Planning agency’s ‘vision’ eyes more tolls

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Does the Chicago area lack a “vision” for its expressway system?

Will more tollways or so-called “managed lanes” be part of that plan?

Yes, says the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, a low-profile public agency responsible for broad-scale land use and transportation planning decisions across the seven counties of Northeastern Illinois.

That vision, CMAP says, “will chart a bold, long-term course for the region’s expressway system” to guide future projects and spending by the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Illinois Tollway.

For too long, CMAP says, the Chicago area has struggled to maintain and modernize its expressways “in the face of persistent funding gaps” and growing congestion. Delays cost the region $7 billion a year in lost productivity and fuel. New ideas and a fresh approach to mass transit are needed.

In announcing the project Thursday, CMAP Executive Director Joseph Szabo said the planning agency was asked by the heads of IDOT and the Tollway to take a “more comprehensive and holistic” approach to the region’s highway management and planning.

Instead of just looking at improving individual tollways or expressways, for example, the CMAP vision will include recommendations for specific 10-15-mile stretches, or “corridors.”

Beyond that, the vision as outlined has no specifics at this point. Those will come later, officials said. But for now, CMAP has set three goals:

First, to support the region’s economy by promoting long-term growth, improving truck freight movement and making the system “financially sustainable.”

Second, to enhance operations with “game-changing” mass transit improvements and preparing for automatic vehicles and new communication technology.

And third, to better manage…

Metra to ‘break silence’ on suicides

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Reposted from Trains Magazine:  Officials at Metra say it’s time to tackle a topic that many in the rail industry have long considered taboo: death by train.

The commuter rail agency, in partnership with Amtrak and the DuPage Railroad Safety Council, sponsored a daylong symposium entitled “Breaking the Silence.” The Sept. 27 session at Union Station was intended to coordinate a strategy to prevent suicides along the tracks.

The agency gathered nearly 100 mental health experts and community members to help in its campaign to install suicide prevention signs along its 11 lines by the end of the year.

Metra Board Chairman Norman Carlson said the agency wanted to develop a collaborative regional strategy to address the problem.

The primary goal “is saving human lives,” Carlson said. “That is our principal objective.”

The event coincided with Rail Safety Week. September was also National Suicide Prevention Awareness month.

Metra announced the campaign in July after a spate of suicides in the Chicago area. So far this year, Metra said it has tallied 21 suicides or suspected suicides, more than in each of the previous five years.

The problem of suicide by train is particularly acute in the Chicago area, experts say, because the city is the nation’s railroad hub, served by six Class I railroads and Amtrak. Metra itself runs more than 700 trains a day.

The agency said it has so far trained more than 700 engineers, conductors and other employees to recognize individuals in despair and to intervene.

Although this program has been successful, Carlson said the agency needed to do more to “break the silence”…

Feds reject Great Lakes Basin railroad bypass around Chicago

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Federal regulators have derailed a private corporation’s plans to build a new, multibillion-dollar, 261-mile railroad to bypass Chicago’s notorious freight congestion.

The U.S. Surface Transportation Board rejected an application from Great Lakes Basin Transportation Inc., saying the Crete-based company’s financial information is incomplete and “fundamentally flawed,” making it impossible to determine if Great Lakes can meet required statutory criteria.

In its decision issued Thursday, the three-member board pointedly described the financial fitness of Great Lakes as “clearly deficient,” based on the company’s admission that its current assets at the end of 2016 amounted to only $151.

The STB also questioned an “unexplained line item” in a balance sheet submitted by Great Lakes. That line item, for a negative $1,203,545, “appears to account for a substantial difference between (Great Lakes) assets and its liabilities and stockholders’ equity,” the decision said.

Great Lakes and its founder and managing partner, Frank Patton, have long promoted the $2.8 billion project as a remedy for Chicago’s “19th Century jumble” of freight rail lines. It’s often said that West Coast trains loaded with Asian imports can take days to pass through the city’s chokepoint to Eastern customers.

Great Lakes’ plan, filed with the STB on May 1, called for building a new railroad line in an irregular arc from southeast Wisconsin through Illinois and ending in northwest Indiana, across mostly rural land.

Indeed, Canadian National Railway followed the very same strategy when it won STB approval in 2008 to purchase the little-used Elgin, Joliet & Eastern Railway, giving it a bypass around Chicago.

