Road Warrior

Another airport that struggles to hold airline service

Toledo Express Airport isn't the only similarly situated airport to struggle with holding onto commercial air passenger service, and the airlines' patience with start-up routes -- even subsidized ones -- is short. Consider the example of Topeka, Kan., which is about to lose its only scheduled flights after just a nine-month startup period -- a startup that included nearly $2 million in revenue guarantees for United Airlines. Apparently their local travelers are happy to drive to Kansas City, even though K.C. is far from being a hub any more.

One would think that, being a state capital, Topeka wouldn't have this problem. Then again, air service at Capital City Airport in Lansing isn't exactly robust, though Michigan's seat of government has managed to hold onto three network-airline hubs via Delta, while Toledo has just American Eagle service to Chicago besides its less-than-daily vacationer flights to Florida.

Toledo officials also have a federal grant intended to subsidize a startup air service, but so far they haven't found any takers.

No more 'Thousand Islands'

There are going to be a lot of alternatives for drivers who don't want to deal with the I-75 reconstruction project that will soon start between Dorr Street and Central Avenue, as long as those drivers are willing to tolerate a few traffic lights.

People who work at -- or otherwise have to visit -- One Government Center or Toledo's courthouses should certainly consider using Greenbelt Parkway to get in and out of downtown, for example. And yes, that includes workers at and visitors to The Blade.

South Toledoans headed to I-75 in Michigan may also find driving through downtown Toledo and taking the Greenbelt to I-280 a more pleasant experience than driving through the work zone -- maybe even during rush hour.

Monroe Street should also be a popular choice, especially east of ProMedica Parkway, which is where I suspect a lot of drivers on eastbound I-475 will bail out when they encounter the big traffic backups this project is likely to cause.

But one option that isn't there is Collingwood Boulevard, and here's why: reconstruction of the "Thousand Islands" intersections at Cherry Street and Detroit Avenue is definitely in high gear. This view from I-75 a few days ago shows how both Collingwood and Detroit have been dug up since work to build two roundabouts there began last week.

Collingwood, the street on the left, will cease to exist north of Cherry as a result of this project. All traffic lights plainly visible in the picture will soon be gone. But to get this work done by early November, as planned, project planners decided to shut off Detroit and Collingwood entirely and restrict Cherry to a single inbound lane through the intersection.

The next 3-1/2 months are going to be an especially rough time to get through this part of Toledo. I don't envy the people whose regular commutes are affected.

Poof! The High Level Bridge is gone!

Among the many features of Rand McNally's annual road atlases is an indicator that certain sections of highway are expected to be under construction during a particular year.

Google Maps took a different tack for the construction work that recently closed the Anthony Wayne Bridge and is expected to keep it shut down until late next year: they removed it! Technically, you could argue they should have taken the stub bits of road out west of Oak and east of Broadway that are also closed, but that's a nitpick. And if you ask Google for directions between relevant parts of the East Side and downtown Toledo, it does give you a proper detour around the closing.

Of course, if you switch to satellite view, the bridge also known as the High Level is still there, and I'm hoping to get out there soon to tell you a little bit more about the work that's being done to renovate the 83-year-old structure.

Toledo snowier than Cleveland? It could still happen

Cleveland averages gets close to twice as much snow in a normal winter than Toledo does, 68.1 inches compared to 37.6 inches, thanks its position on the western reach of the Lake Erie Snow Belt. But the winter now winding down -- don’t look to me to say it’s over, it’s only April! -- could end as a dramatic exception to that rule, if Cleveland doesn’t get any late-season snow bursts like it got last weekend.

 

As of Friday, Toledo’s snowfall total since July 1 was a record shattering 85.3 inches, which smashes the old record from 1977-78 (73.1 inches) by more than a foot now! Cleveland’s winter-to-date total of 84.8 inches obviously is well above normal, but it only ranks seventh on that city’s list of snowiest winters. The 117.9-inch season record Cleveland set nine winters ago appears very safe unless April proves to be the most bizarro snow month ever. Cleveland’s snowiest April -- in 2005, imagine that -- produced “just” 19 inches.

