Picture a nice size orange.  Imagine it cut it in half.  Stick two thin wires into the orange.

Then close your eyes and think of a surgeon placing the orange in the upper left edge of your chest, just below the collarbone, and plugging the wires into your heart.

St. Louis Blue Jay Bouwmeester now has an Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, around the size of that orange, monitoring every beat of his heart.  If the processor in the ICD detects an issue it can jolt his heart with electricity to restore proper beat, or, it can act as a pacemaker to restrict or increase his heart beat rate.

Such technology isn’t cheap:  roughly $30,000 to $50,000 for the device, plus installation and monitoring cost.

Still, ICDs have an impressive track record of saving and extending lives.  Best guess is that 800,000 Americans now have ICD’s, with about 120,000 joining JB this year.  (If those numbers don’t seem to match-up, well, many, many ICD owners never have to worry about device durability.)

Like me, Bouwmeester seems to have experienced a bit of Sudden Cardiac Arrest aka Sudden Cardiac Death.  Only the intervention of medical professionals and an Automatic External Defibrillator changed that last word to “arrest,” as happened in my case.

Ironically, ICDs emerged from the Cold War.  Hubert H. Humphrey visited Russia in 1962 and was awed by their efforts to re-start hearts.  “Let’s compete with the U.S.S.R. in research on reversibility of death.”  [Congressional Record, 10/12/62]

By 1985 researchers had prototype ICDs and by the early 1990’s they became available to the public.  Thanks to the level of need and the price point, multiple companies keep improving the product, issuing new generations of devices.  A new recipient such as JB can look forward to a decade of trouble-free service before his ICD needs to be replaced or recharged.  (My 2009 model had a projected life of seven to nine years:  it will hit 11 years this July.)

Yes, an ICD cheats death and offers peace of mind.  Living with it isn’t all fun and games.

In the mass of papers I came home with after my installation was a form for a handicap placard or a disabled drive license plate.  Having a defibrillator, you see, makes you disabled by Missouri Department of Revenue standards.  That ICD exempts you from employment in many professions: while I don’t recall seeing National Hockey League player on the list, I suspect that liability-wary lawyers will keep JB off the ice as a player.  (I’d bet he could coach to his heart’s content.)

And, with an ICD comes a long list of warnings.  The latest list from Boston Scientific (who made my device) is 47 pages including, for example, saying Don’t Tour Hydroelectric Facilities.  Caution is required around other stuff producing electromagnetic fields, including cell phones.  (Hand units should always be used at the ear furthest from the ICD.)  Some store security systems can get an ICD owner’s attention, and, don’t sit an electric car while its charging. [https://www.bostonscientific.com/content/dam/lifebeat-online/en/documents/BSC_Electromagnetic_Compatibility_Guide.pdf ]

The section on airport security keeps changing.  Today it advises that quick exposures to metal detectors shouldn’t cause an issue.  Back around 2010 I had several jolting experiences with TSA equipment, as well as encountering a prevalent bureaucratic disdain for accepting the government’s rules, including my right to a hand search.  To be safe, I still demand a hand pat down – a process which adds anywhere from one to 45 minutes of extra time at the checkpoint.

Sadly, most TSA workers don’t understand how their own equipment works.  For example, the back scatter machines emit very little radiation on the traveler:  that traveler is standing over the guts of the machine which create a helluva electromagnetic field.  Also, if TSA’s equipment miss that metallic orange size bump in a chest we’re all in danger.

Yes, with an ICD comes a formal looking wallet-size ID card to show TSA and other security people…it’s worthless.  Security types either grant the pat-down or refuse, regardless of the card.

I expect that in a few weeks Jay Bouwmeester will be back home.  It will be a changed life but he can still be anywhere with his family, exercise and do as much as 99% of the population.

And, after about a year you get use to that bump in your chest.

The post The ABC’s of ICD’s [the device implanted in Blues player Jay Bouwmeester] appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I wrote most of this essay on the day (12/29/2019) of the last Loop Trolley ride. For those outside of St. Louis, the Delmar Loop is a famous cultural street, connecting University City with the City of St. Louis proper. Revitalized in the late twentieth century primarily by local entrepreneur Joe Edwards, it was voted one of ten “Great Streets in America” by the American Planning Association in 2007.

And the Trolley? Well, the Trolley is, or was…. not so Great. It cost over $50 million, of which around $30 million came from federal grants, $4 million came from City tax abatements, and $3 million from the County; its construction caused nightmarish traffic in the Loop, stagnating commerce in the area; and it didn’t really do anything, other than provide a shuttle from the Missouri History Museum to the Loop, which is kind of cool, I guess. The whole thing endured for about a year. Now it’s dead.

In a political ideologies class in my undergraduate degree, I read an essay that so stuck with me that the closing of the Loop Trolley provided an instant connection to it in my mind. Titled “Town Meetings & Workers’ Control: A Story For Socialists” and written by political theorist Michael Walzer in 1978, it is a parable about a man who builds a town, and echoes the present situation of St. Louis governance pretty strongly.

This fictional entrepreneurial fellow, J.J., who, “when the frontier was still somewhere east of the Great Plains…set out to make his fortune.” First, J.J. establishes a ferry at the bend of a river (not unlike St. Louis itself). Taking pioneers from one bank to the other earns him some wealth. He buys up some land in the area and, when settlers arrive, lends them the acres needed to build a church, a blacksmith, and the other necessities of an American frontier town. When Indians attack (a somewhat problematic use of language and example on Walzer’s part), J.J. orders the rifles and gear needed to fend them off. In this way he becomes the informal mayor. When he borrows money from a bank and builds the town hall, he formalizes this role. What was previously a functional economic arrangement becomes a formal political one.

J-town, as the settlement becomes known, prospers. J.J. is the default leader, though “the settlers were not surprised; neither was there any opposition. J.J. was still a gregarious man; he knew them all, talked to them all, always consulted with them about matters of common interest.” J.J. built the town; that he would own it made a sort of sense. Years pass.

