People rallied in downtown Chicago on Saturday to advocate for public transit funding throughout Illinois as the state faces a multi-million dollar fiscal cliff.<\/p>\n
The city’s sprawling network of trains and transit could soon get smaller and slower as supporters of public transit urge state lawmakers to call a special summer session to find $770 million.<\/p>\n
Multiple big cities, including Chicago, are set to lose federal COVID dollars that supported trains and buses.<\/p>\n
The news comes as CTA faces pressure for quality of life issues such as smoking and crime onboard.<\/p>\n
“So if I ride the trains, need to make sure it\u2019s clean, need to make sure it\u2019s safe, make sure the service is good,” one rider told NBC Chicago. <\/p>\n
It’s unlikely any more federal money is coming, and without more funding, CTA, Metra and Pace warn stations will close and bus routes will end.<\/p>\n
“We need to protect systems that bring us together and not keep us separated in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the highway,” said Dr. Chloe Groome with Strong Towns Chicago. <\/p>\n
Impacts would also be felt by commuters in the suburbs. <\/p>\n
“Suburban mayors should be at the front of the parade demanding funding for transit because the suburbs would not operate with transit,” Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss said.<\/p>\n
A special tax on food and package deliveries, which would’ve provided dollars for mass transit, did not pass in Springfield at the end of the session. It remains unclear how nearly a billion dollars will be funded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"People rallied in downtown Chicago on Saturday to advocate for public transit funding throughout Illinois as the state…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":61220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5124],"tags":[960,5386,1818,522],"class_list":{"0":"post-61219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-chicago","8":"tag-chicago","9":"tag-il","10":"tag-illinois","11":"tag-transportation"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114843781974602482","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}