The New Old Age: The Executor's Assistant

I’m serving as executor for my father’s estate, a role few of us are prepared for until we’re playing it, so I was grateful when the mail brought “The American Bar Association Guide to Wills and Estates” — the fourth edition of a handbook the A.B.A. began publishing in 1995.

This is a legal universe, I’m learning, in which every step — even with a small, simple estate that owes no taxes and includes no real estate or trusts — turns out to be at least 30 percent more complicated than expected.

If my dad had been wealthy or owned a business, or if we faced a challenge to his will, I would have turned the whole matter over to an estate lawyer by now. But even then, it would be helpful to know what the lawyer was talking about. The A.B.A. guide would help.

Written with surprising clarity (hey, they’re lawyers), it maps out all kinds of questions and decisions to consider and explains the many ways to leave property to one’s heirs. Updated from the third edition in 2009, the guide not only talks taxes and trusts, but also offers counsel for same-sex couples and unconventional families.

If you want to permit your second husband to live in the family home until he dies, but then guarantee that the house reverts to the children of your first marriage, the guide tells you how a “life estate” works. It explains what is taxable and what isn’t, and discusses how to choose executors and trustees. It lists lots of resources and concludes with an estate-planning checklist.

In general, the A.B.A. intends its guide for the person trying to put his or her affairs in order, more than for family members trying to figure out how to proceed after someone has died. But many of us will play both these parts at some point (and if you are already an executor, or have been, please tell us how that has gone, and mention your state). We’ll need this information.

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Paula Span is the author of “When the Time Comes: Families With Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions.”

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McDonald's January sales down 1.9%

McDonald's January comparable sales fell 1.9 percent, due to weakness in the Europe and Asia, the company said Friday. 

The Oak Brook-based burger giant warned during its fourth-quarter earnings release that sales at restaurants open more than one year would be down. But analysts polled by Consensus Metrix had expected a decline of 1.1 percent.

Of greatest concern to Wall Street, same store sales in Europe declined to 2.1 percent. The company cited particular weakness in Germany and France despite solid growth in the U.K and Russia. Europe is the chain's largest market.

Comparable sales fell 9.5 percent in McDonald's Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa division, for which the chain cited weakness in Japan, and declines in China, attributable to a calendar shift in the Chinese New Year, and the ongoing fallout from a poultry crisis.

In the U.S., comparable sales rose 0.9 percent. McDonald's cited popularity of its core menu and moving the grilled onion and cheddar burger onto the Dollar Menu.

Total sales rose in January 0.3 percent, or 0.7 percent adjusted for the impact of currency.

While McDonald's expects sales to improve later this year, the worst isn't over. The company said it expects a 3 percent hit to February sales as a result of a shorter month in 2013.

"While January's results reflect today's challenging environment and difficult prior year comparisons, I am confident that our unwavering commitment to delivering an exceptional restaurant experience will enhance our brand's relevance and drive long-term results," McDonald's CEO Don Thompson said in a statement.

eyork@tribune.com | Twitter: @emilyyork

Reuters contributed to this report.

MCD data by YCharts

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Ex-L.A. police officer suspected in cop killing, other slayings

A manhunt is under way for a double murder suspect, himself a former LAPD officer, after three officers were shot overnight, one fatally.

A massive manhunt is under way for a double murder suspect in California, himself a former Los Angeles police officer, after three cops were shot overnight, one fatally.

The suspect was already wanted for allegedly killing the daughter of a former Los Angeles Police Department captain as well as the woman’s fiance in Irvine, Calif., over the weekend.

The three new shootings occurred in Riverside County, Calif. One LAPD officer was grazed east of Los Angeles, in the area of Magnolia and the 15 Freeway in Corona, law enforcement sources said. Then sometime later, two Riverside Police Department officers were shot in Riverside. One of those officers died, sources said.

Police have launched a manhunt for the suspect, Christopher Jordan Dorner, 33.

Police said they are searching for Dorner, whose last known address is in La Palma, and said he drives a blue 2005 Nissan Titan pickup with California license 7X03191. He is described as a 6-foot tall African American man weighing about 270 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes.

