Ok another issue on my mind these days is the relatively quick rise of awareness about possible BRT routes down western and ashland aves... since i personally live right off western, im very excited about this.
Based on what I am hearing, the CTA has a lot of the funding already lined up for these projects. I don't want to jinx it, but should we start thinking about Ashland and Western BRT routes as imminent rather than just possible?
They are not funded. After 20 years you get 80% of your salary and free health care for life. Who pays for that? The employees didn't.
not entirely correct - the vast majority of the pension fund is paid into by employees - it's a huge chunk their paycheck. plus it's not "free healthcare" - it's healthcare at employee cost (you have to pay whatever the city doesn't cover - usually until you're old enough for medicare). the main reason we have these massive unfunded pension liabilities right now are twofold - exponentially rising cost of healthcare and bad investments by city/state governments that were exacerbated by the recession (which is how the govt typically made up the difference in pension funds before the entire economy went to shit).
what frustrates me is when people are only placing blame on the number and salary of employees rather than saying that the management f-ed up (state and city governments literally lost money that their employees paid into the pension fund - why no one seems to mention this is beyond me). It sucks for everyone - governments are going to have to make cuts and take more serious looks at retirement and staffing and productivity, but to say that these problems are solely due to "bloated government" and a garbage collector making too much is completely unproductive and incredibly small-minded.
Actually, the investments were pretty good -- better than my TIAA/CREF, and the guys making them are fiscally responsible for results. The "unfunded" is actually that the city and state have been employing pension eligible employees for a decade and delaying paying the necessary matching amount into the fund, just like they have been delaying payment or contractors. It is like a private employer claiming that they will match your contribution, but then they don't actually write the check. So in a few years when all of the baby boomers retire, we will all have to write that check, because they are contractually obligated to make the payments -- either in the form of the actual pension, or in the form of the matching value if someone opts to roll-over.
That's when this will all reach chrisis point. The worst part is that Rham's purge of several departments without reforming seniority rules mean that we have to pay the pensions, but the good, able, young qualified workers have all been fired in the last two years. The city employee deal used to be pretty square -- take a salary at 75% of what you could make elsewhere in return for a good and garaunteed retirement. Now, who knows?
Please don't get me wrong... I am specifically talking about Chicago and its history of corruption. (I am not talking about public workers in general. I actually am a professor at public college and work damn hard as do my colleagues. Public service is noble and honorable.) If you read UIC Professor Dick Simpson's anti-corruption report, you might have a different opinion:
Streets and Sans jobs were and still are given by the committee men as favors to people. You are/were then expected to work the election for the chosen pols. These are the guys that greet you when you vote in the morning. They knock on doors and get out the vote for pols like Joseph Berrios. This goes still on. That's why there's three on a garbage truck. It's more man power for the pols, not necessarily better garbage pick up. In fact, the report I cited stated that Chicago's costs were $200 per ton compared to Philly's $110.
I want to live in a sustainable city. I love Chicago. I want to see Chicago grow and prosper. It will only do so when the graft, waste and corruption are called out and dealt with by us and the people we elect. So far, many of us confuse Chicago with Wisconsin and think there isn't a problem here. We have a long way to go. The first step is to realize that extent of the problem.
Just in case my comment earlier was misinterpreted, I don't actually think the individual employees are necessarily paid too much. But I sometimes feel we have proliferating agencies like some kind of building ivy that quietly grows every year, everybody thinking it picturesque at first, until the day you suddenly wake up and realize the tentacles are everywhere, prying into everything, and they are choking the hell out of your building. Or something. I dunno about the metaphor but my point is that it seems like we have to go through 50 committees to get even the smallest stupidest thing done in this town. I wonder if the scope of city government has grown with patronage positions: once desks/agencies are created, nobody ever wants to get rid of them. I, like anyone else, would normally be loathe to cut any jobs, but that natural reluctance shouldn't trap us into freezing extra layers of bureaucracy into every city action. Again, I don't know if this is actually the case; it just seems that way, and makes me curious to see a breakdown/comparison of what we get for our taxpayer money versus other large cities.
And yes toaster completely agreed that the unfunded pension thing / broke city govt is about much more complex issues than simply headcount. But we shouldn't let the fear of complexity keep us from taking simple first steps. And there's nothing wrong with doing an independent headcount audit. Whatever got us into this fix isn't going to necessarily be the same thing that gets us out; it's worth taking the time to fix what discreet problems we can before getting stymied by the complex.
