The fight over transit money between Chicago and its suburbs

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A fight over funding is brewing between the Regional Transit Authority (RTA) and Chicago Transit Authority (CTA), Pace, and Metra about how to divvy up sales tax revenues and discretionary money:

Twelve votes are needed to approve budgets, yet five out of the 16 directors on the board are Chicagoans who have the CTA’s back, conventional wisdom says.

And this isn’t just an RTA fight. It also involves the region’s political heavyweights like Mayor Rahm Emanuel and [DuPage County Board Chairman Dan] Cronin, who appoint RTA directors to their $25,000-a-year positions.

Cronin says he recognizes [CTA President Forrest] Claypool and Emanuel didn’t create the problem. But he describes the standoff as “bullying.”

“The money is collected from all the taxpayers in the region, the majority of whom reside in the suburbs. Why should we subsidize the CTA more than we already are?” he asked. “They seem to care little for their neighbors in the suburbs.”

This is tied up with two larger issues:

1. The Chicago area is infamous for its many governmental bodies. This is another example of the broader issues associated with metropolitanization: multiple transit agencies are fighting for revenues and surplus funds that are controlled by an umbrella organization. All three agencies could really use the money so how is it to be decided outside of what will end up being a very politicized process?

2. In the larger public discussion about taxes, a growing theme is illustrated here: why should funds/taxes raised in one area be spent in another area? This is what Cronin is arguing: the revenues raised from relatively wealthy DuPage County (#57 in the country according to 2011 figures) are being used to fund mismanaged services in the nearby big city that many DuPage residents and shoppers do not use on a regular basis. This, too, is tied to metropolitanization: how can communities, agencies, and governments across a region come together to address common problems if everyone is only looking out for their self-interests?

Los Angeles survives Carmageddon II

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The Los Angeles area has now survived Carmageddon and Carmageddon II, which just took place this past weekend. And it also ended a few hours ahead of schedule:

The reopening of the busiest and most congested freeway in the U.S. came hours earlier than predicted. Crews working on dismantling the Mulholland Drive Bridge had a 5 a.m. Monday deadline, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said at a Sunday evening press conference that there would not be an early opening.

Starting around midnight Saturday when that stretch of the I-405 was fully shut down, crews had 53 hours to complete their work. Had they overshot their Monday morning deadline, a late penalty of about $360,000 would have been charged to them every hour…

The demolition is part of the $1-billion Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project, which adds a 10-mile northbound carpool lane. On Sunday, crews also paved the freeway between the Skirball Center Drive and Mulholland Drive bridges…

As for the benefits of Carmageddon, officials said if this year is anything like the last, a lot of people will be breathing a little easier when the weekend is over. According to a study at the University of California, Los Angeles, the air quality in the area of the 405 closure improved more than 80 percent during the 2011 Carmageddon event.

If you live by the highway, you can also die by the highway (closures). See some photos of the work here.

Apparently, the site of an empty highway in Los Angeles is a strange one:

Like Villaraigosa, some drivers couldn’t resist comparing the scenario to a movie.”It’s like that movie `Vanilla Sky,’ … where Times Square is empty,” Sterling Gates told KABC-TV. “It’s kind of like that. We’re known for our traffic, and it’s just nothing.”…

The rare sight of a carless freeway attracted many onlookers, including seven people who were cited for sneaking onto the roadway, the California Highway Patrol said.

Last year, three people slipped onto the freeway at the crack of dawn and snapped photos of themselves enjoying a gourmet meal on an eerily empty freeway.

It is a post-apocalyptic scene…for two days.

The similarities between opera and sports fans

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People can be fans of a lot of things including sports and opera:

The sociologist Claudio Benzecry spent years studying opera fans in Buenos Aires and observed that their love of opera happened just the way other forms of love do — through an experience that made them want to keep going back for more. Not through reading up on it or going to lectures about it. I discuss Benzecry’s book along with a well-meaning tome called “Opera” that’s designed to deepen opera-lovers’ love, and conclude that Benzecry is right. Opera fans are like sports fans; you get into it, and you start to learn about it, and pretty soon you’re reeling off stats with the rest of them.

