By Harold Henderson
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Not everyone has settled their beef with Com Ed. The Challenger (January), newsletter of the Labor Coalition on Public Utilities, says that “according to Standard & Poor’s ratings, if Edison were to sell power on the open market today [rather than in a market regulated by the Illinois Commerce Commission], its annual revenues would fall by $600 million, or more than 26%. This is what Edison customers are being overcharged every year. This is the result of Edison’s spendthrift construction of unneeded nuclear plants.”
Wanted: smaller, smarter audiences. “If I had to conduct my career according to what managers advise me is the ‘best idea’ to stimulate publicity and increase audiences, I would go crazy,” pianist Radu Lupu tells Dennis Bade in the Chicago Symphonic Times (Winter). “‘Do an interview,’ they tell me, ‘you will have 3,000 instead of 300.’ Well, I would rather have the 300 who come to hear the music than a crowd of 3,000 who come to hear some sort of ‘stage personality’ and have to be seduced by publicity to come.’”
The horror of traffic congestion (not). From the new book The Geography of Urban Transportation: “In 1975, average travel distance to work was about 9 miles and the average travel time was approximately 20 minutes. In 1990, the average work trip covered 10.7 miles and took 19.7 minutes.”