FASCINATING piece on Mayor Emanuel's idea to put together an "Infrastructure Trust" in which banks pool money on loan to Chicago, to be spent on infrastructure projects, from which a healthy interest rate will be repaid using the savings garnered from having fixed the infrastructure. VERY intriguing - I'd love to have your guys' thoughts.
Will this work? Is it clever, or just another hand out to the big banks? Will we end up beholden to them, as in the Great Parking Meter Debacle? Or will be borrow their money, fix up our infrastructure, and move on with our lives? What are these shadowy "european and asian" precedents - does anyone have any previous experience with this idea?
Mantaray, remember what happened to the money the parking meters were supposed to bring. The less money the Mayor has control over the better. Some emergency will lead the city leaders to drain it and then quit and let the next generation clean up the mess. Why not sell bonds like every other city does to fund infrastructure? If we had an elected infrastructure authority that was independent of city hall maybe this would work, but not likely.
Sure would be a nice sign to see Waterview under construction again. I spent 4 years looking at that thing when I worked right next door.
Not specifically Chicago, but anyone seen the film Urbanized? I thought it had a nice collection of thinkers, Rem, Foster as well as mayors, city planners, landscape architects, etc. all discussing urban planning. There was a part on the BRT system in Brasilia, quite impressive how well they were able to develop it only about a decade.
Well, the mayor already has his giant TIF slush fund and yet "we're too broke" to fix up the infrastructure of our falling apart school district, so... yeah I'm also skeptical of handing any more money over to the mayor. But from the standpoint of evaluating new models of infrastructure financing, any thoughts on this new idea? I doubt the city could float a new bond in this economic environment. Well, maybe - anyone know how municipal bonds are doing nowadays?
I remember reading about Rahm's proposal when it was first announced. Thanks for sharing the link. The video mentions that the city does intend to raise a large portion of the money from traditional means, including municipal bonds.
Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I know the parking meter deal gets a bad rap, and rightfully so, but there are some positives that have come from it. The pricing isn't quite optimized, but it is closer. Here is an interesting article I read last year on the importance of supply/demand pricing of parking, The article also addresses the damage caused by minimum parking space requirements.
So I think the new parking meter system does a little better job of optimizing, in my experience I do usually find a spot where I want one, when I want it, and I have had other friends say they found the same. Before the deal went into effect parking was cheap, but you couldn't find a spot. And for what it is worth the meters themselves work well and are properly maintained.
Back to Rahm. What I'd really like to see with all of these discussions is more big picture, dare I say it, central planning sort of thinking. We sometimes seem to spend money on direct contradictions. We should not only be discussing how to fund infrastructure repairs, but also what infrastructure do we need. We throw money into the CTA, RTA, etc. and then we have also throw money into highway expansions, and have city planning laws that force downtown buildings to have X parking spaces. We permit construction of parking lots, parking towers etc. If we want to reduce traffic and up ridership of public transit, start by getting rid of parking. If people can't park, they won't bring a car, or at least it will be a cab or bus. I think it becomes a case where don't know what we want, and we try to have it all, but that doesn't work when some of the goals are contradictory.
I agree, long term i think bus based transit systems hold probably the most promise for much of the US. They are just so much more flexible and cost effective than alternatives. Laying train tracks requires buying tons of land or digging, and once you set the track and stations, you don't even know, maybe 25 years from now, business or housing has shifted, and you aren't even servicing the right areas.
With buses, you can get the system up and running almost instantly, you can scale up or down readily and you can make dynamic changes to the coverage to make the system more efficient.
The problem with BRT is or will be the same problem with bike lanes enforcement. One parked car can screw the system.
As for the benefits of the EL over busses the EL was built to promote development, the trains came and development followed. The trains are also for the most part immune to weather and street congestion. Busses are an integral part of the system but the heavy lifting / moving should be above or below the streets. Also how many tourists actually take the bus?
I am all for waiving minimum parking requirements for developments within 20 min. walking distance from an EL stop.
But we need to make the EL actually work and work better than cars. How about a lakefront line from the Science and Industries to the Pier and north into Lincoln Park? Tourist would love it and pay full fare, and all the museums could be reached by more residents. How much of the LSD traffic is tourist hopping from one lakefront attraction to another. The other essential element is the unfinished or unrealized park and ride garages, the suburbs will not easily ditch the car for transit but if parking down town was scarce then maybe the suburbanites might park and ride, but I doubt they would ever step onto a bus, businesses would move out of the city if that was the only option. Buses have a social stigma and vehicles with rails not so much, and the weird thing is vehicles with rails on the street seem to have the least social stigma.
Chicago is a livable city because of the transit system, it has lots of room for improvement.
I agree, in Chicago, buses are used pretty much exclusively by locals. But that isn't true everywhere. That is a branding and marketing issue as much as anything else.
