Fight transit service cuts

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Posted to “Chicagoist”:http://www.chicagoist.com/archives/2005/03/10/cta_threatens_imminent_doomsday_crappy_lives_for_passengers.php regarding the CTA cuts:

EVERYONE: If you’re as ticked off by the situation as I am, call your state legislator. Go to vote-smart.org and enter your zip+4 (look at your junk mail) to find out who. In most of America, the entire metropolitan region jointly funds mass transit. In most of the rest of the world, mass transit is a national priority and everyone, especially drivers, pay taxes for it. Here in Chicago, city taxes (mostly) fund CTA and suburban taxes go to suburban transit. This is completely stupid, since transit benefits the entire region: by keeping cars off the roads, by making the Loop a central place to do business, by getting people where they need to go, by allowing many of us to live car free. This way of funding things is stupid, and it’s time for all of us to bang down the doors in Springfield and tell them so.

Sure, CTA could fix some problems within its own house — but $55 million is a lot of money, and CTA runs an almost break-even operation these days (so making up a small deficit requires deep cuts). Even if Wilson Yard sold for an extra million dollars (which it wouldn’t; $30 a square foot wasn’t out of range when the deal was struck), that’s still only a tiny fraction of the amount of cash needed. In fact, CTA runs a tight ship relative to other transit agencies: among American transit agencies, it has the lowest per-hour rail operating costs and the second-lowest taxpayer subsidy per passenger (second-highest farebox recovery ratio, after NYC Transit).

Furthermore, it isn’t just CTA. Several other large cities (those with equally stupid funding mechanisms) are also facing transit funding crises: in New York, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, state cutbacks are threatening equally severe measures: in Philadelphia, the transit board actually passed a budget with $2.50 base fares and NO service on weekends or nights, before the state rushed a bailout. Boston recently completely revised its transit funding, resulting in substantial fare hikes. And Washington’s Metro is threatening vastly higher fares if it can’t secure more dedicated operating funding. Even in the suburbs, Pace and Metra have warned that they face similar cash crunches within the next few years if the situation doesn’t improve — that is, if tax funding continues to decrease in real terms (adjusted for inflation), as it has for the past 20 years.

Most of the money for capital projects comes from the federal government and is earmarked as such; it really can’t be spent elsewhere. The state or local funds in the capital pool are there to “match” the federal money 50-50: divert it and an equal amount of federal money disappears. Yeah, it’s stupid, but Washington is like any big money donor: they like to build things, but don’t care about maintenance. Or you could blame it on the Republicans, who eliminated federal operating subsidies in 1997, and of course want to cut deeply into capital funds today.

Keith: trains, simply put, are much cheaper to run than buses, especially when carrying hundreds at a time. The biggest single cost of running transit is labor — a train can carry a thousand people with one driver, while the same number would have to take ten buses. Plus, the electricity from the rails is cheaper than gas, and rail cars require less maintenance. There are many cases where buses are cheaper than trains, but CTA’s train lines aren’t them.

Katie: the ridership numbers are counted at the farebox. The supplemental paper surveys that are distributed on buses from time to time are not what the ridership numbers are based on.

Real estate investors agree: buildings better than parking

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Nadine Brozan’s article in the Times points out that (surprise!) parking lots are a woeful under-use of space in New York:

A Manhattan commercial real estate broker makes the aesthetic case for ripping up parking lots:

In [the view of Anne De Marzo, a broker who specializes in transactions involving developers and the parking industry], the disappearance of lots is aesthetically beneficial. “We won’t have unsightly garages and lots on desolate streets anymore,” she said. “Instead, there will be beautiful buildings with garages.” She did concede that such beauty has its price: higher fees for drivers.

An executive at a billion-dollar real estate investment trust goes further, saying that (gasp) supply and demand also apply to parking:

Fred Harris, senior vice president of AvalonBay Communities, whose Avalon Chrystie Place will have 713 apartments and fewer than 200 underground parking spots, agreed. “There is some academic research showing that parking capacity encourages traffic,” he said. “And a lack of capacity, while it may be an annoyance, lowers traffic. Parking may be great, but in the city people can live without it.”

The article also says does say that the High Line “is to be revived as an elevated promenade” (emphasis mine). I wonder if Bucktown millionaires would be more amenable to a Bloomingdale Promenade than a simple Trail.

bikes on Metra!

