Taking our traffic conversations beyond simple complaining
When there’s a sudden lull in the cocktail party conversation in the Chicago area and no particular appetite for talking politics, a handful of topics invariably can be pressed into service to revive the energy. One of the most reliable is the traffic.
It’s not so much that people love to complain about how hard it is to get to concerts, plays, sports events and all the other attractions of the city and suburbs. It’s more that you sometimes just have to vent. To vent the frustration. To vent the unpredictabilities. To vent the discomfort and annoyance and anger.
And to know that your friends and neighbors share your pain.
That’s all well and good for a few minutes of release over drinks and hors d’oeuvres, but what about when you want to discuss practical solutions — faster or easier ways to get around, how to avoid the latest construction mess, whether a train or bus is an option and how much it all costs or who should pay?
That’s when it’s time to turn to Marni Pyke, the Daily Herald’s senior transportation and projects writer and our In Transit columnist for more than two decades.
Having attended countless Illinois Tollway Board meetings, read scores of Metra budget spreadsheets, interviewed hundreds of engineers, consultants and, yes, listened to the whole range of everyday users’ complaints about the difficulties — and costs — of getting around in Chicago, Marni is among a handful of Chicagoans who truly knows what she’s talking about when the conversation seeks to go beyond the bounds of plain grousing.
Monday’s In Transit column, in which she details no fewer than five major road projects on state highways, the Tollway and elsewhere in the suburbs for an annual preview of the summer traffic headaches ahead, is one example, and it is just a hint of the range of her coverage — and the ways she specifically gears it for readers in the West and Northwest suburbs.
And speaking of range of coverage, she followed that column this week with a short profile on Tuesday of the new temporary chief of the Chicago Department of Aviation and a detailed report on an official review of violence problems on the CTA.
“It's a weird beat,” she says, “because although it's “transportation,” it's not monolithic. You could be reporting on how the Metra fare system works, or why a CTA Blue Line train bounced onto the platform and up an escalator, or how Southwest pilots navigated a go-around to avert a crash at Midway, or why gas prices are up, or the politics behind a CTA, Pace and Metra merger, or previous nepotism on the tollway or runway headings at O'Hare.”
An important factor in Marni’s ability to describe the dynamics of such a complex beat is that she approaches it as a user herself, taking some issue with being the label of “expert” other than being “an expert about driving all around the Chicago region” and having lived and worked from Oak Park to Crystal Lake.
Indeed, she likens herself to a central character in “The Shipping News” by Annie Proulx, in which a journalist who can’t sail moves to Newfoundland and ends up writing a column on shipping.
“I want you to write a column, see,“ the writer’s editor says in the book. “The Shipping News. Column about a boat in the harbor. They'll take to it. Course you don't know nothin' about boats, but that's entertaining, too.”
It’s far from accurate to suggest that Marni “don’t know nothin’ about traffic,” but she does emphasize that she gets a lot of help from readers and other commuters who frequently feed her questions and ideas, citing this one from just this week: “Didn't IDOT repair the bridges on Rte 53 just a few years ago and now they're going to do it again? Was it a result of shoddy workmanship and inferior materials that's causing it to be done all over again? Or are they doing this to keep contractors busy and frustrate commuters?”
Whatever the answers, Marni will find them and pass them along. It may not keep you from complaining, but it will provide some depth and details that will make your cocktail conversations much more authoritative.
• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.