Great Lakes told the…

Use caution with Union Station redevelopment

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IMG_0043Guest commentary: Union Station is key element in Crossrail plan for unified, regional rail service

By Alan Mammoser

Historic Union Station, with grand columns and Great Hall, stands solemnly in the West Loop as is has for nearly a century. But the old station is in the news a lot lately. Recently, Amtrak and Mayor Emanuel announced a $1 billion plan to redevelop this relic of railroading’s golden age. They foresee a new hotel and condos atop the Great Hall, and new towers on adjacent blocks.

It’s an impressive plan that should generate revenue for the city and Amtrak. But it misses the big picture. The big picture for Union Station is much more than a real estate deal. The big picture includes not just the Great Hall but extends across Canal Street to the Concourse. It’s there, in the tracks beneath a nondescript 1960s-era office tower, that the key to revolutionizing Chicago-area transit lay.

Any plan to enhance Union Station’s real estate values should also recognize that its redevelopment can transform Chicago-area transit. Done properly, this plan will give Chicago a world class rail system, one fit for a global city. Done improperly, it could compromise the irreplaceable transportation jewel that Union Station is.

The plan announced in May shows no sense of the need to upgrade the rail network beneath the streets, where Amtrak and Metra face limited space to serve a growing ridership. Worse, its massive scale actually threatens future transit improvements, because its big towers sit directly…

Reformer Martin Oberman leaves Metra board

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(My story from TRAINS magazine News Wire)oberman Former Metra Chairman Martin Oberman, who was credited with helping restore public confidence in Chicago’s commuter rail agency after scandal and controversy, departed the board of directors Wednesday.

Oberman, 72, an attorney who built a reputation as a reformer while an alderman on Chicago’s City Council, was named to Metra’s board by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in September 2013. He was elected chairman in 2014, serving until last October when Norman Carlson took the post.

Oberman tells Trains News Wire that he and Emanuel recently discussed his tenure and decided it was time to leave the board.

“He wanted me to focus on other areas,” Oberman says. “Nothing’s been spelled out yet.”

Metra has an 11-member board of directors appointed by the chairmen of the six Northeastern Illinois county boards, Cook County commissioners, and Chicago’s mayor.

Oberman said two key accomplishments that occurred during his term were helping to professionalize Metra and remove political patronage, and putting the agency on a more secure financial footing.

He refused to take personal credit.

“One person can’t do it,” Oberman says. “Whatever I was able to do required the support of the board and working with the executive director.”

Metra CEO Don Orseno will be leaving the agency this fall after serving more than 30 years in various posts.

Oberman took over at Metra after the agency came under fire for ousting former Executive Director Alex Clifford, who became embroiled in a dispute with some board members over political…

Metra hikes CEO’s pay

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Just one month after raising fares an average of 5.8 percent, Metra’s board of directors Wednesday awarded a 9.7 percent pay hike to Executive Director/CEO Don Orseno based on what they termed his outstanding job performance.

Orseno’s annual salary rises to $317,500 from $289,500, retroactive to Oct. 1. It’s the second pay hike for Orseno in just over a year; he received a 10 percent increase in September 2015.

Metra board members said the higher salary was “market-based” in comparison with the railroad industry and that Orseno “exceeded performance expectations” in his annual review. Officials said Orseno also earns less than his counterparts at comparable public transit agencies on the East and West Coasts.

Metra Chairman Norman Carlson said Orseno tallies 60-65-hour workweeks, and cited Orseno’s 42-year railroad career, including early work as locomotive engineer, and the last 36 years at Metra.

“We are lucky to have him,” Carlson said.

By comparison, CTA President Dorval Carter Jr. is paid $239,112 a year, according to the Better Government Association’s public payroll database.

In addition to running Metra, Orseno has leadership positions with national public transportation and commuter rail organizations, Carlson said.

Orseno took charge of Metra in the wake of the board’s controversial ouster of former Executive Director Alex Clifford in 2013.

Fare increases that will take effect on February 1, 2017 include an additional 25 cents on one-way tickets; an additional $2.75 on 10-ride tickets; and an additional $11.75 on monthly passes.

Metra also announced that Uber would pay Metra $900,000 over three years to be the agency’s “official rideshare partner.”

In return, Metra…

Not right time for new Metra chairman

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Every railroad needs to operate on schedule, right Metra riders? If the timetable says departure is at 8:15 and arrival is 8:45, passengers expect Metra to stick to it. Doesn’t always happen, of course.

The commuter rail agency’s board has a policy that says that its chairmanship should operate on a schedule, too. That policy, adopted in 2012, requires that the leadership post be rotated every four years among the board members from Cook County, including Chicago, and the board members from one of the five other counties that Metra serves.

