Rant & Rave

It is time for a Moderator whine fest. I get one once in a great while.

• I was in D.C. recently and met with a senior person in the Department of Transportation. In the course of our conversation this person said that the toughest part of the DOT's job is convincing people that the United State's transportation network no longer is the best in the world. This person said that the United States no longer is a center of innovation in the planning, delivery and operation of transportation systems. This person said the complacency and cowardliness of the transportation professionals and politicians this person has encountered while working for DOT has been quite discouraging.

• While other cities are implementing or considering the implementation of pricing measures (i.e., tolls) as a way to manage heavily congested highway systems, there is little or no indication that Illinois is considering tolling as a traffic management tool or revenue raising measure (or both). We'd rather have people stand in line for "free" roads than use tolling to spread demand more effectively. And just how is the State's refusal to use an effective tool of highway management going to make it more competitive in the world economy?

• With the completion of the I-355 extension, it appears that the Illinois Toll Highway has nothing new or interesting on its plate despite its inherent ability to fund new transportation projects through relatively modest toll increases and its evident ability to deliver projects in a timely way.

• IDOT can't get a bridge built over the Mississippi River in St. Louis. The hangup appears to be this State's refusal to consider tolling. Apparently, we would rather slow the flow of people and commerce in southern Illinois than charge people a couple of bucks to travel over a major, costly and presumably useful new bridge.

• When IDOT is presented with projects like the Elgin/O'Hare Expressway--O'Hare By-Pass that will generate substantial economic and mobility benefits, it temporizes by using years of studies and analysis in a futile attempt to placate relatively few local opponents. Meanwhile, the benefits from the expansion of O'Hare are diminished for lack of a highway/transit infrastructure that will serve the expansion.
  

• The Regional Transportation Authority, the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra and Pace face yet another doomsday with the recent defeat of a transit funding bill, this time featuring a diversion of the sales tax on gas sold in the six-county RTA region from the GRF to transit. The service boards brought on the current financial crisis by overextending their service levels beyond their financial means. Under the bailout plans so far, the very financial oversight agency that stood by while they did so, and then approved an unbalanced FY 2007 budget using a plug number for hoped-for new State funds, gets even more authority. Huh?

• Metra's STAR Line, whose western leg would be on a rail line designed to avoid population centers and whose eastern leg would run down an expensive interstate highway ROW, can't seem to get out of the station. While Metra undoubtedly will someday produce studies showing robust projected ridership levels, few people will believe them, and certainly not the federal government, which has been burned by overly optimistic ridership projections on other new start rail projects.

• The proposed State capital plan--Illinois Works--allocates a much smaller percentage of new capital money to transit than past State capital bills. This presumably means continued deterioration in the CTA system. Metra will finally join the CTA in being starved for capital, which is no consolation at all.

• The Chicago area continues to sprawl, which presumably means greater dependence on foreign oil and thus an larger outflow of dollars from the region. The auto-centric suburbs suck people out of the center area of the region, where population densities are high enough to support transit. There appears to be no way to brake this sprawl and no real interest is doing so. Before you know it Dunkin Donuts/Baskin Robbins outlets will be sprouting along the Prairie Parkway. Just what we need.

Rant over. I feel a bit better. Pardon my bile. It is a temporary thing, I hope. I'm just discouraged.