Galesburg, Illinois

Of Interest: downtown, railway museum, children's museum

Restrooms: yes, cleanliness so-so

Tourist Office: no, but brochures in station. Also, bus map on bulletin board.

Other transit: inter-city buses

Hotels: no, all the hotels are out by the interstate.

Galesburg is are car-oriented town that promotes its free parking while letting its sidewalks deteriorate. Predictably, people in Galesburg complain that there is no parking in Galesburg. There is a good bus map in the station, but bus stops have no markers. There are sidewalks along all streets. Unfortunately, there are not maintained. Even so, Galesburg is small enough that a lot of it is within walking distance. Hotels are near the interstate, about an hours walk from the station.

There is a Dollar General store that has a real grocery store with bulk beans, milk, flour, and other things that you can actually cook with. There are two local theaters. Not cinemas, but real live theater. There are multiple banks, so an ATM should not be hard to find. Galesburg also boasts a wide variety of restaurants. There is health foods store a couple of blocks from the station.

Intercity buses stop at the train station and announced before hand. Like I said, there is a good bus map of the local buses, but they do not stop at the station, and there is no sign to tell you where the nearest stop is.

Three different train routes intersect in Galesburg, the Southwest Chief, the California Zephyr, and Illinois Service to Quincy, IL. Chicago is about two and a half hours away by all routes. There are four trains a day to Chicago, but the Southwest Chief and the California Zephyr are both scheduled to go through Galesburg at approximately the same time. Tickets on the California Zephyr to Chicago cannot be booked online, probably because this train is often late.

Two trains a day go to Quincy, an hour and a half away. The Southwest Chief goes south once a day. It takes this train four and a half hours each evening to get to Kansas City before continuing on through Kansas and southern Colorado to Albuquerque, NM (23 hours) and, eventually, downtown Los Angeles (40 hours).

The California Zephyr also passes through once a day on its way south. Trains are usually still on time at this point. They pass through Iowa before arriving at Omaha, NE, six hours later. The train continues on to Denver(16 hours), the Rocky Mountains, Salt Lake City (32 hours), Nevada, and ends near San Francisco at Emeryville, CA (49 hours).

On Station Design

Lost in Penn Station by Julia Turner starts with "Penn Station is a confusing place." Her opinion is not unique. Most people consider Grand Central the better of New York City's two major stations. Ms. Turner's article also mentions that Penn Station serves four times as many people than Grand Central.

Which leads to the point of this article: People will use a station if the trains from that station take them where they need to go at the times that they want to travel.

A good station will help people find their train, and provide services that travelers need. A good station is safe. Poor station design makes it difficult for people to find ticket windows and the trains themselves. Poor station design makes people walk across unlit areas and encourages people to walk on the tracks. But the trains are always the most important element. A poorly designed station with many trains will always have more passenger than the best station that only serves one or two routes.

Good station design can help ensure that people who are not used to train travel can successfully buy tickets, print out tickets they have bought online, and get to their trains on time. Good signs can make a well-designed station better and make a poorly designed station tolerable.

One problem is apparent in the photos of the signs in Penn Station, but not discussed in the article. The signs are for the companies that run the trains, not the destinations or type of train. If you don't know what "LIRR" stands for or that Amtrak runs inter-state trains, these signs are not helpful. This reflects the tendency in the US to market bus and train companies rather than buses and trains themselves.

As a previous post mentioned, this a problem for stations in Canada as well.

Warning for visitors to Toronto

The management of Union Station in Toronto have decided to take down the signs that tell you how to get to the different kind of transit services that they provide. Here is guide to the signs.

TTC = subway

VIA = trains

I am sure that there is some other acronym for buses.

(From comments at Slate.com.)

More on the Northwest Rail Corridor public meetings

I am following up on an earlier post.

I went to the meeting in Louisville. There were posterboards with various information on them, and a lecture with followed by questions. The people there were asking for public comments, but I am not sure that they will do any good. It turns out that the comments may not be read by the people actually planning the project. RTD has hired a private company to run their meetings. That private company is the one who is going to read the comments and prepare the final report.

