Category Archives: Transportation

Early 1990s proposal for Personal Rapid Transit in the Chicago suburbs

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Officials are still trying to develop effective mass transit in the Chicago suburbs but perhaps they missed something: an early 1990s proposal for Personal Rapid Transport from several suburbs.

I came across a 1991 “Proposal for a Personal Rapid Transit Demonstration System” from the Village of Rosemont. Envision, if you will, a network of autonomous, futuristic five-person pods zipping through the glassy canyon of corporate headquarters near O’Hare, alighting at their passengers’ chosen destination…

It wasn’t the only avant-garde transportation idea that the RTA was considering at the time “in an effort to coax drivers, particularly in the suburbs, out of their cars.” In June of 1992, as the competition to get PRT continued, the agency was also investigating SERCs, or “stackable electric rental cars,” approximately the size of a Honda Accord, with a range of 28 miles and a top speed of 50-60 miles an hour. The system would allow workers to take the Metra to a SERC station, drive the last few miles to the office or home, and return it by the next day—sort of like bike-share for tiny electric cars. It doesn’t seem to have gone beyond a symposium on the technology.

But the PRT plan got serious. Rosemont retained Winston & Strawn—around the same time the RTA hired them for lobbying work—at a cost of $50,000. They spent another $50,000 to prepare for the application. The mayor told the Tribune in May of 1991 that they were prepared to spend another $100,000 to get the RTA experiment. And Rosemont got the nod, though it took two years.

In 1998, eight years after and $22.5 million dollars after the RTA set it in motion, Rosemont’s PRT system came to life. It came to life on a test track at Raytheon in Massachusetts, but nonetheless, it existed, in RTA-emblazoned glory. RTA officials were pleased.

Moser suggests the plan was killed by two main factors: cost overruns and then Raytheon got out of this particular business. But, I just don’t see how this would have been attractive to average suburbanites. Monorail like lines would have to be constructed to connect major buildings and nodes; how many want to live around those (even with little noise)? It still requires a certain level of density in order to have consistent ridership. This might work great along office corridors – which the suburbs in on this proposal, Rosemont, Naperville, Deerfield, and Schaumburg, all have – where there are thousands of workers on a regular basis. The primary advantage is that people don’t have to ride with many others, something that wealthier commuters seem to like and would pay to get. But, in the end, this seems like a more private form of train/monorail/bus linking higher density areas.

Mass transit as repository of microscopic organisms

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A new study found all sorts of organic material in the New York City subway:

To get a clearer picture of what that ecosystem is made of, Mason and his team set out to map the vastness of the urban microbiome. Using nylon swabs and mobile phones, the group identified 15,152 different organisms lurking on railings, trash cans, seats, and kiosks in 466 New York City subway stations. Their findings were published this week in the journal Cell Systems.

The team also found that, on a microscopic level, the subway is littered with leftovers—evidence of what New Yorkers like to eat. Cucumber particles were the most commonly found food item, along with traces of kimchi, sauerkraut, and chickpeas. Bacteria associated with mozzarella cheese coated 151 stations. And other traces of pizza ingredients such as sausages and Italian cheese were everywhere. (The Wall Street Journal transformed much of that data into a clickable map that lets you explore the findings by subway line.)

And although Mason and his team also found particles of harmful bacteria related to the bubonic plague and anthrax, the levels were so low that they pose little danger to humans. “The important fact is that the majority of the bacteria that we found are harmless,” Mason said. Much more common were the protective bacteria that eliminate toxins and make the subway cleaner. “They represent a phalanx of friends that surround us,” he said…

Of the more than 10 billion DNA fragments that the team sequenced, about 5 billion were unaccounted for. That’s not to say that these DNA fragments belong to never-before-seen organisms. Rather, it shows that the library of sequenced genomes still has many empty shelves. Where beetles and flies were most prevalent in this sampling, evidence of cockroaches was absent—not because New York isn’t crawling with them (it is), but because scientists haven’t fully sequenced the cockroach genome yet. Once that information becomes available, cockroaches will become better represented in the sampling, according to Mason.

While I’m sure plenty of people will be grossed out by such knowledge, it highlights the level of microscopic complexity going on all around us and suggests there is a lot of scientific work in this area still be done. We know the bottoms of the oceans might be the last large frontier on Earth but it sounds like the NYC subway offers plenty of opportunities itself.

Now that we have such information about what is in the subway system, I want to know how the organic material interacts with humans on a regular basis. Where is this material? How many people are made sick and, conversely, does such a collection provide benefits for users?

