The Daily Parker

Last weekend, California governor Gavin Newsom (D) announced that the San Francisco-San Jose heavy commuter rail line had entered the late 19th century (in a good way):

On Thursday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority named its new CEO, Ian Choudri – and today, Choudri joined Governor Gavin Newsom in San Francisco to help celebrate the debut of Caltrain’s new electrified train fleet that will transform rail service in the Bay Area and play a key role in California’s high-speed rail system.

The electrification project and electric trains were supported by more than $1.3 billion in state funding, including more than $700 million from high-speed rail, and will serve as the Bay Area’s connection to California high-speed rail. Caltrain’s electrification and high-speed rail are key projects as part of Governor Newsom’s build more, faster infrastructure agenda.

The Peninsula Corridor Electrification Project converts the Caltrain corridor between San Francisco and San Jose from diesel to an electric service that reduces emissions and enhances capacity. It also equips the corridor to accommodate future California High Speed Rail service. Caltrain estimates that corridor electrification will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 250,000 tons annually, equivalent to taking 55,000 cars off the roads.

The trains look suspiciously like Germany's. (Hmm, I wonder why? Though CalTrain's sets come from Salt Lake City.)

Governor Newsom seems to think that electrified heavy rail somehow puts the Bay Area ahead of the Western World. Streetsblog SF corrects the record:

It was hard not to snicker. As should be obvious to anyone who's spent time in Europe, Asia, or even New Jersey—or anybody familiar with California's rail history—there's nothing innovative or pioneering about Caltrain electrification.

The truth is, running wires over trains so they go faster and don't pollute is just boring, meat-and-potatoes transportation.

There were also electric trains between the Bay Area and Sacramento. There was electric service throughout Marin. And of course there was the famous Red Car electric rail system throughout Los Angeles. But unlike in the Northeast and Europe, nearly all of California's electric rails of old were ripped out and replaced with highways. Today, it's generally accepted that destroying these railroads was a colossal act of civic vandalism.

California should build on what it has accomplished with Caltrain, but state leaders don't need to pretend that it's "pioneering." They also don't need to mess around with unproven technology and distractions such as hydrogen trains and hyperloops. Humanity solved short-to-medium-distance intercity transportation in 1879 when Germany's Ernst Werner von Siemens invented the electric train. Rail electrification using overhead wire is mature, proven technology that just works.

The entire project cost about $1.8 billion, showing that it could cost not much more to electrify the tracks outside my house. (San Francisco to San Jose is about 66 km, while Chicago to Kenosha is 83 km—but Waukegan is 20 km closer.)

Maybe someday we'll electrify Chicago's commuter trains. Of the 785 km Metra operates, the Metra Electric line already has 51 km of fully-electric right of way, and the Rock Island district will start running battery-powered train sets in four years. Meanwhile, I'll keep watching the 40-year-old F40PH locomotives pulling the 65-year-old carriages past my house. (At least we'll get new ones...someday, maybe even this decade.)

Meanwhile, on September 21st, I'll take a 320-km/h train built in the last 10 years. I'm so tired of waiting for my country to get out of the 1950s. CalTrain's electrification is encouraging.

National Geographic examines the characteristics that make some cities better bets than others for surviving climate change:

Immigrants tend to migrate to neighborhoods that meet their cultural and linguistic needs, but the exodus of climate migrants to Buffalo wasn’t solely due to that established community. Months before Maria struck, the city’s mayor declared Buffalo a “climate refuge city,” noting that Buffalo has, “… a tremendous opportunity as our climate changes.”

Since then, the city has launched a relocation guide advertising the advantages to living in Buffalo, including how its average July temperature is a comfortable 71˚F. Anticipating a possible population uptick, the city revised zoning codes in 2017 to encourage development in existing city corridors and began upgrading its dated sewage infrastructure.

And Buffalo isn’t alone. Planners in cities such as Cleveland, Ohio; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Duluth, Minnesota; and elsewhere are beginning to map out what a future with thousands more residents could—and should—look like.

