Do you know the Tale of Admiral Hyman Rickover Ardecila? Look him up.......

Chicago's Big Bet on the Bus
 

This article was posted in the Chicago subreddit and it's interesting to see the opinions of people who are less urban/transit nut balls (like we are). Seems like a lot of people are in favor of this, which is good. I'd give it a 70/30 split.

Thought some of you may be interested in seeing the discussion over there!

There's definitely some SSP/Reddit overlap... but yeah, the masses are not as uninformed as it appears sometimes.

The most vocal people at community meetings are often those with the most to lose and the most time on their hands (semi-retired Boomer property owners). In real life, though, these people are a minority. For obvious reasons, not a lot of these people use Reddit.

I guess you could look at it one of two ways:

"More money for the busses? Why would they do that? The bus system is terrible."

Or.

"More money for the busses? Finally! The bus system is terrible."

Which camp you fall into probably depends a lot on whether you use the bus system to go places.

The article is accurate in that Chicago has a split-personality regarding transportation. I know a lot of people without cars and a lot of people that couldn't imagine living here without a car.

People here think they have a right to drive and park anywhere. With our transit, car ownership rates should be much lower. We're behind Baltimore, Philly, Boston, and D.C. in car free households.

And the number of people that drive to work drives me mad. Maybe the parking meter sale was a bad deal, but I'm all for the price increase. I can't believe people drive to work downtown.

Every single development meeting seems to be like 85% about cars and traffic.

The BRT fight is a real defining moment for the City. Are we really going to block mass transit because people want to drive to Costco? That fact that that is even a legitimate consideration in the city is insane.

Fucking Costco!

I've had planning fatigue for years. I don't visit this thread very often for that reason. While other cities are building, here in Chicago we're just performing a perpetual mental masturbation about "the possibilities". For example, we've had enough meetings about the BRT plan. What's the surprise that a certain faction is against it? Just move the proposal forward and get started. Fuck everybody.

Re Chicago's split personality:

Exhibit A: if you have a kid in the car you can do anything.
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20140...chools-support

I lived near a school, a private one, with a ton of drop offs and pick ups. They caused more problems than any delivery trucks.

A magnet school with families that don't live in the neighborhood could veto a grocery store because parents want to drop their kids off without hassle.

Insane.

^ Should be pretty easy to coordinate delivery times outside of the usual drop off/pickup times for the school.

But yeah... it's kind of annoying. I actually realize now that I could never be an Alderman for the simple fact that I couldn't stand the obnoxious complaints day in/day out from community members about every little issue.

By the way, shouldn't this be in the 'General Developments' thread?

You seem like an unusual kind of politician. The kind usually known as an unelected dictator.

^ In your position as a community leader, I hope you realize that not all opinions within a neighborhood are reflected by its most vocal representatives.

The people with the time to attend community meetings and protest things are not the people who are slogging to work on the bus day in and day out, or struggling to afford housing amid rising prices and stagnant supply.

From the comment section on DNA info:

Absolutely absurd rationale. Potential traffic from a grocery store is the problem here? Not the double parked mommymobiles idling up and down the block waiting for lil Johnny and Suzy to get out of school?

Fuck these people.

The traffic issue is such an overblown one. From LaSalle II's website..

Trader Joe's hours (Diversey): 8:00am-10:00 pm

The sole delivery for TJ's would occur around 5:30a or 6a, before parents arrive, and it would only be one truck. In the afternoon, nobody is really going grocery shopping at 2:45pm. I don't see the potential for conflict. If it's such an issue, move TJ's opening time back. I doubt they do much early morning business anyway.

As far as the parent-dropoff thing being anti-urban... I agree, but what did you expect when you reformed CPS along a magnet/charter school model? Neighborhood schools generally suck, and parents with means typically don't send their kids there, but those are the only schools that young children can safely walk to.

This x100.

With a rake.