The county with the worst roads for traveling in the Chicago region

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The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has a new data tool online and it provides insights into the commuting experiences of Chicago area residents:

CMAP planners say it’s time to “get people excited about data.” The hope is CMAP’s constituents — Cook, DuPage, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties — will use the facts to understand why certain projects deserve prioritization and funding. To access the data, go to http://www.cmap.illinois.gov/mobility/explore…

To that end, a section on ride quality includes detailed maps measuring pavement conditions on both expressways and major roads. A snapshot of counties’ ride quality on major roads puts Cook County with a 47 percent rating compared to 72 percent in DuPage, 80 percent in Kane and 83 percent in Lake and 90 percent in McHenry.

Other data available includes stats on bridges in need of repair, pavement quality, the number of passengers boarding at Metra and CTA stops and the worst railway crossings for delays in the region — FYI, it’s on Chicago’s South Side at Morgan Street and Pershing Road with 3,194 vehicles delayed a day.

Taken cumulatively, the website sends a message that the region’s infrastructure needs more capital to avoid gridlock, stagnant transit and deteriorating roads. The warning is timely, with a new governor in Springfield and a push for state and federal multiyear capital programs.

Two things strike me as interesting:

1. I always like the idea of putting more data into people’s hands. Commuting is a common experience and one that people would probably want to see improved. However, without data that moves behind individual and/or anecdotal evidence, it is hard to have conversations about the bigger picture in the region.

2. Some people may like data but it is another thing to translate that data access into collective action. Assuming that some people go to this site, will they then take an interest in infrastructure projects? Will they contact political officials? Will they vote differently? How exactly CMAP goes about putting this data into action is worth paying attention to.

O’Hare Airport now officially world’s busiest airport again

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Occasionally status anxious Chicago can breathe a little easier: O’Hare was just certified the world’s busiest airport.

While 2014 traffic at O’Hare was down by 0.2 percent, it lost less traffic than the Atlanta airport, where traffic declined by 4.7 percent, according to new FAA data. O’Hare had 881,933 arrivals and departures; Atlanta had 868,359.

But the Atlanta airport is likely to retain the title of busiest airport for passenger traffic.

City officials have said international passenger volume have helped O’Hare totals. In the last 18 months, O’Hare and Midway airports added six new international airlines and dozens of destinations, according to the city.

O’Hare regains bragging rights to the title it had mostly owned since the dawn of the Jet Age, when it surpassed the number of flights at Midway Airport, which had been the leader.

As a transportation center, this looks good for Chicago. Yet, there are two more negative signs: Atlanta may still have more passengers (which number matters more?) and flights were down (Which may have more to do with airlines consolidating as well as trying to cut costs by filling existing flights). Additionally, the lead over Atlanta isn’t that big. I’m guessing this means the competition will continue for years to come and I am curious to know if Chicago and/or O’Hare have some plans in the works to keep their regained lead.

Happenings since Canadian National purchased the EJ&E tracks in 2008

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Here is a recap of what has happened since the 2008 purchase of the EJ&E railroad tracks by Canadian National:

In December 2008, the Surface Transportation Board approved CN’s request to buy the smaller EJ&E, which extended in a half-circle from Waukegan to Joliet. Suburbs traversed by the EJ&E fought the plan, citing extra freight train traffic. The board agreed with CN that the purchase would reduce regional freight congestion but imposed numerous conditions on the railroad as a result and included a period of federal oversight until Jan. 23, 2015.

Last month, the STB extended the monitoring period until Jan. 23, 2017, citing concerns about additional freight traffic in the region.

Mongeau said the railroad’s acquisition of the EJ&E “gave CN what it was looking for — a route around Chicago,” that has a trickle-down effect on other railroads by taking its trains off other crowded tracks.

The railroad has spent $700 million on upgrades and safety improvements since 2008.

Twenty-eight out of 33 towns affected by the merger signed mitigation deals with CN, Mongeau noted. Holdouts included Aurora and Barrington, which fought against the merger and campaigned to extend the monitoring period.

In October 2014, there were 1,620 blocked railway crossings lasting 10 minutes or more on the EJ&E. In October 2009, early in the acquisition phase, there were just nine, according to CN data….

On tracks between Lake Zurich, Barrington and Hanover Park, traffic on the EJ&E grew from about five daily trains prior to the merger to 17 in October 2014.

This was a big issue for a number of suburban communities in the mid-2000s as they wondered how the purchase would affect freight traffic as well as block crossings, create more noise, and potentially harm property values. It sounds like the monitoring is intended to keep tabs on these changes and help ensure the railroad and communities work together. Yet, it is still important to keep the big picture in mind: moving traffic onto the EJ&E tracks can help alleviate freight traffic elsewhere, addressing the problem of the railroad bottleneck in the Chicago region. This sort of issue makes the case for metropolitanization where communities and government could come together and solve problems facing numerous municipalities.

Pace wants to “change the suburban transit environment” with new bus routes

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Pace has an ambitious proposal intended to link important areas in the Chicago area via bus:

A wide-ranging network of suburban bus routes could transform the way people commute and shop, connecting people to job centers in Naperville, Elgin and Elk Grove Village, according to an ambitious $2.3 billion plan shared by Pace on Tuesday.

