Recaps of the debate comprise just a few of the things I haven't had time to read today:
- Who hated Trump's caginess on whether he'd accept the election results if he lost? Everyone: The Economist, The New Republic, The National Review, Talking Points Memo, everyone.
- Trump's debate performance is being compared to book reports by kids who haven't read the book.
- Pilot Patrick Smith says Trump's airline wasn't that bad for customers, but it never made a profit either.
- Meanwhile, the Cubs beat the Dogders 10-2, which means the series will be decided at Wrigley on Saturday or Sunday.
- Looks like Chicago will have a warm-ish November and a normal-ish winter.
- One of the world's largest data centers, here in the South Loop area of Chicago, will soon be a lot bigger.
- Funny statistic: almost all airport noise complaints come from a handful of people—like the one person in Maryland who complained about Washington Dulles 1,024 times last year.
- Finally, "Hamilton," which I saw Sunday, got a rave from the Tribune.
Back to my meetings.
Pretty good, from space. Benjamin Grant, who runs the Daily Overview feed, has put together a "greatest hits" collection in book form, which will be available October 25th:
The best images appear inOverview: A New Perspective of Earth. The book reveals the many ways humans shape the world. Groves of bright green olive trees stand ready for harvest. Deep blue and purple caverns cut into the earth at a uranium mine. Iron tailings turn a pond bright pink. Grant uses juxtaposition to underscore the point, placing, say, a deforested rain forest alongside a paper mill. “You’re able to make comparisons within the chapters, in a way that you can’t if it’s one image per day on the Instagram feed,” he says. The last chapter celebrates remote places, like the reptilian ridges of Rub’ al Khali, the world’s largest contiguous sand desert.
Many of the images are aesthetically beautiful in the abstract, but troubling in context: the aligned grids on a rust-red landscape of the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya, or the yellow stripe and black ridges of a coal shipping terminal in Qinhuangdao, China. Grant hopes to show that tension. “You have an overwhelming sense of the time that would be required to create these staggering landscapes—erosion, build up of mountains—compared to what we’ve developed in the past 100 years,” says Grant.
I pre-ordered the book as soon as Grant posted he was publishing it.
The Chicago Tribune reports that the annoying trend of using smaller airplanes for longer routes is taking off over the Atlantic:
The re-engined 737 Max and A320neo jets offer a 15 percent fuel saving meant to cut costs on the shortest inter-city services. At the same time the revamp has added about 800 km to their range -- just enough to allow the narrow-bodies to span the 5,000 km between the eastern U.S. and Western Europe.
Norwegian Air Shuttle, JetBlue Airways and Portugal's TAP are among airlines buying the jets for trans-Atlantic routes, with NAS set to lead the way when it becomes one of the first carriers to get Boeing's Max 8 next year. Its initial flights may link Edinburgh, Birmingham in England and Cork and Shannon in Ireland to smaller airports in New England and the New York area.
Yeah, 8 hours in a 737 or A320 does not sound fun. The only exception I'd make is for BA flights 1, 2, 3, and 4, which are 32-seat, all-business-class A319s that fly between London City and JFK. Of course, they're not exactly marketing to price-conscious leisure travelers: a round trip on that route will set you back about $6,000. And one more thing: the return trip tops up its fuel tanks in Shannon, Ireland, because even a stripped-down A319 can't make it all the way from London to New York yet.
On my trip home from Minneapolis a couple of weeks ago, I came across this lovely girl at the MSP airport:
Didn't get to say hi, but ain't she sweet?
Airways magazine has the heartwarming story of American Airlines MD-80 N9401W heading off to retirement in New Mexico:
This aircraft, and 19 others, were part of a symbolic retirement.
A 20-aircraft order placed by American Airlines to McDonnell Douglas in 1982 marked the beginning of an era in which AA became the world’s largest MD-80 operator, but as the decades passed through and as new and more efficient aircraft joined the fleet, the venerable Mad Dog era is now heading into the sunset.
Once the last AA MD-80 parks in Roswell in 2018, it will close a chapter in the company’s history; yet it will also signify a new era, with the arrival of new Airbus A320 family aircraft and Boeing 737 Next Generation and the coming MAX variant, all part of a major $4.6 billion order placed back in 2010 for 460 aircraft —the largest commercial aircraft order in history at that time.
Millions of miles had unfurled beneath Ship 4WJ, from the Far East where she was built, to freezing Calgary in Canada to the sunny Los Cabos in Mexico, from Los Angeles to Chicago, and then to New York, transporting about 3,700,000 passengers during its career.
Subtracting engines, the current parts market value of an MD-80 varies from $100,000 to $200,000. Once all marketable parts have been harvested, the value of the fuselage carcass ranges between $10,000 and $12,000. It can take a month to part out an MD-80 yet only a few hours to crush it into scrap metal.
While AA retired today 20 MD-80s, the airline’s remaining 61 Mad Dogswill continue flying—safely and reliably transporting their passengers and crews.
I last flew on an MD-80 on 3 December 2014, from Dallas to Chicago.