I'm not anti EL/subway, but the system cost per mile is incredible and the time of construction is quite slow. The existing design is quite poor, I'm not sure whose brilliant idea it was to draw all the lines into the loop and have them run on the same tracks, but it really bottlenecks the entire system. It is a really unfortunate and costly mistake. Fixing this problem would be an unbelievable undertaking.
BRT will ideally have dedicated lanes, where cars will never park, so a car parking on the lane should be an uncommon occurrence. But consider how one train having problems in the loop can practically cripple half the entire city. A bus can switch lanes or take a different road for two blocks and be back on schedule in a minute.
i think the BRT is kind of a necessary step at this point, especially with the attitudes these days towards spending. if you think about it as a stepping stone, the benefits become more apparent, It will de-centralize the current system a bit and spur growth further out from the loop. it will pave the way for a more robust system in the future. Down the line people won't be complaining about the loss of real estate for rapid transit. Incremental improvements to the system that isn't focused on adding stations or extending the current lines is better in my opinion. I never understood the whole pink line thing... you want to run another train up top through the loop?
It seems like these won't be built for quite a while, so we'll have to wait and see what is actually built. These seems to be consistent with virtually every high rise built in Chicago and the US in the past decade, is it the construction costs that force this aesthetic? Even something very interesting like Aqua tower used a very regular concrete floor plan as its jumping off point, they just found a very artful way to use unique floor slabs to create a memorable building.
Aggregate Chicago
Ok another issue on my mind these days is the relatively quick rise of awareness about possible BRT routes down western and ashland aves... since i personally live right off western, im very excited about this.
http://www.transitchicago.com/westernashlandbrt/
Based on what I am hearing, the CTA has a lot of the funding already lined up for these projects. I don't want to jinx it, but should we start thinking about Ashland and Western BRT routes as imminent rather than just possible?
and aninteresting article on the progress of the new CTA trains...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/classified/automotive/traffic/ct-met-getting-around-0618-20120618,0,2929242.column
They are not funded. After 20 years you get 80% of your salary and free health care for life. Who pays for that? The employees didn't.
not entirely correct - the vast majority of the pension fund is paid into by employees - it's a huge chunk their paycheck. plus it's not "free healthcare" - it's healthcare at employee cost (you have to pay whatever the city doesn't cover - usually until you're old enough for medicare). the main reason we have these massive unfunded pension liabilities right now are twofold - exponentially rising cost of healthcare and bad investments by city/state governments that were exacerbated by the recession (which is how the govt typically made up the difference in pension funds before the entire economy went to shit).
what frustrates me is when people are only placing blame on the number and salary of employees rather than saying that the management f-ed up (state and city governments literally lost money that their employees paid into the pension fund - why no one seems to mention this is beyond me). It sucks for everyone - governments are going to have to make cuts and take more serious looks at retirement and staffing and productivity, but to say that these problems are solely due to "bloated government" and a garbage collector making too much is completely unproductive and incredibly small-minded.
Actually, the investments were pretty good -- better than my TIAA/CREF, and the guys making them are fiscally responsible for results. The "unfunded" is actually that the city and state have been employing pension eligible employees for a decade and delaying paying the necessary matching amount into the fund, just like they have been delaying payment or contractors. It is like a private employer claiming that they will match your contribution, but then they don't actually write the check. So in a few years when all of the baby boomers retire, we will all have to write that check, because they are contractually obligated to make the payments -- either in the form of the actual pension, or in the form of the matching value if someone opts to roll-over. That's when this will all reach chrisis point. The worst part is that Rham's purge of several departments without reforming seniority rules mean that we have to pay the pensions, but the good, able, young qualified workers have all been fired in the last two years. The city employee deal used to be pretty square -- take a salary at 75% of what you could make elsewhere in return for a good and garaunteed retirement. Now, who knows?
Please don't get me wrong... I am specifically talking about Chicago and its history of corruption. (I am not talking about public workers in general. I actually am a professor at public college and work damn hard as do my colleagues. Public service is noble and honorable.) If you read UIC Professor Dick Simpson's anti-corruption report, you might have a different opinion:
http://www.uic.edu/depts/pols/ChicagoPolitics/leadingthepack.pdf
Streets and Sans jobs were and still are given by the committee men as favors to people. You are/were then expected to work the election for the chosen pols. These are the guys that greet you when you vote in the morning. They knock on doors and get out the vote for pols like Joseph Berrios. This goes still on. That's why there's three on a garbage truck. It's more man power for the pols, not necessarily better garbage pick up. In fact, the report I cited stated that Chicago's costs were $200 per ton compared to Philly's $110.
