JR Manning

The very best oldies station in the state of Wisconsin is WOLX out of Madison. Their transmitter is in Baraboo and covers a great deal of the state.

When I used to commute between Milwaukee and Chippewa Falls, on the way home, I could pick up the signal just south of Eau Claire, somewhere around Black River Falls, and I had the signal until about a mile from home, sometimes all the way into my driveway. During a heavy ice storm one year, the tower in Baraboo fell over and they were forced to rent time on another, shorter tower, cutting their range. After the tower was restored, the signal seemed to get stronger and, in fact, I can actually pick up WOLX in the house, and in the car, sometimes on the west edge of Milwaukee County, down as far south as the zoo. That’s quite a journey for an FM signal!

On Saturdays, the offerings on the Milwaukee radio dial are abysmal. Wisconsin Public Radio goes from good to claptrap, back to good to claptrap again, so once Calling All Pets, Dr. Zorba, Car Talk and Whadya Know? are over, WPR reverts to awful, so I can’t stand to leave that on. (Incidentally, Dr. Zorba’s announcer is a bonehead, so I only listen to the good doctor.) Except for sports broadcasts, AM offerings are wonderful if you happen to be a gardener, have an investment portfolio bigger than a breadbox, if you’re a PC bit chaser or you’re planning on remodeling or building a house. For the rest of us? YAWN.

I was so pleased to find that the new radio that I put into the kitchen could pick up WLOX, so that became the standard Saturday radio station, when they usually pick a year and play everything that made the charts that year. It’s grand!

Until today - WOLX has shifted to all Christmas music, all the time.

C’mon, Guys, it ain’t even Thanksgiving yet.

PS - Wisconsin Public Radio has two networks, one for classical music and one for yak. We have at least three public radio stations in the market that carry the yak network, but none of them carry the classical music network. After WFMR went away, you would think the management of one of those stations would see a nitch that needed to be filled, but no, they insist on competing with the other public stations with the very same yak network. It’s a perfect example of how government has no concept of running a successful business. One of the public stations offers the classical network on their digital broadcast, like anyone actually owns a high definition digital radio.

Milwaukee recently unveiled a $15.8 million overhaul of the poorly designed and ugly “union station” that was built back in the 1960’s. It was built to be a “union station,” that is, one station to replace the beautiful old Chicago & Northwestern station that morons tore down, and to replace the Milwaukee Road station so everyone could board all trains from one inconvenient spot. It was clean, shiny and new when it was built but despite all that, it was ugly, too. It didn’t get any better with age. Most of it was unused when multi-road passenger service degenerated, in more ways than one, into Amtrak.

The new station has been dubbed an “Intermodal Station” which means that they also crammed the bus terminal in with the trains. “Intermodal Station” is one of those new, feel-good terms, like “vertical transport engineer” or “sanitation technician” which are still just elevator operators and garbage collectors.

The designers and operators of the Internodal Station have 3,487 square feet of space reserved for “retail space.”

Who actually uses the Intermodal Station? It’s people who can’t wait to get to it so they can get out of it. Someone is either dropped off in front to get on a train or a bus or, if they arrive on a train or a bus, they can’t wait to get out front and catch their ride or a cab - their goal is to get in and get out as quickly as possible.

What does someone between the hours of 6:00 and 10:00 AM want in an Intermodal Station, besides to catch the Hiawatha to Chicago? A cup of coffee. A donut or two. Maybe an Egg McHockeypuck. Just hurry it up, give me my coffee and a donut, so I can get on the train already.

What does someone between 10:00 AM and 7:00 PM want in an Intermodal Station, besides to catch the Hiawatha to Chicago or maybe catch a bus? A sandwich. A can of soda. A bag of chips. Let me grab something and get on the train, and I’ll have a nice, leisurely lunch on the 90 minute ride to Union Station in Chicago.

Speaking of Union Station in Chicago, what does one pass on the way to the Hiawatha? A newsstand that is combined with a convenience store and a McDonalds. If one walks a little out of their way, they can find a coffee place, a donut place, an ice cream place, a shoe shine rack and, surprise surprise, a couple more newsstands combined with convenience stores.

All just exactly what a traveler wants.

