Forums: Regional Mobility Council

Shaping transportation and mobility decisions across the region

The Regional Mobility Council (RMC) is an advisory committee hosted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) that aims to shape decisions across the region, specifically focusing on issues related to Americans with Disabilities (ADA) compliance. The RMC assesses CMAP’s work, offers feedback and recommendations, and helps ensure initiatives align with community needs.

The RMC’s goals include:

• Delivering actionable strategies to enhance mobility and accessibility across the region
• Educating key stakeholders about CMAP’s role and leveraging the council as a platform to drive meaningful change
• Fostering collaboration across all levels of government to address shared mobility and accessibility challenges
• Identifying and highlighting resources that can help improve regional mobility and accessibility
• Offering constructive feedback on CMAP’s priorities, which include programs and initiatives that promote inclusive growth, resilience, and prioritized investment.
• Raising awareness of mobility and accessibility challenges across the region and providing data-driven recommendations for improvement

Supporting regional planning

Since kicking off in April 2025, the RMC has worked to help shape transportation and mobility decisions across the region, emphasizing open dialogue, peer learning, and constructive feedback on planning efforts. Some examples of the work they have done includes:

• Deeper context-setting by learning about CMAP’s role in the region and its core focus areas, with members learning from one another through presentations on their respective agencies and work.
• Meeting with ADA coordinators to discuss collaboration around community engagement, physical accessibility, and resource sharing.
• Understanding what a transportation trip is like for people with disabilities by mapping out each step of a journey — whether walking or rolling, using transit, or driving. RMC members talked through related emotions and challenges, ideas for improvement, and how the experience changes depending on the type of disability and whether someone lives in an urban, suburban, or rural area. This exercise helped CMAP gather a wide range of insights to shape the Regional Transportation Plan.
• A scenario-building exercise, creating personas of people with disabilities searching for housing. RMC members worked through barriers related to affordability, accessibility, transportation access, financial trade-offs, and long-term housing goals. CMAP’s housing readiness team returned with draft strategies shaped by this input, and RMC members helped refine and strengthen those ideas to ensure disability perspectives were meaningfully reflected in the final work.
• And there’s more still to come in 2026, like engaging with The Century Plan, CMAP’s long-term vision for northeastern Illinois, to ensure disability perspectives are reflected as the plan moves toward adoption in fall 2027. The RMC will also explore what ongoing engagement will look like once their work wraps up, including how members would like to stay involved with CMAP work and support the agency’s future efforts.

RMC membership