I want to live in a sustainable city. I love Chicago. I want to see Chicago grow and prosper. It will only do so when the graft, waste and corruption are called out and dealt with by us and the people we elect. So far, many of us confuse Chicago with Wisconsin and think there isn't a problem here. We have a long way to go. The first step is to realize that extent of the problem.
This parking meter business will help the parking garage business. You want to break the lease have a boycott.
Just in case my comment earlier was misinterpreted, I don't actually think the individual employees are necessarily paid too much. But I sometimes feel we have proliferating agencies like some kind of building ivy that quietly grows every year, everybody thinking it picturesque at first, until the day you suddenly wake up and realize the tentacles are everywhere, prying into everything, and they are choking the hell out of your building. Or something. I dunno about the metaphor but my point is that it seems like we have to go through 50 committees to get even the smallest stupidest thing done in this town. I wonder if the scope of city government has grown with patronage positions: once desks/agencies are created, nobody ever wants to get rid of them. I, like anyone else, would normally be loathe to cut any jobs, but that natural reluctance shouldn't trap us into freezing extra layers of bureaucracy into every city action. Again, I don't know if this is actually the case; it just seems that way, and makes me curious to see a breakdown/comparison of what we get for our taxpayer money versus other large cities.
And yes toaster completely agreed that the unfunded pension thing / broke city govt is about much more complex issues than simply headcount. But we shouldn't let the fear of complexity keep us from taking simple first steps. And there's nothing wrong with doing an independent headcount audit. Whatever got us into this fix isn't going to necessarily be the same thing that gets us out; it's worth taking the time to fix what discreet problems we can before getting stymied by the complex.
wha?
http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Chicago-Jobs-Unemployment-Rebound-Study-162849846.html
FASCINATING piece on Mayor Emanuel's idea to put together an "Infrastructure Trust" in which banks pool money on loan to Chicago, to be spent on infrastructure projects, from which a healthy interest rate will be repaid using the savings garnered from having fixed the infrastructure. VERY intriguing - I'd love to have your guys' thoughts.
Will this work? Is it clever, or just another hand out to the big banks? Will we end up beholden to them, as in the Great Parking Meter Debacle? Or will be borrow their money, fix up our infrastructure, and move on with our lives? What are these shadowy "european and asian" precedents - does anyone have any previous experience with this idea?
Check out the whole piece - it's pretty well put-together (thank you, PBS!)
Huzah! Waterview Tower will no longer be an ugly concrete skelton on the river!
Mantaray, remember what happened to the money the parking meters were supposed to bring. The less money the Mayor has control over the better. Some emergency will lead the city leaders to drain it and then quit and let the next generation clean up the mess. Why not sell bonds like every other city does to fund infrastructure? If we had an elected infrastructure authority that was independent of city hall maybe this would work, but not likely.
Sure would be a nice sign to see Waterview under construction again. I spent 4 years looking at that thing when I worked right next door.
Not specifically Chicago, but anyone seen the film Urbanized? I thought it had a nice collection of thinkers, Rem, Foster as well as mayors, city planners, landscape architects, etc. all discussing urban planning. There was a part on the BRT system in Brasilia, quite impressive how well they were able to develop it only about a decade.
Well, the mayor already has his giant TIF slush fund and yet "we're too broke" to fix up the infrastructure of our falling apart school district, so... yeah I'm also skeptical of handing any more money over to the mayor. But from the standpoint of evaluating new models of infrastructure financing, any thoughts on this new idea? I doubt the city could float a new bond in this economic environment. Well, maybe - anyone know how municipal bonds are doing nowadays?
I remember reading about Rahm's proposal when it was first announced. Thanks for sharing the link. The video mentions that the city does intend to raise a large portion of the money from traditional means, including municipal bonds.
Personally, I'm cautiously optimistic.
I know the parking meter deal gets a bad rap, and rightfully so, but there are some positives that have come from it. The pricing isn't quite optimized, but it is closer. Here is an interesting article I read last year on the importance of supply/demand pricing of parking, The article also addresses the damage caused by minimum parking space requirements.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/04/04/donald-shoup/free-parking-or-free-markets/
So I think the new parking meter system does a little better job of optimizing, in my experience I do usually find a spot where I want one, when I want it, and I have had other friends say they found the same. Before the deal went into effect parking was cheap, but you couldn't find a spot. And for what it is worth the meters themselves work well and are properly maintained.