Two stories, in two directions. First, a cool interactive history of how the construction of Chicago's Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) displaced thousands of people and destroyed thousands of buildings:
In the late 1940s, the Oak Leaves newspaper in Oak Park predicted that the new superhighway would replace the West Side’s “appalling slums” with “orderly dwellings where orderly people are living in health and comfort.”
Of all the neighborhoods that the expressway sliced through, the Near West Side had the largest population of blacks in 1950. Nearly 40 percent of its people were African-American.
In February 1949, city housing coordinator D.E. Macklemann said some people in the neighborhood simply didn’t believe that the highway would actually get built. “One man forced us to get an eviction order from the court because he said he had been reading about superhighways for years and thought the whole thing was a dream,” Macklemann told the Tribune. “In several instances residents paid no attention until the buildings next door were being torn down.”
Second, a report about how Rochester, N.Y., has followed San Francisco, Boston, and other cities in burying or removing highways that blighted or isolated their downtowns:
Rochester lucked out. The eastern quadrant of the Inner Loop was isolated from the main flow of traffic into the city, and thus, the traffic volume on that segment of highway was never particularly high. As a result, discussions about burying this portion of the Inner Loop weren’t sidetracked by circular debates about what to do with the traffic it would displace. It may have taken decades to move forward, but that’s still more progress than many cities can claim.
Our research at the University of Connecticut shows that cities that transformed their downtowns with freeways, parking, and monolithic developments were flooded with traffic even while they were losing jobs and residents. The few American cities that maintained most of their prewar urban fabric saw much less growth in traffic congestion and have retained their character as vibrant walking cities.
We also know that cities that have removed freeways—usually due to an act of nature—have seen a decrease in traffic congestion. In some cases, the decrease was more than 50 percent.
I hope that someday, years from now but in my lifetime, we'll see the Eisenhower buried as well. There have been proposals to do that in Oak Park almost since it was built. But that would require a commitment to livable spaces that the U.S. doesn't seem likely to make.
So, this happened on my train line:
A Metra train on the Union Pacific North Line was struck by lightning Tuesday morning in the Rogers Park neighborhood on the North Side.
Outbound train No. 309, scheduled to arrive in Kenosha at 8:18 a.m., was stopped shortly before 7:30 a.m. when it was struck by lightning, causing a mechanical failure near the Rogers Park Station...
Metra spokesman Tom Miller said no injuries were reported.
It actually only added about 15 minutes to my commute. Of course, if I'd known about the problem before seeing two outbound trains copulat--er, coupled together at my station while walking there (in the rain), I'd have taken the El.
At least it wasn't raining hard.
The UK's Daily Mail has a decent explanation and creepy photos of how the southernmost city in Illinois went from a thriving (and historical) port to a nearly-abandoned shell in 50 years:
The town's luck began to fall in 1889 when the Illinois Central Railroad bridge opened over the Ohio River - although much railroad activity was still routed through the town, so its effects were not severe.
The same can't be said for a second bridge that opened around 23 miles up the Mississippi at Thebes, Illinois in 1905.
The completion of that bridge drained away much railroad activity, reducing the need for the ferries that once carried railroad stock.
And with steamboats being phased out in favor of barges, Cairo was no longer the essential hub it had once been. The end had begun.
The town was hit again in 1929 and 1937 when bridges were completed across the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, respectively, allowing a route through for US Routes 51, 60 and 62.
As the bridges were built at the town's southern tip, it was easy for traffic to bypass Cairo completely, draining away more money.
But there was still a little money coming to the town until 1987, when the Interstate 57 bridge opened across the Mississippi, allowing traffic to bypass the town altogether - killing its hotel and restaurant industries.
I visited Cairo in 2003. It was pretty dead then, but judging by the photos in the Daily Mail article, it's even worse now.
Here's the confluence of the rivers, in December 2003:
The Economist's Gulliver blog explains:
America is a big country, and its airlines have to focus most of their attention on domestic flights. In 2014, Delta flew more passengers than any other in the world, but less than one-fifth of them were on international routes. Despite recent consolidation, there is still much competition at home: on top of the big four, customers can sometimes choose among JetBlue, Spirit, Frontier, Alaska, Hawaiian, Virgin America and others. And flyers have made it clear that they have one priority far above all others: price. The result, as one airline industry veteran told Fast Company, is that flights resemble “a Greyhound [bus] with wings”. When flying halfway across the country for $70, can flyers really expect better amenities than on a long-haul bus making the same trip?
That pressure is not felt by, say, Singapore Airlines, the world’s third-best carrier, according to Skytrax. It has no domestic routes to worry about; the entire country is less than 300 square miles.
...
If America wants better airlines, in other words, the answer is simple. First it must take the carriers into state control and squash the unions. Then it must persuade the world to forget its sexist ways and encourage those at home to go on a diet. Finally it should reduce in size and move a bit closer to Asia. Easy.
So history, geography, and culture all play roles? Who'd have thought.
Last week I posted a quick snap of Target Field from my mobile phone. I've finally had time to go through photos I took with my real camera; here are two. First, the park itself:
And I caught this shot of center field when the sun was setting:
