Bold New Plans

The Burnham Plan Centennial was a moment-in-time opportunity to develop Bold New Plans for a sustainable future in terms of transportation, water, energy and quality-of-life issues.

Planning together as a region

To prepare ourselves for the future, this region needs to be as bold as Daniel Burnham. The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) is creating a comprehensive plan for northeastern Illinois which will build on the momentum of the Burnham Plan Centennial in order to lead the region to a prosperous future.

The document, called GO TO 2040, will be the first to integrate planning and policies covering:

• The use of land
• The treatment of the environment
• The movement of people and goods
• The quality of life of the region's eight million residents

Created with input from regional residents at "Invent the Future" workshops held throughout the summer of 2009, GO TO 2040 will provide a key framework for decision-making by multiple levels of local government as well as by the private sector.

In order to move toward a healthy future for the region, we need to agree to work together. We need to agree to think beyond boundaries. We need to pledge to refine the plan, improve it, polish it—and then implement it.

The Burnham Plan has made the Chicago region what it is today because it was given widespread support for decades. CMAP and its GO TO 2040 plan will do the same—if our generation makes the same commitment.

Transportation for a 21st Century Economy

We must have an economy-building plan for transportation so that our region and our state can thrive. Otherwise, we will find ourselves left behind in the global competition of the 21st century.

Chicago Metropolis 2020 worked throughout the centennial to produce a new way for the State of Illinois to plan and pay for transportation infrastructure: not in the current haphazard way of building projects for short-term jobs but according to strategic plans designed to support and build the economy and sustained employment.

Illinois has grown into an urban state with the majority of its population, jobs, income, taxes and gross product located in its 11 metropolitan areas. So it has become more important than ever to combine the brain power of these cities into a tightly knit economic network. The Metropolis plan explains that the way to do this is through:

• Doing everything necessary to double transit ridership
• Prioritizing road building according to long-term employment goals
• Connecting Illinois' knowledge-economy metropolises with convenient, frequent and reliable rail service, coordinated by a state (freight and passenger) rail authority
• Providing high-speed digital telecommunications statewide for universal access to the global knowledge base
• Financing transportation infrastructure more realistically and moving toward revenue based on vehicle miles traveled

For Illinois to succeed, we need to move people and goods with a system that is more efficient, more focused, better integrated, more cost-effective and greener.

Chicago Metropolis 2020's breakthrough document in transportation planning was funded as a Burnham Plan Centennial project by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and will be available on-line at www.cm2020.org.