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* Surprise push to bring first Mayor Daley’s expressway dream to life:

House Speaker Michael Madigan breathed new life Tuesday into Mayor Richard J. Daley’s unfulfilled dream of building a cross-town superhighway to ease traffic gridlock.

* Sun-Times Editorial: We need to get moving on public transit

* Dawn Turner Trice: Let us bury the Chief, not praise him

* Ryan lawyers highlight unfair jury management

Sending former Gov. George Ryan to prison would be “one of the great injustices in the history of the American legal system,” his attorney said Tuesday.

* Stroger, board near compromise: Todd Stroger and the commissioners who have just seven days left to pass a $3 billion budget.

* Tribune Editorial: Crunch time for Cook Co.

The question now is who’ll take the biggest hit from the county’s 2007 budget reductions: either frontline workers in such areas as health care and law enforcement, or layers of Democratic patronage lackeys in administrative jobs.

* Stroger and Devine battle it out

* Commissioners find ways to raise more cash

* Pollution tax eyed by Cook Co. Board

* Protests planned over Cook Co. medical cuts

* Cook Co. budget fight getting tough

* Commissioner goes without office to voluntarily cut own budget by 17%

* County breaks talks with hospital billing firm: Cook County has reversed course again and ended negotiations with a controversial consulting firm because it wouldn’t cut a nice enough deal for the cash-strapped county.

* Three alderman push for airline passenger’s bill of rights

* Illinois, other states Bush administration over mercury emissions

* Blunt hails bridge proposal, IL unsatisfied

Mike Claffey, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Transportation, said the proposal calls for $3 tolls, even at rush hour. “We’ve said all along we’re opposed to a toll bridge,” Claffey said.

* Blagojevich calls IL a national leader in child support collection [press release]

* Transit ills fail to hurt Daley

* Businesses prepare for smoking ban

* Daley rebuts $14.8 million lawsuit from ex-inmates

* ComEd and the city to help with bills:

The new program will provide one-time grants of up to $400 and is expected to help 3,000 to 5,000 households. About 19,000 ComEd residential customers in Chicago have had their service cut for non-payment, although some might no longer live at the listed addresses, officials said.

* Springfield to expand public Wi-Fi, learns from California example

* David Broder: Early primaries blot out the sun

* Small Chicago paper given Polk award for Bronzeville Center probe

posted by Paul Richardson
Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 8:31 am

Comments

hey paul, the Early Primaries “editorial” was an op-ed column, and really should be labelled as such.

Comment by fedup dem Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 9:20 am
Kudos to the reporters who did the Bronzeville probe, which perfectly illustrates the way politics is really practiced on the local level in Chicago.

As to the county fiscal “crisis” I would bet that accountants in the back room are working overtime to discover new ways of presenting the County budget so that, presto, the deficit is a lot smaller than they all thought. That, combined with eliminating a few vacant positions, should
keep all the porkers on board, not to mention the free health care for anybody in the world regardless of income.

Comment by Cassandra Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 9:24 am
Perhaps if Mike Madigan were to pay more attention to urban planning, land use, and zoning issues in Illinois, he would realize that a better use of the state’s money would be enacting legislation that encourages something like New Urbanism throughout the state. Right now, we’ve got a lot of regional planning bodies; but they don’t work together very well, and they don’t have any teeth, so their plans are a little better than useless.

Comment by Squideshi Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 10:23 am
Thanks for the catch

Comment by Paul Richardson Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 10:39 am
Squid-

If you care about the urban environment, please realize the Crosstown proposal is an attempt to make the city work better. Promoting traffic flow, especially trucks, through Chicago would boost the city’s economy and help prevent the current net exodus of 20,000 people a year out of the city’s borders, and maybe help stanch the exurban growth that “new urbanists” and others despise. And if this can be done with private money, and in a way that utilizes existing transportation corridor space and doesn’t disrupt existing neighborhoods, I’d suggest it would be a win-win for most people, Greenies included.

Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 11:58 am
I should of voted for Peraica. I do apologize.

Comment by Richard Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 12:33 pm
“Promoting traffic flow, especially trucks, through Chicago would boost the cityâ€™s economy and help prevent the current net exodus of 20,000 people a year out of the cityâ€™s borders, and maybe help stanch the exurban growth that â€œnew urbanistsâ€ and others despise.”

I think that making Chicago a more walkable city with significantly better public transportation would do more to boost the city’s economy and “curb” urban sprawl. It would also make the city a generally nicer place to live.

Congestion isn’t a result of growth–it’s a result of bad planning. If you keep building nothing but huge bedroom communities, where people need to get on the road and commute long distances to work, well, they’re going to get on the road and commute long distances to work. That creates more traffic and hence all the congestion we experience.

“And if this can be done with private money, and in a way that utilizes existing transportation corridor space and doesnâ€™t disrupt existing neighborhoods, Iâ€™d suggest it would be a win-win for most people, Greenies included.”

I’m all for utilizing existing transportation corridor space and not disrupting existing neighborhoods, but I don’t think that the project should be built with private money. Infrasturcture is a basic government service; and it should remain that way, where the people who control it are, at least in theory, accountable to the public.

Comment by Squideshi Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 2:56 pm
If memory serves, the “Crosstown” - which is an extension of the Skyway /Interstate-90 across the Dan Ryan, up Cicero Ave, and interfacing with I-94 (the current Kennedy Expy.) at the Junction - was not one man’s pet dream, but a key part of the original federal Interstate plan for Chicago, until near-violent opposition from the South Side Irish neighborhoods of the SW Side killed it in the 1960s. Even the Late Mayor had to back off.

