Tuesday, April 29, 2008
News / Clout City Traffic control
Posted by Mick Dumke on 04.29.08 at 07:03 PM
As if your last experience on the road--any road--in Chicago weren't convincing enough, the numbers [pdf] prove it: traffic around here sucks. Rush-hour drivers in the Chicago area spend an average of 46 hours a year--that's on top of normal traffic times--sitting in congestion. Three of every five miles of local roads are congested, and the total length of rush hour--morning or evening--has grown over the last decade from seven to eight hours a day. Traffic delays result in our cars burning an extra 142,000 gallons of gas a year--and cost us millions of dollars in wasted fuel, time, and business. The Chicago area's congestion is among the fastest-growing in the country.
In other words, it's a good thing the feds are chipping in more than $153 million to help ease traffic congestion here, on ideas ranging from the seemingly obvious, such as improving the efficiency of CTA bus routes, to the kinda innovative, like creating incentives to keep vehicles out of the Loop.
Mayor Daley appeared with federal officials Tuesday to discuss some of the plans, which is itself probably a good thing. The last time someone brought up the possibility of trying to reduce traffic downtown--before federal dollars were offered as collateral--he dismissed the idea.
Last year, 14th Ward alderman Ed Burke proposed City Council hearings on the possibility of imposing a London-style surcharge "in a bid to ease downtown traffic congestion, reduce air pollution, and bolster funding for the city’s beleaguered transit system." Daley's response? He said he had an "open mind," then added, "Let's not rush to that and scare everybody off. We're trying to keep businesses here."
Business leaders also pooh-poohed the idea and it died a quick death.
On Tuesday, though, the mayor was talking about raising the rates for downtown parking meters and public garages. Essentially, this revisits the idea of a congestion toll--though it technically penalizes people for stopping and parking.
It's probably not going to be any more popular with the business community than Burke's call for hearings. "We've expressed concern about previous congestion proposals because of their impact on both businesses and their employees," says Justin DeJong, a spokesman for the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce. "We'll be looking at this more closely in the coming weeks."
But if Daley wants it now (and why wouldn't he?--the city's not paying and it could make the place more attractive to an international Olympics committee), they're going to have to compromise and live with it.
Comments (12)
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This might be a good idea if we had a better transit system that could support the ridiculous amount of extra commuters, but as anybody who has waited in long lines just to board the red line after a ball game or has ever squeezed into a bus or train during rush hour already knows, adding everybody who normally drives into the city on to the already overtaxed CTA would be a disaster.
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They play, we pay, hip-hip hooray! The biggest bunch of chumps there ever was. New money! Now lets round table some contracts!
This is a joke the CTA maintenance alone is a budget buster. Outside the loop public transit will become a nightmare. Ron "THE BUTTERFLY" Huberman is full of shit. CTA waste millions on make work project for the loop,to enrich Daley's mob connected construction firms. For example Block 37 and the closing of the pediway. Waste and corruption is the reason CTA is having problems. We need to to put money into track upgrades and replacement and not into buses. The Buses should just feed into the rail network. The loop should be rely on rail and not polluting Buses.
In one of the stories I saw a mention about making bus stops further apart, something I think is LONG overdue (as is a bus/carpool lane on highways and LSD). In some parts of Lake View & Lincoln Park the bus actually stops more than once on the same block, something I suspect might have its roots in connected developers, as I've noticed new stops going up near new developments - the bus isn't a limo, people can walk a block or so, we could all use the exercise. Additionally, buses would be more efficient (and likely would burn less fuel) if they didn't stop so frequently.
As is typical, the Reader comment board is haven for cynics. Cynics with good reason for cynicism, of course--but cynics, nonetheless. $153 Million from the Federal Government? Not bad. Raising the cost on extremely underpriced street parking in the loop and other crowded locations? Maybe people won't drive around the block eight times looking for street parking, thus greatly reducing congestion. I have high hopes for this plan. Or, at least, I'm willing to support it and offer input before writing it off as an exercise in patronage contract gift-giving. Surely, that's not how Daley sees the bike lanes; I think the same may be true of this.
What Ian said. For this plan to work, the CTA has to work well, and that's not going to happen anytine soon, especially with Ritchie as Mayor. I'd love to see this, or anything else, work, but the current City administration views the CTA as nothing more than a capital budget that happens to run some trains and buses. The City has assiduously avoided solving the agency's existing problems, and adding to rush hour ridership - without more - isn't going to help.
...indeed, it would probably be more prudent to take that $153 million and to use it to add the Circle Line (out to Western please, let's think ahead), or to simply fix the crumbling infrastructure already in place.
Ah, but that would mean little to no money going into the pockets of the mayor's 'consulting' pals, and we can't have that happening now, can we?
I'd love to hear more details about the apparent requirement that, in order to receive the moola, the business of the parking meters be privatized.
I assumed they were preparing the meters to be privatized since large numbers of them are broken. It seems that anytime I need a meter, it takes me a couple of tries to find one that works.
A certain level of cynicism is prudent when you're talking about something as corrupt as the Chicago machine, but it's not necessarily warranted when it comes to the CTA. The Illinois Auditor General's report showed that the CTA's cost-effectiveness is similar to that of peer transit agencies in the US. Contrary to "It Came From the 47th Ward" above, the CTA *has not* "avoided solving its existing problems" - look at the recent Brown Line capacity expansion, the slow zone work on the Blue and Red Lines, and measures to improve bus performance. As the audit showed, the CTA's biggest problems come from decaying infrastructure due to inadequate funding, a problem which will continue if Blagojevich's proposed capital bill, which massively privileges road-building over transit, is not significantly altered. I give the CTA a lot of credit for doing what it does on such a limited budget. But what deserves to be criticized is its expansion priorities. The Circle Line, tho a worthy project, should definitely be a lower priority than the Red, Orange, and Yellow Line extensions and the Mid-City Transitway El between O'Hare, Midway, and the Red Line at 87th. The airport express shouldn't be pursued at all. And we need a bold long-term vision that includes projects like a Western Ave subway and better transit for the South Side. It's on issues like these that Daley's preference for building up the Loop at the expense of the rest of the city is clearest.
Or we could stop wasting the money we spend to have several traffic control people at many of the intersections downtown and elsewhere and put that towards a better public transit system. If they were actually effective in preventing accidents it would be a plausible idea, however since they are rarely ever in sync with the lights, or with each other, and drivers never seem to know which to pay attention to, all they do is cause aggravation, accidents, and waste our tax money.
