We all know the frustration: you’re making great time on the bus until someone parks in the bus lane “just for a minute.” In Chicago, those minutes have added up to decades of declining speeds—but that’s about to change.

In part two of our Chicago series, we’re diving deep into the massive changes coming to the CTA and Pace bus systems. Thanks to the landmark NITA Act passed in late 2025, Chicago is receiving $1.5 billion a year in new funding to avoid the transit death spiral and—more importantly—to finally give buses the priority they deserve.

From automated camera enforcement to "orbital" lines that bypass the Loop, we’re looking at how Chicago is speeding up the least glamorous but critical piece of its transit system. Because at the end of the day, faster buses don’t just mean shorter commutes—they mean freedom.

In this video, we cover:

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Chicago is making a historic move. Leveraging Illinois's recent $1.5 billion investment in Chicago transit, they're working to turn Metra from commuter rail into a true regional rail network.

For 40 years, Metra has been the definition of commuter rail: a system designed solely to move 9-to-5 workers from the suburbs to the Loop. But with remote work changing the landscape and a "fiscal cliff" looming, that model collapsed.

In late 2025, Illinois passed a landmark transit bill creating the Northern Illinois Transit Authority (NITA) and funding a massive pivot. Today, we breakdown exactly what regional rail means, how it differs from the system Chicago has, and whether Chicago can avoid the mistakes made in similar transition in Toronto.

In this video:

References & Further Reading:

Kansas City usually shows up on urbanist channels' “worst of” lists. After all, it has more highway-lanes per person than any other city in America. But Kansas City has been taking big swings at addressing its past mistakes for years and it’s starting to gain some momentum.

It’s been a discouraging few months for people who care about transit and urbanism. With the grim political news from Washington and many of our transit systems facing fiscal cliffs, it can be hard to stay motivated.

In this video, we’re going to break down how the Midwest is on the verge of a passenger rail revolution - zooming in on Ohio as a case study. We’ll be talking with local expert and advocate, Elliot Lewis from the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, or MORPC. And we’ll look at the ambitious plans on the table, how earlier efforts have failed, and make the case for why, this time, the revolution might just be unstoppable.

The Midwest is filled with cities that are often overlooked by coastal taste makers and urbanists nationwide. But there’s maybe no city with more urbanist strengths to offer but less attention than Milwaukee.

Like many Midwestern cities, 100 years ago Milwaukee built grand public parks, neighborhoods full of character, and a robust streetcar system. And like many of those cities, it struggled throughout the second half of the 20th century. Perhaps more than most, it is now building on its good bones to reemerge as a surprisingly affordable and delightful city to live in.

In the 20th Century, Milwaukee’s leaders were so focused on public good they were called "Sewer Socialists." It is a city that, despite facing profound challenges that hollowed out so many of its neighbors, is quietly building a practical and forward-thinking transit system and reknitting its urban fabric. This is Milwaukee, Wisconsin and it might just be the most underrated urbanist gem in America.

A few weeks ago, the fantastic channel "Oh the Urbanity" posted a video—"How We Got Around Car-Free with a Baby (and Didn’t Regret It)"—about their experience as new parents living car-free in Montreal. There is so little urbanist content out there that includes the perspectives of kids and families. It's a great video, check it out: https://urbanists.video/w/vBsSdBqiVyCHWzu26MF5gm

Their experience is with one newborn in Montreal - a great city for transit, walking, and biking. We’ve had a few other experiences, including in less ideal cities and with more and older kids.

My wife and I lived car-free in Washington, D.C. until our oldest was a year and a half and now we live in Columbus, OH, where we're a one-car family that gets around mostly by bike and bus. We just welcomed our third kid and our oldest is now 5.5. So we thought we’d respond with some of our experiences, and talk about some of the biggest challenges and opportunities we’ve encountered a bit farther into the parenting journey.

In this video, we'll talk through the gear we use, how we getting around, and what it's like to travel, but also touch on bigger issues, like pedestrian safety and the housing costs that contribute to a frustrating cultural expectation that families will move out to the suburbs once they have kids.

Operating a public transit agency for a city the size of Columbus isn’t easy. For all the talk online, including on this channel, about how to make transit better, it’s a lot easier to talk about making major changes to our transit systems than it is to actually make those changes in the real world. That’s why I was so excited that the good people of the Central Ohio Transit Agency, COTA, agreed to allow me and channel contributor Kyle Campbell tour one of their maintenance facilities and talk to a bus operator, their operations/facilities director, and their communications team. We got an inside look of how COTA runs its system - and specifically, how they are transitioning to electric buses.

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St Louis was once the fourth largest city in the nation. Today, it’s the fourth largest city in the midwest and also home to the second biggest subway system in the Midwest - behind only Chicago of course. And it wasn’t built when or how you’d expect. It’s a interesting story - of a successful push to build real, high quality transit–a light metro system–in an era when most transit expansion wasn’t as high quality. So what does the future hold for the gateway to the west?

Cities around the world use electric trolley systems to make their buses quieter, cleaner, and cheaper to maintain. But while dozens of US cities once embraced trolley buses, today Dayton, Ohio is one of only four cities in the US with this climate-friendly electric transit feature. So while I was in Dayton visiting family over the holidays, I took a trip into downtown to see a cool transit rarity in an unassuming small city in Ohio to explore whether the tech could make a come back as cities and transit agencies work towards net-zero.