Chicago Daily Observer

The city of Chicago is fighting the Federal Emergency Management Agency over a nearly $6-million tab for snow removal.

FEMA obviously doesn’t remember how hard it was for the Federal Aviation Administration to collect several million in fines from Chicago after Mayor Richard M. Daley one midnight bulldozed the federally subsidized, lakefront airport known as Meigs Field

If Chicago can raise $50 million a year using 100 cameras to catch red-light runners, I’m for the city putting in another 100. Or more. Same for the suburbs that are thinking about putting in the cameras.

Yes, we’re supposed to feel sympathy for motorists who race through red rights, as if they’re a picked-on species that is being victimized by the money-hungry Daley administration.

It’s not fair; it’s not constitutional, the ticketed public whimpers. Some lawyer, of course, has filed a class action suit, protesting—what?—a motorist’s right to speed through a red light undetected.

We’re supposed to believe that Chicago is behaving like those Georgia hick towns that ensnared passing Yankees (in Chicago’s case, suburbanites) in those legendary speed traps to feed the towns’ coffers. Or, we’re supposed to believe that cities are intentionally making the yellow caution light shorter to nab more riders.

We’re also supposed to believe ... Read More...

The audit comes in response to a Chicago Sun-Times report on highway Supt. Rupert Graham’s order requiring road repair crews to observe “no-drive” days twice a month to save fuel.

The policy calls for road repairers, who make about $62,000 a year, to spend every other Wednesday doing odd jobs at district garages.

Ah, Bensenville, glorious Bensenville—it’s become my home away from home since I realized that Mayor Daley intended to plow over about 15 percent of it to make way for another one of his Great Ideas, in this case the O’Hare Modernization Program. Before our green mayor is done he will have spent well over $15 billion expanding O’Hare just in time for the collapse of the airline industry. Hey, how’s that for planning?

n Amsterdam, fliers who arrive at Schiphol Airport can board an express train that will whisk them downtown in 20 minutes or so. The story is the same in London and Paris and Hong Kong and even Moscow, for heaven’s sake: reliable, affordable, fast transport to the city center.

In Chicago, we have the $300-million-and-counting “superstation” under Block 37. Until someone wheels in the tons of additional loot needed to finish it and the high-speed rail link to O’Hare International Airport it’s supposed to anchor, the facility will remain empty — a dank, dark and half-completed mausoleum, useless to anyone except perhaps Hollywood for a bat cave set, as Crain’s editorial writer suggested.

If Mayor Richard M. Daley can’t get his phantasmagoric O’Hare Airport expansion plan completed in time for the 2016 Olympics, maybe he can get the Games postponed.

That’s because he has a better chance of getting the Olympics delayed than he has of realizing his airport expansion hallucination by then.

Doubt that? Then consider the Daley airport record so far: False starts, delays, broken promises, excuses. After huge cost overruns and missed timetables for just the first, northern runway (still not open) of the expansion plan’s Phase 1, the news out of City Hall is that Daley has ordered that $200 million more be spent on what only can be called the premature planning and engineering of the even more difficult Phase 2. That’s even though the financially troubled airlines that are supposed to pay for much of the entire expansion have said they are not in for phase 2.

1. Huntley Road at Randall Road Carpentersville Kane 101
2. Rte. 83 at 22nd Street Oakbrook Terr. DuPage 91
3. 79th Street at Stony Island Chicago Cook 88
4. Rte. 132 at Hunt Club Road Gurnee Lake 85
5. Rte. 132 at Rollins Road Gurnee Lake 82

6. Rte. 50 (Cicero) at 127th St. Alsip Cook 80
7. La Salle at Clark Street Chicago Cook 69
8. Randall Road at McHenry Ave. Crystal Lake McHenry 67
9. Butterfield Road at Finley Road Downers Grove DuPage 67
10. Weber at I-55 SB ramps Romeoville Will 67

“Don’t Go Crooked, Go Straight to Roy’s!”
Billboard advertisement for a former garage which specialized in wheel alignment jobs.

The late George Murray, who cut his journalistic teeth working for the Hearst newspapers in Chicago, once contemplated the irony that significant portions of the Appian Way are still serviceable long after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, but the Little Caesars of the asphalt and road paving companies operating in Illinois cannot construct a road surface that will last for more than a few years at most under optimal conditions.

If you need any evidence of the perpetual motion machine that is “the political combine,” to use the term popularized by Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, look no farther than the road construction industry. The paving contractors make substantial political contributions to whatever politicians are in power, the politicians award public works contracts to favored firms to ... Read More...

Jack Davis has a nice piece in the Chicago Tribune about the mass transit funding bill that saved the Chicago area from a transit doomsday. And he rightfully says it didn’t go far enough, but disagree with him on where the fixes need to be centered.

Jack, and the non-profit group he works for Chicago Metropolis 2020, like many in Springfield believe that the only way Illinois as a state can be great is to make Chicago better, and have the greatness spread. I say they are all blind, and ignore the fact that we’ve been trying that since the state was formed, and it’s not working.

If it’s a good idea, it shouldn’t take all that long to get it going.

By many accounts, Chicago took only four years to rebuild and obliterate just about all signs of the 1871 fire that destroyed downtown and most of the city.

Reversing the flow of the Chicago River—an engineering marvel of its time—took 13 years from conception until its 1900 finish. Literally raising the city a half dozen feet out its swampy bottom took six years in the mid-1850s, a mere 30 years after the city’s founding.

Then there’s block 37.

It’ll be almost two decades since the city demolished an entire block in the heart of the Loop before the mixed-use development, including a superstation for CTA “express” service to the airports, is completed, and that’s still just a projection. Add another 20 years or so, ... Read More...