Back to Rahm. What I'd really like to see with all of these discussions is more big picture, dare I say it, central planning sort of thinking. We sometimes seem to spend money on direct contradictions. We should not only be discussing how to fund infrastructure repairs, but also what infrastructure do we need. We throw money into the CTA, RTA, etc. and then we have also throw money into highway expansions, and have city planning laws that force downtown buildings to have X parking spaces. We permit construction of parking lots, parking towers etc. If we want to reduce traffic and up ridership of public transit, start by getting rid of parking. If people can't park, they won't bring a car, or at least it will be a cab or bus. I think it becomes a case where don't know what we want, and we try to have it all, but that doesn't work when some of the goals are contradictory.
The tribune has a piece on the latest proposals for the extending and building out the river walk.
I've liked the direction the river walk has been heading for awhile now, through progress is painfully slow.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-riverwalk-1008-20121008,0,2508669.story
Western and Ashland BRT's will have 24 hour dedicated bus only lanes... I am getting excited about the possibilities here. Its moving in the right direction at the very least...
I agree, long term i think bus based transit systems hold probably the most promise for much of the US. They are just so much more flexible and cost effective than alternatives. Laying train tracks requires buying tons of land or digging, and once you set the track and stations, you don't even know, maybe 25 years from now, business or housing has shifted, and you aren't even servicing the right areas.
With buses, you can get the system up and running almost instantly, you can scale up or down readily and you can make dynamic changes to the coverage to make the system more efficient.
The problem with BRT is or will be the same problem with bike lanes enforcement. One parked car can screw the system.
As for the benefits of the EL over busses the EL was built to promote development, the trains came and development followed. The trains are also for the most part immune to weather and street congestion. Busses are an integral part of the system but the heavy lifting / moving should be above or below the streets. Also how many tourists actually take the bus?
I am all for waiving minimum parking requirements for developments within 20 min. walking distance from an EL stop.
But we need to make the EL actually work and work better than cars. How about a lakefront line from the Science and Industries to the Pier and north into Lincoln Park? Tourist would love it and pay full fare, and all the museums could be reached by more residents. How much of the LSD traffic is tourist hopping from one lakefront attraction to another. The other essential element is the unfinished or unrealized park and ride garages, the suburbs will not easily ditch the car for transit but if parking down town was scarce then maybe the suburbanites might park and ride, but I doubt they would ever step onto a bus, businesses would move out of the city if that was the only option. Buses have a social stigma and vehicles with rails not so much, and the weird thing is vehicles with rails on the street seem to have the least social stigma.
Chicago is a livable city because of the transit system, it has lots of room for improvement.
Over and OUT
Peter N
Peter
I agree, in Chicago, buses are used pretty much exclusively by locals. But that isn't true everywhere. That is a branding and marketing issue as much as anything else.
I'm not anti EL/subway, but the system cost per mile is incredible and the time of construction is quite slow. The existing design is quite poor, I'm not sure whose brilliant idea it was to draw all the lines into the loop and have them run on the same tracks, but it really bottlenecks the entire system. It is a really unfortunate and costly mistake. Fixing this problem would be an unbelievable undertaking.
BRT will ideally have dedicated lanes, where cars will never park, so a car parking on the lane should be an uncommon occurrence. But consider how one train having problems in the loop can practically cripple half the entire city. A bus can switch lanes or take a different road for two blocks and be back on schedule in a minute.
i think the BRT is kind of a necessary step at this point, especially with the attitudes these days towards spending. if you think about it as a stepping stone, the benefits become more apparent, It will de-centralize the current system a bit and spur growth further out from the loop. it will pave the way for a more robust system in the future. Down the line people won't be complaining about the loss of real estate for rapid transit. Incremental improvements to the system that isn't focused on adding stations or extending the current lines is better in my opinion. I never understood the whole pink line thing... you want to run another train up top through the loop?
Yup, the pink line addresses areas outside the loop, but does nothing for the bottleneck in the loop, and as you mention, it obviously makes it worse.
Huzah for more banality pressed onto our beloved skyline, and the wasting of a dramatic site! Score another one for the lowest common denominator!!!
Oh my goodness. Did they dig a reject set out of Pappageorge Haymes' trash circa 2003?
It seems like these won't be built for quite a while, so we'll have to wait and see what is actually built. These seems to be consistent with virtually every high rise built in Chicago and the US in the past decade, is it the construction costs that force this aesthetic? Even something very interesting like Aqua tower used a very regular concrete floor plan as its jumping off point, they just found a very artful way to use unique floor slabs to create a memorable building.
Looks like wolf point is going back for some changes, perhaps you'll get your wish.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/ct-met-wolf-point-deferred-20121128,0,6772122.story
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