I have been researching how this company got this contract, but I haven't found much out yet. I think a lot of FasTracks has been privatized. The more research I do, the more I think that FasTracks money is going to non-transit.

GO Boulder is looking for Commuter of the Year nominations

GO Boulder, a public agency of the City of Boulder, is looking for nominations for the 14th Annual Commuter of the Year awards. One award goes to the Bike Commuter of the Year, one goes to the Transit Commuter of the Year, and one award is for the All Around Commuter of the Year, someone who walks, bikes, and/or takes the bus.

Nominees must live or work in the city of Boulder. They should use alternative transportation to get to work and to go shopping and to go out, etc. Go Boulder is looking for good stories.

You can nominate yourself. You can nominate someone you know. (Just click one of the links.)

Nominations are due by March 12.

Northwest Rail Public Meetings

There are going to be three public meetings about the draft Northwest Rail plans. This is the commuter rail line that is proposed to connect downtown Denver to Longmont, with stops in north Denver, Westminster, Flatiron/Broomfield, Louisville, and two stops in Boulder.

All meetings will have an open house that will be ongoing throughout the meeting and two presentations followed by question and answer sessions at 6:30 and 7:30. (How they are going to fit the Q&A sessions into less than an hour, I don't know. They will probably ignore everyone they don't agree with, as they usually do.)

Thursday, March 11

Longmont at the Civic Center at 350 Kimbark Street

The Civic Center is one block east from Main Street.

Regional buses J,L, and Bolt run down Main Street. Get off at the bus stop near the wear the road widens near the Used Book Emporium. Local bus 323 also serves this stop.

Local buses 326 and 327 also run close by.

Wednesday, March 17

Louisville at Louisville Middle School at 1341 Main Street.

This is near the intersection of Main Street and South Boulder Road.

There is a DASH stop in front of the school. It is also possible to walk to the school from the final stops of the 228 and Lynx buses by walking north along Main Street.

Thursday, March 18

North Denver at Hodgkins Elementary, 3475 W. 67th Avenue

The meeting is in Denver near the border with Westminster, so this is the meeting for Adams County folks.

Both the 31 and 72 buses stop nearish to this meeting. The closest stop on the 72's route is near W. 68th and Lowell. Walk east on 68th to get to the school. The closest stop via the 31 is between 66th and 67th. Walk west on 67th. The entrance to the school may be on Irvine, based on the google map on the area.

The draft Environmental Evaluation for the Northwest Corridor is being released tomorrow. It will be available at libraries in the northwest metro area and online through the FasTracks website.

I hope a lot of people go. I especially hope that people ask to have the stops be accessible to walkers, bikers, and bus riders. Sometimes it seems that FasTracks is being oriented to car owners who occasionally take the bus.

Some History of the Fight for Pay Equity

Lucy Randolph Mason was an early supporter of pay equity. During her tenure as the General Secretary of the National Consumer's League, she lead a protest against discrimination in federal jobs. The 1935 Recovery Act stated that women who worked for the government were to be paid 25% less than men doing the same job. The people who thought up this legislation probably thought they were being progressive as 75 cents on the dollar was better than most women did in non-government jobs at the time. In fact, it was better than most women did until quite recently.

The National Consumer's League thought differently. They thought that slightly less crappy was not good enough. They thought that the government pay should only be based on merit and on the work done, not on race or sex.

RTD, Denver area's transit agency, used to have one of the best records when it came to hiring women of all the transit agency's in the US. Which is to say it was pretty dismal, but not completely ridiculous. I wonder what it is now. Most people in RTD's planning department, like most transit planners in the US, are white men. This limits the experience that the planning department has to draw on, and it indicates that there are limits on the jobs that women can reasonably pursue.

(Since this blog is supposed to present a feminist perspective, I thought that I would write something overtly feminist.)