Asia Long has her own version of the Lombardi rule: To get to work on time means starting her commute at least 30 minutes early — twice as much as the legendary NFL coach deemed necessary.

Long gets to her Red Line stop on the South Side at 4 a.m. each day to ensure she gets to work near O’Hare International Airport by 6 a.m. From 69th Street, she rides the Chicago Transit Authority train to Jackson Boulevard, where she boards a Blue Line train that takes her to Rosemont. From there, she rides a Pace bus to Elk Grove Village and walks about a block to a warehouse where she’s a supervisor.

The journey shouldn’t take more than 90 minutes, but “you never know what’s going to happen.”

“With the Red Line, there’s always something going on,” she says. “You could be stopping because of violence on the train or waiting for signal clearance on the tracks. You have to be ready for anything: people, equipment, weather.”

Any one of those can throw off her commute. If a train is delayed unexpectedly, she could miss a bus and have to wait nearly a half-hour for the next one. She also could be delayed if a bus breaks down or a driver calls in sick. 

“If you miss one, your whole morning is off,” she says. “I give myself time to be late.”

Illinois legislators last fall approved a historic 54% increase in state and local funding for mass transit, or an extra $1.2 billion a year, to make the commute less of a roll of the dice for Long and 1.2 million others like her who use CTA, Metra and Pace every day. 

The aim is a transit overhaul that involves a new management structure, coordinated planning of routes, more reliable service, a streamlined way to set and collect fares across all three systems, and a new approach to improve the safety of riders and workers. It’s the most dramatic change to public transportation in Chicago in more than 40 years.

If it succeeds, the overhaul will guarantee for at least a generation an asset that is a crucial economic link, delivering workers to their jobs and bringing residents and visitors to restaurants, entertainment and leisure activities. If not, the failure will have squandered scarce public resources when the city and the state are strapped for cash at a time of increasing economic uncertainty.

“If there’s no transit system, Chicago just doesn’t function,” says Philip Plotch, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, a think tank in Washington, D.C., who conducted research on Chicago mass transit that was used to make recommendations to legislators. “The city and the region were built around this system.”

Public transit is at a crossroads, with overall ridership last year still down 31% from pre-pandemic 2019. Chicago’s recovery lags peer cities, such as New York, where ridership is about 15% below pre-pandemic levels, and Boston, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, which are about 28% behind.

The $1.2 billion in new annual funding approved by the Legislature is 82% more than the minimum needed to cover shortfalls in fares and federal pandemic-related support. It should provide the resources necessary to make transformative changes to Chicago’s 133-year-old mass transit system — from its governance structure to the quality and frequency of service.

Legislators’ mantra: one network, one timetable, one ticket. It sounds simple, but it’s an ambitious, complex undertaking. The three public transit agencies historically have served different populations with different needs in different geographies: CTA in the city and Metra and Pace in the suburbs.

“Folks around the country are watching us. We have one chance to get this right,” says state Rep. Kam Buckner, a Chicago Democrat who co-chaired the transit working group in the House.

Legislation to fix it was in the works for more than two years. It passed in the middle of the night at the end of the fall veto session, despite opposition from downstate legislators.

“Throwing more money at a car that keeps breaking down isn’t always the answer,” says state Rep. Tony McCombie, R-Savanna, the House minority leader.

The overhaul begins June 1, when the Regional Transportation Authority, which oversees CTA, Metra and Pace, becomes the Northern Illinois Transit Authority.

Change starts at the top
By the end of September, a new 20-member board will be created, with five appointments each from the governor, the mayor of Chicago and the Cook County Board president, and one appointment each from the county board chairs of the five collar counties.

“We’ll probably have a lot of new people enter onto these boards with higher levels of qualifications,” says Audrey Wennink, senior director of the Metropolitan Planning Council, a nonprofit research and planning group that was part of a steering committee that advised on the transit overhaul. “I think we need a lot of new energy and new transit champions who are going to put in the time and be really committed to doing the work.”