Growth requires a degree of formalization, and an elderly J.J. is obliged to appoint other town officers. In an act of hubris, he makes his idiot son chief of police. It is at this point that the citizens stage an electoral revolt. Here’s the crux of the arguments: J.J. is appreciated by all for his leadership of the early town. But this role only entitles him to “honor and glory, but not to obedience.” The citizens are workers, after all. They were the ones who built and operated the business J.J. arranged, and more to the point, his poor governance impacts their lives. The revolt is successful, and the town moves from informal and lax capitalist dictatorship to formalized workers’ democracy. The moral of the parable, writes Walzer, is that “what touches all should be decided by all”. If it will impact you, you should have a say in it. This could be the thesis statement of the entire socialist movement.

Back to St. Louis, with apologies for the diversion. Joe Edwards is our own local J.J. He is widely recognized and positively acknowledged as the man who built the Loop via his ownership and/or support of fruitful businesses like Blueberry Hill. St. Louis Magazine even called him the “Duke of Delmar”. But not all of his ideas have been so brilliant. Edwards has long been a supporter of installing the trolley system in the Loop. Whether or not such a plan could have been viable, its real-world implementation was not, costing taxpayers millions and providing neither increased tourism nor much of a public good.

Joe isn’t alone in St. Louis-area publicly-funded foibles. Consider, for instance, the public opposition to a Major League Soccer stadium over the past few years, which would have involved tens of millions of dollars in public funds. When the proposal was defeated, the organizers began a plan to create a stadium without spending state and local treasure. And a more recent example, the proposed privatization of Lambert International Airport, was defeated by local groups like Don’t Sell Our Airport and the St. Louis Democratic Socialists of America chapter. One might point to these as examples of the system working: A public vote defeated the MLS stadium proposal, and public opposition defeated the airport privatization plan, led by multimillionaire Republican investor Rex Sinquefield, a man with all Joe Edwards’ defects and none of his virtues. But the system clearly didn’t stop the Loop Trolley, and we’re all poorer and worse off for it.

My opposition to these projects doesn’t come from the fiscal conservative’s impulse to save money in the public treasury. Rather, I use the leftist’s critique that instead of playgrounds and attractions for the professional managerial classes, the money should be spent on social services, the homeless, jobs programs, desperately-needed police reform, and greening the city. I think much of the electorate knows this. Imagine if their representatives on the Board of Alderman and the local Democratic Party weren’t mostly weak shills for property developers and investors. Better yet, imagine if the electorate could determine where the money went themselves. Imagine, in short, a community where what touches all is decided by all.

P.S. The Trolley broke down on its final ride in front of Joe Edwards’ Peacock Loop Diner. On a thematically-related note, when Edwards rolled out plans for the diner in 2013, he said he chose the name because “everybody likes [peacocks]—I don’t think anyone has a bad thing to say about a peacock.” Amazing.

The post Socialism and the Loop Trolley appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Proposition D on Missouri’s 2018 midterm ballot asks voters whether to increase the tax on a gallon of gas. Should you vote for it?  Good question. If passed, Proposition D would raise the gas tax by a total of 10 cents, over four years. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it? After all, tax included, a gallon of gas in Missouri costs less than the same gallon in Illinois. You could argue that we’re getting a disproportionate bargain, and that voting yes would bring Missouri in line with neighboring states.

According to a summary published by the League of Women Voters of Metropolitan St. Louis, the current tax is 17 cents per gallon for both gasoline and diesel fuel, compared to Iowa’s 31 cents for gasoline and 32.5 cents for diesel fuel. The higher tax is estimated to generate at least $288 million annually for the Highway Patrol and $123 million annually to local governments for road construction.

I generally support tax increases, because it’s clear from the necessity of continuous cutbacks in services, Missouri government is not adequately funded. But then I started thinking about the regressive nature of sales taxes, and how this increase would put a disproportionate burden on people at lower income levels. And then I read an op-ed by former Missouri legislator Joan Bray. As someone who served 18 years on the Missouri legislature—with a major focus on transportation — Bray’s opinion carries weight. She is urging voters to say no to Prop D, saying that it contains a “poison pill that should outrage voters.”  Here’s her argument, as published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Just like the last two proposals for gas tax hikes, this increase would disproportionately help rural areas by funding only interstates and “letter highways.” Under the state constitution, gas tax goes solely to roads and bridges. None can be spent for urban or rural public transportation, passenger rail, ferries or bicycle paths. This proposal makes sure those modes continue to starve.

I had hoped that after the sound drubbing voters gave the last two gas tax hikes, the concrete cartel in Jefferson City would realize it should address the plight of all transportation modes. But it decided to obfuscate instead. It is promoting the tax for safety — funding the Highway Patrol — while shifting the patrol’s current appropriation to roads and bridges.

The bill’s poison pill defies responsible distribution of state revenue. It sets up the “Emergency State Freight Bottleneck Fund” into which the Legislature would appropriate general revenue. At last, the road and bridge guys could legally take from the pot of money already gutted by tax cuts to build their pet projects.

Who would lose from this sleight of hand? Anyone who relies on state funding for elementary and secondary schools, universities, mental health care, Medicaid, hospitals, criminal justice and prisons, environmental protections, and, not to forget, other modes of transportation without their own special tax like roads and bridges have.

Once again, myopic transportation planners in Jefferson City need to be denied. Locking the state into more funding that ignores the transportation needs of millions of urban, rural and poor Missourians seals the state’s fate in concrete.

Here’s the exact wording that you’ll see on the ballot under Missouri Proposition D. You decide. Full disclosure: Unfortunately, I voted absentee—and I voted yes—before Bray’s op-ed was published. Oops. Someone out there, please cancel me out with a no vote.