 

How is it that Toledo leads Cleveland in snowfall this year? The main reason is a couple of the storms that produced major snows in Toledo this winter followed tracks that delivered a lot lessto Cleveland . In particular, Toledo’s 13-incher of Jan. 5-6 was mainly a rainmaker farther east, yielding just 0.9 inch of snow at Hopkins International Airport, Cleveland’s official reporting station. For all of January, Cleveland got just 23.7 inches of snow, compared with a record-busting 40.2 inches in Toledo.

 

Another factor is that the lake-effect snows were fairly tame this year in Cleveland. The early part of winter usually gives Cleveland a big head start on snowfall when cold air whistles across Lake Erie’s relatively warm waters and dumps the moisture it collects over northeast Ohio. But this time around, Cleveland got just 4.7 inches in November and 17.5 inches in December. That was still more than Toledo got during that time -- a combined 11.3 inches -- but not so much more that Toledo’s January storms couldn’t give the Glass City a healthy lead in this “race” to which it now clings.

 

Clings, I say, because Cleveland has been catching up ever since, with 23.8 inches in February to Toledo’s 21.6, and 15.1 in March to Toledo’s 11.8. Last weekend’s weather put the whole thing truly back in contention. While forecasters said Toledo might get a few inches out of the storm that passed through the lower Great Lakes a week ago, it ended up with next to nothing -- just 0.2 inch. One hundred miles to the east, though, Cleveland got 5 inches.

Maybe some of you would just as soon prefer to forget this winter once it’s over, but me, along with all the records we set and The Weather Channel’s declaration that Toledo’s winter was the worst in the entire United States compared to norms, “beating” Snowbelt City would add to this winter’s superlatives. Only three times since Toledo Express’ 1955 opening, which is as far back as the National Weather Service says its official snowfall records for Toledo go back, has Toledo gotten more snow in a winter than Cleveland, and the most recent was in 1969-70, when the “score” was Toledo 59.4, Cleveland 53.4. I’m not going to advocate for more snow here this, um, spring, but in any case, won’t you join me in doing whatever anti-snow dance or other superstitious foolishness you can think of to try to prevent more snow from falling this winter in Cleveland?

The snow record: Problem solved (mostly)

Shortly after I posted the last entry, the National Weather Service re-issued the Daily Climate Report for Toledo for Tuesday. It makes official the 0.8 inch of snow for the day at Toledo Express Airport, bringing the season-to-date to a record 73.5 inches.

What also shows up in the revision is a new precipitation total for the day: 0.06 inch, which is two-hundredths more than shown in the 12:45 a.m. version and also that much more than shown in the hourly weather reports at the airport.

So that's the solution to the issue that prompted me to question how much snow really fell Tuesday evening when the record was broken.

The whole affair doesn't leave me entirely confident in how these records are kept these days, but at least the numbers make sense now.

Toledo's Tuesday snowfall is "missing," and the record is in limbo

And now, the official snowfall for Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2014 at Toledo Express Airport is… missing.

 

So did Toledo set a season snowfall record Tuesday or not?

 

Officially, the National Weather Service now says it didn’t, although in the morning it said enough snow -- 0.4 inch -- had fallen at the airport to tie the 73.1-inch record from 1977-78, and more accumulating snow fell there during the evening.

 

But when I called the regional office in Cleveland at 10 p.m. to inquire how much snowfall the 0.01 inch of precipitation reported at the airport during the previous hour represented in terms of snow, they didn’t know.

 

They said they’d have the spotter at the airport go outside and check.

 

Fifteen minutes later, the response was "another 0.4 inch," which if accurate would have brought the season total to 73.5 inches.

 

But that would have had to be some darned fluffy snow to get four-tenths of an inch of it out of just a hundredth of an inch of water content. Think of it this way: if one goes by the old rule of thumb that it normally takes the same moisture to produce an inch of rain or a foot of snow, one inch of this particular precipitation would produce a whopping 40 inches of snow! (The 0.4 inch in the morning involved 0.03 inch of precip.)

 

So I didn’t buy that, and the folks in Cleveland said, “Well, it’s unofficial” and something more definitive would be posted after midnight, with the Daily Climate Report.

 

But the Daily Climate Report punted. It lists the snowfall for Tuesday as "Missing," and reverted the season-to-date total back to 72.7 inches -- what it was after Monday.

 

This is going to require a little further investigation, but for the time being, I’m going to start by blaming automation.