Anyone with information is asked to call a tip line at (714) 724-7192.Irvine police on Wednesday night named  Dorner as the suspect in the double slaying in the parking lot of an upscale Irvine apartment complex Sunday. Officials warned that Dorner is armed and dangerous. Law enforcement sources said police have placed security at the homes of LAPD officials named in the manifesto and believe Dorner has numerous weapons.

In the online postings, according to the Los Angeles Times, Dorner specifically named the father of Monica Quan, the Cal State Fullerton assistant basketball coach who was found dead Sunday, along with her fiance, Keith Lawrence.

Randy Quan, a retired LAPD captain, was involved in the review process that ultimately led to Dorner’s dismissal.

A former U.S. Navy reservist, Dorner was fired in 2009 for allegedly making false statements about his training officer.

Dorner said in his online postings that being a police officer had been his life’s ambition since he served in the Police Explorers program. Now that had been taken away from him, he said, and he suffered from severe depression and was filled with rage over the people who forced him from his job.

Dorner complained that Quan and others did not fairly represent him at the review hearing.

“Your lack of ethics and conspiring to wrong a just individual are over. Suppressing the truth will leave to deadly consequences for you and your family. There will be an element of surprise where you work, live, eat, and sleep,” he wrote, referring to Quan and several others.

“I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own, I'm terminating yours,” he added.

Quan apparently served as Dorner’s representative, according to the manifesto. Of Quan, Dorner wrote: “He doesn't work for you, your interest, or your name. He works for the department, period. His job is to protect the department from civil lawsuits being filed and their best interest which is the almighty dollar. His loyalty is to the department, not his client.”

In the document, he threatens violence against other police officers.

“The violence of action will be high.... I will bring unconventional and asymmetrical warfare to those in LAPD uniform whether on or off duty,” Dorner wrote.

In his manifesto, Dorner seemed to allude to the Irvine slaying.

“I know most of you who personally know me are in disbelief to hear from media reports that I am suspected of committing such horrendous murders and have taken drastic and shocking actions in the last couple of days,” he wrote.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “this is a necessary evil that I do not enjoy but must partake and complete for substantial change to occur within the LAPD and reclaim my name.”

Quan, 28, and Lawrence, 27, had recently become engaged and moved into the condominium complex near Concordia University, where they had played basketball and received their degrees, authorities said. Lawrence worked as a campus officer at USC.

Dorner’s LAPD case began when he lodged a complaint against his field training officer, Sgt. Teresa Evans. He accused her of kicking a suspect named Christopher Gettler. An LAPD Board of Rights found that the complaint was false and terminated his employment for making false statements. He appealed the action.

He testified that he graduated from the Police Academy in February 2006 and left for a 13-month military deployment in November 2006.

“This is my last resort,” he wrote. “The LAPD has suppressed the truth and it has now led to deadly consequences.”

Dorner said it was the LAPD’s fault that he lost his law enforcement and Navy careers, as well as his relationships with family and close friends. Dorner wrote that he began his law enforcement career in February 2005 and that it ended in January 2009. His Navy career began in April 2002 and ended this month.

“I lost everything,” he said, “because the LAPD took my name and knew I was innocent.”

Los Angeles Times and KTLA

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The Wanted take music to television with E! reality show

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – After storming the U.S. pop charts with their infectious dance songs last year, British-Irish boy band The Wanted are set to invade television screens with a new reality show on the E! channel this summer, the network announced on Wednesday.

“The Wanted Life,” co-produced by Ryan Seacrest Productions, will follow the band members as they move into a house in the Hollywood Hills and work on their anticipated album, due for release later this year.

The Wanted – Max George, Siva Kaneswaran, Nathan Sykes, Tom Parker and Jay McGuiness – formed in 2009 in England, and was signed by Justin Bieber‘s manager Scooter Braun for its U.S. endeavors.

The five, aged 19 to 24, are known for their raucous behavior and are often pictured out drinking and partying with girls.