Express buses with high-tech amenities would take riders from the south suburbs to O’Hare International Airport. Or from McHenry south to Oswego via Randall Road. Or from Evanston to O’Hare along Dempster Street.

And buses would travel on the shoulder of the Jane Addams and Edens expressways, bypassing car traffic…

Pace has submitted its plan for an innovative suburban Rapid Transit Network to Congress, which asked for candidates for a program called Projects of National and Regional Significance. The agency revealed details of its proposal to the Tribune on Tuesday…

The network is composed of two service types: arterial bus rapid transit and suburban expressway service.

Mass transit that connects suburbs is sorely needed in the Chicago region. The current system of buses does little to add on to the existing hub-and-spoke railway system that connects the suburbs to downtown. New buses provide a flexible form of transport compared to railroads; rather than having a fixed track and sunk infrastructure costs, buses can take advantage of existing important roads and highways.

However, I suspect this plan has a lot of hurdles to overcome even beyond the federal funding they are seeking.

1. How do you get suburbanites to consistently ride the bus? Trains are one thing but buses seem to have a different status.

2. Can schedules between mass transit options be lined up?

3. Can the buses actually get people to places rather quickly and at most times of the day? The current bus system tends to take long amounts of time compared to driving.

4. Perhaps the most important question: is there enough density along the proposed lines to have consistent numbers of riders who need to go where the buses are going? Density contributes to riders which leads to more buses which leads to more options. Going to the airports makes sense – both Chicago airports are busy (O’Hare may just be the busiest in the world again) – as does more highway buses to Chicago but linking residences and businesses is a more difficult task. Downtown Naperville may be lively but how many live near there who would commute by bus elsewhere? Are there concentrations of people living along Randall Road? I wonder if there is any way to encourage denser developments – apartments, condos, townhomes, rowhouses – near such bus lines to help provide more potential riders.

Collecting data to see if cyclists break traffic laws more than drivers

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Cyclists and drivers often do not get along but which group breaks the law more? Some researchers are hoping to find out:

These questions about sociology and infrastructure point to a more nuanced picture of what’s happening on city streets than most heated rhetoric — darn law-breaking bikers! — allows. Marshall, who co-directs the Active Communities Transportation Research Group with Kevin Krizek, wants to research this scofflaw behavior, why people say they do it (drivers and cyclists alike), and when they don’t.

As part of this research project, they and Ph.D. student Aaron Johnson and Savannah State’s Dan Piatkowski are running a survey that they hope will gather broad data on all of our behavior (go ahead and help science out here, even if you’re not a cyclist yourself).

Most of us, whatever mode we travel, break the law at some point, Marshall points out, whether we’re driving five miles over the speed limit, or crossing the street against the crosswalk. And yet, we tend not to treat lead-footed drivers with the same disapproval as cyclists who ride through stop signs, even though the former behavior is potentially more publicly harmful than the latter. Which raises another question: Are cyclists really more prolific scofflaws than drivers anyway?

More data on the scofflaws inside all of us could potentially help create safer streets, even, Marshall imagines, more productive public debate about how cars and cyclists coexist. There is some evidence, for instance, that cyclists may be less likely to ride the wrong way down one-way streets and more likely to wait at red lights when they’re given dedicated bike paths. This would make sense for a number of reasons.

I would like to think that having more data would solve the issues and help both sides look at the situation more rationally. However, I suspect both cyclists and drivers might prefer more anecdotal stories that privilege their own perspectives. People on the roads tend to get angry with the people right in front of them rather than with abstract groups. However, the data could be used to change the infrastructure – more bike lanes? more regulations for cyclists? Roads with no markings or separation from the sidewalks? – which then might have more direct effects.

Study suggests thousands more road deaths when gas prices drop $2 a gallon

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American drivers certainly like cheaper gas prices but it may come at the price of more deaths:

South Dakota State University sociology professor Guangqing Chi, who analyzes the relationship between gas prices and road fatalities, calculated what the current prices might mean for fatalities by analyzing traffic and crash data numbers from a Minnesota study he conducted from 1998 to 2007.

“A $2 drop in gasoline price can translate into about 9,000 road fatalities a year in the U.S,” Chi said on NPR’s Morning Edition Tuesday. NPR science correspondent Shankar Vedantam said his “jaw dropped” when he heard the “scary” number. A more conservative calculation based on Chi’s research translates into 3,000 more road deaths per year, Vedantam said…

Chi’s original Minnesota study — from which he extrapolated the 9,000 road deaths figure — showed that even a 20-cent drop in gas prices was linked to 15 additional road deaths in the state per year.

Chi told The Huffington Post by phone Tuesday that it typically takes almost a year for drivers to adopt new driving habits in response to changes in gas prices. Some analysts have predicted low gas prices will persist for the next six months or so.