It’s kind of like a term limit. That policy was one of the first reforms to emerge from the Phil Pagano scandal, and was aimed at curbing the kind of one-man rule under which Metra operated for decades.

You remember Pagano? He was the autocratic executive director who committed suicide in 2010 after being caught stealing $475,000 in vacation pay and forging memos to cover it up.

For too long, Pagano ran Metra virtually unchallenged. Metra’s 11-member board of directors, comprised of political appointees hand-picked by the six county chairs and commissioners, gave him free rein. For most of this time, Metra’s chairman, from distant McHenry County, was Pagano’s enabler. Patronage was rife. Contracts went to pals. One board member went to prison.

Pagano’s unchecked greed exposed a glaring lack of oversight by Metra’s directors. An outraged public started paying attention, and the politicians – finally put in the spotlight themselves — began feeling the heat.

In 2011, Metra’s then-chairwoman, DuPage appointee Carole Doris, led the effort to bring…

Death by train: Railroads, Metra and suicides

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One morning last January, Metra foreman Robert Tellin was startled as he peered out the window of his office at Elgin’s commuter station. There, Tellin saw a man standing in the center of the tracks, just as the PA announced an approaching train.

Hurrying outside, Tellin asked the man what he was doing on the tracks. The man responded: I want to die.

Quickly, Tellin grabbed the man and safely pulled him from the rails, seconds before the train arrived.

It was a heroic effort on the part of Tellin, whom Metra’s board of directors honored with a resolution in March.

Unfortunately, for every moment of heroism there are many more moments of tragedy across the Chicago area’s vast network of railroad tracks. It seems every few weeks a Metra line is shut down due to a “pedestrian accident.” One just incident occurred last Thursday when a woman was struck in Northbrook by an Amtrak train, which shares the same tracks.

Indeed, death on the tracks is a problem that is particularly endemic to the Chicago area.

According to the Federal Railroad Administration, in 2015 there were 32 suicides-by-train in Illinois. That’s one-tenth of the national total. And as the Chicago Tribune reported in 2014, the metro area itself has a higher incidence of suicides by train than the national average.

Research by Northwestern University professor Ian Savage found that 47 percent of railroad-pedestrian fatalities in the Chicago area were apparent suicides, versus 30 percent nationally.

One reason, Savage explained, is simply…

Metra: Service alerts glitch is fixed

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Metra announced this afternoon that it has fixed a “glitch” that has prevented it from sending out service alerts via email and Twitter for the past two days.
The outage affected about 100,000 Metra customers who have signed up to receive the alerts or tweets, the commuter rail agency said — in an emailed announcement.
The problem is thought to have been related to a queuing problem with the agency’s new email service, Metra said. Metra customers can sign up on the agency’s website for the alerts, which warn of delays, cancellations and other service problems.
“While it took longer than we wanted to resolve this glitch, we can now report that the Metra alert system is back online and fully functioning.” said Metra Executive Director/CEO Don Orseno in a message to customers.
“We apologize for any inconvenience you experienced as a result of this problem.”

Civic group: Boost gas tax for transportation

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By Richard Wronski

An influential Chicago think tank/planning organization is urging the state’s gas tax be increased by 30 cents per gallon. Here are four reasons why:

  • Experts say Illinois needs to invest $43 billion over 10 years to improve roads, bridges and rail lines and tackle a maintenance backlog.
  • Estimates say motorists are already wasting more than that amount on vehicle repairs due to poor roads; time lost in congestion; and loss of population and jobs to neighboring states.
  • The state’s gas tax, currently at 19 cents per gallon, hasn’t been raised in 25 years.
  • The gas tax hike, along with an accompanying 50 percent increase in vehicle registration fees, would cost the average person $12.25 a month, or $147 a year. That’s about one  lunch tab a month or a Netflix charge, the argument goes.

The recommendation to begin “an honest conversation” on hiking the gas tax came Monday from the Metropolitan Planning Council, an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit civic group. MPC’s board consists of many movers and shakers from Chicago banks and businesses.

MPC issued a detailed analysis (http://metroplanning.org/transportation) of its proposal, which it said it compiled after a year’s worth of discussions with transportation officials and other experts.

It’s not the first call for an increase in the state’s gas tax to pay for transportation needs, either by the MPC or others. Just over a year ago, the Transportation for Illinois Coalition, an aggregation of interest groups ranging from labor unions to truckers to local chambers of commerce, urged an unspecified increase in the gas tax along with a…