Early on Halloween morning, the Illinois state legislature passed the Interagency Coordinating Committee on Transit Innovation, Integration, and Reform Act that will raise approximately $1.5 billion for public transportation agencies, most of it dedicated to the Chicago area. Transit officials are referring to the legislature’s vote as a landmark moment for transit, providing both a source of stable funding and governance reforms. The Illinois governor has expressed his intent to sign the bill.

The transit bill builds upon recommendations made by the Eno Center for Transportation to strengthen coordination among the region’s transit agencies. The Regional Transportation Authority will be transformed into a new Northern Illinois Transit Authority that will centralize fare policy, service planning, capital investment decisions, and oversight. The new authority will be governed by a 20-member board whose members will be appointed by the Chicago’s mayor, county executives, and the governor.

Tom Kotorac, senior vice president at the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, said, “This landmark reform was made possible by the deep engagement of a wide and diverse set of stakeholders who came together several years ago to make sure Chicago didn’t go through a crisis but instead created an opportunity to produce a transformational transit system. Eno’s rigorous analysis and research, especially through the Plan of Action for Regional Transit (PART) Plan, helped prove the case that Chicago’s path to a world-class transit system wasn’t just more funding, but a modern governance system that unifies and integrates investment, planning, and operations for our entire metropolitan region.”

Most of the funding, approximately $860 million annually, would come from redirecting sales tax revenue on motor fuel sales to transit operations. Another $200 million would be generated from interest on the state’s Road Fund. The plan also calls for raising the existing Regional Transportation Authority sales tax in the Chicago area by 0.25 percentage points which is expected to provide about $478 million.

In addition to new taxes, the bill resets expectations for fare revenue. Historically, approximately half of the transit agencies’ operating revenue was expected to be generated by passenger fares, but that requirement became unsustainable after ridership losses accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bill, instead, calls for 25 percent of transit revenue to come from fares.

Background

Three years ago, the Chicago area’s transit agencies — Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Metra, and Pace Suburban Bus – faced an estimated annual shortfall of approximately $730 million starting in 2026.

State legislators recognized that a robust transit system was critical to the Chicago region’s economy and that big, bold solutions would be needed to secure the system’s financial viability. The address this challenge, they passed a 2023 law asking the region’s metropolitan planning organization, Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) to develop a set of legislative recommendations that would “ensure the long-term financial viability of a comprehensive and coordinated regional public transportation system that moves people safely, securely, cleanly, and efficiently and supports and fosters efficient land use.”

After bringing in Eno to help identify and evaluate options, CMAP approved a Plan of Action in 2023. CMAP was able to generate support from a wide range of stakeholders because of its dialogue with a public steering committee, focus groups, its councils of governments and mayors, elected and administrative leadership, and engagement with transit agency board members and staff. Since then, Eno has been helping stakeholders, legislators, and policy makers understand and evaluate their options.

The scale of the potential transit cuts necessitated to address this shortfall was unprecedented. Without new revenue, CTA would have been forced to suspend service on at least half its rail lines beginning in 2026. It would have had to close or drastically reduce service to more than one-third of its rail stations and eliminate more than half its 127 bus routes, leaving 500,000 CTA riders without a nearby bus stop. Earlier this year, CTA’s acting president, Nora Leerhsen, referred to these cuts as “unconscionable.”

The Regional Transit Authority (RTA), the public agency that coordinates the region’s transit agencies, led an ad campaign in 2025 imploring residents to contact their legislators and tell them to “Save Transit Now.”

RTA issued stark warnings: “Chicago region’s transit system will be decimated—leaving one in five workers in the City of Chicago without the use of transit for their daily commute; ending all weekend bus service for Pace customers; eliminating early morning and late evening service for Metra; wiping out nearly 3,000 transit jobs; and dealing a devastating blow to the regional economy.” Leanne Redden, RTA’s Executive Director warned, “This isn’t just a transit crisis—it’s a regional emergency.”

The bill passed by a vote of 72 to 33 in the Illinois House at 2:15 AM, and a 36-21 vote in the Senate at 4:00 AM. Opponents argued that it was raising new taxes and taking funding away from road and bridge projects.

One of the bill’s sleep-deprived sponsors, Representative Kam Buckner, referred to it as the “most comprehensive and consequential state legislative policy on public transit in the history of this country.” He added, “Many tried to derail this effort along the way. They performed premature autopsies on it, declaring it dead before its time. But we stayed the course, because that’s what Illinois riders, workers, and taxpayers deserved. This victory belongs not only to legislators, but to the advocates, labor partners, and business leaders who fought alongside us.”

One of those advocates — Amy Rynell, the executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance — told Eno, “Illinois is making a transformative investment that not only averts the transit fiscal cliff, but also improves safety and rider experience, better integrates service and fares across the region, and increases transit service frequency and reliability, all improvements riders have been calling for years.”

To learn more about the fiscal cliff, see the following:

Public transit systems ‘on the edge of a cliff’ amid funding shortfalls (September 2025)

Drama in Chicago and Philadelphia: The Transit Fiscal Cliff Has Arrived (June 2025)

Are Transportation Agencies Taking on Too Much Debt? (February 2024)

WMATA Releases Its “Fiscal Cliff” Doomsday Budget (December 2023)

Webinar: Climbing Down From The Fiscal Cliff: Lessons From Transit Advocates (November 2023)

Chicago: Tackling the Fiscal Cliff and Addressing Governance Issues (October 2023)

WMATA Reveals Plans for Fiscal Cliff Doomsday Budget One Year from Now (June 2023)

New NYC Transit Forecast Previews “Fiscal Cliff” Issues (December 2022)

Looking to the Horizon: How Agencies are Anticipating the Mass Transit Fiscal Cliff (November 2022)

The Mass Transit Fiscal Cliff: Estimating the Size and Scope of the Problem (September 2022)