More from the review of Benzecry’s book on opera fans:

Benzecry’s book doesn’t try to communicate a love of opera: It simply depicts how that love happens. His subjects, none of them wealthy, attend the opera several times a week (often in standing room or the upper balconies, where tickets are not prohibitively expensive). They are not intellectuals; they are certainly not elitist; and they were not drawn to opera by any sense of social obligation. Secretaries and sports writers and blue-collar retirees, they argue passionately about singers, productions and composers, drawing on their own experience and on a wealth of information passed on orally by older and more experienced devotees.

And how did they fall in love with opera? Certainly not through academic introductions, or books, though many of them, Benzecry shows, do attend music appreciation lectures to augment their knowledge. But the initial spark is more likely to have been a powerful “aha” moment at the opera, when first taken by a parent, or a friend: an experience of falling in love that awakens in them a thirst to go back, and back, and back.

Benzecry’s book depicts a world that’s familiar to any frequent opera-goer. Such fandom is a long-standing part of opera tradition. Nineteenth-century opera was a populist art; most audiences experienced it viscerally, singing Verdi’s tunes on the street or swooning in titillated delight after hearing Wagner. You can still get dizzy listening to Wagner — I remember experiencing the “Tannhäuser” overture, at an early encounter, as a kind of psychedelic drug trip — and you can still get passionate about the opera singers who bring these works to life.

Yet few opera guides touch on these aspects of opera. This is partly because even the hardest-core opera fans tend to put opera on a pedestal, subscribing to the notion of it as something better, something higher, something that gives color and meaning to life. This worshipful attitude toward opera, through which even the drollest opera buffa is seen through a more rarefied lens than much more serious but populist contemporary art, is part of what makes the form so off-putting to first-timers, who see it as something that involves unfamiliar rituals, special clothes, expense and jargon, and that is probably boring.

Two things I like here:

1. Sports fans are sometimes used as examples of people who have irrational emotions about something that is just a game. How could they get so worked up over something so trivial? But, lots of people have deep interests and emotions wrapped up in all sorts of activities and hobbies. Indeed, I’ve thought over the last few years that one true sign of being part of the American middle upper class or above is that a person has to have some “irrational” interest to show that they not only enjoy something but they are wholeheartedly devoted to it and are willing to spend a lot of time and money on it. Perhaps it is physical activity, perhaps it is woodworking, perhaps it is sports, perhaps it is indie music, perhaps it is snowboarding. Perhaps this is all driven by the need to feel like an individual?

2. I bet there is some fascinating sociological material here. When people start talking about “falling in love” with opera, there have to be some underlying processes behind this. This reminds me of sociological research in certain areas like fashion or stock trading where employees talk about having “intuition” but there is actually a long process by which someone acquires this “intuition.”  I bet there is something similar going on here: opera fans have developed ways of talking about their interest but there are some common themes across them as they moved from an initial exposure to a full-fledged fandom.

Pew Research: the response rate for a typical phone survey is now 9% and response rates are down across the board

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Earlier this year, Pew Research described a growing problem for pollsters: over 90% of the  public that doesn’t want to participate in telephone surveys.

It has become increasingly difficult to contact potential respondents and to persuade them to participate. The percentage of households in a sample that are successfully interviewed – the response rate – has fallen dramatically. At Pew Research, the response rate of a typical telephone survey was 36% in 1997 and is just 9% today.

The general decline in response rates is evident across nearly all types of surveys, in the United States and abroad. At the same time, greater effort and expense are required to achieve even the diminished response rates of today. These challenges have led many to question whether surveys are still providing accurate and unbiased information. Although response rates have decreased in landline surveys, the inclusion of cell phones – necessitated by the rapid rise of households with cell phones but no landline – has further contributed to the overall decline in response rates for telephone surveys.