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The Trib’s Jon Hilkevitch reports that Metra’s “self-acknowledged non-bicyclist” (for shame!) Executive Director Philip Pagano and (probably un-acknowledged non-bicyclist) board have approved a plan that would allow bikes on board most Metra trains starting in June — all except weekday trains in the rush direction and trains during special events. And yes, it apparently includes the reverse commute:

“Under Metra’s proposal, bicycles would be prohibited on weekday trains arriving in Chicago before 9:30 a.m. and leaving the city between 3 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.”

London demographics

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Just FYI, since I was challenged on this recently: the Guardian reports that “At the last census, England as a whole was 87% White British, while London was 59.8%… with a large variation between outer London (65.6%) and inner London (50.5%).”

So yes, we can probably safely assume that now inner London is less than half White British.

young and restless

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Crain’s this week also had an article about UIUC’s attempts to become “the top” public university in the US–a difficult feat in an era of steeply declining state subsidies (although a winning basketball team might help). Somehow, this led me to looking up the exact numbers on the hearsay that Illinois and New Jersey — two densely populated states with below-top-flight state universities — are the top “exporters” of college students.

Luckily, the higher education industry has a surfeit of social scientists tracking it; the National Information Center for Higher Education Policymaking and Analysis not only had exactly the numbers I was looking for, but detailed crosstabs and graphs of state-to-state migration by age bracket (20-somethings, adults) and education level, and a tasteful color scheme, natch.

In numerical terms, New Jersey and Illinois are the top exporters of college students, sending a net of 24,246 and 11,762 students out of state. Relative to the state’s population, only outliers Alaska and Hawai’i (with young, comparatively underdeveloped higher education offerings and literally a vast new world on the mainland to compete with) fare so poorly.

In the grander scheme of things, the bigger question is about the flow of human capital through the education pipeline. Both Iowa and Massachusetts do a comparably good job at educating their children: 28% of their ninth-graders go on to finish college (within six years), the top rank in a country where only 18% do. However, where Massachusetts benefits from other states’ investment in primary education — fully 38.8% of its adult residents have a college degree–Iowa is one of those underwriting other states’ dynamic, post-industrial economies, with 25% of its adult residents holding college diplomas (lower than the 26.7% national average).

A look at overall migration by state bears out the Bill Frey/Bruce Katz division of states into Melting Pot, Sunbelt, and Heartland. Sunbelt states in the South are gaining tens of thousands of residents, but primarily at lower educational tiers. States with strong post-industrial economies (the Pacific states, the Northeast) attract the young and college educated but not really those with less education — in some cases, like California, the less educated are moving away. And, in many cases, even those college graduates leave as older adults.

Meanwhile, the states of the Great Plains and northern Mountain West are leaking residents, especially college graduates. The industrial Midwest is faring better, but Ohio lost a net of 12,000 young people (age 22 to 29 in 2000) with college educations left between 1995 and 2000, along with nearly 4,000 adults (age 30 to 64 in 2000) with graduate degrees. The numbers are equally discouraging for Pennsylvania: 32,000 young degree-holders.

million dollar babies

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Crain’s this week included what might be the ultimate in real estate pornography: thirty pages devoted to $1-million-plus houses. Included was a list of every single sale in the six-county region that topped $1, $1.5, or $2M (broken down by area), and photos of a few representative samples. Now, I personally can’t even begin to understand the appeal of suburban living, but I can understand why someone else paid $1.7M for this horsey-set estate:

What I don’t understand is $2.7 million (yes, one million more smackeroos! that’s a three-mile-high stack of 200,000 sandwiches!) for this overgrown snout house:

…and it’s on Denali Ridge Drive, in aptly named far-west exurban Plainfield, miles from nowhere but right up against the freeway to Joliet. Probably named after the middling (but huge) SUV, not the Alaskan range, of course.

(Photos by Brett Kramer for Crain’s Chicago Business)

Update! explained after the jump
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Talk and drive and crash

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NHTSA reports that mobile phone use by drivers is, not surprisingly, up: eight percent of drivers are, at any given daylight time, talking first and driving maybe second (or third, or whatever). So why is it that it seems that half the drivers who suddenly cut me off — whether a right hook while cycling, or nudging past the stop line and into the crosswalk — are talking?

Chicago tops in bank proliferation

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According to a WSJ article by Sheila Muto, Chicago beat New York on one retail count: 17.6% of all new bank branches built nationally in the past two years were built here, vs. 16.2% there.

