has developed and evolved over the past several decades, our regional transit system has not. At the regional level, suburb-to-suburb commutes far outnumber suburb-to-city commutes: according to the United States Census Bureau, in 2022 there were 2.4 million suburbanites who both lived and worked in the suburbs, compared to just 672,000 workers who lived outside the city but worked in Chicago.

Even within Chicago’s central business district, the rapid residential – and commercial – growth of neighborhoods like River North, Fulton Market/West Loop, and the South Loop have broadened the footprint of what many people call “downtown” to far beyond the walkshed of Metra’s downtown terminals. Despite all these changes, our transit network has failed to appropriately adapt, which leads to ripple effects throughout Chicagoland.

Here’s a fictional – but plausible – case study to consider. In 2019, John lived in suburban Downers Grove and worked in the Loop on Franklin Street five days a week. It was a very easy choice for John to pay $195.75 every month for a Metra monthly ticket. Post-Covid, John has a hybrid arrangement, working from the office twice a week and working from home the rest of the time. He still uses Metra for his commute, but commuting just eight times a month he no longer finds it cost-effective to buy even a discounted $135.00 monthly pass; instead, he buys a Metra Day Pass 5-Pack as needed.⁵

Fast-forward to today: John received an email saying that his company is relocating to Fulton Market. His office will no longer be within walking distance of Union Station, which means he’ll now need to transfer to a CTA bus to connect from Union Station to his office, a connection that now requires an extra $4.50 every day since interagency fares are not coordinated.⁶ If the CTA goes over the fiscal cliff – or, let’s be honest, even if it doesn’t – John’s probably going to start driving to work more often regardless of what happens to Metra, since his commute is getting longer and more expensive anyway. Without the CTA reliably and affordably serving that last-mile connection, John’s now going to add to traffic through a dozen different western suburbs. One mile of CTA bus service downtown has a direct impact on traffic in DuPage County.

The promise of governance reform

State legislators have generally had two consistent mantras since the beginning of the spring session: the most repeated one, on both sides of the aisle, has been “no new revenues without reform,” the common-sense belief that our agencies first need to be reimagined or at least reorganized before the state uses new taxpayer dollars to make an ongoing investment in transit operations.

The second mantra, gleaned from the legislature’s delegation trip to Germany last winter and codified in the NITA legislation itself, is “one network, one timetable, one ticket.” The idea here is that regardless of which agency is operating whichever service, every rider’s experience is as seamless as possible: schedules are aligned, fares are coordinated, and the overall system operates as a single unified network, rather than a confederation of separate agencies.

In the suburbs, that means less concern about who’s operating what service and more focus on making sure that we actually get travelers where they want to go. Imagine if transfers were actually coordinated between when a Metra train arrives at a station and when a Pace bus departs, because the operators are proactively working together to serve all suburban riders rather than worrying exclusively about their own performance or fare. It also means that suburban riders heading into the city are no longer limited by the distance they feel comfortable walking from a downtown Metra terminal, since connections to CTA buses and trains are proactively planned rather than considered a “premium” add-on to a typical Metra fare.

Frankly, this integration matters more to suburbanites than it does to the city. In Chicago proper, much of the city’s transit network has been fully integrated for nearly 80 years, since the CTA was created to consolidate and unify the city’s surface lines (streetcars, buses, etc.) with its rapid transit (‘L’ trains). As a result, city residents can already use the CTA to get between any two neighborhoods for a single fare. While there are certainly opportunities to improve coordination on behalf of Chicago residents (especially in neighborhoods far from the ‘L’ but along Metra lines, such as the South Side along the Metra Electric and Rock Island lines, and the West Side along the Milwaukee West line), that baseline of interoperability between buses and trains simply does not exist for suburban residents, even though suburban riders are much more likely to need to transfer between Metra, Pace, and the CTA to get anywhere that isn’t downtown.

