Snow day

So I worked from home today.

I didn’t intend to. I got up, showered, dressed, put on boots, got my kid up, made two lunches, and went outside.

I cleared about 4 inches of snow off my car. Maybe 5, if we’re generous. The kid came along, got in, and we drove to the bus stop. I did not have to shovel the car out of the parking space. There just wasn’t that much snow.

Drove out of the hood on the sketchy side streets. This is fine: side streets are the last to be plowed, that makes sense. Least traffic, last plowed.  But then I got to the main roads: and they did not seem to be plowed or salted either. Lots of cars on them, just after 7 am, but no plows, no salt trucks.

I was hearing on the radio the Kennedy was over 2 hours in from O’Hare. That is absurd. It’s a ridiculous time. I thought to myself, well take local roads, maybe go southeast on Milwaukee. It’s got to be moving faster, right?

Every major road I was on was a mess. The great northwest side of Chicago had no roads plowed.  I saw one truck out: going north on Pulaski as I was going south. That’s it.

At some point as I was white-knuckling it down a major artery of the great city of Chicago I thought: I’m not going to make it in. I have to turn around and go home, or I’ll be on the road ALL day trying to get to the southside.  What is it, about 17 or so miles from home? Yeah, not going to make it.

So I spent two hours on the roads this morning, during rush hour, to get as far as Belmont before heading home. Not quite three miles. And back. So … six miles in two hours.

Now the really horrible part of this was that it was completely unnecessary. I have made it into work in far more snow than this, in far colder temperatures than this, in far worse conditions. The roads weren’t bad because of the snow.

The roads were bad because of choices made by our elected officials. There was a dearth of snowplows not because Chicago – a northern city – doesn’t have snowplows. Nor do we lack salt at this point in the season: we had no snow at all in January and February which is exceedingly rare (and very weird and unsettling).  The weather forecast was dead on: there was plenty of warning that the weather would be exactly what it was.

No, there were no snow removal trucks out because our Mayor is awful. Maybe he didn’t want to spend the money on overtime for the Streets and Sanitation guys, because if he got them up before dawn to take care of the roads before rush hour, the city would pay overtime.

Or maybe he’s getting back at the aldermen of the northwest side (and south side, and west side, and …) for not supporting him enough and raising questions about budgets.

Or maybe he’s just incompetent and hired incompetent people to run Streets and San. He doesn’t really care about actually making the city livable for it’s people. It’s not what he considers an important part of his job portfolio.

But wait, you say. The city isn’t responsible for the Kennedy and that was terrible. Yes, the expressways are under the purview of the State of Illinois, and the responsibility of IDOT, so not the Mayor’s fault there.

So let’s move on to our stubborn governor, who can’t get a budget passed in Springfield because he is too bone-headed to know you have to compromise with legislatures, equal branches of government being what they are and all. He is not a CEO, he is a governor. Not the same thing. State government is not a business, and can’t be run like one.

I’m guessing that IDOT has a cash-flow problem, like every other state agency, and wasn’t prepared for this snowstorm. Or perhaps, like the mayor, the governor put incompetent people in charge. Being a Republican, there’s no reason to suppose he believes government should work for the people. But you’d think he’d care that his buddies in the northern and very wealthy suburbs could drive their BMW’s into the City to get to the office …

Or maybe not. Maybe he just wants to ram home how disfunctional state government is, so he can continue to dismantle it.

I’ve gotten to work plenty of times in worse weather than this. The fact that we had the worst travel times EVER this morning was no accident and not a result of the relatively minor snowfall we had (4-5 inches? In Chicago? Pah. Trivial). That was a direct result of the choices made by the Mayor and the Governor.  Equally incompetent, equally smug and ego-driven.

The Twin Disasters.