The Daily Parker

The Chicago Transit Authority cleaned out its attic recently and put a bunch of artifacts up for auction. The auction just ended, and I'm sorry to say I did not win anything.

I bid on a couple of 1990s-era station signs, one from Main and one from Davis. I didn't want to risk getting both so I dropped off the Davis auction once it hit $50. Because, rusty 30 x 45 cm sign with the paint chipping? Yeah, $50 sounds right.

But I kept going on the Main St. sign, using the ancient eBay technique of waiting until the last few seconds to make my last bid.

So, the first day of bidding, I put in $25. Auto-bids pushed right past me. Then I waited. Just now, with the bidding at $95, I put in what I thought was a ridiculous (but still acceptable) number: $130. Bam! Bidder #37522 auto-bid right past me!

Now, I'm thinking, as attractive an artifact as the sign might be, is it really worth $150? Oh, the pain, the pain...yes. All right. It's a unique part of history, part of my history in fact, so it's worth $150 to me. Bid.

D'oh! Bidder #37522 thinks it's worth more than $150, and his auto-bid won.

Well, I'm glad the sign is going to a good home. I hope Bidder #37522 finds a nice place on his wall for it.

But I have no idea what Bidder #37961 is going to do with the rail car he bought for $13,150...

(Fun fact: the CTA Gift Store sells signs.)

Update: Looking through the closed lots, I discovered that someone bought two sticks of rail for $50. Let's do the math here. The sticks are each 11.8 m long, and the description says they're 115-lb rail. That means the rail weighs 115 lbs per foot, so the two sticks together contain 4,068 kg of steel. I don't know scrap prices, but it seems to me that 4 tons of steel scrap might be worth more than $50. So assuming the costs of removing the rails aren't too high, someone may have just made a tidy profit on the auction.

Update: It turns out, scrap steel goes for about $350 a ton. So that $50 investment could bring the buyer a tidy $1300 profit. But then one has to ask, why didn't the CTA just sell the surplus rail for scrap in the first place?

Yes. And snowy:

Snowfall’s been quite relentless here. Flurries (or more) have fluttered to earth 8 of the past 9 days. And, with just under 250 mm on the books to date, the 2013-14 season has been accumulating snow at nearly twice the normal pace and ranks 33rd snowiest of the past 128 years. That places it among the top quarter of all Chicago snow seasons since records began here in 1884-85.

There’s been only one day with a temperature even briefly above freezing in the past 12. An eight day string of above freezing readings came to an end after a November 28 through December 5th run.

This coming week will see some warming, and possibly a few days above freezing starting tomorrow afternoon. Then Monday we'll see more frigid weather coming in behind either a snowstorm (according to European models) or a dusting (according to American models).

You know, I don't mind a few weeks of this every year, particularly if we don't see it until January, like last year. But this? Snow and sub-freezing temperatures for most of December? I'm not looking forward to three months of this crap.

At least the lake will be cooler come June, which should moderate our summer. Still: before Chicago's climate gets consistently warmer in a few decades, we'll keep having crushingly cold winters alternating with warm ones. I can't be sure this is an improvement.

Apparently, Chicago's Divvy is really popular with tourists—and tourists have trouble returning the bikes on time:

Chicago's Divvy bicycle-sharing program took in up to $2.5 million during its first five months, a figure driven by tourists and others who bought daily passes and racked up the majority of overtime fees, according to a trove of preliminary customer data provided by city transportation officials.

As much as $703,500 came from late charges, which kick in when bicycles aren't returned within 30 minutes. Just a sliver of that money was generated from Divvy's clock-conscious annual members, who checked out bikes for short trips instead of hopping into taxis or riding public transit, city officials concluded.

It's not clear whether the Divvy public-private partnership, supported by $25 million in federal funding and $6.25 million in local matches, is turning a profit.

The article goes on to suggest that tourists have trouble understanding the point of the 30-minute time limit. It's not to prevent you from riding Divvy bikes; it's to keep Divvy bikes moving. If the program didn't have a 30-minute window, people would ride to their destinations, park the bikes, and ride back, possibly tying up a bike all day.

So the problem seems to be user education.

Still, I'm glad the program is making revenue. I really hope it's profitable.

After a string of days when the temperature was so low even Parker didn't want to go outside, this morning's -4°C felt downright balmy.

Of course, it's warming up ahead of the 15 cm of snow forecast for tonight.

Looks like we're getting a real winter this year.