Shall Missouri law be amended to fund Missouri state law enforcement by increasing the motor fuel tax by two and one half cents per gallon annually for four years beginning July 1, 2019, exempt Special Olympic, Paralympic, and Olympic prizes from state taxes, and to establish the Emergency State Freight Bottleneck Fund? If passed, this measure will generate at least $288 million annually to the State Road Fund to provide for the funding of Missouri state law enforcement and $123 million annually to local governments for road construction and maintenance.

The post Gas tax [Proposition D] on MO ballot: I voted yes before I knew what I was doing appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Gooey butter cake, the Gateway Arch, the Cardinals, and telling jokes on Halloween. There is no doubt that all of these things remind you of the city of St. Louis, Missouri. But what if, when you thought about St. Louis, you pictured the MetroLink or a MetroBus similar to how we think of the Subway in NYC or the El in Chicago? Well, if St. Louis ever wants public transportation to be as prominent as it is in these two cities, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Currently our Metro system spans a total of 46 miles throughout St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Clair County (Illinois). Within the MetroLink specifically, ridership has declined 11% since June of 2017. Some of the possible reasons for the decline in ridership include the negative security perceptions of the community, the relocation of the Rams lessening traffic downtown, lower gas prices, and the increase in rideshare services such as Uber and Lyft. So far, Lyft has created $15 million in revenue for local drivers in their 16 months of service in STL. Recently, the company struck a deal with Chaifetz Arena at St. Louis University to create a designated area for Lyft drivers to pick up customers. Just this past August, Lyft provided around 5,000 rides for people during the PGA tour in St. Louis. Rideshare programs like this are generally more appealing to consumers mainly because of the ease at which one can summon a ride through a simple app on their cell phone.

In St. Louis, feeling safe riding a train to and from work is important if we ever want to have a successful public transit system within this city. It’s a given fact that when people feel unsafe using a specific form of transportation, they are more likely to find other methods of transport to get to and from places. According to the Belleville News Democrat (BND), in 2017 there were “1.4 violent crimes, such as homicide or robbery, per 100,000 boardings” on the MetroLink. By comparison, “8.5 people per 100,000 Illinois residents died in a motor vehicle crash” that same year. So, for all the people who believe that everyone driving their own car to and from work would be safer, that’s not necessarily true.

Currently, our MetroLink stations have no turnstiles on their platforms, which makes it easier for people to sneak onto the trains. Every now and then, there are fare inspectors who will randomly ask riders to show their time stamped ticket as proof that they paid for the ride, but this becomes more of a challenge when trains get super crowded. An additional safety concern is that there are currently no connecting train cars for police or passengers to move between while the train is moving. This means that it is harder for passengers to escape possible danger that arises as the train is in motion.

While many of these concerns can be solved through the reconstruction of trains and stations, there are still safety concerns regarding policing policies throughout the system. For instance, the Metro security guards don’t share a common radio frequency with the local police departments, nor is there a common radio system shared among the three different security jurisdictions of St. Louis City, St. Louis County, and St. Clair County. If this did exist, it would make it easier to deploy officers when and where it’s necessary if a train is in motion. Other possible improvements to security include adding turnstiles, fences, or some sort of barrier, putting a guard on each platform, or having just a single access point to platforms instead of multiple entry points.

As a response to this growing uncertainty that St. Louisans have towards the MetroLink, St. Louis County officials have decided to delay the study of further expansion of the MetroLink until they have completed an evaluation of security practices used within the system. Keep in mind that the new Cortex station has been the only new station to open in the past 10 years of the MetroLink system. Going back to the security assessment, it will be carried out by an engineering company named WSP USA. This investigation of the 38 MetroLink stations in MO/IL will include looking at the lack of coordination between local municipalities across the system and reviewing the general policies of each police force. The study is expected to be completed by January 2019.

On the other side of the Mississippi in St. Clair County, they have been actively implementing new measures to increase safety on their trains. An example being that they have a deputy on every train from 5:00PM – 1:00AM in locations where higher crime has been reported. As a result of this, there has been a 7% decrease in crime on the MetroLink in this county. Both STL City and STL County need to take note and recognize that if they want to see more people taking transit, then they better step up their game and patrol more officers.

Throughout all the chaos of trying to increase public transit use, there is one group, Citizens for Modern Transit (CMT), that has been somewhat successful. The purpose of this group is to “…lead efforts for an integrated, affordable, and convenient public transportation system with light rail expansion as the critical component that will drive economic growth to improve quality of life in the St. Louis region. One of their more popular programs is called “Try and Ride” which helps first time riders become more familiar with the Metro system. So far, they have helped over 5,800 people through providing services such as personalized route information, free fare for an entire month, and registration in the Guaranteed Ride Program. This programs allows travelers to use ride-hailing services such as Lyft or Uber in case of sickness, unscheduled overtime at work, other personal emergencies, etc. CMT will provide up to $60 per ride in these instances.

Of course will always be pros and cons to public transportation, but for a city currently in the midst of a battle over public transit, privatizing our local airport may not be the best idea. Currently, there is an active push to privatize St. Louis Lambert International Airport, which falls within St. Louis City jurisdiction. The headliner for this project is Rex Sinquefield, a well-known financial contributor to political campaigns in Missouri. His nonprofit organization, Grow Missouri, helped pay for STL’s approved application sent to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). This whole idea of privatizing the airport was introduced in early 2017 when Mayor Slay was still in office, and has now been passed onto Mayor Krewson by default. St. Louis City has selected members for the FLY314 Coalition of Advisors (supported by Grow MO aka Rex) whose job is to work closely with the Board of Estimate and Apportionment to look at ideas from interested investment partners. Supposedly, their job is to also inform the community and airport operations throughout this process, but unfortunately, it is being done under the radar, hidden from public view. Airport privatization needs to be approved by the FAA, Board of Aldermen, Board of Estimate and Apportionment, and a majority of the airlines at Lambert Airport in order to pass.