1. I'm not a politician
2. I believe in a republic run by elected representatives who actually are allowed to make decisions. You know, where they don't have to go back to the public every 5 goddamn minutes to "gauge" their opinion on every little matter in sundry community meeting after meeting.

Democracy has become equivalent to mob rule in Chicago. Intimidation of elected officials to the detriment of the city's bests interests. Aldermen think having power over zoning is some sort of blessing, but if you ask me, it's a curse. They would be much better off, and much more secure in their jobs, if they were stripped of this power and it was instead in the hands of the planning dept. Then they can wash their hands of these decisions and not be held accountable come election time when the "far too dense" 4 story building in a neighborhood of single family homes was approved.

+1

I think any project team in Chicago does a good job reaching out to the public. The only important thing is transparency and open discussions to those affected in the project area. But at some point, you have to let the experts and the people in charge get things done. If the public wants to maintain some sort of status quo for the neighborhood, that's really got to be done through meetings and policy changes before anything is ever proposed. But these meetings tend to be more reactive, despite that what's being proposed is more often that not, legally permissible.

Generally, I think it should be up to the school to find a solution to traffic problems, not the other businesses. I think of Ogden school in my neighborhood that has traffic management down to a perfect science with designated queuing areas. This alongside garages and busy commuter traffic. The neighborhood has grown tremendously but the school took the initiative to create a safe and efficient traffic control system on Walton.

Jobs here; transit over there
 

From a Metropolitan Planning Council presentation

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3784/1...094367ca_b.jpg

http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3796/1...3edd8650_c.jpg

Is there a way to flip the colors on that first map, so we can see how many jobs those blue circles are covering?

^Sorry, I didn't make the map.

Bloomingdale/Western: viaduct removal

https://fbcdn-sphotos-d-a.akamaihd.n...49417358_n.jpg
606 Chicago


Eventually... the Ashland bridge girders will be moved over to Western and the sidewalks will be cut through the embankment to allow for a wider roadway.

http://the606.org/wp-content/uploads...ew-930x435.jpg
src

Amazing that they were able to populate those renders with living people, rather than ghosties. That must require special mastery of dark arts.

You know they're really serious when they completely shut down Western Avenue. I wonder if it was all accomplished within a single day.

That is a really great image IMO. Taken from the centerline, you have the symmetry of the Greek ruin-like columns on the sides, with the ferocious machine in dead center waiting to pounce again. Add those boulders and the snow dusting, and you've got a scene ready for Transformers filming.

By law and good ethics, commercially produced images can contain real looking people if they've come from an officially licensed source where the subjects have given permission or were offered compensation to have their image sold off as photo stock. Otherwise, if the company that produced the images doesn't have a rendering library of background entourage, they must use ghosted figures. As you point out, it's totally worth it for firms to invest in purchasing people image cutouts because it makes renderings way more appealing.

While the blue circles are distracting, the map is useful for identifying job clusters that aren't served by rail transit: the Busse Woods ring (Schaumburg-EGV) and the I-88 corridor appear to be the big offenders. It's also interesting to see that there's still a big drop-off in job density west of I-355, which opened 25 years ago.

Said planning department ultimately reports to political heads. Sure, there are many cities where day-to-day planning decisions are made in a more technocratic manner, but eventually politics will always rear its head. Even Singapore, the ultimate in technocrat city-states, has NIMBYs who influence local elections.

Interesting but not that surprising. Schaumburg/Rolling Meadows and Lombard/Downers Grove boomed as job centers precisely because they had good north-south/circumferential connections on 355 as well as east-west/radial connections on 90 and 88 respectively. In other words, being near a major interchange is desirable to employers because it maximizes the pool of talent they can draw from. The same goes for the central Tri-State/294 corridor, although that tends to be more manufacturing-oriented.

You can't say that about job centers further west along 90 or 88, where north-south connections are relatively poor (IL 59, 31, 25, Randall Rd). The talent pool for those locations is far more limited - just that sector of Chicagoland and not the whole thing.

