Chicago’s Transit Crisis Was Decades in the Making. The Yellow Line Derailment Just Made That Harder to Ignore.
University researchers have been saying it for years: the CTA’s problems predate COVID, predate the pandemic funding cliff, and will outlast any short-term fix Springfield can offer.
When a Yellow Line train derailed near the Howard terminal in Rogers Park on April 23, 2026, stranding roughly 114 passengers and knocking out service on three CTA lines during the evening rush, it felt to many commuters like yet another bad day on a system that has too many of them. The CTA called it a developing situation under investigation. Transportation experts called it something else: a predictable outcome of a transit system that has been structurally underfunded for decades.
The research that explains why Chicago’s transit keeps breaking was not written in response to this derailment. It was written before it. And it is more relevant now than when it was first published.
What the Research Actually Shows
University of Chicago Research Professor Justin Marlowe, director of the Center for Municipal Finance at the Harris School of Public Policy, has studied the regional transit funding structure with the kind of granular attention that rarely makes it into daily news coverage. His findings on what went wrong — and when — provide the clearest available framework for understanding the current crisis.
The Regional Transportation Authority projects a budget shortfall that might be as high as $250 million starting in fiscal year 2026. Absent long-term reforms, observers expect the gap to reappear year after year.
But the gap is not a COVID story. That framing — which has dominated much of the political coverage of the RTA’s fiscal problems — misattributes the cause and therefore obscures the solution.
COVID-19 did not cause transit’s funding crisis, but exacerbated it, as the system has been chronically underfunded for decades. The federal relief dollars that flowed to transit agencies after 2020 did not fix an underlying structural problem. They masked it. When those funds expire, the gap returns — larger, because costs have continued to climb while the structural funding has not.
The data that Marlowe and other researchers have assembled on Illinois’s place among peer states is striking and, for Chicagoans who depend on the CTA, troubling. Illinois ranks last among peer states in funding public transit, covering only 17% of operating revenue in Chicago compared to 28% in New York, 44% in Boston, and 50% in Philadelphia.
That number — 17% — is not a rounding error. It represents a decades-long political choice about how much the state of Illinois is willing to invest in the infrastructure that moves its largest city. Every city on that list above Illinois has made a different choice. The consequences of Chicago’s choice are visible in the slow zones, the deferred maintenance, the aging rolling stock — and, on April 23, in a derailed train near the Howard terminal.
The Infrastructure Behind the Problem
P.S. Sriraj, director of the Urban Transportation Center at the University of Illinois Chicago, has put the infrastructure dimension of this problem in direct terms. “This is a system that’s at least 80, 90 years old. It’s, as is the case with any large system, the needs are aplenty and the resources are few,” Sriraj said following the April derailment. He noted that a maintenance budget backlog has been building since 2017 and that problems in infrastructure manifest in the service disruptions riders experience daily. “Eventually, the infrastructure is going to give way, and it’ll give way when you least expect it, and that may not have anything to do with what the agency has or has not done,” he said.
That last observation deserves to be read carefully. Sriraj is not exonerating the CTA from accountability. He is making a structural argument: when a system has been running on deferred maintenance for years, incidents become a matter of when, not if. The Howard terminal, where the April derailment occurred, has now seen major incidents in 2023, 2025, and 2026. DePaul University professor and transportation expert Joe Schwieterman described Howard as “a very complicated, intricate yard, with lots of traffic — a hot spot for possible derailments.”
The commuters who waited an hour and a half for shuttle buses, the Purple Line rider who watched the derailed train from the platform and described it as “pretty scary,” the worker who called a Lyft because the shuttle information was nowhere to be found — they are experiencing the downstream consequence of upstream decisions that were made years before any of them stepped onto the platform.
The Federal Signal Chicago Cannot Ignore
Marlowe’s analysis extends beyond the state funding picture into the federal relationship, and here his findings carry particular urgency. The Trump administration’s pullback from transit funding is, in his framing, not the cause of the current crisis but a clarifying signal about the future.
The federal government’s pullback from transit funding will have minimal impact on the RTA’s fiscal year 2026 budget, but it is the latest and clearest signal that the decades-long federal-local partnership on public transit generally, and infrastructure finance more generally, is near its end. Chicago and other big cities need to begin to imagine how to build big projects like the Red Line extension in a sustainable way that does not depend on federal funding.
The Red Line extension — which would bring CTA service deeper into the Far South Side, connecting communities that have been chronically underserved by transit — is the most symbolically and practically significant capital project in Chicago’s transit pipeline. It has long been built around an assumption of federal partnership funding. If that partnership is ending, the city needs a different financial architecture for the project, and it needs to begin building that architecture now.
What the NITA Act Provides — and Does Not
In October 2025, the Illinois General Assembly passed a landmark transit funding bill. The legislation includes an estimated $1.2 billion in new annual operating funding for CTA, Metra, and Pace. This sustainable funding means riders will not experience service cuts or fare increases in 2026 and instead provides a foundation to improve frequency, reliability, and safety for millions of riders in the coming years.
That is a meaningful step. The $1.2 billion in new annual operating funding addresses the fiscal cliff that had been generating alarm across the transit system for two years. Of that funding, $53.6 million is earmarked for service expansion and enhancement at the three mass transit systems, including slow zone mitigation and railcar maintenance for the CTA.
But the researchers who have studied this system most closely are careful about what the NITA Act does and does not solve. Operating funding — money to run the trains and pay the workers — is not the same as capital funding for infrastructure repair and replacement. The maintenance backlog that Sriraj identified, the aging infrastructure that makes Howard a hot spot for incidents, the rolling stock that is approaching or exceeding its useful service life — these are capital problems, and the NITA Act does not fully resolve them.
Whether the new funding will be sufficient to meet the CTA’s infrastructure needs remains a question mark.
The Conversation Chicago Needs to Have
What Marlowe, Sriraj, and their colleagues in transit policy research are collectively arguing is that Chicago needs to have a different conversation about its transit system — one that begins with the acknowledgment that decades of underinvestment cannot be corrected with a single funding package, and that the federal backstop that has historically underwritten major capital projects may no longer be available.
That conversation is difficult. It involves questions about state revenue priorities, local tax structures, and the willingness of suburban legislators to fund a transit system that primarily serves Chicago and its immediate neighbors. It involves the governance structure of the CTA, Metra, and Pace, which the NITA Act begins to modernize but does not fully transform. And it involves a degree of civic honesty about what it actually costs to run a world-class transit system in a major American city — and who pays for it.
The Yellow Line derailment at Howard on April 23 will be investigated, a cause will eventually be determined, and the CTA will issue a statement about corrective action. That is the cycle. What the researchers are asking for is something different: not just a response to the incident, but a reckoning with the conditions that made the incident possible. The answer to that question was not written in April 2026. It was written over the course of the last 40 years.