However, if St. Louis ever hopes to see the day where public transit is a main method of transportation, we have to use a more efficient process than the one used in the whole Loop trolley ordeal, which by the way, is still not in full service! According to the 2018 State of the St. Louis Workforce Report conducted by St. Louis Community College, one of the top five potential barriers to expanding employment is lack of transportation. Thus, if we are able to make using our public transportation system safer, easier, and generally more enjoyable, it’ll benefit our workforce, eventually improving St. Louis as a whole.

Links:
https://custapp.marketvolt.com/cv.aspx?cm=1198762691&x=51036870&cust=427641269

That Guy | Metro St. Louis

https://www.bnd.com/news/local/article210317754.html
https://www.stltoday.com/news/traffic/along-for-the-ride/st-louis-county-delays-study-of-future-metrolink-expansion/article_0637637f-f55f-50b8-b133-b2c104ff6239.html
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/metrolink-study-to-focus-on-justifying-project-showing-strong-local/article_013f1546-9cad-57fb-8fa1-c051f7363e4f.html
https://www.stltoday.com/news/traffic/along-for-the-ride/efforts-to-improve-security-on-metrolink-move-forward-but-slowly/article_1799c5c7-eacf-5ffa-939d-be41cabd6a0c.html
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/try-try-again-st-louis-county-seeks-firm-to-study/article_cffe1ad1-ad2c-5a2f-8b1d-68cd31c3e09d.html

CMT’s Try & Ride Program

System Maps

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/tough-to-gauge-risk-to-metrolink-riders/article_c3e4a153-4446-50a0-b227-f2a83b191aa5.html
https://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/news/2018/08/14/expand-metrolink-ridership-falls-as-subsidies-grow.html
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/latest-loop-trolley-opening-guesstimate-mid-autumn-at-the-latest/article_bb26b910-778d-5db3-9d83-7db2674d0398.html#tracking-source=home-top-story-1
https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/top-city-officials-vote-to-begin-exploration-of-privatizing-lambert/article_14e304e2-9f86-5b11-bdd1-dfc67fc30735.html
https://www.masstransitmag.com/press_release/12429091/metro-transit-invites-region-to-celebrate-stl-car-free-day-on-september-21

The post St. Louis public transportation needs to get on track appeared first on Occasional Planet.

One of the challenges that progressives frequently face is that they like to be sticklers for facts, at least wherever possible. And since a basic tenet of progressive beliefs is that many societal problems can best be solved through pro-active engagement by the federal government, it becomes frustrating when then federal government does not acquit itself well.

In our local community of St. Louis, Missouri, there seem to be three public works projects with considerable federal funding that seem to involve potentially unwise expenditures of those federal bucks. These local projects are often where citizens get to meet the federal government “up close and personal,” so when they are lemons, it can definitely color the confidence that citizens have in the feds to address large-scale problems. Most public works programs start off in the “aggravation lane” because they often cause disruption and inconvenience well before the first presumed benefit of the work ever appears.

Example 1 — Delmar Trolley

A $51 million project (behind schedule) in St. Louis is the Loop Trolley running 2.2 miles from the University City Loop near Washington University to the Missouri History Museum. With a transportation project, a good initial question is “does anyone travel from Point ‘A’ to Point ‘B?’ In the case of the U. City trolley, the answer is that people do indeed convene at either end of the route, but rarely do they traverse the exact route. There will be intermediate stops along the route, but none will be high capacity venues. The trolley is the brainchild of University City entrepreneur Joe Edwards who has committed most of his life to make the area in which he grew up into both a livable and exciting place to live.

A trolley is quaint, clever, and unique. Running along a major corridor, it can be very helpful to a region’s transportation needs, particularly if it has an exclusive right-of-way. But with the U. City trolley, it is designed to go down existing roadway, streets that coincidentally used to be home to streetcars. The tracks were pulled up fifty years ago because the streetcars and automobiles could not conveniently co-exist. At this point, there is no reason to believe that the new trolley will have some new magical feature that will allow automobiles to comfortably move, especially since this route has always been nothing but stop and go.

Over the course of the two years of construction, once vital businesses have bitten the dust because construction made it difficult for consumers to get to entry points. The bottom line seems to be that this idea may have been considered an asset to gentrification of an area that was struggling to rebound, but collateral damage has already been significant and it’s unlikely that when completed it will come close to meeting its intended goal. This will not look good for either the local governments or the federal government.

Example 2 — Kiener Plaza

A second project is revamping downtown’s Kiener Plaza. The $19 million project is designed to “better connect to downtown’s urban fabric, be flexible for events year-round, and offer new urban park amenities.” The problem is that the current plaza does exactly that. The photos below show how it was effectively used in 2011 in the Occupy St. Louis movement.

It was a great town hall place with an amphitheater where citizens could gather to take on issues of the day. It might have been mistaken for downtown Athens 2,500 years ago. It had a vibrancy that is lacking in most of St. Louis. But now it is demolished. It is being replaced by a “water garden,” which indeed will be nice for families, particularly children. The problem is that such a park already exists only a block away. Because the new plaza will have streaming water, it will not be a venue where citizens can gather to engage in public dialogue. Why is this $19 million being spent? There are no clear answers. What seems most likely is that local officials want to extinguish public protest downtown and they are being aided in their efforts by federal dollars.

Example 3 — Forest Park Parkway at Kingshighway

Finally, there is the surprising news that within a few weeks, work will begin on eliminating the Forest Park Parkway underground viaduct beneath Kingshighway and replacing it with a new “at-grade” crossing. Proponents say that it will improve traffic flow and make the intersection more pedestrian friendly. But how can traffic at an intersection move more smoothly than it does when one street goes under and the other street goes over? And how will pedestrians benefit from a thoroughfare through a park? There must be some answer, and it probably has something to do with the main property owners in the area, Barnes-Jewish Hospitals and Washington University Medical Schools. Their reasoning may be even sound, although not yet publicly disclosed. But the project is going to take a year of work and inconvenience. It doesn’t look good for either the city or the federal government.

