What's being illuminated here is the constant battle between convenience for daily commuters and legibility to infrequent users. For CTA, this debate is usually between proponents of highly visible rail lines and proponents of fragmented bus service that picks up patrons closer to their homes and drops them closer to their offices. That's why actual everyday commuters in South Shore wouldn't really see any advantage from the Gray Line.

For daily commuters, the 120-series bus lines provide good, reliable rush hour service from West Loop rail terminals to Streeterville offices. But to infrequent visitors, that service is often irrelevant (not running when they arrive) and invisible (hard to show on the map; even harder to see on the street). Suppose tomorrow we had a subway line with stops at Union, Ogilvie, Michigan/Wacker, NWMH, and Hancock. Would the Monday commute be more or less convenient for people who now ride 120-series buses virtually to the door of their office buildings? Including walking time, would their door-to-door time actually be reduced?

^ I view this also being about making it a more convenient option for the millions of people living outside of city limits to conveniently get to River North/Streeterville/Mag Mile without having to drive.

Right now I basically visit Chicago by car even though I would love to take a train. Why? Because I don't work in the Loop, so when I visit the city (a few times per month) I'm usually headed north of the river, unless I'm in the mood to wander around and gaze at the Loop's architecture, or perhaps a trip to MP.

That's where most of the retail, entertainment, restaurants, and hotels are. That's where out of towners tend to be headed.

That's why the city had a free trolley system. Why would there be a free trolley if there weren't a demand? Those trolleys were absolutely filled to the brim every single time I saw them.

If I knew that I could take Amtrak to the Loop and then take a reliable train/BRT to the Mag Mile, that would be a game changer for me, because I sure as hell hate traffic and parking.

If now is not the time to really start implementing this, then when is the right time? Over the years/decades more and more towers are going to get built in River North/Streeterville, more hotels are on the way--thus more congestion, more demand... who are we trying to convince here?

Free CTA rides for seniors will continue

source: http://www.suntimes.com/news/transpo...103009.article
This is a little frustrating. The CTA is trying to shore up its annual deficit by reducing the subsidy to seniors that can afford to pay, yet Hendon is blocking the move while claiming it's the city of Chicago's responsibility to find funding for the budget gap.

Sure, I get that the State can make stipulations if it's going to provide additional funding to the CTA, but unless they plan on providing year-over-year revenues to cover the subsidy to the elderly in addition to their annual contribution, screw them.

^ He's right about one thing, though--if Daley can rally his troops around the Olympics and Millennium Park, maybe he should do something to really prioritize transit in Chicago.

I'm not saying the CTA's budget issues are his fault or in his hands. But if the guy....ugh, whatever. Daley's useful life as Mayor is spent, as far as I'm concerned. Chicago really needs some fresh blood.

I agree that Daley does not prioritize transit enough, but I am very worried about what sort of mayor Chicago will get when Daley steps down/has the office stripped from him by the icy hands of death. Perhaps we could get a more transit friendly major, but I'm worried they would not keep pushing the development of the loop, an epic disaster in my opinion.

Now, my dream is for Ron Huberman, former head of the CTA, to became mayor.

^ Yeah, Huberman doesn't seem too bad on the surface. I'd like to hear a little more about his views, etc

Why does the 124 bus not meet your needs? Or the 151? Just because you don't know about them?

While I think there are a number of things Daley's City Hall could do to better aid CTA (e.g. re-orienting CDOT to value pedestrians and buses above private vehicles, a more aggressive transit-oriented posture in the zoning code, going to bat against the aldermen when CTA wants to cut blatantly inefficient services, etc.), it's prudent to bring up that just in 2008, Daley supported both an additional .25% sales tax and a city-only real estate transfer tax.

^ They're bus routes.

I don't use buses unless I"m forced to. I learned my lesson in NY.

So upgrading that route to BRT/rail just isn't worth it in your mind? To each his own, but that's what I call second rate transit; kind of unbecoming for what we're supposed to be calling a first rate, world class city.

Lol, thats because the busses in NYC suck balls. In Chicago buses are usually faster and more reliable than the train. If you've only been using the El here, man are you wasting your time...

Yea, bus service here is arguably some of the best in the country, both in terms of the size of the network and the frequency of service. Bus Tracker is an amazing benefit, too, but it shouldn't be restricted to people with smart phones... busy stops should get screens like those in the L stations, with Bus Tracker info and advertising. JC Decaux might get pissed, but we're not here to make them happy.