But not Mayor Tom Barrett and Alderman Bob Bauman. Nope. They want a fancy, sit down restaurant to make the beautiful new Intermodal Station a destination. A train station or a bus station has never been a destination and never will be a destination. Are these two guys nuts?

“You don’t spend $15.8 million to build an iconic structure and have a Dunkin’ Donuts as your primary food service,” Bauman said. “This should be a destination restaurant location.”

Mayor Tom Barrett agreed, saying, “C’mon, we can do better than this. . . . This is our building of first impressions for people who get off the train. We don’t want our first impression to be, ‘Is this all there is?’ ”

An “iconic structure?” It’s a train station, for crying out loud. This is not one of the Union Stations in Kansas City or Cincinnati, where the beautiful old buildings have been restored to better than former glory and house lots of destination places like museums and special events. Milwaukee blew that opportunity 40 years ago when the Northwestern station came down.

As beautiful, shiny and new as this building is today, let’s face it. Buses are dirty. Trains are dirty. Exhaust is dirty. Winter salt and dirt coming off the 6th street bridge is dirty. This shiny, white building will become just another downtown building in 10 years.

Forget the sit-down restaurant, anyone dumb enough to try to operate one in the Intermodal Station will go broke with no customers. Why? If I’m going to a nice restaurant for dinner, I’m not going to the airport or the train station or the bus station. I go to the Intermodal Station for one reason - to get on or off the Hiawatha. Just let me get my donut, my coffee or an egg-filled hockey puck and let me get on the train.

A sit down restaurant in a train station? That’s about the dumbest idea to come out of Milwaukee since Kilbourn and Juneau lined their streets up on different grids.

Forget the destination restaurant, Tom & Bob. A place for coffee, donuts and maybe a bagel are all we need.

When many of today’s movers and shakers were little kids, they were enthralled with a PBS Television show that was supposed to teach them how to be wonderful citizens. The show was called Mister Roger’s Neighborhood. One of the regular features of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood was the Neighborhood Trolley, the device that made the show transition from one scene to another - from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, through the wall to the Neighborhood of Make Believe, where benevolent King Friday ruled.

The little trolley, which resembles a San Francisco cable car, well, sort of anyway, was kind of a generic model of a public transportation vehicle that used to be popular in the United States. Even though Mr. Rogers’ little trolley seemed to have a mind of its own, it was tied to its tracks and traveled only between the two destinations - a fact that seems to have been forgotten. After all, a trolley can only go where its tracks go, a severe limitation at best.

While trolleys were a major component of public transportation at one time, trolleys are virtually extinct in the United States today. They fell out of favor with the rise of automobiles and buses, because trolley tracks run down the middle of traffic lanes in major thoroughfares. Trolley tracks still exist in many cities, long since paved over.The last operating trolley in the United States is in New Orleans. If you’ve ever driven in New Orleans and been stuck in the traffic that piles up behind the trolley, you instantly know why the rest of them are all gone.

Another type of trolley, often known as an interurban railroad, has also pretty much disappeared from American life. In Milwaukee, interurban lines once ran north to Sheboygan, west to Waukesha and Oconomowoc, southwest to East Troy and the North Shore ran to Chicago. Most of them failed in the 1940’s because no one was riding them. The North Shore, the interurban line that ran to Chicago, lasted into 1963 but it, too, succumbed to low ridership. When the Edens expressway opened in 1951, the first nail was in the coffin, and when the Northwest Expressway, now known as the Kennedy opened, the line hemorrhaged riders until there was just no one left to ride the rails.

Even though the interurbans and trolleys all failed, for some reason, the movers and shakers who grew up with Mister Rogers seem to think the Neighborhood Trolley is a good idea. They cannot believe a trolley is just a cute anachronism. Sadly for trolley fans, their day is past. Trolleys are useless, fixed to an inflexible route and unable to change once built. Regardless of the romance of building a trolley, the ignored fact is that far more people will not ride it than will ride it. Despite the millions of dollars that such a boondoggle would cost to build, the millions of dollars that it will require to subsidize the operating expenses, and the much more attractive alternatives offered by rubber tires, the fans of the trolley insist on installing one in every major city.

Well, why not? The real trolley will be just like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood trolley. Both will have the very same destination. The only difference is that the real trolley will carry millions upon millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars to the very same place as Mister Roger’s trolley:

The Neighborhood of Make Believe.

