The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

CTA North Side El plan to start in 2017

A massive effort to rebuild the hundred-year-old El tracks between Howard and Lawrence moved forward this week with the CTA's announcement that work will start in 2017:

Construction will be divided into two segments: The first is expected to keep the Lawrence and Berwyn stations closed for about 18 months; the second will involve closing the Berwyn, Argyle and Lawrence stations and restricting the Bryn Mawr station to southbound boarding only for 18 months to two years.

The station redesigns are expected to include new elevators; wider platforms to reduce boarding times; larger canopies to guard against the elements; and more benches. New bridges won't require pillars in the median, which should provide better sightlines for drivers, [CTA spokeswoman Tammy] Chase said.

This project will complement the ongoing UP-North improvements Metra has been working on since 2013.

This interests me even more than it used to because IDTWHQ is moving to the affected area in just under seven weeks.

More crickets

I had my office door open most of the day and people kept walking in and speaking before I could acknowledge them. Hilarity ensued. Then I closed my office door and people who had appointments to talk to me simply walked away without knocking.

While that fun was happening, I didn't read any of these:

Off to more meetings.

In the queue

To read:

Back to cleaning up after a production bug this weekend.

Divvy is faster than the El, usually

Now that Chicago's bike share has hundreds of stations, its efficiencies are becoming clearer:

But what about convenience? Recently Divvy held its second annual data visualization challenge, and one of the winners, by Shaun Jacobsen at Transitized, compares the speed of Divvy with the speed of the CTA. And Divvy wins by a nose.

Jacobsen’s “Who’s Faster” project starts with a look at the 1,000 top “station pairs"—i.e. the places that people most often go from point A to point B using Divvy. Then, those are compared to the same route on the CTA at noon on a Monday.

And a couple patterns emerge. One is that the bulk of station-to-station trips are faster, centering on five minutes’ savings. It might not sound like much, but it adds up; Jacobsen calculates 32,023 hours saved over 571,634 trips. The other is that the most heavily-used station pairs tend to save more time than less frequently-used ones, as if people are starting to figure out how it works.

Cool stuff.

How Spirit is hurting air travel writ large

New Republic's John Paul Rollert explains:

That a flight on Spirit will occasionally cost you less than $40 highlights for its defenders the airline’s essential promise: bargain basement ticket prices. “Offering our low fares requires doing some things that some people complain about,” [Spirit’s CEO, Ben] Baldanza wrote in an email to the Dallas Morning News last April, after the paper ran a story about the egregious number of complaints his company receives. “[H]owever, these reduce costs which gives our customers the lowest fares in the industry.” The contention is not unreasonable, it's merely disingenuous. Baldanza would have us believe that the frustration with Spirit is simply a matter of obtuse passengers confusing the constraints of a low-cost carrier with a wanton unwillingness to afford First Class frills. Most people, however, don’t expect artisanal mustard at McDonald's or concierge service at Save-a-Lot. The discontent is not a consequence of failing to meet ridiculous expectations, but flouting those that are entirely reasonable.

Success breeds admirers. In December, Delta announced that it was introducing five categories of service, including its answer to Spirit’s Bare Fare: Basic Economy. In addition to its precarious grammar, Basic Economy does not allow passengers to pick their seats, change their itineraries, or fly standby. The move is merely the most recent evidence that Spirit has become a trendsetter—arguably, the trendsetter—in the American airlines industry. But what trend is it exactly? Baldanza has repeatedly affirmed that Spirit is refining the art of offering affordable airfare, an effort which he qualifies as nothing less than an essentially democratic endeavor. He has a point, insofar that we live in a world where social mobility and simple mobility increasingly go hand-in-hand. Yet other low-cost carriers have long provided models of budget air travel without engendering nearly the angst of Spirit.

This seems like a familiar story. I mean that literally: didn't someone else run almost the same story a few months back?

Chase enters the 2000s

Chip-and-PIN cards have ruled Europe for almost 10 years, because (a) they reduce fraud that (b) customers are liable for over there. In the U.S., where banks are liable, consumers haven't pushed as hard for the security measure, so it's rare. I've had a chipped card for two years now but even my bank hasn't gone the whole way to requiring PINs for purchases with it.