“We’ve always tried to show who we are. We haven’t hid much,” band member George said in an interview with E! Online.

“I don’t think there’s anything off limits to be honest … We’ll let everything be exposed,” Kaneswaran added.

The band have accumulated a strong following of fans on Twitter after hit singles such as “Glad You Came” and “Chasing the Sun” became radio and pop chart staples last year.

The band also opened for Bieber at various tour dates including his sold-out Madison Square Gardens gig in New York last December.

They will be embarking on their own headlining tour in the United States and Britain in the fall, with details to be released in summer.

George has also grabbed headlines for his friendship with troubled actress Lindsay Lohan, who has been traveling to the UK with the band in the last few months.

George did not say whether Lohan would appear on the show, which is set to premiere in June.

(Reporting by Piya Sinha-Roy; Editing by Eric Kelsey and Eric Walsh)

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Well: Think Like a Doctor: A Confused and Terrified Patient

The Challenge: Can you solve the mystery of a middle-aged man recovering from a serious illness who suddenly becomes frightened and confused?

Every month the Diagnosis column of The New York Times Magazine asks Well readers to sift through a difficult case and solve a diagnostic riddle. Below you will find a summary of a case involving a 55-year-old man well on his way to recovering from a series of illnesses when he suddenly becomes confused and paranoid. I will provide you with the main medical notes, labs and imaging results available to the doctor who made the diagnosis.

The first reader to figure out this case will get a signed copy of my book, “Every Patient Tells a Story,” along with the satisfaction of knowing you solved a case of Sherlockian complexity. Good luck.

The Presenting Problem:

A 55-year-old man who is recovering from a devastating injury in a rehabilitation facility suddenly becomes confused, frightened and paranoid.

The Patient’s Story:

The patient, who was recovering from a terrible injury and was too weak to walk, had been found on the floor of his room at the extended care facility, raving that there were people out to get him. He was taken to the emergency room at the Waterbury Hospital in Connecticut, where he was diagnosed with a urinary tract infection and admitted to the hospital for treatment. Doctors thought his delirium was caused by the infection, but after 24 hours, despite receiving the appropriate antibiotics, the patient remained disoriented and frightened.

A Sister’s Visit:

The man’s sister came to visit him on his second day in the hospital. As she walked into the room she was immediately struck by her brother’s distress.

“Get me out of here!” the man shouted from his hospital bed. “They are coming to get me. I gotta get out of here!”

His brown eyes darted from side to side as if searching for his would-be attackers. His arms and legs shook with fear. He looked terrified.

For the past few months, the man had been in and out of the hospital, but he had been getting better — at least he had been improving the last time his sister saw him, the week before. She hurried into the bustling hallway and found a nurse. “What the hell is going on with my brother?” she demanded.

A Long Series of Illnesses:

Three months earlier, the patient had been admitted to that same hospital with delirium tremens. After years of alcohol abuse, he had suddenly stopped drinking a couple of days before, and his body was wracked by the sudden loss of the chemical he had become addicted to. He’d spent an entire week in the hospital but finally recovered. He was sent home, but he didn’t stay there for long.

The following week, when his sister hadn’t heard from him for a couple of days, she forced her way into his home. There she found him, unconscious, in the basement, at the bottom of his staircase. He had fallen, and it looked as if he may have been there for two, possibly three, days. He was close to death. Indeed, in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, his heart had stopped. Rapid action by the E.M.T.’s brought his heart back to life, and he made it to the hospital.

There the extent of the damage became clear. The man’s kidneys had stopped working, and his body chemistry was completely out of whack. He had a severe concussion. And he’d had a heart attack.

He remained in the intensive care unit for nearly three weeks, and in the hospital another two weeks. Even after these weeks of care and recovery, the toll of his injury was terrible. His kidneys were not working, so he required dialysis three times a week. He had needed a machine to help him breathe for so long that he now had to get oxygen through a hole that had been cut into his throat. His arms and legs were so weak that he could not even lift them, and because he was unable even to swallow, he had to be fed through a tube that went directly into his stomach.

