Dunes Blog

Welcome back!

It is very rare that people love their bank. But I must admit that I love my bank, First National Bank of Valparaiso. I came to FNBV after being chewed up and spit out by Chase Bank, whose lack of customer service and general disdain for the consumer banker, drove me away. I’d heard good things about the local bank.

I’ve had nothing but a positive experience with FNBV. Their customer service is top-notch. They are always extremely helpful and nice. Whenver there is a problem, they actually want to fix it. And get this, when you call them for help, someone actually answers the phone on the first ring. No endless phone tree trying to get someone who may have something to do with your particular problem.

Sadly, on June 6th, a venerable Porter County institution will finally be fully absorbed into it’s new owner, 1st Source Bank, and cease to exist. I was very saddened to hear that the family that owned the bank for many years finally sold out.

The future worries me. Will the new stewards of FNBV be as kind an attentive as the old ones? We’ve already seen some of the negative effects of the merger. Many convenient branches have been closed for good. There have been a few layoffs. One can only hope that they don’t start raising fees, holding deposits and generally throwing the middle finger at their customers.

If a bank loses it’s local roots, will it still be loyal to the locals? I hope so. I’d hate to have to find a another bank. There’s something quaint about banking at a small local bank. It’s important, when living in a small town, to keep local businesses and local roots. Valpo may be growing by leaps and bounds, but I still think it’s a small town, a feeling I hope doesn’t change anytime soon.

I have to hand it to 1st Source Bank though, they seem to be on the ball. The absorption of FNBV accounts seems to have been planned out with military precision. On June 6th, everyone’s accounts will be switched to new 1st Source Accounts, account numbers will change, but the old ones will still work for the immediate future. New debit cards will be issued, which is fine with me, my current one isn’t working very well anymore. The old checks will work fine.

There will be a new online banking system. I hope it’s as simple and spartan as the current FNBV system. I just want to see my balance and move money around, fancy graphics are not needed for such tasks. I’ve already got my info packet that details the whole transfer. I’m a little worried that there isn’t anything in the packet about the acount fees, I hope they’re the same and don’t go up.

If 1st Source drops the ball and screws us all over, there’s gotta be another local bank around that will be a go substitute.

Which local bank do you guys recommend, just in case?

Well, get on with it guys.

That’s what I have to say to those pushing to build an extension of the South Shore Line. This is something that I wholeheartedly support. The plan on the table it to extend the South Shore Line to run south through Lake County and terminating in Lowell and to run it southwest into Porter County, terminating in Valparaiso.

They have been talking about doing this for years. And every year it becomes increasingly more necessary that they actually do it. The population in Northwest Indiana is exploding. People are discovering that it’s cheap land and closeness to Chicago make it an attractive place to commute from. Currently, people are stuck either driving to Chicago from Lowell or Valparaiso or in the case of Valparaiso, driving way out of the way to take a train from the Dune Park Station.

Anyone that has ever tried to take the train from Dune Park knows that it’s at capacity. Despite the fact that they’ve built a new parking lot, it’s still always full as are the trains. Oftentimes during morning commutes on the South Shore, it is standing room only.

The Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, or NICTD, has bought new train cars which will be arriving soon, to help alleviate some of the overcrowding. But that is only a temporary solution. The long term solution is to build new commuter lines.

The project will cost nearly $1 billion. This money has to come somewhere and it’s proving hard to come by. The federal government won’t open it’s coffers until the Regional Development Authority (RDA) can prove that population growth is high enough for justify the cost.

There are many reasons why South Shore Expansion is a good thing. It will ease overcrowding on the highways, it will encourage population growth in Northwest Indiana, it will make Chicago more accessible to Hoosiers while also providing a greener way for people to commute to work. The economic benefits of it are sound. Wages would most likely rise in the area as business will have to compete with Chicago for the same labor pool.

People seem to forget that Amtrak used to run a line to Valparaiso many years ago and the NITCD is studying the prospect of simply using the old line to run the new service. This seems like the most logical solution to the problem since the track and the rights of way are already there. The biggest cost of building the proposed extensions is purchasing the rights of way and laying new track. I think I heard that it costs something like $1 million a mile to lay new track.

Many people are afraid of what South Shore Line Expansion will bring. Some say it will bring Chicago’s problems to the quiet corners of Indiana. Some say it will cause the local population to grow too quickly. Some argue that it will cost too much and provide little economic benefit. I don’t believe any of those arguments.

Let’s hope legislative support is strong this year and that they can finally put this project on the front burner.

If you’re interested in support the South Shore Line Expansion Project, then go ahead and show your support by signing this petition:

http://www.petitiononline.com/CESSL/petition.html

I was never really sold on the idea of the Indiana Dunes Visitor Center. Seemed to me like an incredible waste of money considering that it’s not really by the expressway and cost a ton of money to build. Surely people could rely on the similar money pit that is the Lake County Visitor’s Center. We didn’t really need two visitor center’s doing essentially the same thing.

I was shocked to find that I found it useful.

