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| Wynne Delacoma takes the bus (photo for the Sun-Times by Anthony Vazquez) |
On Monday, Wynne Delacoma went to ship Christmas presents — early, yes, but that's the sort of person she is. Organized. After dropping her parcels at the FedEx at Barry and Clark, she went to call a cab for her next errand.
But the Curb taxi-hailing app was down. So she walked to the nearest bus stop, finding it icy and clogged with snow.
Delacoma, 80, boarded as best she could, taking the bus to Gethsemane Garden Center.
There she planned to deliver a length of red ribbon for her Christmas wreath. Pretty velvet ribbon; saved from last year's wreath. Good ribbon is hard to find. And she got a discount on the new wreath by providing her own ribbon. Practical and aesthetic.
Again she had to survive a common challenge facing bus riders this very snowy winter: getting past the obstacle course at the bus stop.
"It was terrible. Just awful. I was afraid I'd have to walk along the side of the bus in the street," said Delacoma. "That's where they'd plowed. I just couldn't do it. Luckily, some young women there were able to help me off."
Walking close to a bus, and you take your life in your hands. Just the week before, a woman in South Shore was killed by a bus after appearing to slip as the vehicle began to move forward.
Yet snowbound stops are common.
When Delacoma got home, being civic-minded in addition to the aforementioned good qualities, she fired off a letter to the CTA, and cc'd a copy to me.
"I'm writing to ask you why CTA bus stops have not been cleared of snow," she began. "I used the No. 22 and No. 77 buses today ... only one of the stops — the Belmont/Red/Brown/Purple Line station at 945 W. Belmont — was clear of snow. All the others were packed with snow, making it extremely treacherous to board or leave the buses."
If that seems a particularly lucid account, it's worth mentioning that Delacoma was the classical music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times for many years. She raises an interesting question:
"Who is responsible for cleaning the stops? The CTA or the city?"
I told her I would try to find out.
This must be a common enough public concern that the CTA has a webpage, "Snow Removal" dedicated to sidestepping responsibility.
"One of the biggest challenges during the winter is navigating areas that are not cleared of snow and ice," it says, with apparent sympathy. "We're responsible for snow removal on our property, while most bus stops and areas adjacent/leading up to CTA property are the responsibility of others."
There are nearly 11,000 bus stops in Chicago. If the CTA is not responsible for clearing the vast majority, who is?
"We work closely with the Chicago Department of Transportation to ensure bus shelters are shoveled as quickly as possible," the CTA continued.
Anyone who takes buses knows this is deceptive, since buses do not actually stop at shelters, which seem to exist primarily for the benefit of the homeless.
CDOT also ID'ed other suspects:
To continue reading, click here.
Agreed re bus stops but don’t forget the side streets. They are no longer plowed. I witnessed a city plow come down our street WITH ITS BUCKET UP after the most recent snow not bothering to plow while barreling S on Paulina to Grand Ave.
ReplyDeleteThis one is aces! A quintessential "Life in Chicago" column.
ReplyDeleteOh, honey, it's life anywhere, even sans public transportation.
DeleteFranco
ReplyDeleteI do property maintenance for four commercial Warehouse buildings on the west side when it snowed on Friday after Thanksgiving I realized I was not going to have the 4 days off in a row that I was looking forward to.
One of the buildings I'm contracted to is on Chicago avenue and we have a driveway leaving the building and a bus stop.
I've noticed in the past that we shovel combination snow blow that half block which is on the corner and then the plow comes by which is a regular occurrence there on Chicago avenue across the street from the streets and sands yard and they plow it right into the bus stop and back across the driveway.
One of the problems with snow" removal" is where do you put it?
There's just not a lot of space to pilot
One of our neighbors has his street parking plowed and they plow it right in front of our driveway will sometimes have a four or five foot mound waiting for us and then we just push it back towards him or push it out into the street where yes I have noticed on the side streets the plows don't come it's a lot of work and it's not simple and realistically the bus stop is not our property we're just trying to be good citizens
Franco, the areas under the highways in Chicago where the homeless people camp out (or Mary Magdilan shows up on the wall) are actually designed for excess snow.
DeleteThe idea is that the snow that has no where to go can be gathered there and then loaded into dump trucks and then dumped in the lake. I'm not sure they work as well as intended, but that's why they're there.
It's our job to get the snow off our sidewalks and onto the grass or street. Then the wheels of government turn to do the rest. Plows move the snow to the underpasses or parking lots. City gathers the snow from the underpasses and parking lots, loads it into trucks, and dumps it in/on the lake.
Several years ago, I got off the L at the Linden Station in Wilmette to transfer to a bus there. Now Wilmette plows the sidewalks after bigger snows & they had done the sidewalk, but their plow driver had created a three foot high ridge between the sidewalk & the street. A few younger people had managed to climb it to bet to one of the three bus routes that stop there, but I walked all the way east to the parking lot driveway, which had been plowed & then in the street to get to the bus.
