Amtrak, the White Sox, and the Bears

I am once again at SFO watching the fog roll across the final boarding of Hawaiian Air's next flight to Kona:

My flight boards in about 45 minutes. From hotel to BART to the other side of security took 38 minutes, which is the entire point of staying in Millbrae instead of the city, now that American Aiirlines seems to have cemented 8am and 2pm as the principal return options to Chicago. Since I have a rehearsal this evening, the 8pm arrival at O'Hare would have been a bit inconvenient.

Before going back to my book and my coffee, I want to flag Amtrak's environmental assessment of moving its repair facilities from 14th St to 35th St, one of a series of steps required to get the Chicago Bears, Chicago White Sox, and St Charles Air Line into states that will see them into the 2060s or longer. We can't fix the St Charles Air Line bridge until Amtrak closes its 14th St repair facility; the Sox want to move out of Rate Field and build a new park to where the 14th St shops are right now, and there's speculation that the Bears could be convinced to stay in Chicago by building a new stadium on the rubble of Rate Field.

The sand in the gears is, naturally, some South Side NIMBYs who woke up this summer at the end of the 10-year planning process to extract some kind of concessions from Amtrak. This is Chicago, after all, where our unofficial motto is "Where's mine?" Local opposition to turning an abandoned rail yard on an active freight trunk line into a functioning rail yard on an active freight trunk line isn't going to tank the project any more than it's going to fix the ugliness of that particular stretch of 35th St. But someone has his hand out to City Hall anyway. Amtrak will build its facility, but now it'll be delayed another year, and the United States will fall further behind every other Western democracy in transit. This is what a declining empire feels like, in case you're wondering: endless fighting over the smallest changes to anything. Because we're done growing, we can only dig in deeper.

I might need more coffee.

Other than that, I'm halfway through Dungeon Crawler Carl. Travel is great for reading. (And if you're wondering why I appear to have stalled on reading John Scalzi's latest, Monsters of Ohio, it's because I generally don't travel with first edition signed hardcovers.)