On Sun, 21 Sep 2008 09:56:04 -0700 (PDT) andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> writes:
>
> I don't things in general are specially screwed up in Chicago as
> opposed to other large US cities. There are things in Chicago that
> are specially screwed up -- public transit has gone to hell, just at
> the time when gas prices make it more imperative than ever.
>From my visit in Chicago a couple of years ago, I found the
CTA to be more comfortable and at least as reliable than
the MBTA is in Boston. The MBTA, in my experience,
seems to be one of the worst mass transit systems in
any major US cities, and is a complete joke compare
to mass transit systems in cities like Paris, London,
or Toronto.
> Part of
> that is a state/federal problem -- the CTA is (duh) not
> self-maintaining from a Chicago or Cook County taxbase. It relies
> heavily on support from the feds and the state. Politically people
> outside Chicago and the collar counties, downstate we call it here,
> resent giving anything to Chicago, short-sightedly, they do not see
The MBTA faces similar issues in Massachusetts.
> that they are sunk as well if we are. (Plus the gov keeps blowing
> the transit budget on pointless vote-buying stuff like free rides
> for seniors, like he's not going to jail instead of back to
> Springfield.) The feds have not, as far as I know, been overly
> generous in supporting mass transit.
>
> But still, even there, other major US cities have done decent things
> with mass transit, and not just ones that started with a newer
> system, like the DC Metro or the Bay Area BART. New York's system is
> about the age of Chicago's, more than a century, and while it's
> pretty crappy compared to Paris, Rome, Moscow, Prague, or public
> transit generally in countries that believe in public transit, New
> York has been improving markedly over the last 20 years or so and
> the deterioration in the both the CTA and the suburban trains in
> Chicago has been precipitous in the last ten years, the last five
> years in particular, I'd say.
>
> Some of what happens with stuff like mass transit in Chicago,
> especially anything nonfederal, has got to do with the astounding
> level of corruption in Illinois -- not just Chicago. Remember we
> just sent our downstate (Kakankee) Republican ex-gov to jail. I
> don't know how to measure these things, and I don't know if Chicago
> is more crooked than NYC, which certainly has been pretty crooked at
> various points (Tammany Hall, the Koch administration, at least I
> know about those), or LA or Kansas City or, heaven help us, New
> Orleans. There is a culture of corruption here, like in Louisiana,
> that takes a perverse pride in crookedness, though. To suggest an
> answer a question posed earlier in this thread, it is at least
> possible that federal operations like the USPS are affected by the
> _culture_ if not directly by the politics of the Machine.
>
> But with the Post Office I don't think we are facing specifically
> Chicago problem.
>
> Enough of this for now.
>
>
>
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