The Daily Parker

Forecasters predicted that Chicago would break its old record high (technically "high maximum") temperature of 13.3°C today. Well, we just hit that temperature, so let's see how high it goes.

For what it's worth, I walked from class to my client today. In many parts of the world that's not extraordinary. In February in Chicago, though...

Update, 11:10 CT: 11 am temperature officially 14.4°C, new record. How high will it fly? (Sorry...)

Update, 12:05 CT: now 15°C, another new record.

Update, 13:00 CT: 15.6°C.

The President will visit Chicago Friday for the first time since taking office. As I've speculated before, he brings with him a temporary flight restriction (TFR) affecting the second-busiest airspace in the world:

ALL AIRCRAFT OPERATIONS WITHIN THE 10 NMR AREA LISTED ABOVE, KNOWN AS THE INNER CORE, ARE PROHIBITED EXCEPT FOR: APPROVED LAW ENFORCEMENT, MILITARY AIRCRAFT DIRECTLY SUPPORTING THE UNITED STATES SECRET SERVICE (USSS) AND THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, APPROVED AIR AMBULANCE FLIGHTS, AND REGULARLY SCHEDULED COMMERCIAL PASSENGER...FLIGHTS....

(The shouting capitals come free from the FAA.)

Notice, on the map below, that Midway Airport is within the 10-mile circle, and my home airport, Chicago Executive (and O'Hare) is within the 30-mile ring:

The TFR prohibits flight training within the 30-mile ring, too, but planes can depart on a discrete transponder code and fly to another airport to practice landings.

Welcome home, Mr. President. I'm glad I'm not flying this weekend.

The numbers yesterday turned out to be correct, but there was one aspect of the thaw I forgot to mention. We've had snow on the ground in Chicago since just before New Year's Eve. Just 36 hours ago, O'Hare had 27 cm of the stuff, and all of it melted by dinner time yesterday. Welcome to Chicago's fifth season: Mud.

The official score won't be in until past midnight, but it looks like the temperature at O'Hare today topped 13°C—about 33°C warmer than Thursday morning's -20°C. It's quite a relief. And almost all the snow is gone.

In celebration, Parker and I will now take our second long walk of the day.

Now that Illinois has started the long process of removing our ex-governor's name from tollway signs, this essay from the New York Times' Freakonomics blog extolling the virtues of congestion tolling is worth a read:

[I]t can be hard to convey this because the theory behind tolling is somewhat complex and counterintuitive. This is too bad, because variable tolling is an excellent public policy. Here's why: the basic economic theory is that when you give out something valuable — in this case, road space — for less than its true value, shortages result.

Ultimately, there’s no free lunch; instead of paying with money, you pay with the effort and time needed to acquire the good. Think of Soviet shoppers spending their lives in endless queues to purchase artificially low-priced but exceedingly scarce goods. Then think of Americans who can fulfill nearly any consumerist fantasy quickly but at a monetary cost. Free but congested roads have left us shivering on the streets of Moscow.

(In an odd bit of timing, the concepts of "shortage" and "free goods" will be on my Intro to Microeconomics exam next Thursday.)

Now, living as I do only a 20-minute bus ride from the Chicago Loop, and dreading any time I have to use one of our area's expressways, I think congestion pricing makes perfect sense. Especially when you see, for example, the traffic loads on the Kennedy Expressway during the week. Check this out:

This shows the average travel times from the Circle (downtown Chicago) to O'Hare, a distance of about 27 km. The blue line shows inbound traffic, the red line, outbound. At 40 minutes, the average speed is 40 km/h; normal expressway speeds (90 km/h) get you to O'Hare in under 20 minutes.

Ah, but see this week's chart:

Yes. This week, on average, the trip from O'Hare to downtown took almost an hour during the morning rush period. (For the record, the El takes 35 minutes, you can spend the time reading, the odds of dying are much lower, and it only costs $2.25, as opposed to typical Loop parking lots which cast $28.00.)

Now imagine you had the option of paying $5 to use the reversible lanes, knowing the trip would take 20 minutes. Is 40 minutes worth $5 to you? Forty extra minutes of sleep, 40 minutes with the kids, 40 minutes doing something other than stop-and-go traffic moving slower than a bicycle?

Chicago O'Hare just recorded a temperature of 4.4°C, the warmest it's been since December 30th.

That is all.

After 31 days of snow cover, 40 days without a temperature above 10°C, 67 days without four consecutive days above 5°C, and not one night above freezing since December 29th, Chicago is finally, finally getting warmer weather:

Warming in coming days—a slow process at first—leads to a 50-degree [Fahrenheit] temperature increase by Saturday afternoon. The day may produce the first 50-degree high here since late December.

(Skilling wrote that around 11pm CST yesterday when the temperature was heading down to its overnight low of -19°C.)

Here's the National Weather Service temperature plot for the next 48 hours, predicting a rise from -9°C up to 7°C by noon Saturday:

I really can't wait. Really. I'm wearing long johns under my suit right now, which is just plain wrong.

Update, 3:25pm CST: Ahhh. The temperature has already risen 15°C in the past 12 hours.

While I am, with the rest of Chicago, holding my breath to learn how extensively fire damaged the 130-year-old Holy Name Cathedral this morning, I actually hit my head on my shower wall when a reporter at WBEZ described the fire as "tragic."

I am almost certain it wasn't a tragic fire, but I'm willing to bend on that one if it turns out (a) a person who (b) through his own character flaws (c) accidentally set it (d) killing himself in the process. There are other scenarios that would be tragic, too. But none at all is likely.

I have gotten so tired of lazy writers calling things tragic when the things in question don't involve human beings failing because of their own character flaws. Enough.

An example may help (yes, I'm poking Alanis Morrisette): If it rains on a couple's wedding day, that's unfortunate. If the bride and groom are both meteorologists, that's ironic. If one of them dies—say while trying to kill the other because of the botched weather forecast—that's tragic. If, however, they finally get married at the end, that's comic.

The tragedy and the irony of all this, of course, is that I believe languages evolve and generally (but not in this specific case) like that, and this post will probably get me written off as a crank.

The Chicago Tribune has an introduction:

[T]he prospect of Gov. Quinn is shocking to many Illinois politicians who thought of him as a gadfly, a master of holding Sunday news conferences to gain media attention on traditionally slow news days. There he would pitch plans such as electing taxpayer and insurance watchdogs or non-binding referendum questions that looked good on a ballot but had no real effect, such as a ban on naming rights for Soldier Field.

His two biggest achievements, the result of tapping into voter anger, occurred more than a quarter-century ago: cutting the size of the Illinois House by one-third and creating the consumer advocacy Citizens Utility Board.

The piece touches on, but doesn't dig too deeply into, Quinn's financial interests and flirtations with good old Chicago-style corrup—er, politics. It'll be interesting to see what he does, and how his relationship with House Speaker Mike Madigan goes as well.

Even though it's finally above freezing at the moment in Chicago, we did make it through the entire month of January without having a single above-freezing night. It has been the coldest January in 24 years, and it looks like mid-February we'll see some more. Enough already.