The board also will choose a chairman and executive director. It’s not clear whether they’ll pick outsiders or insiders for the jobs.

“The two people most critical to turning this legislation into success are the chairman and the (executive director) of NITA,” says Stephen Schlickman, who was executive director of the RTA from 2005 to 2010. “They are going to be responsible for managing a more complicated system and more complicated governance structure than before. If you don’t have the right people in those two positions, it’s going to fail.”

The jobs require approval by the Illinois Senate, which also must approve the board chairs of CTA, Metra and Pace through 2030. It’s just one of the ways the state will gain more influence as a result of the legislation.

The governor, who currently has no appointees to the RTA, also will have more say in mass transit, appointing one-fourth of the NITA board. His influence doesn’t stop there: The law gives the Illinois Department of Transportation the task of hiring a consultant to make recommendations on how to carry out the transition from RTA to NITA.

It wasn’t by accident, says Plotch, who led the Eno Center’s work supporting the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning as it developed transit recommendations for legislators. 

“If the governor is seen as having more of a say, he’ll provide more resources and maybe help overcome some of the differences between Cook County and the collar counties,” he says.

The current RTA board has 16 members and requires a 75% supermajority to approve actions affecting individual transit agencies, which has often resulted in gridlock when it comes to coordinating service and investment. The new law would lower the supermajority to 60%, or 12 of the 20 members, if at least two members from each group of appointees are on board.

At least five NITA board members also will serve on the CTA, Metra and Pace boards.

“The law is designed to force regional decision-making,” Buckner says. “The risk is that people revert to supporting the people who appointed them. We have to be careful of not reverting to delay as a strategy. The risk isn’t that we’ve given people too much power but people not actually using it.”

Once the board is appointed, it will have to quickly tackle a number of big decisions involving safety, fares and laying the groundwork to plan future levels of service across the different systems.

“With a big increase in funding, it would be easy to say we’re just going to increase the frequency of existing service. That’s not the intent of this legislation,” says Erin Aleman, executive director of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, which was tasked by the Legislature in 2022 to come up with recommendations for the transit overhaul.

“It’s about standing up an agency and making tough decisions," Aleman says. "We want to think about the future, how people work and how they move around. We have to take a tough look at the service we have today and how it’s performing, and how things have changed in how and where we need to get people to and from.”

People and jobs have spread farther away from the city over time, and commuting patterns were upended by the pandemic.

Rail service has come back more slowly than bus service, and weekend demand rebounded faster than weekdays. CTA and Metra train ridership is still 42% to 43% below 2019 levels, respectively. CTA bus ridership is down 23%, while Pace ridership is down 35%. On the CTA, average weekday ridership on both buses and trains is off 34% since 2019. Weekend ridership, while smaller, is only off about 20%.

A difficult to-do list
The core challenges will be to make buses and trains safer, more affordable and easier to use.

Harvey resident Kenneth Wright takes a Pace bus and a Red Line train each day to get from his south suburban home to two jobs on the Near South Side. The trip usually takes about an hour. But it can take twice that long, as it did on a recent day when the Red Line train he was riding home was delayed by about 40 minutes getting to the 95th Street station, where he catches the Pace bus for the last leg of his journey.

“Public transportation is public transportation: It’s not perfect,” Wright, who has been riding buses and trains in Chicago for the past decade, said as he headed home between jobs.

Crime is a bigger concern than delays caused by equipment problems or staffing issues, he said. “People selling drugs, robbing people.”

Under the legislation, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart is charged with assembling a task force that includes Metra police, Chicago police, Illinois State Police and other agencies to figure out how to tackle crime, which is a top complaint of transit riders. By December, the task force  will make recommendations to the board, which will vote on a plan by June of next year.

“The number of crimes is down," Buckner says. "But if people don’t feel safe, we’ve missed the entire point of this.”