The result is that everything from I-90 and I-94, including all truck traffic, has to go up the Dan Ryan and the Kennedy (re-christened 1-90 / I-94), with obvious results.

If the money is available, the time for the Crosstown may have come.

Comment by Bubs Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 3:13 pm
“IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!”

I refer, of course, to the Crosstown — which this old timer thought was drawn, quartered, disemboweled, eviscerated, and buried thirty years ago. (And dead, too.)

It was what, a four or five billion boondoggle back then? Daley was saying earlier today that it’d cost something like ten times as much now. And I think he’s lowballing the price. (The present Dan Ryan rehab is what?, one billion?)

On this one, he and Madigan are flat out stupid wrong.

Okay, for the sake of argument — say it gets built it as a tollroad.

What will the tolls be in order to handle that kind of monster debt service? Five bucks a car? Twenty-five bucks a truck? Ha! Who’s gonna pay THAT?

A Crosstown Tollway will end up just like the circa 1950s Skyway (which went flat broke under THE single worst awful public works disaster perpetrated by Daley the Elder): no one wanted to pay the toll on the Skyway, so they took 80/94 instead to Indiana. (It’s only in the past what, ten or fifteen years that the Skyway finally, finally turned around financially.)

The Crosstown Tollway will be the same. Guys like me who come down the Edens enroute to the Stevenson or the Ryan will say “screw that!!” and take the Kennedy downtown and back out, for the precise purpose of avoiding the ridiculous toll.

Result: flat broke tollway and stiffed bondholders, just like old man Daley ended up with. Exactly. Precisely.

(Yeah, all youse guys who already have sugarplum visions of building the Crosstown and selling it to investors a la the Skyway, dream on!)

The preposterous financial prospects aside — how about a take from my shrill whiny futuristic side.

Peak oil. Global warming. Profligate car/truck driving is coming to an end, friends, like it or not. Over-the-road trucking will drop to a trickle (in favor of intermodal rail), and in urban areas, we’re gonna have to get out of our cars and onto mass transit. Sorry.

So we don’t need another frigging expressway. No way. No how.

Igor, put the Crosstown back in its coffin. Stupid preposterous idiotic lamebrain idea.

Outta here.

Comment by Dooley Dudright Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 6:35 pm
Dudley,

Just as sure as Nell is in love with your horse, our economy and personal freedom depends on the ability to go from dang near anywhere we are to dang near anywhere we want. The genie was let out of the bottle in the 1920’s and all the wishing that we would abandon personal transportation and trucking is just that, wishful thinking. Public transportation will play a role where it makes sense and where the public is willing to pay the subsidy. I can see it increasing to 15-20% of all greater metropolitan trips under the most optimistic scenario, and we WILL need to increase it to keep up with the population boom.

Personal transportation and trucking are now dependent on a finite supply of oil, but there are too many smart people working on alternatives that they will inevitably take over as soon as the economics work out. After all, Big Oil won’t have too much clout when there is less big oil to be found, eh? I’d love to see the electric car take off when they solve the challenges of battery range, etc.

As far as the Crosstown is concerned, it will be realistic if the economics dictate it, and it won’t fly if they are off by a ton.

But to answer Squid, IF (and it’s a pretty big if at this point) a Crosstown was built, I’d rather it be a toll facility than to take precious bucks away from transit in a short-sighted “transit vs. highway” public funding struggle, because transit WILL need the public subsidy in most cases. And all the walkable sidewalks and close-knit urban communities, while desirable for many reasons, won’t take hardly any trucks off the highways. After all, Chicago is already more walkable and tightly-knit than 95% of its suburbs, and has the 2nd most extensive transit system in the US, and there is STILL a ton of road congestion in the city. Cicero Avenue. The Ike. The Edens. And so on.

Comment by Six Degrees of Separation Wednesday, Feb 21, 07 @ 7:13 pm
“After all, Chicago is already more walkable and tightly-knit than 95% of its suburbs, and has the 2nd most extensive transit system in the US, and there is STILL a ton of road congestion in the city.”

The loop may be very walkable, but many of the other neighborhoods in Chicago are not. The El is great, but the El won’t take you everywhere. I think a lot of people avoid taking the bus because (1) they don’t want to bother trying to figure out the routes and schedule and (2) it’s a pain to stand out in the rain and cold. Address these two problems, and I believe that you will see ridership dramatically increase.

Comment by Squideshi Thursday, Feb 22, 07 @ 7:48 am
â€œAfter all, Chicago is already more walkable and tightly-knit than 95% of its suburbs, and has the 2nd most extensive transit system in the US, and there is STILL a ton of road congestion in the city.â€

I also wanted to mention that the poorly-planned suburbs create traffic problems and congestion for their neighbors–including Chicago. For example, the Village of Plainfield is way out on the edge of the southwest suburbs; and they’re building subdivisions like crazy. There aren’t nearly enough jobs in Plainfield, so people get on the road and commute long distances to work. They pass through communities like Joliet, Romeoville, Bolingbrook, even as far as Chicago. In this way, the Village of Plainfield’s bad planning creates a problem for its neighbors–a problem over which the neighbors have absolutely no control. In economics, this is what is called an externality.

Comment by Squideshi Thursday, Feb 22, 07 @ 7:53 am