Chicago has five of the 20 most-congested roads in the U.S.:
Drivers in the northeastern Illinois-northwest Indiana region suffered the misery of 61 extra hours behind the wheel on average in 2014 — equivalent to a week and a half of work — because of delays caused by gridlock, construction zones and collisions that tied up traffic, according to the Urban Mobility Scorecard released late Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute.
The Los Angeles area took the top three spots on the congestion scorecard last year. Locally, different stretches of the Kennedy and Dan Ryan Expressways (Interstate 90/94) gave motorists the biggest headaches, accounting for three spots in the top 20. Two areas on the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) also were among the 20 most congested.
Coming in at No. 4 nationally was I-90/94 westbound from 35th Street to the Edens junction. The report noted that 4 p.m. on Fridays tended to be the worst time to be driving on the 13-mile section of road where average speeds were as slow as 16 mph. The eastbound stretch from Montrose Avenue to Ruble Street, just south of Roosevelt Road, ranked seventh nationally.
Chicago also ranks #3 in total travel delay (302.6 million hours) and cost of truck congestion ($1.5 bn). But the 1.6 million CTA rides and 300,000 Metra (heavy rail) rides every weekday probably prevent Chicago from becoming a true dystopia, like Dallas.
I am not a food writer, so I don't have the vocabulary to describe dinner the other night at 42 Grams. Let me just reproduce a few items from our meticulously-presented, precisely-timed courses:
- Carabinero: finger lime, phytoplankton, kelp, and lacto-fermented vegetables
- Sweet pea custard: bacon, whey, brown butter, herbs & lettuce
- Summer corn: corn silk, roasted corn broth, polenta
- Organic Irish salmon: tea smoked with fallen pine, muhroom dashi, spent grain toast, nastrurtium
- Lamb neck: smoked yogurt, tamarind, fennel
- Veal sweetbread: foie gras, ash-baked eggplant, golden berry
Plus five more courses. And we brought wine that we'd obtained in Como.
I said, "Even if I could afford it, I couldn't eat like this every day."
My dinner companion said, "Why not?"
She has a point.
Oh, look: they have a last-minute reservation available for 6pm tonight...
Via DNAInfo, this is awesome:
Another consequence to a four-hour drive and lots of household chores yesterday was my first Fitbit goal miss since June 6th. I only got 8,000 steps yesterday, after exceeding 10,000 steps for the last 71 days straight. It was also the fewest steps I've gotten since May 29th. I traveled on all three days, which explains the correlation: lots of sitting in vehicles and not a lot of opportunity to move.
It didn't help that the temperature has hovered around 32°C for the past few days, forecast to cool off tomorrow or Wednesday.
Still, I hate missing goals, even arbitrary ones like this. Fortunately, since June 6th, I've averaged around 14,000 steps per day, so one day under 10,000 won't defeat my fitness plan.
It's so depressing sometimes, living in the Greatest City in North America and realizing that we have the worst pension system in the country:
The city of Chicago is the local government most burdened by unfunded retirement plans in the nation, with a pension debt that's more than eight times annual revenues, according to a new study by Moody's Investors Service.
The city's unfunded pension obligations total $29.80 billion, based on a three-year average calculated by Moody's. That is 15.9 percent of its property tax base, making it the highest in the nation by that measure as well, according to the report, which tracks the 50 largest local governments based on outstanding debt.
On the other hand, climate change is making Chicago a little more pleasant, even without the record El Niño forming in the Pacific right now. Crime is down, green space is up, and the lake is clean. It's really a great time to live here.
We are going to have to pay those pensions, though.
No matter what it's called, or how it's ranked, it's still the tallest building around:
Crain's Chicago Business has done a yeoman's job investigating the Illinois pensions crisis. Today's installment digs into how it happened:
A dense, 78-page bill aimed in part at curbing pension abuses in downstate and suburban school systems landed in lawmakers' laps two days before their scheduled May adjournment [in 2005]. One sponsor called it the first “meaningful” reform in 40 years, a reversal of “decades of neglect and bad decisions.” Another predicted that it could save the state up to $35 billion.
But in addition to true reform, the bill later signed by Gov. Rod Blagojevich allowed the state to skip half its pension payments for two years and to stretch out some expenses approved under the previous governor, George Ryan. No one mentioned those could cost $6.8 billion. The math hadn't been done.
Cumulatively, those poor decisions more than quintupled the $20 billion deficit that existed in 1995 to the current $104.6 billion, leaving a seemingly insurmountable emergency with no fix in sight.
Most charitably, the reason Illinois faces such an unholy mess may be the inability of state leaders to fathom how even slight alterations to state employee retirement plans could carry billion-dollar costs or lead to bond-rating downgrades.
Crain's has a definite point of view, and while I'm not sure I completely agree with it, they show how the bad decisions weren't confined to any party or clique. Illinois politicians of both parties showed crashing (or willful) ignorance of basic financial math for so long that it's impossible to hold any of them truly accountable. Maybe that was the plan all along.
Illinois isn't going to drop off the map, nor is Chicago going to disappear like other major industrial cities east of us have done. But we're certainly heading towards ugly negotiations with state retirees and with taxpayers. I just hope that as taxes increase to pay for our past sins, the benefits of living in a vibrant and connected urban space outweigh the increasing costs.
Something has to give, and soon. Maybe our pensions crisis will push us into electing more responsible officials. I'm not optimistic in the short run.
Problem: my keyboard suddenly wouldn't respond to the left-shift, enter, 3 or F5 keys. No idea why this is. Tested with mskey.exe, tested on another machine...still those four keys aren't working.
Solution: Get a new keyboard. Walk 10 minutes to Staples, find the same make and model, buy it, return to office.
New problem: New keyboard's spacebar is broken.
When I say "rinse and repeat" I mean that when heading back from Staples—this is the Chicago Loop, so one walks everywhere—it started to rain. Which is good, because the dewpoint is about infinity.
Now I'm cranky, damp, hot, and tired (which was a pre-existing condition today), and unproductive.
Waaah.
The three-month period ending July 31st was the wettest in Illinois history:
Illinois experienced its wettest May – July on record with 500 mm of precipitation, 200 mm above the 20th century average, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Most of that was due to the record precipitation of June with 240 mm statewide, based on their latest numbers and discussed in more detail here.
That is about an extra two months of precipitation during that three-month period.
Factors include the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge out west and possibly the incipient El Niño taking hold in the Eastern Pacific.
Traveling to San Francisco and London as often as I do underscores to me how crappy some things are in Chicago. Take our ridiculous transit fare systems. Metra, the heavy-rail system, still uses little paper tickets, while Ventra only works on CTA buses and trains. I want one card that would let me tap in and tap out of any public transit service in the city.
Citylab says this may be coming soon, at least to some cities:
Unified mobile ticketing means riders no longer need to worry about having the right change for the bus, or having time to buy a train ticket at the station after hitting a major traffic jam. And there’s seamless transitioning between modes of transit. But the digitization creates a lot of savings for the transit agencies themselves.
Then there’s the data. When transit operators have a massive live stream of data on how many people are buying tickets, where they are, where they’re headed, it allows for much more responsive management. They can tweak bus routes based on how the customers actually buy bus tickets and ride. Granted, this approach can’t truly transform American cities until everyone has access to the critical technology.
Given the speed of technological change in Chicago, we can probably expect this in the mid-2040s.