 

Two decades ago, the National Weather Service had its own staff at the Toledo Express Airport weather station and many other locations that have since been automated.

 

With automation, most of the information coming from the airport is self-reported by thermometers, anemometers, rain gauges, and other instruments. Cloud cover is determined by measuring brightness and sending a light beam up into the sky; if there are clouds below 12,000 feet, the beam bounces back. If the beam doesn’t bounce back but the sky cover is ambiguous, then the National Weather Service reports the weather as “fair,” which basically means only that there’s no precipitation.

 

Automated instruments, however, are very unreliable for measuring snowfall and snow cover. For the latter, the National Weather Service relies on the spotter -- apparently an airport employee who goes outdoors a couple of times a day and sticks a ruler in the ground at a spot or three that one presumes are sheltered from the effects of wind, so that they neither lose nor gain snow because of drifting.

 

New snow is supposed to be measured using a bare surface -- presumably one that is cleaned off after each measurement, and also is relatively immune to wind influence. But the National Weather Service’s backpedal Tuesday night on whether Toledo had even tied the record, much less beaten it, suggests that the readings taken out at Express on Tuesday weren’t reliable for some reason.

 

I'm not going to say the spotter did anything wrong, but I will say I'd have a whole lot more confidence in the measurements if they were being taken by a weather professional. And there’s been some other funny stuff going on with Toledo's snow data this winter, too.

 

There was at least one day out at Express when the snow amount on the ground exceeded the amount that had fallen. How’s that again?

 

And after January, when the crew in Cleveland added that month’s record 40.2-inch Toledo snowfall to the top of the Top 10 list for snowiest Januaries, somehow a bunch of the other Top 10 years’ numbers changed.

 

When I inquired about that latter phenomenon, some of those numbers were changed again, back to figures closer to what they were before, but not entirely. The explanation I got was that there was some sort of data-entry error -- but what data exactly needed to be entered for years long past? It still doesn’t quite make sense.

 

As for the most recent readings, what it would seem to come down to is that the snowfall amounts the National Weather Service officially logs at Toledo Express are fudged a bit -- and that therefore the official records aren’t as solid as one might expect them to be.

The fudge factor isn’t that great, and probably wouldn’t have been noticed at all had it not come into play on a day when a tenth of an inch of snow actually mattered -- at least, it mattered to people who wanted to know if Tuesday was the day that 2013-14 would officially become the snowiest in Toledo’s history.

The dark side of street repairs

It may be harder to get around if you live on an older Toledo street that the city hasn’t gotten plowed to bare pavement during this brutal winter, but there is an up side.

Your water pipe is less likely to freeze.

I’ve learned this one the hard way. Yep, I neglected to leave a faucet running at a trickle during our most recent bout of subzero cold, and one morning last week I woke up to dead faucets.

I hoped the problem might be attributable to one of several nearby water-main breaks, but no such luck. Yes, I’d rather have to boil water for a few days than be totally without for nine days -- and counting.

And several of the city water-division folks who have been over to my house since then have told me the same thing: living on a street the city recently rebuilt, right down to the dirt, and plows reasonably thoroughly is a disadvantage when it comes to keeping my water pipe insulated during extreme cold, especially since the main is on the far side of the street from my home.

When the city’s contractor dug down a foot or more into the ground to remove the old pavement a few summers ago, then laid down a compacted bed of gravel before paving the street anew with asphalt, that had the side effect of reducing the depth of earthen insulation protecting my and my neighbors’ water pipes.

The frost depth in most of the city, the utilities department’s Don Moline told me last week, is down to about 3½ feet, which by rule of thumb is the minimum depth you want for water pipes. But under well-built streets that are generally kept well-plowed, I learned Tuesday, the frost has gotten as deep as five feet -- plenty deep enough to lay a severe chill on pipes.

Scores of people’s pipes froze last week, and the water-division people who visited to diagnose mine told me a lot of them are on recently rebuilt streets. Indeed, they found the problem with my service line was beneath my street, not under my snow-covered front yard or in my amply heated basement.

That layer of fresh gravel beneath the pavement helps the street drain better, which means it should last longer and have fewer potholes in the future. But it also means cold penetrates it faster.

And just as snow on the ground helps protect flower bulbs and other hibernating plants from winter’s chill, so too does it keep the soil beneath a roadway just a little bit warmer than it otherwise would be.

