It made no sense to the commuters. Pouring off the Metra train that had just pulled in from Du Page County, they were importuned to sell the Tribune under their arms. The puzzled passengers pointed to honor boxes stuffed with the paper.
So he rode the Ravenswood el south to Quincy and dashed over to Union Station. Sure enough, the tollway article unworthy of being carried in Chicago stared out at him from page one of the MetroDuPage edition.
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The center contends that fiscally irresponsible road building abets unplanned, even mindless urban sprawl that exploits and eviscerates long-established communities. The North-South extension, according to Michaels, “would be a financial dog for which everyone else in the region would have to foot the bill.” And the Tribune article he wishes more people could have read backed him up.
Suburban transportation writer Janan Hanna reported that according to tollway officials, the North-South extension will saddle the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority with some $50 million in annual debt payments that will be offset by just $10 million in toll revenues. Hanna wrote, “The $40 million difference would be made up by the millions of drivers using the Northwest, Tri-State and East-West Tollways, said tollway Executive Director Ralph Wehner.”
“The zone calls are made usually by the metro editors,” public editor George Langford told me. “We can zone in about eight ways, and there are a lot of close calls. Sometimes we make mistakes. We get a lot of complaints–not a lot, but people say, I hear a story was in another zone, and I’m really interested in it. That’s one of the downsides of doing a lot of zoning.”
It’s a sweet-and-sour mix of depth and superficiality. The tollway package posted there May 7 contains not just a history of the system, an analysis of where the money goes, and a critique echoing the arguments of Robert Michaels, but the text of the 1967 state law under which the tollway authority now operates. Yet each story is brief, each paragraph is separated from the next by a broad causeway of white, and the quota of sentences per paragraph appears to be two. Wonderful junior high school term papers will be written by students who look here.
Digeratum Ginger Orr wrote most of the tollway pieces. Her bio was admirably restrained, though she let slip that she once worked with two soap-opera writing teams. I didn’t send her a message. Instead I called.