It came a lot faster than I thought it would. Hizzoner, Wisconsin Governor Diamond Jim Doyle, issued a statement today that does exactly what we predicted - he places the blame squarely on General Motors and completely overlooks the downward turn in the market, sales of SUV’s that have plummeted and he wants GM to reconsider the closing, just as we predicted. Much of what he said is true, but some of it (see bold text) is just typical, political bloviating.

“After all the years of work and everything the people of Janesville have given, it is tough to stomach what GM is doing here today.

“Families here have dedicated their working lives to this General Motors plant. The city of Janesville, the state of Wisconsin – we have all been committed to making this plant work.

“So many people here have put their hearts into building trucks at the Janesville assembly plant, and now they are left with a cold decision that casts them aside. We all feel it in our guts.

“GM made it clear that this was a plant that they were invested in. They brought Barack Obama here just months ago. It was clear that this plant was the pride of GM.

“But, it should have been obvious long ago that the future was not where GM was headed. Bad corporate decisions kept these lines turning out gas guzzlers as fuel prices went from 2 dollars to 3 dollars and now to 4 dollars per gallon.

“Now we stand here, carrying the burden of those bad corporate decisions – failed leadership that culminated in a calculation that left out the very heart of this company, the workers who built it.

“I am inspired by the workers who in the face of all this – in these difficult times – are saying they will work to make the best of this. That’s the spirit that made this company worth something, and that’s the spirit that built Janesville.

“I want Wisconsin workers to know that the state will stand with you. We will work together to fight for Janesville and our future together.”

Of course, politicians blaming GM for building products people actually wanted to buy is nothing new.

Gov. Doyle: “…the future was not where GM was headed.”

Governor? Perhaps you’d like to share just where GM was headed? Did they figure out a way to head somewhere other than the future? That would be a pretty remarkable R&D Department.

In 1973, when OPEC deeply curtailed oil output, extreme shortages were the norm. People who had been comfortably driving their large, American land yachts like Buick Electras, Chevrolet Impalas, Ford Galaxies, Plymouth Furies, Dodge Coronets, even Cadillacs, Lincolns and Imperials, suddenly wanted to trade them in on Pintos and Vegas, even AMC Gremlins. The big cars were sale-proof, no one wanted them.

Public outcry was immediate, and loud. Why hadn’t GM, Ford and Chrysler built downsized automobiles? The answer is simple. Before the oil embargo, GM, Ford and Chrysler could hardly give away small cars, let alone sell them to Americans who wanted luxo-boats.

By federally mandated fuel economy standards, those cars were reduced in size. GM introduced downsized B and C body cars in 1977, lopping nearly 1,000 pounds off the signature Cadillac. The A body cars followed in 1978. While the cars were popular, many GM customers went to Ford and Chrysler in those years. Why? Ford and Chrysler were still building large cars, large cars that Americans wanted to buy - despite government intervention.

The 1977 Cadillac was 950 pounds lighter than its 1976 ancestor.

Well, here it is, 35 years later and history is repeating itself. Gasoline, now four bucks a gallon, is finally making people look at abandoning their large vehicles, which happen to look like Tonka toys compared to the their 1970 counterparts.

And just like 1973, the politicians are pointing fingers for the sake of trying to put the blame…somewhere, anywhere, trying to make themselves look good.

And just like 1973, they look foolish.

For many, many years, there has been a group of American do-gooders telling us that our cars are too big, gasoline isn’t expensive enough, and it should be against the law to build and sell SUV’s.

Today, General Motors has announced the closing of the assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin by the close of 2009, or sooner, if market downturns continue. The Janesville plant is one of the locations that GM builts medium duty trucks and SUV’s.

Just watch - the do-gooders will be ecstatic that the plant is closing. No more SUV’s, no more gas-guzzling GM vehicles.

Not long after the closing, those same do-gooders will be crying about the loss of 2,700 jobs in Janesville that will come in one fell swoop. They will decry GM for releasing all those workers and tell us there ought to be a law that says GM was supposed to keep the plant open, ignoring the fact that the plant no longer builds a product that customers want to buy.

Don’t scoff - it will happen. It always does.