Mining for Money

Blowie needs money:

• Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration has quietly begun filing lawsuits over what it has described as “rogue buses” transporting migrants, an escalation the mayor has coupled with an attempt to further crack down on the transportation companies.

  The stepped-up enforcement is the Johnson administration’s latest effort to address the influx of new arrivals, which has become one of the mayor’s most vexing challenges. The care of more than 24,400 migrants who have arrived in Chicago since August 2022 has taken on heightened urgency as winter sets in, and tested the limits of how welcoming the city can be.

  The city has filed 55 lawsuits since it implemented new rules about when and where buses can arrive in mid-November, the Law Department said. The lawsuits address 77 total buses accused of violating the rules, and public records show at least some cases are seeking fines against the bus companies.

The "rules" they bus companies are allegedly violating?

• The city announced it would crack down on buses in mid-November, laying out rules for when and where buses could drop off migrants. Buses were capped at two per hour, and limited to drop-offs between 8 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.

  The rules also require intercity buses to apply for approval from the city to drop off passengers. The Chicago Department of Transportation said it has not received any applications.

No idea how they would regulate this. Is it two per company per hour? Because if we were Texas, we'd be sending two bus loads from multiple companies to multiple cities while limiting it to two per hour, no problem.

As for approval to drop people off, there are all sorts of "technical issues" that would require us to evacuate occupants for safety reasons. There are probably pages of federal regulations dictating how and when to empty buses that the city cannot override.

Blowie would be better off trying what Los Angeles is trying to do:

• Heads up drivers — Los Angeles Metro buses will install AI-powered cameras to ticket vehicles parked in bus lanes.

  There will be two cameras installed inside the windshield of the buses scanning the bus lanes in real time. Once they detect that a vehicle is parked inside a bus lane or in front of a bus stop, those cameras will take videos and photos of the license plate to create an "evidence package" to be sent to local parking enforcement agencies.

  Those cameras will be angled to capture parking violators and "not unnecessarily capture identifying images of people or vehicles that are not parked illegally," according to a statement from Hayden AI, the company providing the cameras to Metro.

Did Streets and San used to have cameras on the street sweepers that did this? It was supposed to free up the District car that got assigned to enforce the street cleaning signs. If we remember, they even tried to have the ward superintendents travel the cleaning routes and tried to authorize them to write tickets.

The head of the Teachers Union still wouldn't pay though.