:hell:

Effort to end free mass-transit rides for Illinois seniors gets derailed at state Capitol

^^^ They raise a good point in the article, the seniors are going to be hurt a hell of a lot more by having to wait 2x's as long in the freezing cold for a bus or a train than the younger generations. Not only will the trains and buses have to run less frequently, but older people as less likely to use new technology that would enable them to access bus tracker and know exactly when to head outside. Whatever, you can't have your cake and eat it too, the elderly will be hurt either way, I would just prefer the option that doesn't screw the rest of us as well...

Chicago isn't New York, all the moreso since Chicago now has by far the newest and most reliable bus fleet of any big city transit agency, along with, of course, Bus Tracker. The others have hinted at it, but the bus ain't what it used to be.

This touches on a pretty interesting and controversial topic of transit research, actually. Long story short, transit-dependent populations in general obtain maximum utility by keeping fares to a minimum even if that means reduced levels of service, in contrast to choice riders who get maximum benefit from having higher fares supporting higher levels of service. This phenomenon is apparent when you consider that "transit cities" like Chicago, New York, Philly, DC tend to have substantially higher fares and of course higher levels of service than cities where transit is almost exclusively for the transit-dependent - the latter cities where the bus costs $1.25 but doesn't actually get anyone out of their cars if they have one. I just bring this up to point out that it's very messy and complicated when talking about who is impacted and to what extent by fare levels versus service levels - most of us on SSP will fall in the camp that would much prefer maintaining service levels than low fares, but that's just one slice of the transit (and voting) constituency.

I don't understand how I'm expected to have more money in college than a senior is expected to have?

The free rides issue pisses me off more than any single issue in the Illinois general assembly. We all know what the real problem is...THERE"S AN ELECTION NEXT YEAR. Nobody wants to potentially piss off their largest voting demographic in an election year.

Dipshits like Quinn of course say that seniors just can't afford to pay for fares, yet the proposal would only have required seniors making more than $22k a year to pay a fare of less than a dollar. Over a third of seniors riding the CTA make in excess of $55k. But they vote, so they're safe.

And people wonder why this state is in such financial trouble.

Agree with your first point completely, as it is blatantly obvious.

but, I remember Quinn wanting to limit senior discount but backing down because he didn't have the votes to pass it.

and if those are real stats I'd love the source. Doing ridership and traffic flow studies on a project, and that sounds like an appropriate precedent.

So did I...and then he went and shit the bed and said it was an important program that he wanted to keep.

http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?sec...cal&id=7093395

Populist pandering combined with needless entitlements. No wonder why debt holes keep getting bigger with such a mentality.

When's the City going to start talking more about the transit components of the Central Area Action Plan?

Deal reportedly reached to avoid CTA fare hike
Posted by Greg H. at 11/10/2009 5:35 PM CST on Chicago Business

Transit officials and Gov. Pat Quinn have reached agreement on a deal that will avoid a threatened Chicago Transit Authority fare hike, both in 2010 and 2011.

According to reliable sources, the deal involves the Regional Transportation Authority issuing bonds for capital projects that would be funneled to the CTA. That would allow the CTA to shift some federal capital funds into its cash-short operating budget, thereby avoiding the necessity to hike fares.

As part of the deal, the state reportedly would help the CTA pay debt service on the RTA funds for at least a couple of years. Other monies would go to Pace, which has had trouble financing its para-transit operation.

Sources said the deal is to be formally announced at a press conference featuring Mr. Quinn and transit leaders as soon as Wednesday afternoon.

If the deal comes about as promised, the CTA would not as threatened raise most fares a quarter -- for instance, all el rides would cost $3 -- but would go ahead with about $90 million in service cuts.

^ What? Still going forward with the service cuts?

Damn, that's a shame

^^^ No, what they are doing is going ahead with service cuts and also mortgaging the future of the CTA and RTA with lots of bonds that will just suck all of CTA's funding dry in the future. Lovely plan guys, too bad it doesn't involve growing any balls and actually fixing the problem. I've said this a million times, its stupid pandering to special groups like this that makes me Libertarian. They can't do anything right because they are too afraid to lose votes...