Finally, after five weeks in the hospital, he was well enough to be moved to a short-term rehabilitation hospital to complete the long road to recovery. But he was still far from healthy. The laughing, swaggering, Harley-riding man his sister had known until that terrible fall seemed a distant memory, though she saw that he was slowly getting better. He had even started to smile and make jokes. He was confident, he had told her, that with a lot of hard work he could get back to normal. So was she; she knew he was tough.

Back to the Hospital:

The patient had been at the rehab facility for just over two weeks when the staff noticed a sudden change in him. He had stopped smiling and was no longer making jokes. Instead, he talked about people that no one else could see. And he was worried that they wanted to harm him. When he remained confused for a second day, they sent him to the emergency room.

You can see the records from that E.R. visit here.

The man told the E.R. doctor that he knew he was having hallucinations. He thought they had started when he had begun taking a pill to help him sleep a couple of days earlier. It seemed a reasonable explanation, since the medication was known to cause delirium in some people. The hospital psychiatrist took him off that medication and sent him back to rehab that evening with a different sleeping pill.

Back to the Hospital, Again:

Two days later, the patient was back in the emergency room. He was still seeing things that weren’t there, but now he was quite confused as well. He knew his name but couldn’t remember what day or month it was, or even what year. And he had no idea where he was, or where he had just come from.

When the medical team saw the patient after he had been admitted, he was unable to provide any useful medical history. His medical records outlined his earlier hospitalizations, and records from the nursing home filled in additional details. The patient had a history of high blood pressure, depression and alcoholism. He was on a long list of medications. And he had been confused for the past several days.

On examination, he had no fever, although a couple of hours earlier his temperature had been 100.0 degrees. His heart was racing, and his blood pressure was sky high. His arms and legs were weak and swollen. His legs were shaking, and his reflexes were very brisk. Indeed, when his ankle was flexed suddenly, it continued to jerk back and forth on its own three or four times before stopping, a phenomenon known as clonus.

His labs were unchanged from the previous visit except for his urine, which showed signs of a serious infection. A CT scan of the brain was unremarkable, as was a chest X-ray. He was started on an intravenous antibiotic to treat the infection. The thinking was that perhaps the infection was causing the patient’s confusion.

You can see the notes from that second hospital visit here.

His sister had come to visit him the next day, when he was as confused as he had ever been. He was now trembling all over and looked scared to death, terrified. He was certain he was being pursued.

That is when she confronted the nurse, demanding to know what was going on with her brother. The nurse didn’t know. No one did. His urinary tract infection was being treated with antibiotics, but he continued to have a rapid heart rate and elevated blood pressure, along with terrifying hallucinations.

Solving the Mystery:

Can you figure out why this man was so confused and tremulous? I have provided you with all the data available to the doctor who made the diagnosis. The case is not easy — that is why it is here. I’ll post the answer on Friday.

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Rules and Regulations: Post your questions and diagnosis in the comments section below.. The correct answer will appear Friday on Well. The winner will be contacted. Reader comments may also appear in a coming issue of The New York Times Magazine.

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Exelon cuts dividend by 41%

Exelon Corp. Thursday morning said it will slash its dividend by more than 40 percent in order to maintain an investment grade rating and free up money to "invest in growth."

Beginning in the second quarter, Exelon's divided will drop to $1.24 per share on an annualized basis from $2.10 per share. The company maintained the $2.10 dividend, among the highest of U.S. utilities, since late 2008.

Analysts predicted the move in light of stubbornly low natural gas prices that have been driving down the company's earnings and are largely responsible for the nearly two-thirds drop the company has seen in its stock price since a high in 2008.
 
Net income for 2012 fell to $1.16 billion, or $1.42 per share, from $2.5 billion, or $3.75 per share. In the fourth quarter, net income fell to $378 million, or 44 cents per share, from $606 million, 91 cents per share, a year earlier.

Revenue was $6.28 billion in the fourth quarter compared to $4.36 billion a year earlier. For the year, revenue rose to $23.49 billion, from $19.06 billion in 2011.

