Comment on the Chicago Regional Transportation Plan. The Chicago area has a critical role to play in building high-speed and regional rail.
Please comment on Chicago Regional Transportation Plan.
Comments due by July 31 and you don’t have to live in Illinois to comment.
As the center of the nation’s railway network, the Chicago area has a critical role to play in building high-speed and regional rail.
The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is seeking comments on the 2026 revision of the official Regional Transportation Plan (RTP), which describes the vision and guidelines for transportation spending and planning.
Here’s the good news. The RTP outlines great emerging goals:
Strengthen connections between people and places
Prioritize safety and public health
Mitigate pollution and invest in resilient infrastructure
Support economic prosperity and inclusive growth
Strategically govern, fund, and preserve the system
These goals cannot be met without the dramatic mode-shift that only electrified trains can create.
The bad news, the RTP doesn’t do much to make competitive trains a reality.
The plan does give a shout out to Metra Regional Rail. But it doesn’t lay out a strategy for building it. Amtrak’s Chicago Hub Improvement Program (CHIP) gets a big mention, but CHIP’s goals are too modest to have the needed impact.
The most important part of the plan is the 2027-32 Transportation Improvement Plan (TIP) which lays out spending priorities. The TIP is where the real priorities come to the fore. It has several projects that could be the foundation for regional rail, including upgrades to several Metra lines, but none of them have any substantial work in progress. Nor have they been funded.
CMAP is in the process of changing the process for developing its long range plans. Your comment on this plan will play a role in changing priorities in the future.
Please make a comment if you would like to take the train to or from Chicago, or within Chicago.
We have provided sample comments, but it will be best if you make them your own. Let them know where you want to ride the train and why it’s important to you.
When I say that the 2010s were a decade of lost millennial creative labor, I am largely referring to a unique post-recession rebound starting around 2012 when a whole lot of corporations and venture capitalists were willing to spend money on internet content. … And all the millennials that jumped over to digital media companies and social platforms … spent a lot of time and energy making content that, 10 years on, basically doesn’t exist anymore. And I mean this quite literally in the case of all the essays, short stories, magazine features, comics, and other written works have been lost to digital rot. But the stuff that you can still find, if you dig deep enough in an archive, has very little legacy, if any, because much of it was meant to game and algorithm or news cycle that no longer exists. …
Why does everything feel so stale and so boring? I think the lost millennial decade has a lot to do with it. Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal. Culture stopped being something the consumer paid for and cultural industries became kindling for digital furnaces that only wanted to monetize our data anyways. An entire generation of young creatives were paid to dump terabytes of posts and videos in a black hole, trying to entertain users long enough to be surveilled and train AI.
While working on the WPA Florida guidebook, the Federal Writers’ Project team – including Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy – documented a wide range of life from prison camps to soup kitchens to hair salons, in recordings that reveal a living culture and enduring traditions.
Hurston and Kennedy traveled the state recording people’s stories and songs. That included a visit to a remote turpentine work site, where they encountered a forced labor camp and the brutal conditions in a form of slavery that continued well into the 20th century.
Project interviewers in Florida also searched for survivors of pre-Civil War slavery and gathered hundreds of interviews. Nationally, thousands of “ex-slave interviews” are treasures for understanding that lived experience. But the Project’s written interviews should be read with caution. Historians remind us that those manuscripts are complicated and often reinforced racial bias and stereotypes. Historian Tameka Hobbs helps put this work in context and brings it alive. {listen}
For years, going solar meant owning a home. That's starting to change thanks to the rise of plug-in solar panels, also called balcony solar.
The regulatory gray area
In states without enabling legislation, plug-in solar isn't necessarily banned, but utilities often treat even a single plug-in panel the same as a large rooftop array. That can mean interconnection applications, fees, and waits of weeks or months.
Now, most people who have quietly plugged in small systems in these states haven't faced enforcement action, but know that you’d be operating outside clearly defined rules. While the practical risk is low for small, certified systems, it's worth being honest about the ambiguity.
If you're a renter, check your lease before installing. If you're in an HOA, review your CC&Rs. These agreements can restrict exterior modifications even where state law doesn't.
telecom service providers in india are getting orders from government to shutdown our internet. they might also mass delete the posts and videos online. i know this is not the content you followed me for but please raise voice for the people in india if you can. if you find any posts about the brutality that the police inflicted upon protesters, people seeking legal or medical attention, people needing donation for sanitary pads, food, water, masks, etc. on twitter or instagram, please share it. it's my humble request. this is our last day. they're applying emergency alerts and new rules from tomorrow but today we are standing here in rain raising our voices and we will continue to do so.
I found his bio on societyofpresidentialdescendants.org and it was so delightful I had to copy paste the whole thing:
“Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave it to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale (BA, 1977), and was trained to be a museum curator in the University of Delaware’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture (MA, 1980). A decorative arts curator at the Newark Museum for thirty-seven years before he retired, Ulysses has never stopped writing for the sheer pleasure of it. Aside from books on Victorian furniture, art pottery, studio ceramics, jewelry, and the White House, Ulysses created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel, appeared in 2012. His most recent novel, Cliffhanger, was released by JMS Books in December 2020.
“Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of 45 years. They have two grown children, adopted in 1996.
“Ulysses is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant. His late mother, Julia, was the President’s last living great-grandchild; youngest daughter of Ulysses S. Grant III, and granddaughter of the president’s eldest son, Frederick. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City. He is also on the board of the U.S. Grant Presidential Library and Museum at Mississippi State University.”
“With his husband of 45 years.” You kids don’t know ... they got together before AIDS, at the peak of the Gay Glam Life. They stayed together as their generation died around them, and made through it to the point where they could marry and have a legal family. He looks like a chipper preppie who never had a serious thought or care in the world, but it took *incredible* determination, commitment, and also luck to get here.
having now read the first of this man's vampire books, you can absolutely tell that he cares a lot about historical furniture because oh my god he really wanted to tell us about all the historical furniture in this vampire's house. material culture as foreplay. seduction via theses about chairs
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
origamiaround