I recently completed a two-week trip around America on Amtrak. All of the federal employees were extremely friendly and helpful. That speaks well for the federal government. But questionable local decisions with federal complicity do not engender faith in the federal government. I think that it would behoove progressives to work to ensure that federal monies are neither wasted at the local level nor become an enabling factor for the kind of frustration that construction projects often bring. Call these projects what you will, but they’re all pork. Some pork is better than others and we need to be more discerning.

The post How the federal government may not be serving St. Louis well appeared first on Occasional Planet.

My wife and I, along with friends, spent a wonderful week in Arizona.  We admired the Grand Canyon on a perfect April Day.   We toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture school outside Scottsdale.  We visited Sedona, the red rocks canyons, and, the picturesque mountains below Flagstaff.  On four evenings we watched the Cardinals play the Diamondbacks in a domed stadium where parking next door is just $12.00 and $8.00 gets you two and a half scoops of Cold Stone Creamery ice cream in a waffle bowl with fudge and caramel topping.  The week before we got to Phoenix afternoon highs were in the high 90’s.  Our week the thermometers never crept above 81○F.

The week verged on perfect…except for the bookend encounters with the T.S.A.

Yes, the Transportation Security Administration involves itself in every trip involving an airplane.  Once again, they did their utmost to ruin my vacation.

Back in 2009 a complicated chunk of metal and wires went into my upper left chest.  That creates two issues.  My Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator has enough metal mass to set off a standard metal detector several feet away.  It also shows up as a black hole on a backscatter x-ray screen or a millimeter wave scanner used in airports.  Whether that hole is a lifesaver or the latest ISIS suicide toy requires a bit of investigation.  I understand that.

The second, more important issue is that it hurts like hell when my ICD is exposed to high energy electromagnetic devices.  A standard metal detector really gets my attention.  Those backscatter x-rays have almost taken me to the floor twice.  The millimeter wave scanner itself doesn’t use much energy in its scans, but, beneath the device the business part of the machine creates a pretty substantial field which I keenly feel.

On the afternoon of April 23 I went through T.S.A. at the main terminal at Lambert International Airport.  I had my driver license and my I.D. card, issued by the manufacturer of my defibrillator, in my hand when I told the T.S.A. agent that I needed a hand pat-down:  “We’re not doing that here today.”  No pat down, no option.  Wave good-bye to my three traveling companions or go through the millimeter wave scanner.

The tingling calmed down after about a minute, allowing me to put my shoes and belt back on before I had to walk to the gate.

The trip home came in two segments, Phoenix to Denver, then Denver to St. Louis.  Sky Harbor Airport will never be my happy place.

Even on a clear Saturday morning, the security line crept slowly.  Oh, off to my left they did do a long hand pat-down on a tall, attractive young blond woman in a tank top.  (After a long time in line even prurient entertainment is welcome.)  The T.S.A. staffers handling the item x-ray lines seemed a bit over zealous, even when iPads or smartphones or other items were very spread out in the bins.  The conveyor belt stopped, retreated and moved forward time after time.  That slowed the proceedings.

Finally, I got to the metal detector and millimeter wave machines where – as instructed – I asked for my hand pat down.

Now, T.S.A. agents don’t like pat-downs.  After all, they take more work than nodding as people walk through technology.  And, the job of a T.S.A. screener sucks.  The hours are long and the pay mediocre.  The people you screen won’t like you.  Despite limited representation by the American Federation of Government Employees, they serve pretty much at the whim of mid-level bureaucrats.  Per Glassdoor.com, full time pay for experienced screeners is in the $37,000 a year neighborhood:  who goes after a $37,000 job with a lot of hassles?  Someone making $25,000 a year in another job with a lot of hassles.

So, you have a mess of people struggling to stretch for the bottom rung of the middle-class watching people who can afford expensive trips to fun places saunter past you.  Putting travelers in their place is one of your few work place pleasures.

In Phoenix that meant I had to wait, crammed into a non-space between a x-ray conveyor and a metal detector as dozens of other travelers squeezed by me.  The wait is standard, the nine minutes in Phoenix pretty much standard.  Then things went downhill.

First, as they do, they isolated my bins off the x-ray belt from the good people’s stuff.  Only isolated isn’t the proper word.  My stuff was out of my sight (but within reach of all the other travelers) while the screener got up close and personal with all the inside surfaces of all my clothes, including my Dockers and my all-cotton briefs.  After being probed once in front of the crowd, the screener rubbed a special strip of paper over his gloves, then fed the paper into a machine – which gave him the wrong answer.  That meant a call for a supervisor, a move to a private room and a second, even more personal pat-down.

Meanwhile, my lovely wife was told she couldn’t fly because her stylish top had a metal zipper front.  That encounter got heated when her pat-down screener said she didn’t like my wife’s tone and the screener invoked the trump card – we can keep you from your flight.

In my little space they repeated the paper strip test, again failing.  The third pat-down was getting pretty close to my annual prostate exam.  The screener and supervisor then gave up.  They couldn’t get the machine to like the paper strips but they couldn’t find anything.  Besides, the loud lady in line was making them uncomfortable.  (They finally relented and let her head for the gate.)

We changed airlines in Denver.  Unfortunately, after disembarking at one of the fringe gates (meaning we had to walk through a snow shower to get into the terminal), we had to get our bags, re-check them and again go through security.

That airport security staff was not having a good weekend:  TSA Admits mistake after Amy Van Dyken-Rouen said she was ‘humiliated’ by agent at Denver airport.  [www.thedenverchannel.com  5/2/16]  Amy won six Olympic medals before an ATV accident put her in a wheelchair.  Still, she travels extensively as a motivational speaker.   As she put it, “They go around your breasts, they basically go under your butt and they just grab things, not grab, they touch things that are not appropriate…”

Again, crammed into the narrow space between electromagnetic energy emitting technology, I waited and waited and waited for a pat-down.  Then I waited some more.  I could see my friends and my wife across the terminal, watching for me to emerge.  My iPad, phone, wallet and other personal property was in some unseen place as scores of other travelers picked-up their gear and moved through.  I waited some more.  A gentleman came up behind me.  The screener/hall monitor asked if he wanted to go through the millimeter scanner.  “I decline,” is all he said.