Just playing devil's advocate here, but isn't this (i.e. borrowing from future hypothetical tax increases to pay for spending today without a present tax increase) just a form of pandering to anti-tax voters?

^^ Wasn't that his point? I'm confused.

Yes it is, which is a big reason why I am a libertarian and not a Republican (other reasons include the fact that Republicans pretty much want to kill everyone who isn't WASP except the Jews and don't like political freedom or free thought). Libertarians are for the reduction of the size of government then the reduction of taxes. Republicans are for the reduction of taxes and the reallocation of all government spending to the military-industrial complex regardless of whatever massive deficits it creates.

In other words, the if the government kept their filthy hands out of the transportation business by not massively subsidizing the construction of highways, the private mass transit companies that built the El and streetcars would never had gone broke. If they would never had gone broke, the government would never had an excuse to expand their power into the management and subsidization (though they suck at subsidizing it) of mass transit. So today we would still have an extremely dense urban center with less open lots, fewer cars, and nearly everyone taking the train or a street car (instead of buses) to work.

Essentially I believe the government gets involved somewhere it shouldn't, throws the natural balance of things out of whack, then uses that out-of-whackness as an excuse that "oh clearly the government needs to expand their power here" which only causes further problems that give them further excuses and so on. So what I am for is nipping that process in the bud and reducing the number of stupid things the government has taken over. Then, once the government saves money by not spending trillions on freeways then spending billions more a year subsidizing the transit they undercut with freeways, we reduce taxes because the surplus would be huge, not the other way around.

I don't have a problem with paying taxes for things like fire departments, reasonable national defense, education, and even health care (if they would just go all the way and make a system that mimics the competition between public and private universities). I have a huge problem with paying taxes to build freeways everywhere, invade random countries, and to line the pockets of bureaucrats. I also have a problem when the baby boomers, because they are demographically huge, rape and pillage the future of my generation by cutting taxes for themselves and then ramping up government spending through the roof and dumping the massive deficits on me for me to pay someday when I have a good job (assuming the boomers slash and burn of our country doesn't destroy all the jobs...).

^I don't know whether to dignify such drivel with a logical response, but your view of history is pretty laughable. Most of the private transit carriers were merely support for subdivision schemes or ways for the founders to skim off the construction profits and leave stockholders holding the bag with a train line to run. Most of them were bankrupt by the 1920s, and virtually all by the end of the 30s. The geometric growth in auto ownership dragged local governments into making road improvements, not the other way around.

When state governments (and eventually the feds in 1956) began doing large-scale highway improvements, it was politically impossible to pay for them with general taxation in a society where less than half of voters were motorists. The solution was for the highways to pay for themselves, through gas taxes.

Has it totally escaped your notice that your theory has no proof of any kind? That no transit system, anywhere in the world, under any system of government, operates without heavy taxpayer subsidy?

^^^ I was waiting for another arrogant post from MrD.

Thats exactly my point, there are no longer any major private transportation systems because the government in the US took all them over because they messed it up by forcing gigantic freeways through the centers of downtowns. However, if you look at my "laughable" (but entirely factual) view of history, there were in fact dozens of profitable mass transit systems until the massive building binge on auto infrastructure occurred. I know that there were profitable systems in Milwaukee, Chicago, New York, and many other American cities all of which became suspiciously unprofitable as soon as freeways were built.

When it comes to the gas tax nonsense you always bring up, last time I checked a gas tax is still a tax and still counts as government spending and intervention. The important part of the construction of freeways wasn't so much that the government was spending money, it was that the government had the power to mess things up in ways the private sector could never dream of. For example, do you think that a private company could have arranged for any of the downtown freeways to be built by buying properties on the market and tearing them down? Do you think any investor would take that risk? No. The government had to come in with eminent domain and completely tore apart the fabric of the urban core and punched freeways through, it doesn't matter where they go the money, it matters that they used force (something private citizens cannot legally use) to make things happen that bankrupted the railroads.

Also, if transit was so unprofitable, then why were railways so profitable (among the most profitable industries in history) for about 70 years?

Sorry MrD but your opinion doesn't count as history and your are not superior to everyone in the world because you have some job in planning... Also, I heard the shadows over Grant Park caused by evil highrises are actually why its impossible for private mass transit to exist.