A new study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that, despite declining response rates, telephone surveys that include landlines and cell phones and are weighted to match the demographic composition of the population continue to provide accurate data on most political, social and economic measures. This comports with the consistent record of accuracy achieved by major polls when it comes to estimating election outcomes, among other things.

This is not to say that declining response rates are without consequence. One significant area of potential non-response bias identified in the study is that survey participants tend to be significantly more engaged in civic activity than those who do not participate, confirming what previous research has shown. People who volunteer are more likely to agree to take part in surveys than those who do not do these things. This has serious implications for a survey’s ability to accurately gauge behaviors related to volunteerism and civic activity. For example, telephone surveys may overestimate such behaviors as church attendance, contacting elected officials, or attending campaign events.

Read on for more comparisons between those who do tend to participate in telephone surveys and those who do not.

This has been a growing problem for years now: more people don’t want to be contacted and it is more difficult to contact cell phone users. One way this might be combated is to offer participants small incentives. This is already done with some online panels and it is more commonly used in mail surveys. These incentives wouldn’t be large enough to sway opinion or perhaps just get a sample of people who want the incentive but would be enough to raise response rates. It could be thought of as just enough to acknowledge and thank people for their time. I don’t know what the profit margins of firms like Gallup or Pew are but I imagine they could offer these small incentives quite easily.

This does suggest that the science of weighting is increasingly important. Having government benchmarks is really important, hence, the need for updated Census figures. However, it is not inconceivable that the Census could be scaled back: this is often a conservative proposal either based on the money spent on the Census Bureau or the “invasive” questions asked. And, it also may make the Census even more political as years of polling might be dependent on getting the figures “right,” depending on what side of the political aisle one is one.

Space, the earth’s suburban office park

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Ian Bogost argues that space exploration has become dull, just like a suburban office park:

It’s not so much that the space program is broken in the sense of inoperative. Space is alive and well, for the wealthy at least, where it’s become like the air and the land and the sea: a substrate for commerce, for generating even more wealth. Instead, the space program is broken in the sense of tamed, domesticated, housebroken. It happens to all frontiers: they get settled. How many nights can one man dance the skies? Better to rent out laughter-silvered wings by the hour so you can focus on your asteroid mining startup.

In the 1960s we went to the moon not because it was easy but because it was hard. In the 1980s we went to low Earth orbit because, you know, somebody got a grant to study polymers in zero-gravity, or because a high-price pharmaceutical could be more readily synthesized, or because a communications satellite had to be deployed, or because a space telescope had to be repaired. The Space Shuttle program strove to make space exploration repeatable and predictable, and it succeeded. It turned space into an office park. Now the tenants are filing in. Space: Earth’s suburbs. Office space available.

I don’t think this is a new argument: others have argued we need a new vision for space travel that involves looking for new frontiers. But the comparison to the suburbs is intriguing. The suggestion is that suburbs are fairly dull places themselves generally populated by wealthier residents where stuff happens (indeed, a majority of Americans live there) but it is rather routine and is done more out of habit than pushing beyond existing boundaries. This is not an uncommon image of the suburbs and it dates back to the early days of mass produced suburbs when critics worried about conformity, homogeneity, and quiet desperation.

Yet, the suburbs have continued to grow and perhaps more interestingly, they have changed in a number of ways in recent decades: new groups have moved to the suburbs (including more immigrants, minorities, and lower-class Americans), a variety of suburbs have come to serve a variety of functions from bedroom communities to center for office and industrial parks to entertainment and cultural hubs, residents, developers, and business leaders have adapted to a changing landscape with some new innovations. Putting this back in space terms, even if we don’t get much further than the moon or Mars in the coming years, can’t we still discover new and important things? Can’t some good come out of just-out-of-Earth’s atmosphere office parks?