Who pays: How and how much
The NITA board also will have new authority to set and coordinate fares across CTA, Metra and Pace. The systems all currently use Ventra, a card and mobile-app payment platform, but it’s administered by CTA.

The transit legislation calls for the new board to decide by Jan. 1, 2028, how it will procure a “next-generation fare-collection system” with “a unified mobile-ticket application” and have it implemented two years later.

What that means in practice is open to interpretation. CTA and Pace use flat fares, or the same price no matter how far a rider goes. Metra, like most suburban commuter systems, uses distance-based fares.

Some experts argue that flat fares, while simple to understand, are actually more costly per mile for users than distance-based fares.

“Distance-based fares could be done on the local system,” says David King, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences & Urban Planning. “There are political reasons why that doesn’t happen.”

Whether the board will tackle the underlying structure of the fares themselves remains to be seen. One important change in the new structure is that fares will no longer provide 50% of the annual budget for service. The law now requires fares to account for at least 25% until 2029, when the threshold drops to 20%. That should give transit officials more latitude in thinking about fares.

“Whatever it is, it just needs to be easy, easy, easy,” MPC’s Wennink says. “A lot of people don’t ride transit because it’s hard to figure out.”

Many point to the regional day passes launched this year that allow unlimited rides on CTA, Metra and Pace. NITA also will have to come up with solutions for commuters. Seattle offers something called Orca, which features a monthly fare that covers buses, rail and ferry transportation.

Another requirement of the law is to limit how much a rider pays in a month. The idea is that riders will never pay more in a month than the cost of a monthly pass, even if they are paying as they go.

Getting from here to there
The bigger challenge long term is figuring out where, when and how to provide service. Some users want better synchronization of service between trains and buses. Others say more frequent service, particularly on buses, is the route to increased ridership.

The region’s rail services were for the most part laid out with the goal of getting people to and from downtown. But offices, manufacturers and warehouses have sprawled throughout the suburbs. Rather than bringing workers into or across the city, many employers now need to bring workers from the city to the suburbs or from one suburb to another.

Debra Lawrence used to have staffers at Business & Career Services — a suburban nonprofit that connects workers and employers — participate in an exercise to better understand the challenges facing clients: take a bus to a jobsite less than 5 miles away.

“It took two hours,” she says of a trip that required transferring from one bus to another along the way. “In the suburbs, transportation is a huge barrier to employment. Getting a job is one thing. To keep the job, you need transportation.”

It illustrates an important rule in public transportation. “Frequency is freedom,” says Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning and a research fellow in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA.

“I live near a Pace bus that’s once an hour,” says Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group in Chicago. “I take it rarely. It’s very hard for it to be part of your daily life.”

There’s another practical consideration: It’s not just how often the bus comes but for how long. Lawrence notes that hospitals, manufacturers and warehouses still operate on traditional shifts, such as 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., and 3 to 11 p.m.

“In suburban areas, oftentimes the buses don’t begin until 7:30 a.m. or they end at 7:30 p.m.,” she says. “People can’t get to work on time, or they can get to work but can’t get home. So they end up having to carpool or take an Uber.”

Pace has set up dedicated service from Metra stations to some employers, such as warehouses in Joliet and Monee, with buses and van pools. Its express bus service that travels on the shoulder of the interstate to areas such as Bolingbrook and Plainfield is one of the fastest-growing options. Pace also has worked with IDOT to prioritize traffic signals for buses along specific routes to speed up service.

“Now that we have the resources, we have the opportunity to say: Where can we be more innovative?” says Romeoville Mayor John Noak, a Pace board member.

Other transit systems around the nation, many of them still working on their own solutions to the challenges of the post-pandemic fiscal cliff caused by the drop-off in ridership and federal funding, are paying close attention to Chicago and how it reinvents itself.

“I guarantee everybody is watching this,” says King, the Arizona State researcher.