Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and several local lawmakers held a press conference on Thursday to discuss the Chicago Hub Improvement Plan, a billion-dollar project that will look to improve Union Station and rail connectivity across Chicago and beyond.
While it remains to be seen if the U.S. Department of Transportation will sign off on the project, it already has Chicago's tech community excited.
The project will help establish what Chicago startup founder Garry Cooper, CEO of Rheaply, called "the Brain Train."
"As a business owner, I'm excited to introduce the Brain Train — the vision for the first-of-its-kind, high-capacity travel network that will drive innovation and collaboration," he said at Wednesday's press conference.
Cooper said the vision is to connect Chicago's siloed emerging hubs with the city.
"Today's announcement is much bigger than a rail improvement project. Brain Train will solve real problems for real people in Chicago," he said. "People like Oluwaseyi Olaleye, who works for the XChange, which has begun work for what will be a 5,000-person, diverse tech-delivery center that will bring high-wage jobs to the South Side that many companies currently outsource overseas."
Cooper said the Brain Train will provide the XChange with the reliable fast transportation that its workforce needs from Grand Crossing to downtown.
He also referenced Nancy Amato, head of computer science at the University of Illinois, and her thousands of students who find it difficult to directly commute to downtown to connect with their research and other peers. Amato said that having a fast and reliable connection from Champaign-Urbana to the city would allow students and faculty to make day trips and spur more collaboration with the other educational institutions in the city.
"Right now we have to organize buses to bring them up. It's a big production," she told Chicago Inno.
Amato added that improving that connection may help keep more tech startups in Chicago.
"If you look at our undergraduates, more than half of them are from the state of Illinois, but we lose a lot of them to the coasts," she said. "They will go to Silicon Valley, or even places like Austin and Seattle, and that's inexcusable."
Having this connection would be a real "game-changer" to keep young entrepreneurs throughout the state here, Amato said.
Amato also thinks it will help recruit faculty.
"One of our challenges in recruiting faculty is access to the startup culture," she said. "The other is the dual-career situation. Almost all of our faculty have a partner who's often also in the tech scene. Maybe one of them is a professor and the other might want to work in tech, and we can't really offer that as much in Champaign."
She said a better connection to the city may completely change the equation for the University of Illinois.
Others will look to connect emerging tech workers on Chicago's South Side to Fulton Market, O'Hare, the University of Illinois Chicago and more.
"By increasing access and fostering efficient connections, the Brain Train will bridge the gaps between [the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign] and the city and propel the region's tech ecosystem to new heights," Cooper said.