ReplyDeleteI complained to their public works department & they finally got someone with a brain to wake up & clear the ridge away.
But both of the bus stops by my house in Rogers Park are now just ice fields. The businesses on the corner don't clear them. I was actually planning to do them with my big snowblower after the storm, but I had spent several hours fixing something in the house that had broken & was too exhausted to do another 400 feet of snowblowing after I did mine & about six other houses worth of the sidewalks on my block!
Since the law requires them to do it, there's an instant way of increasing the city's revenue, by sending out inspectors to issues tickets, so that they will then have to pay the fine for not clearing the bus stops.
But the city is also at fault, the plows pile up huge mounds of snow at intersections, which the plow driver could get rid of in under a couple of minutes if someone in charge would just order them to do it.
On top of that, Chicago is utterly incompetent at snow removal on the streets. I will watch a plow go down a street, plow the snow off to the side, spread salt, only for another plow to do the same ten minutes later, repeating this a dozen more times, while ignoring the side streets. What the dimbulbs in City Hall have never seemed to understand is that if you don't do the side streets, then the cars are all limited to the main streets & will then get stuck on the side streets. The same for the alleys, the city needs V plows to do them.
I love that she copied you on her letter and that you dug into this story. It is indeed crazy, having to navigate iced-over piles of snow to get on a freakin' bus. (I was just thinking about her and Steve the other day because I received a Peanuts Christmas card from a cousin. They used to send Peanuts cards. Perhaps they still do. I haven't sent cards in years. I need to get back to that. I like and miss that tradition.)
ReplyDeleteThere is often a lot of ado about the homeless, un-housed, and immigrant communities. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't understand is why we don't utilize these populations.
Minimum wage to shovel snow across the entire bus and train systems.
Minimum wage to repair the schools that are in disarray and empty, while using them as housing for the immigrant population.
Get these people into the system and make them part of communities. Their pay will be taxed and help fund the very things they are paid to do. The city will be safer.
There are plenty of things that no one seems to want to do that these communities could work on. Let the rest of the population become jealous and then fold them into that labor force.
But I'm sure, like the field workers that are constantly chastised by the right for "taking our jobs," no one who thinks this would be a bad idea would ever do such a job.
It's long past time for us to make the better society we want.
And not removing snow properly is unacceptable.
But i also think every paved surface, outdoors, in the city (and really county) should be heated. While the initial cost would be high and involve a lot of labor, the savings would be insane. We wouldn't have to buy salt. we wouldn't have to spend money on the plows, plow maintenance, or plow drivers. The environmental impact would be incredible. no one wants to spend money now for savings later. that's why the 60s were so good, because we spent insane money on public stuff in the 40s and 50s.
Let the rest of the population who complain about jobs
Much as I agree with you on your CCC-esque (an idea whose time may soon come back) recommendations, the "heating paved surfaces" idea is simply not possible. It would require opening literally every paved surface for the placement and connection of heating elements.
DeleteAnd connection to what? The energy required for this would dwarf what every data center in the state would consume.
People, from individuals up through government bodies, not handling their snow removal resposibilities properly is a social/cultural problem, not an engineering problem.
Double B, great ideas until the heated sidewalks. We engineered some of that where I worked, we would do the stairs and that's it. If you had a corner lot you would probably have to bring in another 200 amp service and that's not going to happen. But all you other ideas are excellent. They won't happen because they make too much sense.
DeleteThe bank that used to be at Clark & Lunt had a heated sidewalk. it was removed when the building was torn down for a small strip mall.
DeleteThe Wilmette Library put in heated sidewalks in the front a few years ago, when they did a major remodeling job, but unfortunately, didn't extend it to the westbound bus stop on the street.
Thanks for addressing this in your column today.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know whether Commissioner Stallard means Streets and San employees or Chicagoans in general when he says “We have a lot of people who haven’t seen snow like this.” Either way, he must be talking about people new to the area. (And very welcome they are, as far as I'm concerned!)
Left Chicago for good 33 years ago, but all these comments are reminding me of the years I spent riding on the CTA in wintertime, to avoid driving my Beetle in the snow. Especially during those horribly snowy and record cold winters of '77 and '78 and '79...back-to-back-to-back misery.
ReplyDeleteAnd several later winters, in the early and mid-80s saw more of the same. All those years ago, and nothing much seems to have changed in Chicago. Bad winters and CTA riding don't mix, and both of them still suck.
Only ride the train in Cleveland, which gets twice as much snow, but I don't ride it very often anymore. Almost never rode on buses, so I don't know if we have it as bad. Almost anyone here who isn't poor has a car, and everybody drives everywhere, all the time. Still miss taking the "L"...but now I hear that the "L" has gone to hell. Sad.