Those driverless cars (with solar power and electric cars) can’t get here soon enough. Yet, Chi acknowledges that Americans have already been driving less so it will take some time to see if driving picks up just because gas prices dropped significantly.

“How solar power and electric cars could make suburban living a bargain”

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New technologies may help the American suburbs live on for decades:

[A] new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Magali A. Delmas and two colleagues from the UCLA Institute of the Environment suggests that recent technologies may help to eradicate this suburban energy use problem. The paper contemplates the possibility that suburbanites — including politically conservative ones — may increasingly become “accidental environmentalists,” simply because of the growing consumer appeal of two green products that are even greener together: electric vehicles and solar panels…

Installing solar panels on the roof of your suburban home means that you’re generating your own electricity — and paying a lot less (or maybe nothing at all) to a utility company as a result. At the same time, if you are able to someday generate enough energy from solar and that energy is also used to power your electric car, well then you might also be able to knock out your gasoline bill. The car would, in effect, run “on sunshine,” as GreenTechMedia puts it.

A trend of bundling together solar and “EVs,” as they’re called, is already apparent in California. And if it continues, notes the paper, then the “suburban carbon curve would bend such that the differential in carbon production between city center residents and suburban residents would shrink.”…

The reason is that, especially as technologies continue to improve, the solar-EV combo may just be too good for suburbanites to pass up — no matter their political ideology. Strikingly, the new paper estimates that for a household that buys an electric vehicle and also owns a solar panel system generating enough power for both the home and the electric car, the monthly cost might be just $89 per month — compared with $255 per month for a household driving a regular car without any solar panels.

Read on for the discussion of how both solar panels and electric cars are becoming cheaper to purchase and operate. Yet, I’m sure environmentalists and critics of sprawl would argue these costs aren’t the only ones incurred by suburban life. Other factors include using more land, spreading out services (from police to shopping centers), the resources needed to build and maintain individual properties, and the loss of community life.

This is another piece of evidence that the suburban based lives, the space where a majority of Americans live, is not likely to disappear anytime soon.

A reporter spends the night under O’Hare’s new air traffic patterns – and doesn’t report much

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After recently learning of an uptick in complaints regarding airplane noise around O’Hare Airport, one reporter spends the night in an affected neighborhood:

On the horizon are five blinking lights, all destined for the runway that parallels Thorndale Avenue, which now handles almost half of overnight arrivals. A little south, coming in toward the Lawrence Avenue runway, are two more jets. As they converge overhead, it looks as if the Northwest Side were in the midst of an alien invasion.

At one point, the planes coming in pass overhead at the same time, and the whines of the engines bounce off each other in stereo. JP launches the noise monitor app on his phone and registers 86 decibels, which, according to the Illinois Deaf and Hard of Hearing Commission, is roughly equal to the sound of a screaming child. The FAA claims the metric for “significant” jet noise—meaning the amount at which homeowners can be eligible for soundproofing subsidies—is a day-night sound level average of 65 decibels. But only those residences within the FAA’s noise contour map (Sauganash Woods and most other Northwest Side neighborhoods are not) qualify for the soundproofing…

Evening settles in, and JP and I sit in his family room to watch the Bears-Packers game. Every once in a while, a plane whizzes by, which actually provides a welcome distraction from the historic pummeling the Packers are giving the Bears. After the game, my hosts head to bed, and I try to get some sleep on the couch.

A few minutes later, around 11, the jets start rumbling by again, often in 30-second intervals. Using radar and tracking apps on my iPhone, I watch the dots as they approach: At 11:55, a Boeing 747 Yangtze River Express from Shanghai blows in at 1,300 feet. At 11:56, an Airbus from Phoenix roars over the house. The last plane I see on the screen before dozing off at 12:30 a.m. is a Cessna coming in from Green Bay. (Jay Cutler’s private jet?)

The general theme of the report is that some people’s lives are affected by these changes at O’Hare. At most, it suggests at least a few families, businesses, and communities are affected. But, we don’t hear if life is unbearable. We don’t hear if everyone in these neighborhoods and communities feels the same way. We don’t get a broader view from elsewhere in the region. We get a narrow slice of life with an uncertain conclusion.

Articles like these tend to draw my sociological attention because this one addresses (a) an area experiencing some significant change, which leads to differing reactions from people and (b) the issues at O’Hare represent an opportunity to discuss metropolitan-wide issues. Certainly, other areas in the country have similar issues, whether it is from airport noise or an undesirable facility nearby or because the powers that be decided to change things for the good of the majority. This particular case at O’Hare could provide an interesting comparison to see exactly how this balance between individuals, communities, and the region plays out. Yet, most of the media coverage I’ve seen so far tends to focus on individual complaints or relatively small communities.