This revelation may be too late to help anyone this winter; after all, the frost line is already deep. But keep this in mind in the future: if your street gets rebuilt down to the dirt, you may want to pay special attention to keeping a little water flowing through your pipes during a deep winter freeze.

Wind chills ain't what they used to be

A friend commented online about how he remembered -70 wind chills during the Midwest's severe winter of 1993-94. “Now that hurt,” he said.

 

This time around, the wind chill in the Toledo area has only gotten down to around -45 or so. One might think it hasn’t been nearly as cold.

 

But before you draw that conclusion, remember that the formula for calculating wind chill was changed early last decade, and the basic result of that was to make wind-chill readings less extreme -- which officials said also would be a more accurate representation of what wind chill is intended to measure: how much colder low temperatures feel on exposed skin when it's also windy out.

 

This National Weather Service page explains the change in more detail. It also has a wind-chill calculator that shows both the old-formula and new-formula wind-chill readings for any given combination of temperature and wind speed.

 

I decided to enter -15 degrees and 25 mph, which is roughly how bad conditions got back on the night of Jan. 6, Toledo’s coldest night so far this winter, into their calculator.

 

The results: -44 under the current formula, and -66 under the old one.

 

So it really has gotten almost as cold in the Toledo area this winter as it did 20 years ago, even if your memory of wind-chill temperatures from back then is that they were much lower.

Pothole calls and unshoveled walks

Last weekend, a couple of calls came in to my voice mail from motorists wishing to report potholes.

Now, I do pass these reports along when I get them, but that may lengthen the delivery time by as much as several days depending on timing. So it’s probably better to call your local municipality, or county engineer’s office, or the Ohio Department of Transportation directly to report your potholes.

 

Toledo’s pothole hotline is 419-936-2867 (936-BUMP), while the Lucas County Engineer’s Office is 419-213-2860 and ODOT in Bowling Green is 419-353-8131. Pertinent phone numbers for most other jurisdictions are readily available on the Internet.

 

ODOT also can be alerted by going here and filling out a pothole report, and there’s also a link on that page to the Ohio Court of Claims, which is where you should go if you want to file a claim for pothole damage against the state. I wouldn’t count on getting much back for a busted tire or bent rim, though, unless you can prove ODOT had been notified about a particular pavement defect and had ample time to do something about it. The same holds for a pothole on a city street or county highway, though those claims should be made in local courts. More likely to succeed is a claim one might make for damage to a private vehicle or mailbox caused by a plow.

Along with the Anthony Wayne Trail, which is the city of Toledo’s problem, I-75 through downtown Toledo is likely to have recurring pothole trouble this winter. At least with that piece of road, drivers can take a bit of comfort knowing that it’s scheduled for reconstruction starting this spring. The lane closings will be a pain in the butt for two construction seasons, but at least it should be bump free for quite a while after that. Rebuilding the Trail, conversely, is still a need in search of funding, and rebuilding it isn’t going to be cheap.

 

I’ve gotten perhaps a half-dozen phone calls, meanwhile, and one postcard written in tiny cursive handwriting complaining about the inadequacy of snow removal last week on various Toledo streets. This is pretty much par for the course any time Toledo gets more than about six inches of snow. Let’s face it, folks: Toledo just isn’t very well equipped to keep up with that much snow, much less more. The city has something like 1,100 lane-miles of streets, and even with “sister division” trucks called out to assist with smaller streets, it just doesn’t have the equipment or manpower to stay ahead of storms like the two we had within six days of each other this month. It doesn’t help when people leave their cars parked on the narrower residential streets, either -- it really does keep plows from getting through in some cases.

 

What I learned last week that astounded me was that the Monroe County Road Commission has even fewer trucks than Toledo does, despite having greater lane-mileage to maintain plus its having contracted for plowing on state highways. Apparently whatever money Monroe County gets from MDOT isn’t enough to pay for a few extra trucks to do that work? Then again, many Monroe County roads are pretty awful year ‘round -- that’s been a recurring theme from that part of Blade Land for the entire 20+ years I’ve been here, and writing stories about it doesn’t seem to have any effect.

 

If money really is being poured down a hole somewhere in Monroe County, I’d love to hear how, but otherwise I can only surmise that there’s something wrong with the road commission’s income stream. Officials’ inability to declare travel bans during a storm like the one early last week doesn’t help matters, either.