I'd like to add Chicago to the list. We have nearly-unlimited fresh water, moderating winters and beautiful summers, and non-stop flights to every Western European capital (except Lisbon).

I haven't visited Duluth, but I hear it's lovely—three months of the year. Not to mention, Michelin reviewers don't go up there yet, nor to Cleveland or Ann Arbor.

I have painters painting and I'm coding code today, so I'm just noting a couple of interesting stories for later:

• The New York Times explains how the warming climate could send seven systems over the tipping point into unrecoverable damage.
• Bloomberg CityLab climbs through the $80 million effort to make Chicago's Merchandise Mart last another 90 years.
• National governments trying to protect their own railroads have derailed private cross-EU night-train service, hurting passengers.
• The City of Chicago could have to pay over $100 million to the thieves who stole our parking meters in what continues to be the stupidest, and possibly most corrupt, municipal contract in the city's history.

Finally, a pilot ferried a Cessna 172 from Merced, Calif., to Honolulu in 17½ hours last Tuesday, a feat that I would categorize as "stupid risky" rather than "brave." I have a policy never to fly beyond gliding range in a plane with one engine, which means even around Chicago I don't fly more than a few kilometers off shore. Sure, a Cessna 172 can easily get from Chicago to Grand Rapids on a standard load of fuel, but why on earth would you risk ditching even 10 km offshore. This guy flew over 2,000 km from the nearest shore. And it wasn't his first time.

Yesterday I went out to the exurban village of New Lenox to review one of the most remote breweries on the Brews & Choos list, near the Laraway Road station on the Southwest Service. (Fun fact: After decades of living here, I have now taken every one of Chicago's commuter rail lines at least once.)

I had planned to walk from there to Rock Island train station in the center of town, as the Southwest Service didn't have a return train until 10:30pm. I knew the first 2 kilometers of the walk would have some challenges as I would have to walk along two highways. But the satellite photos did not prepare me for how hostile the walking environment would be on the ground:

I'll walk along a shoulder if needed, and I'll even walk along short grass. But that stuff came up to my knees.

Then, this morning, I woke up to three stories about urban planning failures right here in Chicago that make me want to take every engineer in IDOT on a forced march along the stretch of Laraway Road pictured above:

• Despite multiple bike fatalities, the good people of Lincolnwood have decided to reject $2.5 million in state funds to build bike lanes on a dangerous stretch of stroad.
• The Chicago Transit Authority has announced a $4.9 billion plan to install elevators at all of the El and subway stations that need them—by 2038.
• State and local officials joined residents yesterday at Truman College to protest IDOT's backwards-looking plan to redesign DuSable Lake Shore Drive, as the state plan has no concessions for mass transit and would in fact make traffic worse.

Cars are killing us. (Literally: the US has 40,000 traffic deaths a year, far more than any other country.) And yet state transit departments seem to think their only mandate is to increase the number of cars on the road. 

My plan this evening will take me to Arrowhead Ales in New Lenox, the only Brews & Choos brewery on Metra's Southwest Service. Because the SWS has such an inconvenient schedule, getting home requires me to get to the Rock Island District station 4.3 km away.

Now, I could simply take a Lyft, but given that I'll have almost 2 hours between arriving at Laraway Road and the train departing New Lenox (with another train an hour later), and also given the weather forecast, I plan to walk there.

The only trouble is, the brewery sits in an exurban, 100% car-oriented area, 1,800 meters from the nearest sidewalk:

The intersection of Laraway Road and County Route 4, where I take the right turn towards the village of New Lenox, requires me to Frogger across a total of 11 traffic lanes and 3 high-speed turn lanes:

Then, walking against traffic (always do this!), I have another 1400 meters of 4-lane county highway to follow before I finally reach the village limits. At that point the 4-lane county highway becomes 2-lane Cedar Road, so even in the spots without sidewalks the traffic speed should be much lower.

Wish me luck! And stop funding highway expansion!

The hot, humid weather we've had for the past couple of weeks has finally broken. I'm in the Loop today, and spent a good 20 minutes outside reading, and would have stayed longer, except I got a little chilly. I dressed today more for the 24°C at home and less for the cooler, breezier air this close to the lake.