Also this isn't even a legitimate argument. This is the status quo, its not evidence. If this argument were true then we wouldn't have private communications companies or airlines (among countless other examples) because, until deregulation, they were all publicly owned, operated, or controlled.

Spoken like a true academic.http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/imag...s/rolleyes.gif

Granted the Libertarian viewpoint is complex, but most people's takeaway from it, aside from narcotic legalization, is that government and taxes are bad. My point is that the current technique of borrowing against the future is the inevitable result of the horror a large chunk of the voting public expresses regarding anything remotely resembling a tax (and yes, this includes the less-nuanced among Libertarians - even though they favor balanced budgeting, they will never pass up an opportunity to oppose a tax under the 'starve the beast' logic). In fact, I think one could extend this line of reasoning to try to understand most of Chicago/Illinois absurd tax structures, wherein the property tax levy is sacrosant and any increase, even at the rate of inflation, causes granny to resort to a cat food diet, so instead we resort to nickel-and-dime taxes (which happen to be highly cyclical, natch) to actually fund the government services everyone takes for granted and demand continuation of, apparently with money growing on trees. It's more an issue at the local and county level than the state level (e.g. the county's sales tax hike because its property tax levy was capped, the city's myriad little consumption taxes, etc.), but clearly the success of the technique locally is rubbing off on Springfield

Besides, my impression is that his remark regarding pandering was directed more towards seniors and labor unions rather than anti-tax types, which hadn't previously been raised.

...and that's when I tuned out.

Those profitable railroads were generally only built and profitable because the legal path was cleared for them by government. Read up on land grants, operating franchises and the like. You think the L getting built over alleys and streets, or railroads linearly traversing entire states, didn't involve government involvement on some level? You'd be profitable too if you owned a government-protected monopoly (or perhaps at most, duopoly in some markets) for interstate movement of bulk goods.

If government had never got involved in any sort of infrastructure development you'd have something closer to India circa 1990. Well-oiled wealth-producing machine of pure efficiency, eh?

Quite simply - no. The construction of highways had nothing to do with the companies going broke. The companies were long gone by the time highway construction started in Chicago.

The private lines started having financial troubles in the 20's, and the depression killed them off. They received massive Federal assistance during this time - the first subways in Chicago were paid for by Federal grants given in 1937. By the early 40's all private transit companies in Chicago were in receivership. The CTA was created in 1945 to take over all of the lines. Highways were built much later: The Eisenhower opened in 1955, The Kennedy in 1960, and The Dan Ryan opened in 1962. All opened decades after the transit companies had gone broke.

Many of the transit companies were never meant to be self sustaining businesses. Yerkes desribed his business model as "buy up old junk, fix it up a little, and unload it upon other fellows.". That is exactly what he did with the lines he owned. Insull was involved with transit to help him sell electricity and land.

I know you're talking about urban railroads, but it's also worth noting that the railroads through the old west were not only built on land granted to them by the government, but they were also typically given miles of land on either side of their ROW that they could turn around and sell to speculators/settlers, further enhancing their profits.

Gas taxes haven't covered the cost of highways, much less the cost of new cosntruction, in decades. I'm not necessarily saying that that means that they should all be ripped down as insolvent, but the idea that they are paid for purely by users is simply incorrect.

Hong Kong, Osaka, Taipei, Tokyo, London

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

The libertarian line of "if not for government, everything would be perfect" quickly loses steam when one is forced to interact with reality. I too was sympathetic towards the anti-government mantra as an anti authority rebel in college. Then I entered the real world, where i discovered that (i) people are inherently irrational and easily manipulated and need some sense of order and guidance so as not to revert to a primitive and tribal state of mind; and (2) government has and always will be the basic foundation of absolutely everything we know and ever will.

In the case of transit, how do you expect private entities to enter into a contract to build a station without a government courthouse to enforce said contract? How can land for a rail line be purchased without some form of land distribution and acquisition policy created, administered, and enforced by the government? Do you really expect transit safety to be regulated by the market through after-the-fact market corrections? How many people will need to die before such a correction will happen? Wouldn't it make more sense to have some uniform safety policy set forth by the government? Or do you expect the victims to rely on the government created and administered tort system to sort out the money damages?

As for your hatred of special interests, perhaps you should look to the spineless politicians for blame. From my experience, the "appease every tiny interest group" phenomenon is quite recent. Taxes were raised and budgets slashed regularly throughout the 20th century, with and without the support of interest groups. Politicians had balls. Our system is designed to have loud and annoying interest groups, but it also depends on the ability of elected officials to listen to them all and then shut some of them out.