With two of us filling the space, after a couple of more minutes, they finally brought over staff to do the pat-downs.

Last week The New York Times headlined a long piece, Catching a Flight?  Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security [ www.nytimes.com  5/2/16].  The article quoted the head of the Charlotte airport calling the T.S.A. ability to screen passengers on Good Friday a “fiasco.”  The number of screeners has declined by about 5,800 due to budget cuts.  Washington’s answer is to hire 768 screeners.  That will still leave airlines with unhappy passengers missing flights, “But, there’s not much airlines can do, except warn passengers to show-up three hours before takeoff…”

My group had almost three hours between flights in Denver.  Our overpriced late lunch got delayed while I waited and finally went through my pat-down.  The screener was less intrusive than his Phoenix colleague but added a new wrinkle.  My bins of items, including a canvas bag for under the seat with my Cardinals road hat, part of a newspaper, my iPad and other items were all spread out on a steel counter and individually examined:  what the screener hoped to see that had escaped many rads of x-rays baffled me, but it took another five minutes.

I was asked why I wasn’t TSA-Pre, paying the $85 to avoid some of the hassles (the theory being that people with extra money are less likely to blow-up airplanes?).  Well, my friends were TSA-Pre – and were signaled out for ‘extra screening,’ including pat-downs (even after they chose a line as far from me as they could).

When I was a kid I have a vague memory of an American propaganda film telling us how bad things were in the Soviet Union.  The prime example was that Soviets couldn’t move about their nation without special permission and special identification.  In the Clint Eastwood Cold War flick Firefox (1982), the hard part of getting old stone eyes in position to steal a revolutionary Soviet fighter plane prototype was getting him through the internal checkpoints with a dead man’s I.D.  (Yes, Clint’s friends wasted him for his I.D. but he was a bad guy so it was cool.)

Here we are in the United States now tolerating a system where low-level agents of the government decide if we get to exercise our constitutional right to travel freely.

Imagine if a Clayton cop stopped lunch time strollers on Central Avenue and stuck his gloved hands in other people’s pants in full view of other citizens?  His probable cause – they were on the street.

The Tea Party would start the demonstrations before happy hour.  As they should.

So let’s go over the Transportation Security Administration conundrum.  To protect Americans and the constitution we cherish, T.S.A. violates our personal privacy, ‘humiliates’ women in wheelchairs, put hands inside our underwear and threatens to prevent us from using our purchased airline tickets.   Kind of like destroying a village to pacify it, we let government violate our rights to protect them.

Yes, terrorism is real.  But is the response intelligent and effective?  Tests of T.S.A. effectiveness inevitably find mock guns and explosives getting through screenings.  The ‘intelligent’ part I think has been already answered.

And people wonder why I hate to fly.

The post TSA misses guns and knives, but nails me for my cardiac device appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Every once in a while, we get a clear view of a major disconnect in the Republican Brain.This certainly is true with the responses of many GOP office-holders to the recent tragic crash of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia.

In terms of what happened, the train was going 106 mph in a 50 mph zone with a tight curve, as it headed north to New York.The train derailed,  leading cars to fall apart and tumble down inclines. Of the 238 passengers and 5 crew on board, 8 were killed and over 200 injured, 11 critically.

It has still not been determined if the cause of the crash was human error by the engineer, mechanical failure of existing equipment, or even the remote possibility that a projectile hit the engine window and disoriented the engineer.

Officials of the National Transportation Safety Board said that the crash might have been prevented by a computerized, speed-limiting system called Positive Train Control (PTC) that was operational elsewhere on the Northeast corridor.

When it comes to understanding why the PTC system was not in place on this stretch of track, we have a classic example of how Republican thinking tends to be illogical. Shortly after the crash, House Speaker John Boehner was asked if the crash was in part due to Amtrak not being well-funded. Boehner jumped on the question and said, “Are you really going to ask such a stupid question?” He went on to say:

“Listen, you know, they started this yesterday, it’s all about funding; it’s all about funding. Well, obviously it’s not about funding. The train was going twice the speed limit. Adequate funds are there, no money’s been cut from rail safety, and the House passed a bill earlier this spring to reauthorize Amtrak, and authorize a lot of these programs. And it’s hard for me to imagine that people take the bait on some of the nonsense that gets spewed around here.”

(21-second video)

Amtrak’s budget has been repeatedly cut by GOP lawmakers. Boehner is missing the obvious. Had more money been appropriated to Amtrak, it would likely have been spent it on installing PTC in that stretch of track.This action was already in Amtrak’s budget for 2015, and with a few more dollars, they could have completed this work much earlier, as well as many other necessary safety projects.

Boehner was not alone in his stance. Rep. Bill Shuster (R-PA), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which has oversight of Amtrak, said the crash “did not have anything to do with money.” His committee that bottled up requests for increased Amtrak spending on safety.

Rep. John Mica (R-FL) took it considerably further, saying that opening the commuter rail market to private investment was the solution to what he called a “third-world rail system …. run in a Soviet-style operation.” His memory seems to fail him. For years, passenger train service was in the private sector (with considerable government assistance). When airline business boomed in the second half of the twentieth century, passenger service plummeted.

Yet, in certain areas of the country, particularly the northeast corridor from Washington, DC to Boston, demand was still high. One only needs to drive from Washington to Boston to be convinced that it is good policy to have alternate forms of transportation that can take cars off the roads. That route is the bread and butter of Amtrak. For it to be sustainable, it must be safe.

Train fares alone do not provide that money for Amtrak. Since its inception. it has had federal subsides (as the private railroads previously had). It is in the national interest to keep Amtrak solvent, which means a combination of sales revenue and federal subsidies to make it safe, convenient, and effective.

