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A transportation nightmare is looming over Chicago, where a $730 million hole in the regional mass transit budget could force the city to cut bus and train service nearly in half.

That could shutter some train stations and leave the country’s third-largest city with fewer bus routes than Madison, Wisconsin. Many of the system’s 1.2 million daily rides would shift to cars, clogging the streets, and the system would enter the “transit death spiral,” in which service cuts beget ridership declines until transit is the option of last resort.

It’s the latest city to face a “fiscal cliff” in mass transit funding as COVID relief money fades away, leaving behind budgets eviscerated by declining ridership, reduced fares, and higher costs. California legislators have proposed a sales tax measure to help BART, the train network that connects San Francisco and Oakland. New York has generated money for mass transit with congestion pricing. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has directed $153 million in highway money toward shoring up SEPTA, which runs the trains and buses in Philadelphia (though a long-term solution is urgently required).

Now it’s Chicago’s turn, and the state is using the opportunity to dream big. As former Mayor Rahm Emanuel might have said: Never let a good crisis go to waste. “There will be no funding without reform,” is the refrain in Springfield, where legislators are trying to act on years of studies that have come to basically the same conclusion about Chicagoland’s mass transit: It’s no way to run a railroad. To hear Chicago’s civic watchdogs tell it, dysfunctional governance—four separate agencies, running three separate services—has left the country’s third-largest city with subpar options for getting around without a car. (Those agencies are: the CTA, which runs buses and the L in Chicago; Metra, which runs commuter rail; Pace, which runs suburban buses; and the RTA, which supervises the other three.)

But who should run trains and buses in and around Chicago? The city, the suburbs, the state? In cities where suburban interests dominate transit planning, like New York and Boston, money and service flows accordingly. On the other hand, in a metro area of almost 10 million people, does it make sense to have four separate boards composed of 47 different people, managing different ticketing systems, schedules, maps, unions, and infrastructure?

With weeks to go until agencies start planning how they’ll hack away at jobs and schedules, there are two separate proposals to rethink the system, as well as a separate list of demands from Illinois state Rep. Marty Moylan, a powerful suburban Democrat who runs the state’s transportation committee and is concerned about how much overtime pay transit workers take home. What there is not, so far, is a check to shore up Chicago’s mass transit before the death spiral begins.

The current blueprint for reform comes from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, which was directed by the state to produce a 134-page study in 2023 that anticipated the arrival of the fiscal cliff. The report outlined a few ideas that everyone likes in principle: coordinated fares and schedules, faster buses, a link between transit provision and land use planning, steady funding support to replace an atypical reliance on fares, increased accessibility, and renewed public confidence in the safety of riding the El.

Erin Aleman, the executive director of CMAP, told me that many of these ideas have been floating around for years, but the post-pandemic change in travel patterns—fewer everyday commuters, growing ridership on middays and weekends—has supplied the urgency to make a big change.

The result of these recommendations is a 500-page bill called the Metropolitan Mobility Authority Act, which has the support of CMAP and a variety of Chicago’s civic stewards. The MMA would resolve what advocates say is the fatal flaw of the region’s buses and trains, by replacing the four regional boards with one unified body.

Kam Buckner, a state representative from Chicago and self-proclaimed “transit geek” who has sponsored the bill in the House, told me it’s both a good policy and a necessary show of intent. Good policy because the agencies aren’t currently working together (the city and the suburbs are developing two separate fleets of electric buses, he said). Necessary because, “We need folks to wrap their arms around this and say, ‘We’re satisfied.’ People do not want to be throwing good money after bad.”

“They’re competing with each other rather than working together,” Audrey Wennink, who leads transportation policy efforts at Chicago’s Metropolitan Planning Council, told me of the current four regional boards. Since agencies are fighting for fare dollars, she said, they have little incentive to work with their rivals on comprehensive service. “We need unification of our regional planning functions. It’s more than the fiscal crisis we need to deal with to make transit competitive and attractive.” In December, Wennink traveled with Illinois lawmakers seeking inspiration to Berlin and Munich, where different transit operators are part of a single, seamless verkehrsverbünde, or transit association. It’s an appealing model to imagine in Chicago.