One note: I would be interested to hear from Bogost about how new space exploration could be financed. There could indeed be some issues if exploration is limited more and more to wealthy individuals and corporations but what governments have the money to pay for this out of public funds?

A few graphs suggest people in wealthier countries spend more on housing, less on food

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Look at some graphs of how families in different countries around the world spend their money and a few things stand out:

Two big ideas for the road: Houses and food. Everybody needs somewhere to live and something to eat. But you can learn a lot about a country by looking at housing and food spending. Here’s how the U.S., where middle-class families spend about a third of their income on housing, compare to the developing economies in this survey…
I don’t want to push this point too far, because these sort of surveys have obvious limitations. Tremendous income inequality in developing countries with hundreds of millions of people makes it impossible to tell the story of the frothy middle class *in one graph.* But the bigger picture is clear and uncontroversial. When families earn more income, they can afford to eat more and buy more clothes, but the real shift is from those essentials to bigger better houses, education, and health care.

Interesting. However, I wonder much of this differs by country based on political, economic, and cultural values. Clearly, items like food are necessary for survival. But once citizens reach a certain income threshold, I assume there are differences across countries in how they spend this more discretionary income. For example, in the United States, transportation is a relatively high cost because of a reliance on automobiles. Similarly, people in the US might spend relatively less on food but how much of this is due to policies that help keep food prices low? More broadly, don’t government policies affect whether people have to spend more in certain categories; for example, they might spend less out of their income for health care but if that is due to paying higher taxes which cover more health care costs, then such figures of discretionary spending might be misleading.

Perhaps this situation is ripe for a cross-cultural experiment. Go to different countries and give people a scenario: suppose you are given a decent sum of money (might differ by country) and then ask how people would spend that money. What emerges as a common need or want?

Sao Paulo traffic jams can stretch over 100 miles

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A massive traffic jam in China last year attracted a lot of attention but it sounds like Sao Paulo has this beat: how about traffic jams over 100 miles long?

This is the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, where the BBC reports that, in the city of 11 million, traffic jams average 112 miles long on Friday evenings. It can even stretch to 183 miles on particularly bad days. With so much time spent in cars, it’s inevitable that life events like meeting your future spouse occur there too.

IBM’s annual Commuter Pain Survey (which did not include Sao Paulo) awarded Mexico City the ‘most painful’ ranking:

The index is comprised of 10 issues: 1) commuting time, 2) time stuck in traffic, agreement that: 3) price of gas is already too high, 4) traffic has gotten worse, 5) start-stop traffic is a problem, 6) driving causes stress, 7) driving causes anger, 8) traffic affects work, 9) traffic so bad driving stopped, and 10) decided not to make trip due to traffic.

Mexico City scored the worst overall, and Sao Paulo’s traffic jams may cover the longest distance. The record for worst traffic jam ever, though, goes to China.

Any solutions to this problem? The BBC report has some ideas:

Professor Barbieri says Sao Paulo has skilled and experienced traffic engineers that somehow manage to get the city to flow, albeit slowly.

“But the big problem is that we Brazilians are terrible with planning and traffic will only become more manageable if we start looking into real long-term solutions.”

But he is also clear that a “more manageable traffic” environment is the best possible scenario that can be achieved.

“No city in the world will ever manage to end congestion because when traffic flows, people are drawn to their cars. The key is to find a balance, the point at which it is worthwhile for commuters to use public transport because it’s faster then driving,” he says.

“That way Sao Paulo needs urgently to invest more in public transport instead of building new roads and expressways that will only be filled up with more cars.”

While the article suggests the local helicopter industry is thriving, it sounds like an opportunity for an enterprising politician or leader to chart a new course.

William Julius Wilson on what has changed in the 25 years since “The Truly Disadvantaged” was published

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William Julius Wilson offers some thoughts on what has changed since his book The Truly Disadvantaged was published in 1987:

It doesn’t do any good to offer some people a job if their values don’t lead them to take it. That concerns Wilson, too. At the conference, he and other policy experts explored the importance of “neighborhood effects” that can undermine values and incentives to, for example, pack up and move to where jobs might be more available.