“One network, one timetable, one ticket” is the larger regional vision that the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) legislation begins to address. Under the legislation, the RTA would become NITA, a regional coordination agency that more proactively shapes and guides how the CTA, Metra, and Pace fundamentally provide service. By setting regional service standard goals for each of the service boards to meet, controlling fare structure and policy at a regional level, and by requiring certain seats on each of the service boards to be filled by NITA board members, NITA would finally create incentives for the individual service boards to cooperate rather than compete, and to create connections by coordination instead of coincidence. This structure would also empower NITA to spearhead larger, regional-level plans, projects, and initiatives that the RTA simply cannot perform due to their current statutory purview and restrictions. Notably, this structure would still require the CTA, Metra, and Pace to continue handling day-to-day operations themselves, including reliability, maintenance, cleanliness, and safety issues.⁷

Figure 2 Board reapportionment illustration

Far from being a “Chicago-Cook County takeover” as one Republican senator claimed earlier this year, under NITA the structure of the transit boards would be rebalanced without disenfranchising the suburbs. Each collar county currently sends one board member to the Metra board, one board member to the Pace board, and one board member to the regional board; under NITA, that would continue (albeit with some board members serving “double-duty” on the NITA board and either the Metra or Pace board). Suburban Cook County would actually have less representation on the Metra and Pace boards (from five seats to three and from six seats to three, respectively), but would gain new seats on the CTA board, given how much of the CTA’s service area extends into the most densely-populated parts of suburban Cook County.⁸

Some suburban representatives have expressed concern that NITA’s board structure would disrupt the RTA’s current supermajority requirements that ensures no specific parts of the region can get, pardon the pun, railroaded in regional decision making. However, the draft legislation addresses this in two ways: the NITA board has two different avenues to approve things, which we’ll call the “easy way” and the “hard way”.

• The “easy way” relies on regional consensus. The 20-member NITA board can approve items with a 12-person (60%) vote, but only if at least two appointees from each of the four appointing “factions” (the City of Chicago, Suburban Cook County, the collar counties, and the Governor of Illinois) vote yes. In other words, under the “easy way”, at least two members representing each regional constituency must agree to successfully advance an initiative.

• Recognizing that the “easy way” effectively gives each faction unilateral veto power, the NITA legislation also includes the “hard way”: a brute-force 75% supermajority threshold to advance initiatives regardless of what votes come from which faction to ensure the board can avoid total gridlock by one disaffected faction. The 75% threshold also means that, in the face of a unified faction of opposition, the region in its entirety would be needed to overrule the “veto”.

The fears of the “hard way” being weaponized against a specific jurisdiction are rooted in the same false city-vs-suburbs binary that landed us where we are today: opponents want us to believe that a Suburban Cook appointee from Barrington would inherently vote different than their counterparts from Lake or McHenry County, or that a Suburban Cook appointee from a CTA-served area like Evanston or Cicero would automatically side with the collar counties rather than their peers from the city.

Instead, the ‘hard way’ helps ensure that there’s a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency option in the event that a given jurisdiction becomes an impediment to any and all progress. Frankly, it’s easier to imagine that that tool is used by an otherwise-unified region in the event of an intransigent governor (or Mayor of Chicago, or Cook County President) than it is to confront a situation where all of the collar county appointees find themselves arrayed against statewide and Cook County appointees.

The challenge of finding more funding

The really hard part, however, is finding more money. On the eve of another doomsday scenario, there are three possible paths forward.

The first option is to do nothing. That would be a disaster. The Regional Transportation Authority has warned about 40% systemwide service cuts once the transit agencies go over the fiscal cliff. While the projected amount needed to cover the cliff in 2026 was recently – and unexpectedly – drastically reduced from $771 million to $202 million, the gap for 2027 will be significantly larger, now projected at $790 million as the remainder of Covid-era federal assistance is exhausted over the first half of next year.⁹ The size of the fiscal cliff is simply too large a gap to close with cuts, efficiencies and fare hikes without triggering a “death spiral” of falling ridership that necessitates even greater hikes or cuts in the future.

Let’s not do that.

Our second option is to do what we’ve always done in the past: slap what’s effectively a bandage on the broken leg to keep the system solvent but struggling for a few more years. We’ll raid the couch cushions for the state government’s version of loose change (e.g., earmarking interest on the rainy day fund – which probably should stay in the rainy day fund, and which disappears if we ever need to use the rainy day fund) to keep the lights on and the wheels turning, but far short of what’s needed to truly adapt and modernize our system for a post-pandemic world.¹⁰

This ongoing paradigm of providing just enough funding to avoid the next doomsday plays a significant role in our regional system’s ongoing lack of advancement and modernization. Bluntly stated, our agencies can’t afford to think big or to experiment with new innovations or technologies because the next doomsday is never more than a couple fiscal quarters away. As a result, every new infusion of funding has gone to propping up the system we’ve always had, rather than going towards creating the system a modern global city needs or deserves.

