Logic? In Chicago, transportation spending priorities aren’t even ranked by staff. Instead, everything gets into the plan, and everyone jockeys for political points or for expanded fiefs: random new highways here, contracts awarded there.

20 years after signing a desegregation consent decree, whites and blacks in Chicago Public Schools are just as segregated as before. And it’s not for lack of trying: magnet school admissions are tilted in favor of whites and against blacks. Rather, continued white flight and other demographic changes have changed the city in the meantime.

Voter turnout in Chicago municipal elections declined 58% from 1987 to 2003, from 1.1 million votes to 462,605. Votes for Black candidates dropped from 591,881 to 99,554, or 83%.
Two ideas for improving turnout: (a) move elections from midwinter. Weekend elections elsewhere work well, but in any case February has the worst of Chicago’s weather. (b) Instead of 50 racially gerrymandered single-member wards, try a less parochial system: say, 10 compact (measured by perimeter/area), four-member districts. Geographically diffuse minorities would get more representation, the tyranny of local majorities would be reduced, and individual aldermen’s power over local decisions would be weakened — possibly resulting in more equitably distributed services (as city staff take control) and reducing corruption.

“Tower Bridge, which critics feared could be damaged by the weight of extra traffic, carried hundreds of extra bicycles but unusually few cars.”

[Can’t find this document on the web anymore, so I might as well host it.]

I earlier referenced the concept of cars as “privative goods”; this article was the source. BTW, the Ivan Illich analysis [that, considering the time spent working to feed one’s car, a car averages only a few miles per hour] is a bit out of date: wages have risen, but the cost of car ownership has fallen in real terms. Thus, cars are a bit faster these days — but still, on balance, probably slower than bicycles.

It is nonetheless true that household transportation expenses *as a
percentage of household outlays* are much higher now than they were before
the automobile. Transportation costs were negligible in household budgets
circa 1900, but took a quarter of household budgets circa 2000 — a very
high cost for the added mobility, especially when one considers that net
accessibility has not increased — people may be traveling faster and
further, but they’re not really getting anywhere new (e.g., they’re just
going to work, school, church, shops, baseball games; it’s not like they’re
experiencing vastly different new landscapes on road trips every single
weekend).
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Quick gripe: spent too much of today hearing platitudes about gentrification, my own poster child of how the complexity of urban social, political, legal, and economic systems is manifested in sometimes random ways. Argh.

and I think I’ve written this earlier, but it bears repeating: fellow CTA commuters, you make for an attractive crowd! Surely far better than the car-bound, and probably better than those on the sidewalks.