RTA eliminated, governor given more power under transportation proposals
 

http://www.suntimes.com/26139628-761...proposals.html

By ROSALIND ROSSI Transportation Reporter March 11, 2014 6:26PM

The Regional Transportation Authority board would be eliminated and the governor would get more power over transit
appointments under proposals advanced Tuesday to Gov. Pat Quinn’s Northeastern Illinois Public Transit Task Force.........

Email rrossi@suntimes.com

Twitter @rosalindrossi

Saw a poster today at Jefferson Park... not sure if this has any teeth to it. It's not connected to ward-level zoning decisions and not connected to Metra's decisions about service frequency or infill stations. Not even sure what the point is other than to start the discussion about Metra TOD in the city.

http://chicagometratypologies.com/meetings/

Expect the lakefront flyover bike path to beginning very soon.

It's going to be done in 3 phases and take 4 years.

http://www.cityofchicago.org/content...ON_feb2011.pdf

I will certainly be at the meeting March 25th at the Avalon Park Field House, (which is close to the 83rd St. Electric District Main Line station) to hand out literature and information about upgrading the in-city Electric District routes to the Gray Line.

Creating maybe a few hundred New Jobs right there in the vicinity of the station, and thousands in Economic Development right there in the Neighborhood

Hells yeah, good to see this starting soon. It's about time we actually build something instead of having more silly meetings

LSD bike flyover
 

Yes, great news indeed. But 4 years? Isn't that half the time it took to complete the Big Dig in Boston?

Oh well, its good to know its eventually coming. Given that I became a serious biker again in the last year it couldn't come again too soon.

Does this greenlight and timetable include the Dusable Park buildout as well?

It's going to be a huge improvement having a continuous and sane walking/biking route between museum campus and Navy Pier. That's one of my favorite walking routes to take out of towners on, until I remember about the bridge and the unfriendly path the rest of the way to NP.

It would be great if they could integrate this with the new riverwalk, too. And I hope they work with Divvy to set up some convenient stations. And they could add some of those bicycle repair posts to the flyovers themselves, since I think those weren't really around when this thing was being designed.

It shouldn't... that's a separately planned and (un)funded project. I think Shelbourne was going to chip in some money towards DuSable Park but obviously that never happened and there's no way to access the site right now.

it boggles my mind how it could possibly take 4 freaking years to build a glorified bike ramp! they should probably do another half dozen "studies" to determine if this flyover can really be built in only 4 years. it might take 5 or 6.

fucking ridiculous. the city that works (slowly)!

POLITICS Dan -- P O L I T I C S .......

And NEVER forget -- WE elect them!

Not sure but I believe the funds for the flyover are coming from the annual CMAQ grants, so it might take four years' worth of grants to fully fund the project.

IIRC the flyover kept getting passed over (no pun intended) for the grants in favor of other stuff that presumably improves air quality, like right turn lanes at giant suburban intersections or stoplight coordination.

2 plans considered for overhauling transit system
 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/l...,6282303.story

By Richard Wronski, Tribune reporter
8:52 p.m. CDT, March 12, 2014

A task force studying reform of the region's mass transit system is considering two plans that would
drastically overhaul the way the Chicago area's network of buses and trains is overseen and operated........

^ Both essentially place CTA/Metra/Pace into one fold, and that is a good thing. I like the idea of a "superagency" not dissimilar to New York's MTA.

It's the only way you can achieve any regional planning without separate agencies, like CTA and Metra, competing with eachother for "customers".

For example, I find it outrageous that Metra controls the busway in Grant Park that takes passengers to McCormick Place and insists that CTA should not be allowed to use it. This is the kind of silly, petty garbage that does nothing to help the city and needs to be done away with.

You hit it right on the head urban -- S I L L Y and P E T T Y! GET RID of them!

So the second plan would place control of Chicago transit in the hands of Illinois. That seems kind of preposterous on its face, but I don't know a single thing about state government.

From my history as a Michigander, if Michigan decided to take over Detroit transit it would probably be way less corrupt but would probably gutted to barebones by the current governor who hates poor people.