But these just further cement the point - all of these private operations own land and operating franchises granted by government. That would be like the City of Chicago or State of Illinois having acquired land around every transit station (in addition to having acquired the land for the ROW and stations themselves), giving those assets to the transit operation, then bidding out the operation of the service via a concession agreement. At some point, there was still not only a public expenditure, but there is also application of force/law that is solely the purview of government. Their present 100+% farebox recovery ignores past public investment in the property acquisition (at minimum) and likely also public investment in the capital expenditure to construct fixed assets. Further, there's assorted other indirect subsidies: e.g. do any of the above operations pay local property taxes on their ROW and stations?

Also, the tables in that article have some suspect figures borne of sloppy consideration of "system-generated revenues" vs. "farebox recovery ratio" - the latter is the extent to which passenger fares only cover operating expenses, while the former includes all other incidental revenue such as advertising, real estate, and reserve interest income. The distinction is huge when comparing agencies with varying levels of real estate portfolios. If CTA were collecting rent on downtown skyscrapers and retail malls (built on land granted to CTA by the government) and were politically allowed to raise fares to something closer to revenue-maximization, its system-generated revenue would look a lot more like the Asian transit operations.

I wouldn't consider London a good example of how to privatize transit. The largest private partner in the project went under in 2007, leaving the government with a bill for £2 billion. Currently the majority of the system is run by Transport for London, which is a Government organization.

I'm fine if he wants to argue against seniors and labor unions, although much of his argument seems like standard Kunstlerian ranting. And didn't the City pass a property tax increase recently, despite the recession leading to a substantial drop in market values?

This will probably get lost in the shuffle, but does anybody remember a plan to connect the Eisenhower and Stevenson along the B&OCT corridor, near Western Avenue? I was looking at a map recently and realized how that might be a good idea, as a truck highway, to ease congestion on Western and act as almost an inner ring to divert truck traffic from the Circle, which is aging poorly and can't handle the load of heavy trucks.

The property tax levy (amount collected by the assessor) is completely independent of market values, an oft-misunderstood nuance which is a big part of why everyone starts lighting up the torches to burn the bastille whenever a politician accidentally mentions it. Houston's mayor proudly boasted of lowering property taxes for several consecutive years even while total property tax revenue increased, since in Texas property tax is set by a rate. In contrast, here at home a compounded 5% increase in property tax collections over 2 years ($329m) is called the "biggest tax increase in history" by the Tribune, which is strictly accurate ($329 is indeed the biggest) but very misleading.

Chicago Public Schools has been raising it's levy, but the City hasn't. Of course, the City gets money from TIFs, which is like taking money from the schools, thereby making CPS more likely to raise their property levy since it is their only revenue source and they have minimal public oversight that might make them hesitant in raising their levy, unlike the City Council. It would be way more efficient to just let the city raise it's levy rather than force all the districts to raise theirs (Cook County, who has also lost property tax revenue to the City via TIFs, instead turned to the sales tax, because the anti-tax types capped the County levy. Check page 60 here to see the total property revenue: http://198.65.148.209/bof4/08approbi...Estimates.pdf).

Or put another way, it's all totally messed up, which is sort of my point. If the voting public weren't so reflexively anti-tax and instead viewed taxation as a value exchange to be evaluated on it's own merits (e.g. proposed tax X to pay for public benefit Y: yay or nay?) then the entire charade wouldn't be necessary and ironically there would be more transparency and efficiency. Instead, we just get what we deserve, which is Pat Quinn and Mayor Daley.

Agreed on all points. The problem is your parenthetical "proposed tax X to pay for public benefit Y..." Politicians at all levels have gotten into the habit recently of "sweeping" funds into the general budget to adress budget shortfalls. People aren't entirely incorrect when they see a proposition for a tax that's supposed to benefit transit, for example, and they wonder where that money is going to actually end up. Taxes and all funding issues would have a much better chance of actually getting evaluated on their own merits if there were better legal protections placed around them to ensure that the money actually ends up where it is supposed to be and/or if legislatures would simply stop stealing money from one fund to pay for a completely different fund's shortfall.