Wilson credited welfare reform and the robust economy of the 1990s with reducing underclass poverty, but noted that poverty has rebounded since 2000. The dip in the 1990s might prove to be only a “blip” in the long-term decline of concentrated poverty communities, he said.

Black prison incarceration also has increased, putting even more of a chill on black incomes, family life and marriageable men.

“Quite frankly I think that (President Barack) Obama’s programs have prevented poverty, including concentrated poverty, from rapidly rising, considering the terrible economy,” Wilson said. He included Obama’s stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which earmarked $80 billion for low-income Americans. It included such emergency benefits as an extension of unemployment benefits, a temporary increase in the earned income tax credit and additional funds for food stamps. It also offered $4 billion in job-training and workforce enhancement programs and $2 billion for neighborhood stabilization efforts, Wilson noted.

Based on what Clarence Page reports here, perhaps not a whole lot has changed? It doesn’t seem that poverty or inner-city neighborhoods have really been a major priority of any major political candidate…

Architect discusses “natural historic evolution of neighborhoods”

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An architect discusses historic preservation and ends with two paragraphs on the changes that neighborhoods experience:

Yet embracing historic preservation too fervently and dogmatically can be problematic. Not all old buildings in historic neighborhoods are salvagable. Some are functionally, technically and architecturally beyond redemption. And over time entire neighborhoods change in ways that necessitate appropriate physical changes. For example, homes constructed 50 or more years ago, perhaps unrealistically small and impractical by today’s standards, may need enlarging, upgrading of windows and exterior materials, and new environmental systems.

Furthermore, insisting that all new buildings look like old buildings in a neighborhood is an overly restrictive policy. Good architects can design modern buildings that, without being historic replicants, aesthetically harmonize with historic buildings. Indeed, mindlessly creating architectural clones denies the natural historic evolution of neighborhoods, towns and cities, where community fabric is collectively enriched over time as human needs and desires, available technologies and aesthetic styles play out.

Perhaps the trick is ensuring that this “natural historic evolution” happens more smoothly and both sides, those who want to preserve some of the older buildings and those who want to build new structures, feel like they are getting something out of the deal. I wonder: are there neighborhoods that have successfully done this?

Additionally, what is the time frame for this natural change? A few decades? Fifty years? I would suspect this would depend on the neighborhood, particularly if the older neighborhood had buildings people wanted to save. I’ll be very curious to see what happens to suburban neighborhoods. Particularly for post-World War II suburbs, how much will people want to save? If McMansions are lower quality construction, as critics charge, will they last long enough for people to want to save them?

Chicago leads big cities in increasing downtown populations between 2000 and 2010

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The residential population in the downtown of a number of American big cities grew between 2000 and 2010 and Chicago led the way:

The report found that the number of people living within two miles of Chicago’s City Hall rose 36 percent from 2000 to 2010. Though many of the largest U.S. cities experienced a similar trend in the last decade, Chicago outpaced them all in that category.

More than 48,000 moved to downtown Chicago in the last decade, according to the report. New York City saw a 9.3 percent increase in its downtown population, or about 37,000 people…

Rob Paral, a Chicago demographer, says the city’s downtown population growth reflects several underlying economic factors, including downtown revitalization and an expanding job market.

But though places like the South Loop and West Loop have benefited from the trend, Paral says, its effects quickly fade the farther out you go.

“There’s a big difference between what you see in downtown and what you see in other parts of the city,” he said. “We wish it would be happening within 20 miles of City Hall, but no city has that kind of prosperity.”

In other words: one of the wealthy areas of the city continues to grow while less well-off areas struggle to tackle social problems while facing declining population. I assume this report will be spun by Mayor Emanuel and others to suggest that Chicago is resurgent even in tough economic times. However, a city is not just its downtown.