Chase, however, has had enough, and has decided to issue them to everyone:

Chip cards have significantly cut into fraud globally. For example, in the United Kingdom, card fraud in stores dropped by 75 percent from 2004 — when a large-scale rollout began — to 2012, said Zilvinas Bareisis, a senior analyst for Celent, a consulting firm to the financial services industry.

A December 2014 report by the Payments Security Task Force, whose members include Visa, Bank of America and Riverwoods-based Discover, estimates that 47 percent of U.S. terminals will accept chip cards by the end of 2015.

Chase, which holds almost 25 percent of deposits in the Chicago area, said its rollout here will be followed nationally.

Other banks are slowly introducing chip cards. BMO Harris Bank, which holds 12 percent of deposits in the Chicago area, said it recently began issuing chip debit cards. Any new or replacement debit cards include chips, spokesman Patrick O'Herlihy said.

It's sometimes amusing and sometimes sad that the U.S. lags the rest of the OECD in technology. This one is sad. I'm glad Chase is making this push. We could finally have chip-and-PIN cards in time for Europe to roll out whatever comes next.

New runway set to open at O'Hare this fall

The Trib expects noise complaints to take off:

The Federal Aviation Administration is expected within the next four months to release a preliminary report based on thousands of computer-generated flight simulations involving what will become O'Hare's fifth east-west runway and a subsequent runway that the city plans to open in 2020.

All this work, however, might not bring relief after a record year for O'Hare jet noise complaints. The simulations are aimed in part at finding the best way to squeeze in hundreds more daily flights at the airport.

Suburbs expected to hear more jet noise as the result of the 7,500-foot runway opening this fall include Bensenville, Franklin Park, Wood Dale, Bloomingdale and Addison, FAA and city aviation officials say.

So, people in Bensenville—which lies along the southern edge of O'Hare and is notable for its immense rail classification yard—are unhappy with their noisy neighbor. Keep in mind, the runway plans have been around for over 10 years. And jet noise today is far lower than before.

Hillary to announce tomorrow

The New York Times has the story:

Mrs. Clinton is expected to begin her campaign with a video message on social media, followed by a visit to important early-primary states next week, said two people briefed on her plans.

But for all the attention paid to how Mrs. Clinton would reveal her 2016 candidacy, little has been said about her reasons for mounting another presidential bid. Her campaign rollout is expected to provide voters, particularly users of Twitter, Facebook and other social media, a succinct rationale that she is best positioned to address an American electorate that has seen virtually stagnant wages for middle-income earners over the last 15 years.

Meanwhile, the remnants of New Republic caution that she has become a single point of failure for the party:

In Hillary Clinton’s case, though, there’s still a good argument that the Democratic Party could use a contested primary this cycle: not to toughen Clinton’s calluses, but to build some redundancy into the presidential campaign. It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.

If you’re faithful to the odds, then most of this anxiety is misplaced. Clinton may have slipped in the polls by virtue of an email scandal and her return to the partisan trenches more generally. But she's still more popular and better known than all of the Republicans she might face in the general, her name evokes economic prosperity, rather than global financial calamity, the economy is growing right now, and Democrats enjoy structural advantages in presidential elections, generally.

If nobody serious challenges Hillary Clinton, nobody can be her understudy. In the near term that isn’t a problem, but if doubts about her inevitability develop late in the year or early next, the placid silence in the Democratic field will grow eerie.

We're still a long way from the 2016 election. Clinton may be the best we have, or she may just be the best one running. But looking at the other guys, I can't help but think we're still going to win.

Stranger than satire

It appears that not everyone realized yesterday's post about RFRA was an April Fool, possibly because shortly after I posted it both Mike Pence and Asa Hutchinson backpedaled:

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson told lawmakers on Wednesday to revise a bill that rights activists and U.S. businesses said allowed discrimination against gays, and home-state corporate giant Wal-Mart Stores Inc praised his action.

Indiana's governor a day earlier said lawmakers should fix a similar Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). After it was enacted last week, the state was hit with protests, threatened boycotts and warnings from powerful U.S. firms of pending economic damage for being seen as standing against U.S. ideals of inclusion.

Note that both Hutchinson and Pence were upset with the political response to their states' bills, not to the obvious discriminatory aspect to them following Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. Both the SCOTUS decision and the RFRA bills (as a collective) passed since then are bad law. But read the GOP's backpedaling carefully: to them, that's a feature, not a bug. They're just surprised anyone objected.