Similarly, people don't really understand that government money goes into dedicated funds for dedicated purposes (a limited understanding that has been further eroded by the government's own acts, as I just said). People see that the government already has money for public service that I don't like X so why should I give them more money for public service that I do like Y? Why doesn't the government cut X and use that money to pay for Y? It doesn't work that way, and a lot of people (and a disturbing number of politicans) don't understand that, which limits their willingness to vote for any new budget measures as long as their are still expenditures that they disapprove of.

Depends on what you mean by highways. In this blog entry, a high-speed rail supporter uses my beloved Table HF-10 to "demolish the myth" that highways are paid for by their users. But table HF-10 uses the word highways to mean all roads and local streets, including the ones that used to be paid for 100 percent by general taxation. Seen in that light, a 21 percent shortfall doesn't seem so bad. Given the history, I think the best way to sum it up is that high-traffic highways are paid for entirely by their users, and motorists also pay a little more than half the cost of ordinary local streets, which we had long before the auto and will need for the foreseeable future.

Well, at least in suburban areas, the model holds up. Local streets aren't paid for by a motor-related tax, but the homebuyers in new developments pay for the cost of their streets as part of their purchase price. These streets feed into collectors and arterials, whose cost is funded in part or in whole by fuel taxes.

This is part of the reason that street networks in subdivisions tend to be non-connective, since people who largely plan to use their cars do not want to pay for any more streets than are necessary. It also gives those people a strong sense of possession of their streets, which is one of the origins of the bugbear of "through traffic". Back in the 1800s, when streets weren't improved, just strips of dirt, it was easy to lay a street grid, because imposing it didn't raise the costs of lots or new homes substantially. Now that streets require drainage systems, complex pavement, utility lines, and sometimes sidewalks, it becomes far more expensive to lay a street grid.

^I would add that there are numerous other indirect subsidies to the "auto-oriented" lifestyle that are difficult to capture. One more obvious one is police and emergency protection, with of course many jurisdictions spending the bulk of their time dealing with traffic issues but being funded out of property taxes or general revenue funds, rather than exclusively out of the fuel tax. Illinois State Police actually used to be partially funded out of the fuel tax (amazing!) but that ended when part of the 2009 budget balancing raiding assorted funds to shovel money around to avoid cuts or tax increases(nod to mwadswor).

Other society-wide indirect subsidies that are even more difficult to monetize are in health insurance (i.e. we collectively pay higher health insurance rates to deal with treatment of injuries caused in auto accidents, the latter much more likely than getting injured on foot or in transit on a per trip basis), and of course land use regulations that ensure cross-subsidization of accessory parking.

It makes sense for the state police to be funded out of fuel taxes if their primary job is patrolling the highways within the state. That's not indirect at all.

Healthcare, as you said, is really difficult to measure because we pool risk, and we each have different kinds of risk associated. Living in a city where car-free life is possible, my risk of crashing a car is low, but I am at higher risk for physical assault, respiratory conditions, or getting hit by a car while on foot. Since each person's individual habits are difficult to reduce into a questionnaire, it's nigh impossible to have a completely "fair" insurance system where each person pays according to their health risk. It's worse when you consider that poorer people tend to assume a greater risk, being more likely to live in high-crime areas, areas with environmental risks, work dangerous jobs, etc.

I guess my point is that there are plenty of risks inherent with any lifestyle, so including the healthcare costs of those risks is unfair when analyses of other societal forces do NOT take those costs into account. It skews the picture and makes driving look like some huge societal cost, when plenty of other things like cell-phone networks, libraries, and the electricity grid also affect societal costs indirectly.

Land use regulations aren't my favorite for the economic distortions they cause, but it's not as if Houston (the only major city with a substantial laissez-faire attitude toward land use) is some sort of ideal city. My annoyance at such regulations has more to do with the complexities they introduce into analysis, not their practical effect on cityscapes, since that effect depends on the content of the regulations and not their mere existence.

That's my point - police funded by a fuel tax would be ideal, and we in Illinois had it, but Quinn ended it this year. But in most municipalities, the police and emergency medical are not funded by the drivers who necessitate them - i.e. indirect subsidization of driving.

Houston mandates 1.33 off-street parking spaces per bedroom, and has a similarly high parking requirement for retail. Developments can also be denied on grounds of traffic modeling reducing the level of service on adjacent roads by a certain amount. So even though they don't have Euclidian Resi/Comm/Manu zoning classification, they still have development restrictions that ensure cross-subsidization of easy car use.