I'm sure there's tons of graft and lined pockets and embezzling within CTA/Metra, maybe sending the reins down to Springfield would help with that? It just seems like they'd completely lose touch with the city and its people.

Hates poor people, aka "person who disagrees with my particular political ideas and solutions." I see so much of this on the left. If you don't support their ideas, you're racist or hate poor people. And then they complain about the "political-partisan climate" in the country, which of course, they go on to blame on Republicans only.

I would hardly place Rick Snyder as an anti-transit wingnut; the guy frequently cites his experience riding Metra as a cause for his support of rail in Michigan.

Giving greater control of transit to the state might lessen corruption but I doubt it would improve planning. For better or worse, the three agencies are pretty responsive to local governments. That means patronage hires and sweetheart deals but it also means new benches and fresh paint at an L station, or much-needed improvements at a forlorn urban Metra stop.

It's worth noting that a series of crises spurred the creation of the MTA in New York, but the governor (at the time, Nelson Rockefeller) gained power over the MTA in the deal and MTA has starved for funds as a result of the largely rural/suburban/Upstate bias of the Governor's office. Internally, my impression is of a much better managed agency, but it still suffers as a regional authority because large parts of the region are surrendered to NJTransit, Port Authority, and ConnDOT.

You should learn more about their ideas.

^ My thoughts are that any "loss of power" to the city by ceding control to the State will be outweighed by the benefit of reducing all of the redundancies of having 3 separate agencies with 3 separate budgets and 3 separate agendas. We have to remember that agencies like Metra, CTA, etc are essentially non-for-profits, and non-for-profits are some of the most greedy, slimy organizations in the world. They are salary generating machines for scores of executives, and hence revenue streams are highly important to them; that explains why Metra does as much as possible to not cooporate with CTA, and to prevent CTA from "stealing" their customers. The single greatest achievement of merging these agencies, if nothing else, will be to eliminate the disincentive to work together to solve regional transit needs.

Regarding the politics of handing control over to the State, there is always a chance that any "superagency" board will have members appointed by the Mayor of Chicago. We are still early in the process. I'm hoping that will be the outcome. Either way, I don't think a comparison to Michigan is very accurate for a few reasons: 1) the Detroit region doesn't have the same clout with Michigan that Chicago does with Illinois, 2) Detroit's urban core simply isn't the kind of economic engine that downtown Chicago is, and 3) most of the "power brokers" in Illinois State Govt live in or around Chicago anyhow, and I'm not sure that is the case with Michigan and Detroit.

I agree completely.

Option 1 includes merging CTA/RTA/Metra as well, just keeping it within the city. So it seems like either way the redundancies and conflicting interests would be reduced. Those things being equal, it seems like local control would be logistically easier. Figuring out who to run it and fill the board with would probably be a nightmare, though.

As a 40 hr. per week MINIMUM WAGE worker, tell me briefly what the Republicans might do to benefit me. One of them made me REAL P/O'ed talking about LOWERING the min. wage -- but then he backed off of it.

I felt just like a Pawn on a Chess Board, if I'm WORKING 40 hrs. per week (N O T sitting at home waiting on some F'King "check") -- I shouldn't be made to feel like that.

You've misread my tone. I was eluding that the more you learn about their beliefs and "ideas" the more scary they're revealed to be and the less likely anyone would and should be to throw both parties into the "oh they're all the same" camp. When I hear that I can tell that person is a low information voter and probably just nods along to anything. They are not the same. Many might be crooks and doing the work of big business over the working man on both sides, but look, at this point one party wants to progressively govern and the other wants to put Ted Nugent in the Oval Office to arm children, spread Objectivist propaganda, burn books and dismantle the country. So there really should be no confusing the two. Personally speaking I'm more of a small s socialist so I'm right there with you.

Then I Truly and Sincerely Apologize, I see that I did misread you Bee -- you are NOT part of the "Ted for Pres." set!! G O O D

You should know I don't "just nod along" for anything.