My company's holiday party happens tonight, preceded by a stop at a client's party, so it makes a lot of logistical sense just to hang out at IDTWHQ and bang away on work. But there's another practical reason:

With the opening 11 days of December 2013 running 9.2°C below a year ago, the Chicago area moves into an 8th consecutive day in this early Deep Freeze.

The past 7 days have averaged -8.7°C, a jarring 7.8°C below normal—-cold enough to have ranked 8th coldest on record here and the coldest such period in 8 years!

Chicagoans shiver through the season’s second sub-zero night

Temperatures Wednesday dropped below zero [Fahrenheit; -17.8°C] at the official O’Hare thermometer for only the second time this season.

At the moment it's warmed up a little, to -16°C. And I don't have to go outside.

At least the forecast looks better. Temperatures should return to a more-normal 1°C (above freezing) by Tuesday.

While London's bike-share program seems to have some problems, Chicago is expanding its Divvy program, and asking for user input:

To cap off the Year of the Divvy, the city is crowdsourcing all you urban dwellers for suggestions on where to install 175 more stations across Chicago next year. Still no word on if they will make sure Divvy riders know not to ride the bikes on crowded Michigan Avenue sidewalks.

They bred like rabbits this summer, popping up in succession so close to each other. I could literally crawl from Divvy station to Divvy station if I had to. Doesn’t seem like the best use of multiple resources, especially in an area so accessible by transit. Sure, a Divvy station next to a major road or train stop makes sense, but four of them seems excessive.

The suggestion map shows interest in Divvy bikes clear up into the northern suburbs, but not so much on the south and west sides. Some wag even suggested a station at O'Hare.

The Atlantic Cities blog sounds the alarm about London's bike share program:

While the system recorded 726,893 journeys in November 2012, last month there were only 514,146. To cap these poor user figures, today Transport for London announced that the scheme's major sponsor, Barclays Bank, will pull out of its sponsorship deal in 2015. Given the bad publicity the system has received recently, it may be hard to find a replacement sponsor without some major changes.

None of this would matter much if London’s scheme was entirely self-sustaining. But while Paris's bike-share scheme actually makes money for the city, London's 4,000 bikes cost local taxpayers an average of £1,400 per bike per year. As the Daily Mail points out, this would be enough to buy each of the scheme's 38,000 registered users a £290 bike. Barclays has thus found its sponsorship deal a mixed publicity blessing – though the bank itself may be part of the problem. The £50 million it promised was never going to be enough, and the amount it has actually handed over so far suggests their ultimate contribution could be at little as half that.

So, Toronto and London are having problems; Chicago and Paris are booming. This is turning into a fascinating natural experiment.

Yesterday's forecast really didn't go far enough. We weren't expecting -16°C until tomorrow night, but we got -21°C early this morning:

The temperature dipped below zero overnight at O'Hare International Airport, the earliest that has happened here since 1995. The cold will hold through the week, bringing a burst of snow in time for the morning rush Wednesday.

The temperature fell to one degree below zero around 12:55 a.m., according to the National Weather Service. That's the earliest subzero readings here since a low of minus 4 on Dec. 9, 1995.

It could warm up Thursday or Friday, but not before we get another 50-100 mm of snow tomorrow morning, smack in the middle of rush hour.

Parker and I are working from home today so I haven't had to spend much time outside. That, and my body has finally decided it's had enough of me, which led to an uncomfortable early morning. (I'll spare the details.)

It's cold in Chicago right now: -7°C with a wind chill of -13°C and gradual cooling predicted towards a low of -16°C Wednesday night. This is only the second time in 30 years it's been so cold, so early.

Two things: first, though I don't have time to link to anything right now, it turns out this cold in Chicago is caused by abnormally warm temperatures in the North Pacific. So, yeah, aggregate global warming causes localized cold snaps.

Second, thanks to celestial mechanics, tonight's sunset will be later than last night's for every point on earth that has a sunset. (Inside the Arctic and Antarctic circles, there are no sunsets today.) Sunsets continue to get later everywhere until well past the March equinox, even though sunrises in the Northern Hemisphere will also get later until January 6th. (See the Chicago sunrise chart for details.)

So, despite this really unpleasant weather, there are definite signs it will get warmer soon. Relatively soon, anyway.

My cousin and I, who have season tickets to Wrigley Field, went to the park on Thursday to see what other seats were available. Last season we were in section 518:

After walking around a bit, we decided on a change of view, to Section 524:

The seats are nearly equivalent, just rotated 90° to the south, and without the foul ball catcher between us and the pitcher's mound.

We're not optimistic about the Cubs' chances this season, but we'll be there anyway. Opening day against the Phillies on April 5th.