Elsewhere in the world:

• I was waiting for Russia expert Julia Ioffe to weigh in on last week's hostage release.
• The Chicago White Sox failed to set the all-time record for most consecutive losses in the American League yesterday by winning their first game in the last 23.
• Of the $1.2 trillion Carbon Reduction Program funds allocated to reduce fossil-fuel emissions, $130 billion has been spent so far: but only $26 billion on rail, and $70 billion on highways. 
• Even though Deutsche Bahn has faster, timelier, more convenient, more comfortable, and just more trains than the US, Germans say their national railroad is on the wrong track.
• Deadhorse, Alaska, which lies at 70° north latitude, set an all-time record yesterday with a high temperature just below 32°C.
• After CrowdStrike told Delta Airlines to go pound sand a couple days ago, Microsoft told the carrier off yesterday.
• Be careful taking dogs to fresh-water swimming holes: warmer weather has made blue-green algae blooms more common.

Finally, today is the 60th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. If you don't know what that is, read up. It's probably the most direct cause of most of our military policy since then.

One of my co-workers and I got into a good-natured debate about the efficiency of my Prius Prime. In addition to boasting that I used no gasoline at all last month (and only 41.6 L—11 gallons—all year), I pointed out that Illinois gets a majority of its power from nuclear fission, so yes, my car is net-positive on carbon emissions. He challenged me on that, saying that Illinois uses a lot of coal and natural gas, obviating the benefits of my car's electric drive.

Well, the New York Times has a really cool interactive piece today showing how each US state's electricity generation mix has changed this century. And it turns out, I was right:

Nuclear energy has been Illinois’s top source of power generation for much of the last two decades, accounting for about half of the electricity produced in the state during most years. Coal was long the second-largest power source, briefly surpassing nuclear as the top generation fuel in 2004 and again in 2008. But coal’s role in the state power mix has declined significantly in recent years as older coal-fired power plants have retired or been converted to burn natural gas. Both natural gas and wind generation have grown over the past decade, and last year gas surpassed coal as the second-largest source of power in the state.

So, in fact, Illinois gets 68% of its power from renewables and only 15% from coal—and wind power is going up while coal and gas go down. And down at the bottom there, it looks like solar is finally making a debut, at about 2% but going up.

Vermont's graph, though, surprised me. It turns out that all of Vermont's power generation has been renewable for since 2001. But since the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station closed in 2014, the mix went from 76% nuclear/16% hydro/7% biomass to 51% hydro/19% solar/16% biomass/15% wind today.

We really need to start building more nuclear power plants, though:

The Climate Prediction Center's 6-10 day temperature outlook has generally good news for the upper Midwest, including Chicago:

I wouldn't want to be in New Orleans next week, but that's true most weeks of the year even without this forecast.

While we weather the summer, the news just keeps coming:

• The XPOTUS lied about what caused the one-hour delay before he took the stage at Wednesday's National Association of Black Journalists conference, as one would guess, because the truth was he didn't want to be fact-checked in real time.
• Author Katherine Stewart lays out the right-wing worldview that explains how people like vice-presidential candidate JD Vance (R-OH) can lie so effortlessly while claiming to have morals.
• Paul Krugman warns that the Cryptocurrency industry "initially driven, seemingly, by libertarian instincts but which has never delivered on its economic promises will nonetheless be able to buy itself a huge government bailout."
• Chicago's Red Line extension to 130th Street got an unexpected boost of nearly $400 million extra for its first year, and may get another $2 billion (of $3.6 billion in projected costs) next year.
• The Paris regional transit agency has persuaded Google and Apple to direct travelers away from the fastest routes on the RER and Métro so "[t]hat each spectator can benefit from the best itinerary, not necessarily the most direct but the most comfortable."
• It turns out, adults learn foreign languages just as well as young children, and derive great benefits from doing so. C'est pourquoi j'apprends le français maintenant pour obtenir le niveau CEFR-B1 devant mes vacances le mois prochain.
• This year is the 100th anniversary of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb killing Bobby Franks in the Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago.

