CHICAGO (AP) — Adella Bass dropped her in-person college classes because it was just too hard to get there from the far South Side of Chicago, where the city’s famous elevated train doesn’t run. And it can take her nearly two hours to get to the hospital where she is treated for a heart condition.
But things are looking up, with bright red signs across the area boldly proclaiming, “Ready, Set, Soon!” Next year, the city is poised to start making good on a decades-old promise to connect some of its most isolated, poor and polluted neighborhoods to the rest of the city through mass transit.
The Biden administration notified Congress last week that it would commit $1.9 billion toward a nearly $5.7 billion project to add four new L stations on the South Side, the Chicago system’s largest expansion project in history. The pledge, which the Federal Transit Administration is expected to formally sign before President Joe Biden leaves office in January, essentially locks in current and future funding.
Still, Bass fears President-elect Donald Trump’s administration might try to scuttle it.
Signals abound to assure residents that the project is “a go,” said Bass, who is raising three young children and works on health equity issues that affect residents of a massive public housing development near her South Side home. “But you just never know with Trump.”
Could Trump slash transit funding?
The $1 trillion infrastructure plan Biden signed into law in 2021 focused far more heavily on transit than anything his predecessor advocated. That is why there has been a scramble to finalize some transit grants before Biden’s term ends, including commitments last week for rapid transit upgrades in San Antonio and Salt Lake City.
Yonah Freemark, a researcher at the Urban Institute, said Trump unsuccessfully encouraged Congress in his first term to pass budgets eliminating funding for some new transit projects that hadn’t secured their grant agreements. But it has been practically unheard of for administrations to claw back projects after they won final approval.
Steve Davis, who handles transportation strategy for Smart Growth America, said Trump could try to redirect future competitive grants to prioritize highway construction over alternative transportation methods such as transit. He said Trump’s Transportation Department could potentially slow down some allocations from already approved infrastructure projects but would have trouble halting them entirely.
“If you’re building an enormous $2 billion road widening, you need to know you’re going to have money in year four or five and there’s nothing a hostile administration could do to stop it,” Davis said.