And now for the counterproposal. A union-supported group called the Labor Alliance for Public Transit has put forward a plan called “United We Move.” The labor proposal also draws on the CMAP blueprint for reform, but with a crucial difference: It maintains the four governing bodies and suggests giving a stronger hand to the supervisory RTA.

There is a certain amount of self-interest here, since a proposal closer to the status quo would avoid a messy combination of the various union contracts and pension plans. But that gets at a larger issue, opponents of the consolidation plan say. “If we were designing it from scratch, we might not design it the way we have it now,” Kate Lowe, a planning professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, told me. “But that doesn’t mean consolidation is a silver bullet.” Creating one body to govern all the trains and buses would also require combining debt, bonding authority, assets, property, staff, and contracts.

That might not actually thin the administrative overhead, the bus network guru Jarrett Walker argued in a post last year. Walker acknowledged a conflict of interest—he is working for the CTA and Pace—but pointed out that the benefits of mergers decrease with organizations of this size and complexity: “There aren’t that many economies of scale that arise from consolidating agencies as large as CTA and Pace,” he wrote, adding that the agency would be huge and mired in “bureaucratic inertia.”

I called Jim Aloisi, a former Massachusetts secretary of transportation who watched a similar “reform before revenue” reorganization take place at the MBTA, which runs buses and trains in and around Boston. “Legislators typically don’t have a sense that when you reform governance structure you create a massive amount of disruption and layer on new costs,” he explained. “It’s not like turning an on-and-off switch.” If the state wants reforms, he said, they can mandate that the different agencies enact them.

He raised another cautionary lesson from Boston, where the mayor appoints just one member to the board of the MBTA. “From the city of Chicago’s perspective, a reorganization to remove city primacy over the board is not a good idea.” Chicago’s mayor-run system carries some 85 percent of the area’s transit trips—but would lose control under a regional reorganization to suburban and state appointees, disenfranchising the city’s Black and Latino communities. A better model, he said, could be found in San Francisco, where local transit is combined with the city’s department of transportation, putting street design, traffic rules, transit operations, and parking policy under a single authority. (London operates a similar model.)

The irony is, everyone agrees that Chicago’s CTA has been terribly run in recent years under the tenure of a president who spent more time flying abroad than riding the El, using his transit card on just 12 days over two years. But at least voters knew who to blame.

You can make up your own mind about which of these arguments carries more water. (Here is a thoughtful, detailed argument from the Chicago newsletter A City That Works.) What makes this situation unusual, perhaps, is the confidence that the state will ultimately come to the aid of its largest city. Gov. J.B. Pritzker said last month, “It’s something I think we all understand is necessary soon.” Cities and states haven’t always seen eye-to-eye about the value of urban mass transit, with its majority-minority ridership and powerful unions. The head of the U.S. Department of Transportation recently called the New York City subway a “shithole” and claimed riders were “forced” to use it.

But what Illinois has in common with California and New York—to take two other states actively working to shore up struggling urban transit systems—is a Democratic trifecta in the statehouse. The old city-suburb political distinctions aren’t what they used to be. Big cities are still subjects of the state, but no longer are they surrounded by conservatives who wish them ill. After all, it was the Illinois General Assembly that commissioned the report on fixing Chicago transit in the first place.

So if things seem touch-and-go in Illinois, at least it’s not Pennsylvania. On Thursday, Gov. Josh Shapiro joined a Republican state senator, Frank Farry, to urge the Pennsylvania senate to fund Philly’s SEPTA. The plan has passed the Pennsylvania House three times—where Democrats have a one-seat majority. In the Senate? Republicans have a five-seat cushion. It will be up to them to stop a 45-percent service cut that would close scores of train stations around Philadelphia. If you don’t have a car, you’d rather be in Chicago.