The current structure of the RTA overseeing the CTA, Metra, and Pace was created to preserve the status quo of the early 1980s and we’ve succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination. Our current structure fundamentally turns the three service boards against each other: with each agency focused on its own farebox recovery ratio, there is an incentive not to provide interagency transfers or coordinated fares. A CTA rider who chooses to start taking Metra instead is a financial hit to the CTA, and vice versa.

This is unfortunate because not only are our transit agencies generally good stewards of public funds in terms of operational expenditures, but our investments in transit – even in the suburbs – provide strong returns. The RTA recently reported that Pace’s Dempster Pulse higher-frequency, limited-stop bus route between Evanston, Des Plaines, and O’Hare resulted in 15% ridership gains in its first year of operations, and another 12% increase in its second year.¹¹ Following weekend service additions, Metra’s BNSF ridership is up 18% on Saturdays and 30% on Sundays year-over-year.

At a regional level, a recent study by Argonne National Laboratory and MIT found that Chicagoland public transit supported $35 billion in direct economic activity, with an ultimate 13-to-1 return on investment. At the suburban municipal level, this also results in home prices commanding a 30% premium near rail stations compared to the regional average, providing suburban municipalities with a strong, sustainable tax base and unlocking opportunities for much-needed new residential development while minimizing additional congestion. Compared to the $21 billion annual cost of vehicle ownership that comes directly out of the pockets of collar county families, an ongoing investment to create and maintain a transit network that can be a viable supplement or alternative to driving for suburban households that choose to do so should be a fiscal imperative.

That brings us to the third path forward: real regional transit reform that creates a modern, unified transportation network for all of Chicagoland, coupled with significant and sustainable revenue streams to finally start working towards creating the network we want to have rather than once again simply settling for the system we’ve inherited. Our transit agencies have gotten so used to shoestring budgets that they’ve also become the biggest challenge to regional coordination: each agency is forced to worry about its own bottom line more than the best ways to serve a modern, multi-polar global city. The NITA bill provides the common-sense framework to keep all of our transit agencies accountable to all of Chicagoland’s taxpayers while providing the ongoing revenues needed to finally bring our entire transit system into the 21st Century.

Humpty Dumpty keeps falling off of the wall, and we’ve gotten quite efficient at putting him back together again and again and again. But it’s time to realize that the root of the problem is the wall we’ve built between the city and its suburbs.

1. In late 2026 and early 2027, respectively.

2. More recently, the CTA constructed a “transit center” at LaSalle Street Station comprised of an elevator between platform and street level and covered waiting areas for buses, as well as a signed connection to the Blue Line at LaSalle, but connections to the ‘L’ still require walking a full block on city streets.

3. The Mayor appoints four out of seven seats, with the Governor of Illinois appointing the other three.

4. The Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities is the City of Chicago’s representative on the Pace board serving in an ex officio role but does not get to vote on appointing Pace’s board chair.

5. These fundamental changes in commuting frequency are one of the largest reasons why the fiscal cliff has become a major post-pandemic issue for American transit agencies.

6. Metra Monthly Pass holders can purchase a $30 Regional Connect Pass that includes CTA and Pace fares, and Metra Day Pass holders can – with some effort – purchase a $2.50 Regional Day Pass that includes CTA and Pace fares, but Metra Day Pass 5-Pack ticket holders cannot purchase discounted fares for CTA or Pace.

7. The NITA bill would convene a regional-level “Law Enforcement Task Force” to create suggestions and recommendations to enhance security throughout the system, up to and including a new regional transit police force, but operators would still be tasked with addressing day-to-day security concerns.

8. The net impact of the overall NITA structure would require just 33 total regional board members compared to 47 today.

9. Similar to what our friends in Philadelphia are currently dealing with, going over the cliff will result in multiple different doomsdays: cuts to balance the books for next year, and then a second shave later on when we need to determine the 2027 budget.

10. To the credit of our transit agencies, they’ve operated under some version of this paradigm for many years, and they’ve gotten quite efficient with it: CTA and Metra routinely outperform peer agencies in terms of operating cost per passenger mile, a common national benchmark for comparing operational efficiency. Metra, for instance, has gotten so proficient at stretching their pennies that they famously are able to safely continue to operate coaches that date back to the Eisenhower administration.

11. Pace currently operates two Pulse routes, with up to seven additional Pulse corridors identified.