I Hope This Helps 👍🏽 (Week of 3/31/2025)
The future of Chicagoland transit, the balance of power between local, state and federal governments in the United States, and the value of laying blame aside in this edition of I Hope This Helps👍🏽!
Welcome to I Hope This Helps, a weekly roundup of articles I’ve encountered that furthered my thinking about cities and life. From sustainable transportation to housing, to design, and the social forces shaping our daily lives, I take a broad lens in this review. Whether you're a planner, advocate, or just curious about the world around you, I hope you’ll find something here that resonates.
1️⃣ “Chicago Transit Is in Danger” from Trains Are Awesome
I feel like YouTube gets discredited as a venue for planning discussions. I wholly reject this. Some of the the most engaging, timely planning conversation I’ve seen in a while are playing out on Youtube. Check out this video from Trains Are Awesome detailing the current transit funding situation in Chicagoland. In short, there is a $771 million annual funding shortfall that Chicagoland transit must fill by January 2026 or face regionwide service cuts of up to 40%. Before any additional funding comes from the state, legislators are requiring governance reform. The two dueling acts at this point are HB5823 (The Metropolitan Mobility Authority Act) which would consolidate CTA, Metra and Pace into one regional agency, the MMA, and SB1938 which strengthens the existing RTA.
2️⃣ How to Reprioritize the Fire Department
Instead, because fire safety in Chicago has gotten better, but emergency response has not, we should be comfortable redeploying resources from one challenge to the other. Chicago has real financial challenges, so we can’t just throw money at our problems - but we have to maximize every dollar we do spend. That means fewer bodies to fight fires and more bodies to staff ambulances, because that’s the best way to save the most lives.
A City that Works is the publication that brought me to Substack. Expect consistently in-depth coverage on governance issues throughout Chicago. In “How to Reprioritize the Fire Department” Conor Durkin looks at how, shifting Chicago Fire Department (CFD) resources from fire trucks to EMT crews presents a cost neutral solution to ensure Chicago’s emergency response capacity is well aligned with this types of emergencies CFD is regularly responding to. Check it out
3️⃣ Beyond Federal Chaos: Let States and Cities Govern
“Centralizing power in the federal government is an extraordinary aggregator of risk, enabling a single administration to wreak havoc. Unfortunately, what’s happening right now—which is doing both short-term and long-term damage—is a particularly potent example of that.”
The above excerpt is from the article Beyond Federal Chaos: Let States and Cities Govern, from Civic Insighter. The article discusses how our current level of reliance on the federal government has given it tremendous power over very local issues. It argues for managing most domestic issues at the state and local level. This approach would allow for more localized solutions, and experimentation, with more risk averse places borrowing successful policy lessons from less risk averse places. Take a read and tell me what you think!
4️⃣ Letting go of Blame
Right now, I’m reading Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Stone, Patton and Heen. This book breaks down most conversations into their specific, recurring elements and provides guidance on how to traverse the stickiest conversations. Here’s a quick synopsis of the book if you’re a SparkNotes type of person! The below excerpt on blame felt timely.
In my service fraternity, we had a phrase “just flush the toilet”. In the time it took for you to figure out who didn’t flush, you could have just flushed and moved on with your life. Be the change you want to see in the world!
Thanks for reading! I’m doing research for an article about the urban planning space generally and could use your help. If you work in urban planning or an urban planning adjacent field, or you live in a city and care about how it functions, please take a minute and fill out this 5 minute survey and pass it around your networks. Thanks in advance!
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