Republicans can laugh all the way to the bank as they continue to pour government largesse upon our largest corporations, particularly in the financial industry. But for them to not see the connection between government assistance and safe rail service is not just poor public policy, it is a window into the curious and often malicious Republican brain.

The post Amtrak crash shows disconnect in Republican Brain appeared first on Occasional Planet.

It took exactly one, tersely worded email to blow the lid off Chris Christie’s “Bridge-gate” scandal. The now infamous “Time for some traffic problems in Ft. Lee” email from Christie’s deputy chief-of-staff, Bridget Ann Kelly, to David Wildstein at the Port Authority set in motion the politically engineered traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge, the four-days of massive inconvenience to New Jersey citizens, and the potentially politically disastrous revelations about it.

Without that seven-word note [eight, if you count Ft. and Lee as two separate words], it’s likely that we’d know nothing about what happened behind the scenes.

So, why the hell did Bridget Kelly send that damning email?

To me, it’s all about old-school vs. new-school communications. In a previous world order, before email/Facebook/texting/Twitter, if you had something—especially something incriminating—that you wanted to tell a co-worker, you’d either pick up the phone and call his/her extension, or you’d walk across the hall to his or her office, or meet at an out-of-the-way café or bar or parking garage, and communicate face-to-face. (If you were an idiot, you might put your secret information in a memo and either send it through the office mail system, put a postage stamp [what’s that, again?] on it and drop it in a mailbox, or put it on your co-worker’s desk.)  But that’s old school, antiquated, quaint, slow—and, by the way, less traceable.

So, there it is: If Kelly and her co-conspirators had simply called each other, or had a secret meeting, or walked across the hall, the whole thing might have remained under the radar. It’s a lot harder to subpoena a phone conversation [unless, of course, you’re the NSA or the FBI or the FISA court, and I doubt that any of those organizations were giving a hoot—at the time– about the inner workings of Chris Christie’s office or of his politically vengeful mind.] Old-style incriminating memos—with no carbon copies [what are those?]—can be burned or otherwise destroyed, and with them—poof!—the evidence of conspiracy or other wrongdoings.

But new-school communications are the way it is. It’s easier. It’s faster, it’s freakin’ instantaneous. And that’s the way we like it—until something like Bridge-gate happens. I suspect that’s what occurred here.  Electronic communications are the default, the way most staffers like Bridget have been doing things since day one, and who can blame a generation raised on speedy, keystroke communications from using the technology that’s available?

Unfortunately, the need for speed makes it too easy to forget that technology is not always our friend: Richard Nixon fell in love with the idea of recording his conversations for posterity on an audiotaping system—state-of-the-art at the time—and look what happened to him.

But maybe there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this—even if you’re not doing something wrong. (One could speculate, of course, that Kelly et al didn’t think what they were doing was in any way nefarious or in need of concealment—maybe dirty tricks and political retribution were simply part of the atmosphere in the Christie administration—part of his no-nonsense, tough-guy cachet—and didn’t need to be hidden.) It might be helpful, even in seemingly innocent circumstances, to pause before sending and to consider whether what we’re about to say electronically might be better said face-to-face.

I’ll bet Bridget Ann Kelly is thinking that right now.

The post Old-school communications might have saved Chris Christie a lot of embarrassment appeared first on Occasional Planet.

I’ve done some traveling in recent days, and when it comes to travel, these days are not ordinary. The federal government is closely watching many of us, wherever we might go. Our whereabouts are often tracked by private firms that are “just trying to protect us.”

The most obvious example of the tentacles of security impacting the way we travel is the work of the Transportation Security Administrations (T.S.A.). Long-gone are the days when someone could rush into an airport, buy a ticket and then beat a speed record going from the ticket counter to the actual doorway of the plane. Also gone are the exciting days of being able to go to the gate in advance to wait for a close relative or friend to arrive on the next inbound flight.

I took the Capitol Limited Amtrak train from Washington, DC to Chicago. The journey was most relaxing, and so was the transition from land to rail. We arrived at the refurbished Union Station in Washington, checked in at the ticket window with no wait, and were directed to seats in a special waiting room for passengers with sleeping car arrangements. I must confess that this was a special privilege; a convenience that I was willing to and able to pay extra for.

Twenty-five minutes before the train was scheduled to depart, we were escorted through a door that took us right to the train. Climbing the steps to the car with luggage was more challenging than boarding a plane, but we made it. What we would otherwise have checked  on an airplane, we simply put on a luggage rack on Amtrak. It stayed there for nearly 18 hours, and as has always been the case on previous journeys, it remained undisturbed the entire trip, even though anyone could have grabbed the suitcases and absconded with them. We went to our room, enjoyed watching the bustle around the train until we left at our appointed hour. A few minutes later, the conductor scanned our tickets. No muss; no fuss; no quizzical looks; no disrobing; no x-rays.

Beside having terrific sleeping accommodations, we had food that was second to none. The journey went through Appalachia, which was both beautiful and haunting, because the landscape was dotted with pockets of poverty and environmental scars.

We arrived at Chicago, although late, and could easily unload our luggage and walk to the station. Only at that point were we confronted with the inconvenience of security. Taxis could no longer drive into the tunnel by baggage claim to pick up passengers. We had to lug our belongings some distance to the street. Not fun, but acceptable.

Like most passengers on the train, I would like to see Amtrak greatly expanded and equipped with more modern technology. However, I hesitate to push too hard for this change, because I feel as if train travel is a hidden American secret. It’s possible that if terrorists targeted trains, they would have much more success than they have with planes. So I enjoyed the trip, was pleased that it was entirely the work of a government agency rather than a private corporation, and hoped that these glory days would continue as long as possible.

