President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, an eight-year, $2 trillion infrastructure spending proposal announced on March 31, is refreshingly city-friendly. About a third of that cash would be earmarked for transportation, including generous slices of the pie for public transportation, vehicle electrification, and Amtrak, which will be especially helpful for big cities. Chicago is no exception.
But transit analyst and former Chicagoan Yonah Freemark detailed the massive upsides of Biden’s plan for sustainable transportation and addressing climate change in a recent The Hill op-ed. Of the $621 billion reserved for transportation, $85 billion will go to transit agencies, and $80 billion will be earmarked for intercity rail.
Democratic Congressional rep Marie Newman, who represents Illinois’s third district, including parts of the south side and southwest ‘burbs, also spoke glowingly of the proposal, which she said takes infrastructure funding off “the back burner.” Newman added that she looks forward to working with the administration and her colleagues to fine-tune the plan. “That means investing in green, clean infrastructure projects and energy-efficient transportation that will create new, sustainable union jobs and reduce our dependence on unsustainable means of production.”
“A lingering question that will haunt the entire [infrastructure bill] process is whether or not the traditional downtown-oriented transit market will rebound over the next few years as a result of work-from-home lifestyles,” argued Joe Schwieterman, director of DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development. “This will bring pressure to focus on transit upgrades that aren’t primarily reliant on bringing workers to downtown jobs.”