And as we go into the election, it's worth remembering that German President Paul von Hindenburg died 90 years ago today, ending the democratic German Republic and elevating you-know-who. Let's keep working to prevent anything like that ever happening here.

I had a burst of tasks at the end of the workday, so I didn't get a chance to read all of these:

• Associate Justice Sam Alito (R) drafted such loony-right-wing opinions in two major cases this term that he lost crucial support from other Republican justices, reversing the Court's initial vote.
• Russia released journalist Evan Gershkovich and other hostages in exchange for a convicted KGB hit-man.
• Tom Nichols argues that, however good it is to get our hostages back from Russia, they were still hostages.
• Banker Rebecca Patterson argues that the XPOTUS's treasury policy proposals threaten the world's banking system.
• The Internet Engineering Task Force published a new standard (RFC-9557) for date and time formats back in April.

Not to mention, this week we've had some of the stickiest weather I can remember, with dewpoints above 20°C for the past several days. And this sort of thing will only get worse:

Climate change is accumulating humidity in the region — between 1895 and 2019, average precipitation in Illinois increased by 15%. A moist atmosphere ramps up heat indexes, meaning the weather feels worse to the human body than it would during drier conditions.

In Chicago, overall summer average temperatures have warmed by 1.5 degrees between 1970 and 2022, but that’s not the whole story: Average lows on summer nights have increased by 2.2 degrees in that same time.

Warmer nights occur when the atmosphere is waterlogged. Clouds form and reflect incoming heat from the sun back into space during the day, but after the sun sets, clouds absorb heat from the surface and emit it back toward the ground.

Just like greenhouse gases trap heat, moisture holds onto heat in the atmosphere for longer and into the night. Rising temperatures, in turn, lead to rising humidity: For every 1°C increase in temperature, the atmosphere can hold 7% more water. It’s a never-ending loop.

Yeah, even walking Cassie from day care (less than 1.6 km) sucks in this weather. At least I got home before the thunderstorms hit.

Too bad I'm in my downtown office. It's a perfect, sunny day in Chicago. I did spend half an hour outside at lunchtime, and I might take off a little early. But at least for the next hour, I'll be looking through this sealed high-rise window at the kind of day we only get about 25 times a year here.

Elsewhere in the world:

• Former CIA lawyer James Petrila and former CIA spook John Sipher warn that the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v US could undo 50 years of reforms that reined in illegal clandestine activities here and abroad.
• James Fallows reviews President Biden's "quasi-valedictory" address from last night.
• The doddering, elderly, convicted-felon Republican nominee for President seemed to have some difficulties at last night's rally. Maybe he's too old to be president and he should withdraw from the race?
• Helen Lewis, shaking her head sadly at the mess of a human being that is Republican Vice-President nominee JD Vance, hopes the XPOTUS "kept the receipt."
• Bowing to market pressure, Southwest Airlines has announced an end to its chaotic boarding process, and will now assign seats like a grown-up airline.
• London expanded its Ultra-Low-Emissions Zone (ULEZ) to encompass most of the metro area last year, which has resulted in improved air quality equivalent to taking 200,000 cars off the road.
• Unfortunately, this side of the pond, the Illinois Dept of Transportation seems unable to comprehend the opportunity we have to remake DuSable Lake Shore Drive for the future, and instead wants to repeat all the mistakes of the past. All the aldermen along the north lakefront oppose the plan, fortunately.
• The South Works site on the southeast side of Chicago, which used to house one of the world's largest steel mills, will soon become a quantum-computing research facility.

Finally, the various agencies charged with protecting the Democratic National Convention next month have published their plan for a 60-hectare "pedestrian restriction" zone around the United Center and a smaller zone around McCormick Place. "Only people with credentials who 'have a need to be there' – such as delegates, volunteers and other workers – will be allowed within that inner perimeter, said 2024 DNC coordinator Jeff Burnside." Presumably people who live on the Near West Side will be able to get to and from their homes as well.