In the past two years, banks in the Chicago metro area alone added 488 branches — more new branches than any other area in the U.S. During the same period, 447 new bank branches opened in the New York metro area [out of 2,765 branches nationwide, according to a survey from First Manhattan Consulting]…

“I can empathize with civic leaders that fear a run of vacancies,” says Steve Reider, president of Bancography Inc., a banking-industry market-research firm. Some banks are reluctant to retrofit a former bank location to fit their own design criteria, which can be as expensive as building another bank from scratch, he says. And with the exception of a jewelry store, he says, “there’s not a lot of demand from retailers for a space where a good chunk of it is taken up by a cast-iron and concrete vault.”

New highways not needed

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William Presecky reports in today’s Trib on an IDOT commissioned survey of far southwest suburban residents that revealed little passion for new freeways, and a sanguine view of growth:

Critics of the expressway are heartened by the survey results, which show “building new freeways or expressways” ranked fifth among the “top five solutions” chosen by respondents as the best for relieving traffic.

According to the poll results, 57 percent cited widening existing roads as the best solution to traffic congestion. Improving intersections, signals or turn lanes was ranked second with 34 percent, followed by better coordination and planning (28 percent) and building other new connecting roads (25 percent).

Building new freeways or expressways garnered 21 percent, according to the results.

“This survey dramatically reinforces our position that IDOT should focus on improving existing roads and adding new connections to meet current and future traffic needs,” said Jan Strasma, chairman of Citizens Against the Sprawlway.

Water quality was the top concern related to the effects of transportation improvements, followed by cost to taxpayers, air quality, loss of natural areas and loss of farmland.

Seventy-five percent said traffic congestion will get much worse in the next 10 years and many believe that residential construction and economic development have not been effectively coordinated with long-term transportation planning, Powell said.

Calumet steel museum

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The Trib recently carried a story by Russell Working on a steel museum that’s been proposed for the former Acme Steel site on the Calumet River, way down on the south side. A coalition formed by the steelworkers’ union has purchased the structures from a scrap dealer, but the legal status of the land is questionable. Alderman Pope has his doubts about the plan, particularly regarding the location — which I share, having looked in vain for a way to see these up close. (I’ll try again this summer.)

Still, the museum would be a nice complement to the ongoing plans to create an industrial heritage corridor for the Calumet region.

Representatives of Chicago’s Steel Heritage Project envision exhibits that would teach the public about steelworkers’ lives and their unions’ struggle during tours of the old Acme Steel Co. Chicago Coke Plant at 11236 S. Torrence Ave.

Chicago’s Steel Heritage Project is a non-profit that includes groups ranging from the Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois to the United Steelworkers of America. The Calumet Heritage Partnership, an umbrella group of environmental, nature and historical organizations in the southeastern Chicago area and northwest Indiana, is acting as the fiscal agent.

Of the $250,000 cost, the project has raised $65,000, which will more than cover the down payment. The largest donation, $40,000, came from the United Steelworkers of America. The Landmarks Preservation Council of Illinois named the facility one of the state’s 10 most endangered historic places and gave a $10,000 grant toward the project.

For steelworkers, the project is a means of preserving a common heritage of hard work and a struggle for rights. In its heyday, there were 85,000 steelworkers on the industrial belt of Lake Michigan running from the mouth of the Calumet River to Burns Harbor, Ind., said Sadlowski, who is the retired director of United Steelworkers of America District 31.

Federated chief

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Terry Lundgren threatens to strangle America’s retailing history with his bare hands:

Well, it looks like fewer than 100 malls are truly threatened by the merger. What I’m worried about is the forthcoming death of perhaps a dozen regional department store names — each of them with a longstanding connection to regional histories and, for Filene’s and Field’s, a strong connection to some great American stories. In fact, I’d be genuinely mad if the Field’s name were axed–I’m not even from the Midwest and moved to Chicago precisely because it seemed distant and unknown, and yet the brand still meant something to me upon my arrival. Macy’s, on the other hand, never excited me.

The newspaper accounts I’ve scanned from Chicago, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and New York are pretty evenly split about the chance of Federated retiring Field’s, although the analysts who predict its death seem more certain. In the press conference, Lundgren left the possibility of keeping Field’s and Lord & Taylor alive after market research. On the other hand, there may not be enough ex-May stores in the Upper Midwest to permit Federated to do a full rollout of Macy’s while keeping one or two other brands around.
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