Massive Public Transit Win in Chicago Shows the Power of Grassroots Coalitions

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 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.

The coalition included strong policy experts, lobbyists, members of grassroots organizations, and folks who had not previously engaged in organizing. From the city, suburbs, and even far downstate communities, we cared deeply about transit and wanted to keep Illinois from going over the fiscal cliff. Just as importantly, the coalition worked closely with champions in the legislature — particularly Sen. Ram Villivalam and Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado — who played a crucial role in organizing their colleagues to settle for nothing less than a transformative set of improvements in transit.

Community organizing was a central element of the campaign from start to finish. The People’s Lobby launched a series of 10 town hall meetings in six areas of Chicago and the suburbs, which gave people the opportunity to share with state legislators their stories about being ghosted by buses, waiting long hours in Aurora for the PACE bus, or dreaming of moving from one suburb to the next suburb with transit. Legislators saw a diverse array of voters demanding both reform and resources to transform our transit system. These events drew more than 700 people and were covered by media that reached tens of thousands more.

It quickly became clear that a core of committed riders in Chicago had the appetite to fix our transit system. More than 100 people turned out to our first listening session in the Logan Square neighborhood, committed to joining the fight. However, opponents of transit funding and transformation started using the city/suburban divide as a racialized tool to dismiss the whole enterprise as a bailout of the City of Chicago, arguing that it would benefit city residents at the expense of people in the suburbs.

To push back against this false narrative, we expanded our organizing program to include suburban transit riders, hosting listening sessions, talking to riders at Metra stations, who commute by train in the morning to Chicago and arrive by early evening back to the suburbs, and training suburban riders to share their stories in media interviews and lobby visits with lawmakers. The reality is that suburban riders and city riders alike depend on investment in our transit system and support a bold vision for a system that invests in a just and sustainable future.

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Over the course of two years, coalition groups mobilized thousands of Illinoisans to bring their voices to legislators. The People’s Lobby, Active Transportation Alliance, and our partners in the coalition organized lobby days, sent letters to legislators, filled out witness slips, and had members tell their transit stories to reporters and at public actions together with our coalition partners.

The coalition negotiated challenging differences with transit labor groups worried about the impact of restructuring on their jobs and bargaining power so the Illinois Clean Jobs Coalition and the Labor Alliance for Public Transportation could pull in the same direction on the proposed funding increase.

Ultimately, the decision was made to not fully merge the three transit operating agencies so bargaining agreements were not impacted, while the Northern Illinois Transit Authority took on the power to set budgets, integrate routes and fare systems between the three agencies, and plan coordinated regional transit service, while new resources will increase the number of transit jobs.

We pushed back on regressive funding ideas like increased speeding cameras and fought hard for more equitable solutions such as reallocating money from the road fund. On October 31, as the system edged toward disaster, the legislature passed the NITA Act in the final hours of the special fall legislative session.

NITA is a big deal. It’s the largest funding increase in Chicago-area transit agency history. METRA, PACE, and CTA’s combined budgets were $4.2 billion in 2025, which includes the $817 million in expiring federal COVID relief funds. Adding $1.5 billion annually is a massive increase. It prevented a 40 percent cut in transit service and enables a variety of improvements, including an integrated fare system and schedule that riders can use for three branches: Metra, PACE and CTA; unarmed “transit ambassadors” to improve safety; the conversion of the current fleet of buses from gas to electric; and “bus rapid transit” that uses dedicated bus lanes and pre-boarding fare collection to make buses much faster and more reliable, just to name a few. Since passage of the law, the transit agencies have already on 39 bus and train routes.

This campaign shows that low-income communities organizing for environmental justice can win real improvements in people’s lives that also dramatically reduce carbon footprints, even in the face of devastating attacks from Washington.

Nationwide, people are embracing a bigger vision for a just world, with expanded public services — including transit — as an important focal point.

Last year, Seattle elected Mayor Katie Wilson, a transit advocate and co-founder of the Transit Riders Union who campaigned on her vision to turn Seattle’s public transportation into a world-class mass transit system. Since taking office in January, she has begun adding bus lanes and proposed a major transit funding expansion.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s landslide victory in New York was in part an affirmation of his call for investment in public goods and affordability, including making buses fast and free. In July, his administration committed $882 million over the next five years to build new bus lanes, increase frequency, upgrade stations, and more in 50 corridors across the five boroughs.

All of these wins demonstrate the potency of organizing around strong demands for investment in public services that improve people’s lives, especially in an economy that makes it difficult for working people to thrive.

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