 

Clearing sidewalks, meanwhile, is supposed to mainly fall on landowners, but compliance in Toledo is spotty at best, and it doesn’t help that in some places, responsibility is ambiguous. I took a ride along Glendale Avenue on Monday and the sidewalk conditions along nearly the entire length of its eastbound lanes were atrocious. In the residential areas, most of the houses that have frontage along Glendale face various side streets in their subdivisions and are fenced-off from Glendale, so the property owners may not even consider the Glendale sidewalk to be their problem. At a reader’s request after the Jan. 1-2 snowfall, we published the relevant section of the Toledo Municipal Code requiring property owners to clear their portion of the public walk within 24 hours of a storm’s end. But as in the past, there seem to be no consequences for neglect.

 

I also happened to have some idle time along Central Avenue in Sylvania Township and discovered that sidewalk shoveling -- or lack thereof -- is not exclusively a Toledo problem. A colleague says the issue also has come up in Northwood. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve been to any commercial district in the area this winter where anyone seemed to care much about sidewalk conditions -- perhaps because many businesses are tenants, their landlords aren’t present, and so nobody polices how plow contractors simply shove parking-lot snow into huge piles that block sidewalks and foul up visibility for vehicles exiting driveways.

 

Maybe the most disturbing example, though, was this one on Newton Street, right across from Toledo’s main post office. I would think the post office, whose carriers refuse to deliver mail if a walk hasn’t been cleared to the mailbox and who travel sidewalks all the time, would be more conscientious about sidewalk conditions, but apparently whoever plows out the parking lot off Newton isn’t so concerned. This glacier they built on the far side of Newton, completely burying the public sidewalk, will be gone by when, exactly? April?

 

Now, I’ll admit, there aren’t a lot of pedestrians in Toledo. The band Missing Persons once wrote about how “only a nobody walks” in Los Angeles, but that must be doubly so here. But is that a cause or an effect of this neglect for sidewalks? Perhaps a little of both….

'911 - This is Peggy'

A failed attempt to report an unsafe driver in the Cleveland area Tuesday evening was a case study for regional 911 systems to replace municipal call centers.

I was westbound on I-90 approaching the Columbia Road exit in the west Cleveland suburb of Westlake when a white sedan passed me in the exit lane at well over the speed limit and then cut across the ramp split in front of me. The car made several more dangerous lane changes before it disappeared from sight.

Although listening to Toledo’s police radios on a regular basis gives me no confidence that reckless-driver calls routinely result in arrests -- or even tickets -- I tend to make 911 calls in such situations anyway, if for no other purpose than to establish a behavior history for the drivers in case they end up in a collision like the one Thanksgiving night on the Ohio Turnpike.

Making the call even easier for me this time was that the car had a vanity plate, so that information was easy to remember. But getting through to the right police agency proved to be a daunting task.

I don’t know which 911 center initially got my call, but when I described what I was calling about and where I was, I was told I’d be transferred to Rocky River, which I found odd as I thought I had already gone by that community (which a quick map check confirms).

So I went through the same description with Rocky River’s 911, and was promptly told I needed to talk to Westlake. Of course, by the time I got connected to Westlake, I was approaching the next exit, and I hadn’t seen the offending driver for more than a mile. And Westlake told me, based on my current location, that I really should be talking to Avon Lake, the next community to the west, so they told me to hold the line while they transferred me. Again.

Sure, they were doing their jobs, but at this point, all I could think of was that Discover Card commercial in which the exasperated cardholder who wants to talk with the competitor's customer-service supervisor gets transferred all over the boiler room before ending up with the call-taker he started with.

“911. This is Peggy.”

I hung up.

At this point I had no confidence about Mr. White Sedan’s current location, if he was even still on I-90. Should I be talking to Elyria instead? It was no longer worth the trouble.

With a regional 911 center, my report probably would have been handled by the first call-taker, and if a call transfer had been needed, the chance of that being botched would have been much smaller.

Mr. White Sedan, whose license plate I remember two days later, there’s no report on you with any of those police departments -- at least, not from me. Maybe somebody else also thought you were worth reporting and had better lucking calling you in.

In any case, be safe out there, y’hear?