Tag: Mass Transit

Miscellaneous Chicago Anecdotes – Chaotic Marriage Lamp and Red Line Exorcism

Times are brutal right now- so in an effort to get our minds off of the situation at hand- I have a question. What’s your most bizarre Chicago story- that at the time you didn’t think twice about (because well, Chicago is Chicago)- but later realized the insanity of the situation?
byu/checkyourfuckingbag inchicago

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h2opolodude4
I was near the gold coast, walking home from a party at probably 3am on a Tuesday in November. I worked in a bar so weeknights were our party time.

A dude is sitting in an alley, on a kitchen chair, reading a book. A 3rd floor window is open and a woman is screaming/shrieking and I can hear things breaking.

She comes to the window and screams something and throws a lamp at the guy. He’s as calm as a cow at a vegetarian convention and barely reacts other than to catch the lamp.

I ask what’s up, and he says occasionally she gets really mad, kicks him out and throws all sorts of stuff out or at him. They’ve been married a while and he’s used to it, he just waits for her to stop throwing things, and stays at his sister’s place until things calm down. Apparently it’s an annual occurrence and has been for a while.

He doesn’t want to stuff the lamp into his SUV and offers it to me. How could I turn down a chaotic marriage lamp at 3am?!? I still have it, it’s at my parents house in the suburbs plugged in in the basement.

TJ_Fox
I was new to Chicago and exploring the downtown area. A torrential downpour forced me to shelter in an alcove, so I opened the door in hopes of getting further away from the rain. It let to a totally nondescript corridor, like a service corridor, so I followed that around a few corners, down a bunch more blank corridors, until I came to another door. Opened that and suddenly I’m standing in the vast, deserted lobby of a magnificent 19th century hotel, with high, painted ceilings, columns, crystal chandeliers and mirrors on the walls.

Laster research confirmed that I’d simply accidentally entered part of the Pedway and ended up in the lobby of the Palmer House hotel, but it was a surreal time-travel moment when it happened.

svckafvck
I was working at a cupcake shop in wicker park during college, the front windows can open completely like super tall doors. We had them open since it was super nice outside when I just start to hear Elvis playing in the distance. It gets louder and louder, and then I start to hear motorcycles too. All of a sudden, like 100 motorcycles start flying down Milwaukee ave and all the riders are dressed in FULL Elvis costumes, wigs, outfits, the works, and they all have the same Elvis song blasting from their stereos. It passed quickly and I was left just standing at the open windows staring. Honestly hilarious and I was dumbstruck. I was also alone so I had no one to be like … wtf just happened?!?

chimamax
Not terribly exciting, but I always chuckle when I remember it. Years ago, when I was on the blue line headed into the Loop, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lights went out. Probably just 30 seconds in the dark.

When the lights went back on, there was a pigeon sitting in the seat right next to me. Just chilling, as if it was also commuting into the office. It finally moved when I excused myself as my stop was next.

bombyx_amore
I got exorcised on the red line.

I was getting off at the Jackson stop and hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning. Standing up to get off the train took all the blood out of my head, and I passed out about 5 feet onto the platform. Someone helped me to a bench, but I didn’t want to be late for work. So, stayed until I could see again and headed to the escalator. Passed out again at the top and woke up sitting against the wall behind the empty attendant desk.

This woman comes up to me, maybe 50s, small, and asks if I’m ok. She says she’s a nurse. I tell her I’m just lightheaded and will be fine in a minute. She asks if she can lay hands on me. In the back of my cloudy head I knew that sounded familiar, but my dumb ass overrode the warning signal and figured hey, she’s a nurse, she’s just asking permission to help you up.

Nope. She locks eyes with me and presses her hand into my forehead, hard. I think she’s trying to feel for fever but her hand doesn’t move, and then she starts speaking in tongues. Something about Satan is all I catch. She’s yelling now, and I’m definitely awake now, and if the devil were here like she says he would be crazy to stay. At this point the attendant who belongs to the desk runs over and pulls her off of me. I am cured.

I called off work, went home, and took the longest, hottest shower my blood pressure would allow.

Majestic-Selection22
Remember Tilapia and Ryan? A woman overhears another woman (Tilapia) talking about breaking up with her boyfriend Ryan. Reddit tried to warn all the Ryans in Chicago of the impending doom. We will never know if we succeeded but it was a fun couple days.

State of RTD, Westword on

Over the course of a single weekday, people in metro Denver collectively travel more than 110 million miles — greater than the distance between the Earth and the sun. More than 1.8 million employed adults and 650,000 students need to get to work or school and back, and over 2 million passenger cars, freight trucks, buses and other vehicles clog the region’s streets and highways. Though it’s currently only responsible for moving a small fraction of these commuters through this vast transportation network, the RTD system has to balance a staggering array of competing needs and priorities.

During any given morning rush hour, perhaps 100,000 people board an RTD bus or train, bound for 100,000 destinations across a service area the size of Delaware. Eight hundred buses, driven by 800 operators, work their way between nearly 10,000 passenger stops along 169 fixed routes. Two hundred rail vehicles are weaving through downtown traffic or speeding through railroad crossings from Wheat Ridge to Peña Boulevard.

RTD Sees a Future That Runs on Transit — but First, It Has to Weather a Crisis
Chase Woodruff, Westword

SB 827 Autopsy – Why is affordable housing is so scarce?

For the past four months, California state Sen. Scott Wiener has been on a quest to strip his staunchly left-wing hometown of its power to maintain single-family residential neighborhoods. His Senate Bill 827 would have required California cities to permit midrise-apartment construction—buildings rising up to 45 or 55 feet—around train stations and busy bus stops. It was a radical attempt to subvert local control in the interest of creating more homes and would have opened up neighborhoods in San Diego, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area to row houses and small apartment buildings. Transit-rich San Francisco, where Wiener, a first-term legislator, previously sat on the board of supervisors, would have been almost entirely rezoned to accommodate a residential scale about half that of a typical Parisian street.

Opposed by virtually every Californian in a position of power, Wiener’s bill failed in a Sacramento committee on Tuesday. This had been widely anticipated; what Wiener and his co-sponsor Nancy Skinner, representing the East Bay, proposed was nothing less than to upend the entire framework for the past century of American racial politics and wealth building.
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From a bird’s-eye perspective, though, it’s not clear that things can get much worse. Consider the Bay Area, where the nurse in San Jose flies into work from Idaho and where families living in cars dump their feces into storm drains across the street from the future Chan-Zuckerberg School, a philanthropic endeavor of the Facebook founder and his wife that’s a five-minute drive from the company’s global headquarters. In the past five years, the Bay Area has added 373,000 jobs and built only 58,000 units of housing. California homes cost 2½ times the U.S. average, and higher still in the coastal metros that SB 827 would address. The California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated in 2015 that the state’s major metro areas between 1980 and 2010 built barely half the number of housing units needed to keep price growth in line with the U.S. average. Hundreds of thousands of low-income households have left the state over the past decade, replaced by high-earning new arrivals. California is basically one enormous gentrifying neighborhood. What does “worse” look like?
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Via Slate

Parable of the Mass Transit Commuter

A man gets on the bus. A hobo gets on the bus a stop or so later. The hobo smells unpleasant and is babbling loudly.
The man says to himself, “Please God, don’t let him sit next to me.”
The hobo walks by a couple available seats.
Again, the man says to himself, “Please God, don’t let him sit next to me… Please God, don’t let him sit next to me.”
The hobo stops and settles down in the seat next to him.
“Do you know why I sat next to you?” The hobo asks the man.
The man shakes his head.
“God told me to sit next to you.”

Origin unknown.