The results were within the company's guidance range.
 
Exelon said Thursday morning that lower prices for the energy it sells, as well as higher nuclear fuel costs,  diminished earnings. Storms, including Sandy, also affected earnings at its regulated utilities in Pennsylvania and Baltimore.
 
The addition of Constellation Energy's contribution to its margins since the merger and favorable weather elsewhere helped to partially offset some losses, the company said.
 
jwernau@tribune.com | Twitter @littlewern

EXC data by YCharts

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Post office to end Saturday mail service

After losing $16 billion last year, CBS News has learned the postal service wants to halt Saturday delivery of first class mail starting this summer. CBS News' Nancy Cordes reports.

Tribune staff and wire report

8:19 a.m. CST, February 6, 2013

WASHINGTON -- The Postal Service is planning to drop Saturday delivery of first-class mail by August, a congressional source said on Wednesday.

The cash-strapped mail agency will still deliver packages, said the source, who is familiar with the matter but not authorized to speak on the record.

USPS spokesman Mark Saunders could not confirm the change, but said the agency would issue a news release on Wednesday.

The move is part of the mail carrier's larger effort to aggressively to cut costs amid rising use of email and the Internet as well as looming payments for future retiree's health benefits. USPS lost almost $16 billion last year.

The 237-year-old institution has already run into its legal borrowing limit and defaulted twice on required payments to the federal government.

Reuters contributed

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Ipswich Journal: Paul Mason Is One-Third the Man He Used to Be

Paul Nixon Photography

Paul Mason in 2012, two years after gastric bypass surgery stripped him of the unofficial title of “the world’s fattest man.”

IPSWICH, England — Who knows what the worst moment was for Paul Mason — there were so many awful milestones, as he grew fatter and fatter — but a good bet might be when he became too vast to leave his room. To get him to the hospital for a hernia operation, the local fire department had to knock down a wall and extricate him with a forklift.

That was nearly a decade ago, when Mr. Mason weighed about 980 pounds, and the spectacle made him the object of fascinated horror, a freak-show exhibit. The British news media, which likes a superlative, appointed him “the world’s fattest man.”

Now the narrative has shifted to one of redemption and second chances. Since a gastric bypass operation in 2010, Mr. Mason, 52 years old and 6-foot-4, has lost nearly two-thirds of his body weight, putting him at about 336 pounds — still obese, but within the realm of plausibility. He is talking about starting a jewelry business.

“My meals are a lot different now than they used to be,” Mr. Mason said during a recent interview in his one-story apartment in a cheerful public housing complex here. For one thing, he no longer eats around the clock. “Food is a necessity, but now I don’t let it control my life anymore,” he said.

But the road to a new life is uphill and paved with sharp objects. When he answered the door, Mr. Mason did not walk; he glided in an electric wheelchair.

And though Mr. Mason looks perfectly normal from the chest up, horrible vestiges of his past stick to him, literally, in the form of a huge mass of loose skin choking him like a straitjacket. Folds and folds of it encircle his torso and sit on his lap, like an unwanted package someone has set there; more folds encase his legs. All told, he reckons, the excess weighs more than 100 pounds.

As he waits to see if anyone will agree to perform the complex operation to remove the skin, Mr. Mason has plenty of time to ponder how he got to where he is. He was born in Ipswich and had a childhood marked by two things, he says: the verbal and physical abuse of his father, a military policeman turned security guard; and three years of sexual abuse, starting when he was 6, by a relative in her 20s who lived in the house and shared his bed. He told no one until decades later.

After he left school, Mr. Mason took a job as a postal worker and became engaged to a woman more than 20 years older than him. “I thought it would be for life, but she just turned around one day and said, ‘No, I don’t want to see you anymore — goodbye,’ ” he said.

His father died, and he returned home to care for his arthritic mother, who was in a wheelchair. “I still had all these things going around in my head from my childhood,” he said. “Food replaced the love I didn’t get from my parents.” When he left the Royal Mail in 1986, he said, he weighed 364 pounds.

