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The Attack of Jamzilla

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Residents of Los Angeles are serious about their cars. Really serious. Since traffic jams are routine in and around the city, an 80-hour closure of a major artery like Interstate 405 is nothing to be taken lightly. This is why the Metropolitan Transportation Authority needed a plan to get the attention of drivers before they made repairs to the 405—which carries more than 300,000 vehicles a day and is one of the heaviest traveled in the country.

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The $1 billion 405 Freeway construction project over President’s Day weekend added a carpool lane and improvements to entrances and exits along a 10-mile pass. It also required full and partial closure of the northbound lanes.

To get the attention of motorists, the project was dubbed “Jamzilla.

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” According to the Los Angeles Times, this follows the lead of closures of the 405 in 2011 and 2012, with replacement of the Mulholland Bridge. Local media dubbed the events “Carmageddon” and “Carpocalypse,” and “Carmageddon II.” While the names may sound frivolous, the media hype helps make sure that drivers pay attention and stay away.

For Presidents Day weekend, “we wanted to come up with a term that would be like Carmageddon in its ability to influence the public,” said Dave Sotero, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, told the Times. The strategy has been successful in the past. In 2011, the Metrolink commuter train system, in fact, reported their ridership was 50% higher during the construction at the same time the previous year.

Jamzilla was a complex paving operation in a 5.6-mile stretch, with the contractor, Kiewit Infrastructure West, pouring single layers of pavement at a time. Metro officials compared the job to “baking layers of a wedding cake—a far more delicate task than the bridge demolition that prompted the ‘Carmageddon’ full-freeway closures.”

K.N. Murthy, executive director of transit project delivery at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said, “Operationally speaking, demolishing a bridge is a much simpler operation than paving and striping freeway lanes that must return to public use as quickly as possible. It’s the essential difference between destroying a structure and building a structure. Building something is much more difficult, and the paving methods we are using vary between each material type and have specific requirements that must be adhered to.”

Last week I visited Los Angeles and found Jamzilla to be a topic of conversation everywhere. Trips to destinations on the West side of L.A., such as the J. Paul Getty Museum right off of the 405, were scrapped and an extra half-hour was added to my already generous travel time to LAX early Sunday morning.

The good news is that all the hype surrounding Jamzilla resulted in success. Fortunately for me, traffic was so sparse that I arrived at the airport an hour early. Traffic overall was said to be lighter than usual on the 405 with no major jams. The Times reported a successful project and the 405 was opened an hour ahead of schedule. So much for Jamzilla.

The 10 Most and Least Expensive Health Insurance Markets in the U.S.

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Health Insurance

Under Obamacare’s new insurance marketplaces, people in Minnesota, northwestern Pennsylvania, and Tucson, Ariz., are getting the best bargains for health care coverage. Premiums in these areas are half the price of policies in the most expensive regions, based on the lowest cost of a “silver” plan – the mid-range plan most consumers are choosing.

“The cheapest cost regions tend to have robust competition between hospitals and doctors, allowing insurers to wrangle lower rates,” according to a report from Kaiser Health News and NPR. “Many doctors work on salary in these regions rather than being paid by procedure, weakening the financial incentive to perform more procedures.”

The 10 regions with the lowest premiums are:

$154: Minneapolis-St. Paul – Anoka, Carver, Dakota, Hennepin, Ramsey, Scott, Sherburne and Washington counties.

$164: Pittsburgh and Northwestern Pennsylvania – Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Crawford, Erie, Fayette, Greene, Indiana, Lawrence, McKean, Mercer, Warren, Washington and Westmoreland counties.

$166: Middle Minnesota – Benton, Stearns and Wright counties.

$167: Tucson, Ariz. – Pima County.

$171: Northwestern Minnesota – Clearwater, Kittson, Mahnomen, Marshall, Norman, Pennington, Polk and Red Lake counties.

$173: Salt Lake City – Davis and Salt Lake counties.

$176: Hawaii

$180: Knoxville, Tenn. – Anderson, Blount, Campbell, Claiborne, Cocke, Grainger, Hamblen, Jefferson, Knox, Loudon, Monroe, Morgan, Roane, Scott, Sevier & Union.

$180: Western and North Central Minnesota – Aitkin, Becker, Beltrami, Big Stone, Cass, Chippewa, Clay, Crow Wing, Douglas, Grant, Hubbard, Isanti, Kanabec, Kandiyohi, Lac qui Parle, Lyon, McLeod, Meeker, Mille Lacs, Morrison, Otter Tail, Pine, Pope, Renville, Roseau, Sibley, Stevens, Swift, Todd, Traverse, Wadena Wilkin and Yellow Medicine counties. In Chisago County, the lowest premium is $162.