The wife and I have been enjoying the beginning of the summer by starting to bike ride in Northwest Indiana. We’ve ridden in a few cool places, the Sumer Valley and the Beverly Shores World’s Fair Homes (blog entry on that forthcoming), but we quickly ran out of ideas of places to ride. We needed a way to figure out where all the bike routes and bike paths were.

Generally, I rely on the internet for this sort of information. And the internet came up woefully short in quickly providing this information.

I was in the neighborhood one day and on a whim decided to run by the visitors center to see if they had any information about bike routes in Northwest Indiana. I walked in and was pleasantly surprise of how nice the place was. It was filled with people milling about and there was even a nice gift shop.

As soon as I entered a very helpful woman asked if I need help looking for something. I told her I was looking for a map of bike routes in northern indiana and she led me over to a shelf that had one. Sure enough, I opened the map and it was of the entire region and had a color coded map key of all the bike routes. Best of all, this map was free. It’s also a good map of the area to boot.

Inspired, I browsed all the bookcases and grabbed all the free brochures I could. Never hurts to have that stuff laying around.

The Dunes Visitor Center may have cost more money to build than I’ll ever make in my life, but it’s a nice guide to the fun things to do in Northwest Indiana. So I guess it’s not a complete waste.

Trains are a way of life in Northwest Indiana. Because of our location at the bottom tip of Lake Michigan and the fact that we are as central as in gets in the US, NWI is bisected by many major freight and passenger rails lines. It is, to say the least, a pain in the butt sometimes. We could all probably go on a week’s vacation with all the time we’ve been sitting at railroad crossings.

The reason I bring this up is there is another train related accident in the news. Some teenager was walking along the railroad tracks, most likely listening to his iPod and got hit by a train. A couple weeks ago a two year old was hit by a train in Hobart. A further few weeks ago someone was killed up in Miller by a train because they decided to go around the gates.

I continue to be baffled by this. People, we’ve grown up being around these trains our whole lives. Why is it so hard for people to understand the danger they represent? Why can’t people understand basic safety when it comes to trains.

It’s simple. Never go around railroad crossing gates. EVER unless directed by a cop. Don’t walk along railroad tracks, especially wearing headphones.

Train travel is an important mode of transportation, it keeps the economy moving, it moves commuters and it’s much more environmentally friendly. The train companies do their best as far as safety goes, but they can only do so much. It’s up to regular people to do their part by showing some intelligence.

I feel bad for these people that get killed or injured by trains. I really do and I’m certainly not say that they deserve it. But I feel more sympathy for the poor men (and women) who drive these trains and have no control whatsoever over what they hit. Not only are you putting yourself at huge risk by going around the railroad gates, you could end up ruining someone’s life. All they did was go to work that day and because you couldn’t wait five minutes for the gates to go up, you destroyed yourself and the life of someone who didn’t have a choice. You never hear about the train drivers in these tragic stories.

I grew up in Ogden Dunes and have been the witness to may train tragedies over the years. There’s gotta be a better way to protect level train crossings to prevent this stuff. In the United Kingdom, they have gates that you simply cannot go around. Why can’t we do that here?

After one of the South Shore tragedies a few years ago in front of the former Midwest Steel plant, the state decided to best to way to prevent an accident like that from happening again was to simply build a bridge over the tracks. Problem solved. This is just one example.

It’s not feasible to replace all the crossing gates in the country nor is it feasible to build bridges over every crossing. But in a densely populated area like Northwest Indiana, there has to be a solution to a problem like this.

It all starts in the home. Parents need to drill into their children the basics of train safety. Respect your life by respecting the trains.

This past weekend, Indiana’s venerable Senator Lugar, reaffirmed his undying support for Gary International Airport, the unwanted stepchild of the Chicago Aviation industry.

He talked up his continued committement to airport expansion and getting the federal funding neccessary to faciliate it (also known as pork barrel spending).

Every year, and this is a cycle that play outs every year like clockwork; a new start-up airline pledges to use Gary Airport. Usually the flights go to places that one wouldn’t think immediately, ‘hey let’s go there!.’ Inevitably, no one actually does and the airline folds a few months later.

We’ve seen a kaleidoscope of names, SkyBus, SkyValue, PanAm, Hooters Air, Southeast. There is an even more exciting array of names for airlines that have pledged to use it in the future. But the runways at Gary are splattered with the dead bodies of failed airlines. So, this raises the question, will Gary Airport ever matter? Will it ever be taken seriously?

I really don’t think it ever will. It will continue to be a hub for corporate jets, antique aircraft, the Gary Air show and the Chicago Air and Water show. But I don’t think it will ever be anything more unless a major airline decides to make it’s home there.

And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why they don’t. It’s the perfect location. 30 minutes from the Chicago Loop. Traffic is reliably good. Easy to get to. Small. So security lines. Cheap for the airlines to operate from.

All it would take is a serious commitment from Chicago and the airlines and it could easily be ‘Chicago’s Third Airport.’ But it won’t happen. It won’t benefit the City of Chicago, it won’t get a share of the revenue. Springfield won’t care because it won’t benefit them either. They’d much rather build a new airport from scratch in the middle of nowhere (Peotone).

Gary Airport is in the midst of expansion, money is being thrown at it. I hope it’s not a waste.

What do you guys think?