The post Amtrak: A respite from intrusive security appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Bogotá, Colombia, has been celebrated and emulated worldwide these past 10 years for its innovative Transmilenio system of articulated buses. Reports regularly appear in print that cities far afield, including New York City, are interested in replicating Bogotá’s Transmilenio system. Here at home the system has done well in imposing order on a chaotic urban environment. Transmilenio buses run along designated lanes separated from daily traffic, and generally offer speedy, if at times very crowded, massive ubran public transportation.

All has been well and good for over 10 years. New Transmilenio lines have been successfully added to the system, most recently arriving almost, but not quite, to Bogotá’s airport. The system works efficiently, daily and consistently. Not quite a subway, not a streetcar exactly, not simply a bus, the Transmilineo initiative in Bogotá is a great urban compromise in transportation, an attempt to offer a speedier and lower cost alternative to a 20 or 50 year investment in subway construction. The citizenry of Bogotá, a city of no small size, has given the Transmilenio system a major thumbs up. The system is used by millions daily.

We were doing good.

We are accustomed in the United States somehow to believing that, anywhere other than here, radical changes in urban planning are happening daily, and that those changes are more citizen-friendly, more well thought-out and more successfully implemented than those here at home. Urban planners elsewhere are so much more adept in planning than we are in the US – so goes the thinking. Somehow, in the general mindset, we think that we are behind, less capable of initatiating change for the better than those anywhere other than here. These innovative changes, we believe may be happening in Spain, or in Canada or just possibly in an emergent economy such as Colombia.

Well maybe. Perhaps not. Do we lack perspective?

Back to Bogotá, to where we were doing so well. Here in Bogotá, Colombia, we have decided that we need to unify our non-Transmilenio bus system, our chaotic, broadly diverse, urban, antiquated, daily- polluting patchwork of buses into our very successful Transmilenio network. This sounds very good. Why not marry success to further success. Let’s have an integrated public transportation system unified under the already established Transmilenio brand.

What a great idea!

We could call this integration something unifying, something like Transmilenio Bus, for example. But no, no, no. no. Too simple. No.

Let’s complicate things. Hey, what the hell, let’s change the whole endeavor to something hard to pronounce like SITP. No, not the whole system, just the new bus part. SITP has such a ring to it! Try saying SITP fast three times in a row, in Spanish or in English. But wait. Why don’t we add the word Urbano to that!  Why not? Let’s call this new associated Transmilenio bus system the SITP Urbano. Okay, we’re good. We have come up with a name that is really hard to pronounce and without reference to what we were looking for, the already established Transmilenio brand. But what the hell, we have a new bus system, the SITP Urbano.

Let’s build the buses, give them their SITP (I am never sure if it is SITP or SIPT) logos, add their unifying blue color, and give them a sophisticated new electonic access system, and get them onto the streets of the city as fast as we can. But wait, shouldn’t we have a public education plan in place first, tell people what we are doing, build up to an official launching?  Nah. Shouldn’t we have vending machines that issue the new sophisticated bus passes at designated bus stops?  Nah. Where will people purchase these passes needed for bus entry? People will figure it out on their own. They really don’t need us to tell them what we are doing. Our citizens are very smart!

Guess what. We have had SITP Urbano buses roaming the streets of Bogotá for over a year now and almost nobody knows how to access these buses. We add new routes regularly, monthly it seems. We now have quite a lot of blue SITP buses plying our streets, adding to our urban congestion, traveling their routes generally empty of passengers.

It does not help matters that the designers of the system forgot to provide an easily identifiable means of recognizing where these buses are going, an electronic destination or bus number easily visible at night, for example. No, a non-descript placard, impossible to read, propped up on the interior bus windshield proports to tell you, if you have hawk vision, where the bus in question might be going.

But never mind where the bus is going, how do you pay to get on one of these buses. No, you cannot use cash as you can on the buses being replaced. Nope, you cannot use a Transmilenio electronic card, used throughtout the Transmilenio system. And so?

I have tried more than once to figure out how to get on one of these buses. One of these empty buses passes right by the intersection adjacent to my building. Coming home, it would work out great if I could use it. It turns out I have to apply for a boarding pass on line.   You have to have a fixed address and telephone number to apply. And you have the option of supplying your blood type, sex, occupation, and place of work. Apparently, the system wants to know my life in great detail before issuing me a pass. If you are a casual tourist or visitor to the city, you are going to be out of luck!  You want to go from here to there, sorry, no can do unless you have a couple of weeks available to apply for a transit pass. Funny, this system doesn’t ring a bell in any other major metropolitan center. Up to now, I have been able to get on a bus in London or New York without being vetted first.

So, I can apply for a pass on line. Can they mail or deliver that pass to me electronically?  No. To pick up my boarding pass once approved, I will need to go as far as the airport or to a few very specific out of the way other Transmilenio stations. This of course is not a Transmilenio pass. It will not allow me to board a Transmmilenio bus, simply the convenience of retrieving my pass at one of their stations. This pass is issued by a completely different company from the one that issues the pass that I need to get on a Tranmilenio bus. The Tranmileno authorities are up-beat, saying that a million passengers have already gotten their SITP transit passes. Well, perhaps those first million passengers went through the arduous process of getting a bus pass just for the fun of it, because one thing is for sure they are not riding these buses daily.

Is your head spinning yet?  I decided, as apparently have millions of other Bogotanos, that it was not worth the effort to figure out how to get on one of these new SITP Urbano buses. Nobody seems to have thought it worthwhile to offer a transitional way to board a bus already operating on the streets of the city, proferring cash say, or a widely available Transmilenio bus pass. Nope. Better to have these new SITP Urbano buses ride the streets of the city empty, taunting, like some kind of mirage ghost bus line of the future, than to encourage the citizenry to board!

“Bogotá Humana,” the Human City, is the motto of the present administration in the city of Bogotá, the same administration responsible for crowding the streets with a spanking new urban transporation system of SITP Urbano buses, unavailable to what appears to be about 99% of the citizenry.

Come on guys. There must be a better way to do this!

The post How not to upgrade a public bus system: Bogotá, Colombia appeared first on Occasional Planet.