$181: Chattanooga, Tenn. – Bledsoe, Bradley, Franklin, Grundy, Hamilton, Marion, McMinn, Meigs, Polk, Rhea and Sequatchie counties.

 

The 10 most expensive regions are:

$483: Colorado Mountain Resort Region – Eagle, Garfield and Pitkin counties, home of Aspen and Vail ski resorts. Summit County premiums are $462.

$461: Southwest Georgia – Baker, Calhoun, Clay, Crisp, Dougherty, Lee, Mitchell, Randolph, Schley, Sumter, Terrell and Worth counties.

$456: Rural Nevada – Esmeralda, Eureka, Humboldt, Lander, Lincoln, Elko, Mineral, Pershing, White Pine and Churchill counties.

$445: Far western Wisconsin – Pierce, Polk and St. Croix counties, across the border from St. Paul, Minn.

$423: Southern Georgia – A swath of counties adjacent to the even more expensive region. Ben Hill, Berrien, Brooks, Clinch, Colquitt, Cook, Decatur, Early, Echols, Grady, Irwin, Lanier, Lowndes, Miller, Seminole, Thomas, Tift and Turner counties.

$405: Most of Wyoming – All counties except Natrona and Laramie.

$399: Southeast Mississippi – George, Harrison, Jackson & Stone counties. In Hancock County, the lowest price plan is $447.

$395: Vermont*

$383: Fairfield, Conn. – The southwestern-most county, which includes many affluent commuter towns for New York City.

$381: Alaska.

*Unlike other states, Vermont does not let insurers charge more to older people and less to younger ones. Its ranking therefore will differ depending on the ages of the consumers.

The Rise and Fall of Captive Reinsurers in the Mortgage Market

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Before the collapse of the housing market in 2008, it was common for large, high-volume mortgage lenders to form captives to spread their exposures to property mortgage insurance (PMI). But once the market bottomed-out, these arrangements fell under greater legal scrutiny and many courts are now finding them lacking. According to attorneys David McMahon and Peter Felsenfeld of Barger & Wolen, in a new online article in Risk Management magazine, the way premiums are collected by the captives may be a violation of federal law.

Mortgage reinsurance captives…are not funded by premiums paid by the parent company. Just like a standard reinsurer, they operate by collecting premiums from the PMI provider and sharing in the payment of losses. They are “captives” by virtue of their relationship to the parent institutional lender. In that way, they appear to the outside world just like any other wholly owned subsidiary of the lender.

Once commonplace, this arrangement may create legal exposure to lenders that outweighs the benefits of reinsuring through a captive. Courts are increasingly frowning on the captive mortgage reinsurer model, allowing class actions to proceed against lenders that allege the premiums generated constitute improper referral fees or even “kickbacks.”

As the authors report, court decisions over the last few years are increasingly chipping away at the concept of mortgage reinsurance captives and putting lenders on the defensive. For more, you can read the entire article at RMmagazine.com.

New Forecasting Method Predicts 75% Chance of El Nino in 2014

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There is a 75% chance of an El Niño event in 2014, according to an early warning report published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers used a new method that uses network analysis to predict weather systems up to a year ahead, instead of the usual six-month maximum of other approaches. The model successfully predicted the absence of El Niño in 2012 and 2013.

El Niño events are characterized by a warmer Pacific Ocean, which results in a disruption to the ocean-atmosphere system. This can lead to warmer temperatures worldwide, droughts in Australia and Southeast Asia, and heavy rain and flooding in parts of the U.S. and South America. If such an event occurred toward the end of 2014, the increased temperatures and drought conditions could persist through 2015.

The researchers suggested that their work might help farmers and government agencies by giving them more time to prepare and to consider investing in flood- or drought-resistant crops.

“Farmers might find it worthwhile to invest in drought- or flood-resistant varieties of crops,” Josef Ludescher and Armin Bunde told Businessweek. “A strong El Niño event in late 2014 can make 2015 a record year for global temperatures.”

The current highest record global temperatures date back to 1998, during the last strong El Niño. Given the continued increases in baseline temperature around the world, an El Niño event this year could lead to the record-breaking heat.

Last week, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center issued a similar warning. While the forecasters expect neutral conditions through the spring, a change in temperatures may “portend warming in the coming months.

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El Nino Phenomenon