The Blue Line of the CTA was extended to O’Hare airport, running in the median of the freeway – this is the newest part of the CTA system (the Dan Ryan part was just rebuilt in the last year, however)
Nothing dramatic here – maybe interesting if you haven’t ever been to Chicago to see how your gasoline tax dollars are spent.
The only thing noteworthy is the doors are accordian style Pullman doors. They are narrow and not ADA compliant – the CTA El stations were built in the 1890s so much if the system is still wheelchair hostile (or problematic for large men who have trouble on stairs)
Cool. The interesting aspect for me is the ability for cleaners to step into the car with a hose and blast everything clean. No fabric. No mold. No problem.
Interesting exemption to the ADA law- if this were a private business, the government would have shut them down.
Where was the airport parking lobby on this one? In most cities, they pay a huge airport tax to the city – it has kept most northeast airports from connecting to train lines and subway lines for decades. Only in the last 10 years or so the the NY-NJ Port Authority allow such a thing.
There is an interesting answer to that, which I found out the last month I was there.
The CTA station is right under the terminal – about 3 weeks ago a CTA driver fell asleep at 3 am and crashed into the end of the track at 25 mph
CTA went to a new fare collection system that used RFID cards or touch less credit cards. I figured I would try out the system when I flew back to Chicago. The couple mile taxi ride costs around $20 – I wasn’t carrying any luggage. The Cumberland station was about 4 blocks if I wanted to walk or the CTA bus had a stop a couple hundred feet from my apartment door.
So I went to get on the CTA and tried to buy a ticket. There were lines and confusion. There were two employees full time just answering people’s questions. It turns out there IS a surcharge on trips from O’Hare and you needed to do something special so your O’Hare ticket would allow you to transfer to a bus. The bus ride was pretty unsatisfactory, with the driver making little effort to pay attention to passenger safety and comfort. The Cumberland station has serious deferred maintenance issues. The place is full of birds roosting in the open air roof area, pooping on everything.
Pooping without a permit? Where was the EPA? Good thing they didn’t poop when flying over in that open air reservoir in Oregon or the idiots would have to drain it again.
The spokesman said that they aren’t sure the pee even reached the reservoir. The sensitivity is that this is “clean” water that has already been treated and is pumped straight into the water mains. It’s an old reservoir and the Feds have ordered them to phase it out. It’s not an issue for the water department – Portland has lots of potable water capacity – it’s the enviro-weenies who moved to Portland who want the city to not “waste” the fresh water – they think they’re still living in the desert of California.
For comparison (since I just looked it up yesterday) – source of water for Charlotte and surrounding towns without their own water system is the Catawba River (Lake Norman). The Catawba River is a small river – it has 1% of the flow of the Ohio River.
The city pumps and treats an average of 98 million gallons per day. The normal water flow of the river is 1.7 billion gallons a day. The “pond” of Lake Nornan holds about 200 days worth of the river, but it is just one in a series of hydro dams made by Duke Power.
The dam was built in the 1960s in order to provide a cooling water source for a coal fire generation plant and the later McGuire nuclear power plant. I am a little concerned there is no mention of a backup source (like wells) if the Catawba River water suddenly was unusable (let’s say the nuke plant somehow contaminated the lake – not likely as the cooling loop is separate from the steam pipes with the slightly radioactive steam)
About 90 million gallons a day is treated and returned to the Catawba river. People downstream are drinking our recycled urine. That’s what they do on ISS. If that makes you uncomfortable, don’t think about it, and certainly don’t run to TV stations demanding the experts “do something”
How do they think humans survived up until now, before we started treating drinking water? The same people probably see no danger in another person’s sperm swimming up their colon.
Colon? Now you’re talking about the Panama Canal. 🙂