^^ Yes, of course (should have known better than to bring up Houston around you) but those same restrictions about traffic impact, parking, and minimum square footage apply to most suburban municipalities around the country, who also exercise zoning at the same time. Houston's regulations are deliberately set up to create an auto-friendly and pedestrian/transit-hostile city, yes, but they are also set up to DISCOURAGE the kinds of rigid stratified patterns of income and land use that form in those other suburban areas around the country. As far as I can tell, based purely on anecdotal evidence, they have been successful at doing this.

I won't try to argue that motorists pay all indirect costs of driving. After all, that calculation depends on who's doing the calculating. Some car-haters include the costs of Mideast military operations. And I think including indirect costs obligates the accountant to include indirect benefits as well.

I will say, though, that the HF-10 calculation does attempt to include the cost of highway law enforcement. Medical costs for auto accident victims are mostly reimbursed by auto insurance—which is, of course, paid for entirely by motorists.

If this was already posted I'm sorry...

http://www.suntimes.com/news/sneed/1...NEED12.article
November 12, 2009

Thumbs up to new expressway?


BY MICHAEL SNEED Sun-Times Columnist
It's a hot-button issue!

It's not official yet, but Sneed hears Gov. Quinn will give a "thumbs up" to construction of the Illiana Expy., a 30-mile superhighway that could cost $1 billion!

• The upshot: "The governor is ready to commit to the creation of the new expressway, which would connect Interstate 57 in Will County with Interstate 65 in Lake County, Ind.," a Quinn source said.

• $$$: "It would also be a huge economic opportunity for the south suburbs," he said. "Quinn plans to meet this month with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who supports the project and has faced fierce opposition in the past."

• A privateshot? "It could be a public/private venture, but Quinn would like the creation of the expressway to become part of his legacy," the source added. "It would significantly cut traffic congestion and change the dynamic of the south suburbs."

(Word is the venture is already being eyed as an investment by a major pension fund outside Illinois.)

So I see they're not passing through the fare increases, but are going ahead with the elimination of 9 express bus routes, reduction of service by up to 4 hours on 41 bus routes, and cutting service on most bus routes. The average wait time for a bus will increase 18% in 2010, and 9% for trains.

They're also borrowing funds for the 2010 budget. The state will pick up the interest expenses for the next two years, after which the CTA will be on the hook for $10 million a year in interest payments for the next three decades to pay for the 2010 operating budget shortfall.

So basically what everyone clarified - the Governor has said the CTA won't raise fares until after the next election - at which time they're on the hook for a total of $228 million in interest and principal payments to cover pushing off the 2010 budget crisis until future years.

So really we're going to have to raise fares in 2012 to not only cover what will probably still be funding issues that were never solved - but another $10M can be thrown into the bucket because of ignoring it in 2010.

Pisses me off so much. This state is so royally screwed in all aspects! We've been borrowing and running budget deficits at the state level every year since 2001. Next year is projected to be 11.2 billion. The CTA is having more and more debt piled on to cover operations.

I'm sadly doing a long term plan of how I'm going to get out of Illinois when this finally all becomes too much to handle. The state is seriously underwater pretty bad right now - and only going one way.

NO ONE in this state's leadership from the state to county to mayors are dealing with anything, just hiring more people, borrowing more money, handing out more patronage and pushing it to another election cycle.

Ciao Illinois

Do you have any evidence of the bolded portions? Basically every state and local agency has been on a sharp downward trajectory in employee headcount since at least 2001.

e.g. City of Chicago employment has dropped from 40,324 in 2003 to 35,570 in 2008 and down to 33,154 proposed in 2010 (that's an 18% reduction in headcount). Cook County dropped from 27,042 in 2003 to 22,142 in 2008. Clearly the structural deficit issues aren't a result of spending binges on excess employees, and if you dig into dollar amounts it's not an excess of take-home pay either (except inasmuch as some unions' employee pension contributions are arbitrary rather than automatic/statutory based on the health of the pension fund). The cost escalations are mostly in health care and retirement, which are exactly the same primary drivers that are bankrupting the federal government, who also kick the can down the road as the preferred method of 'solving' the problem rather than deal with the root causes of the structural deficit.