Then things spun out of control. Mr. Mason tried to eat himself into oblivion. He spent every available penny of his and his mother’s social security checks on food. He stopped paying the mortgage. The bank repossessed their house, and the council found them a smaller place to live. All the while, he ate the way a locust eats — indiscriminately, voraciously, ingesting perhaps 20,000 calories a day. First he could no longer manage the stairs; then he could no longer get out of his room. He stayed in bed, on and off, for most of the last decade.

Social service workers did everything for him, including changing his incontinence pads. A network of local convenience stores and fast-food restaurants kept the food coming nonstop — burgers, french fries, fish and chips, even about $22 worth of chocolate bars a day.

“They didn’t deliver bags of crisps,” he said of potato chips. “They delivered cartons.”

His life became a cycle: eat, doze, eat, eat, eat. “You didn’t sleep a normal sleep,” he said. “You’d be awake most of the night eating and snacking. You totally forgot about everything else. You lose all your dignity, all your self-respect. It all goes, and all you focus on is getting your next fix.”

He added, “It was quite a lonely time, really.”

He got infections a lot and was transported to the hospital — first in a laundry van, then on the back of a truck and finally on the forklift. For 18 months after a hernia operation in 2003, he lived in the hospital and in an old people’s home — where he was not allowed to leave his room — while the local government found him a house that could accommodate all the special equipment he needed.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 6, 2013

The headline on an earlier version of this article misstated Paul Mason’s current weight relative to what he weighed nearly a decade ago. He is now about one-third of the weight he was then, not two-thirds.

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Chicago sees surge in foreclosure auctions

More than 35,000 homes and small multifamily buildings in the Chicago area completed the foreclosure process last year, the highest number since the housing crisis began, and the vast majority of them became bank-owned.

An increase in foreclosure auctions was expected since lenders shelved many foreclosure cases while state and federal authorities investigated allegations of faulty foreclosure processes. Still, the heightened level of auctions — 35,244 in 2012, compared with 20,281 in 2011 — along with an increase in initial foreclosure filings, shows the local housing market has a long road to recovery, according to the Woodstock Institute.

"There's going to be pain in the housing market in the short term," said Katie Buitrago, senior policy and communications associate at Woodstock. "There's still high levels of filings. Five years into it, there is still work to be done to help people save their homes."

The Chicago-based public policy and research group is expected to release its report on 2012 foreclosure activity Wednesday.

The year-end numbers show that, with few exceptions, all Chicago neighborhoods and suburban communities saw high double-digit percentage gains in auctions last year. Across the six-county area, 91.3 percent of the foreclosed properties were repossessed by lenders. At the same time, notices of initial default sent to homeowners, the first step in the foreclosure process, increased by 2.9 percent last year, to 66,783.

Real estate agents have worried for more than two years about a glut of foreclosed properties — a shadow inventory — that banks would list for sale en masse and cause home values to plunge. That largely has not happened, but the vast number of distressed properties in the market has kept a lid on local home values.

On Tuesday, for instance, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's websites listed 2,415 Cook County homes for sale that the two agencies had repossessed.

Chicago-area home prices, including distressed sales, fell 2.3 percent in December from a year ago, housing analytics firm CoreLogic said Tuesday. Illinois was one of only four states to see home-price depreciation.

The increase in auctions "is a mixed blessing," Buitrago said. "We've been having a lot of trouble in the region with vacant properties that have been languishing for years. The longer they're vacant, the more likely they are to be a destabilizing force in their communities."

Woodstock found that within the city of Chicago, there were 20 communities where more than 1 in 10 owner-occupied one- to four-unit residential buildings and condos went through foreclosure from 2008 to 2012. Five of those neighborhoods are included in the city's 18-month-old Micro-Market Recovery Program, a coordinated effort to stabilize neighborhoods and property values hit hard by foreclosures and vacant buildings.

Also designed to benefit hard-hit areas are the recent establishment of a Cook County Land Bank and legislation waiting for Gov. Pat Quinn's signature that will fast-track the foreclosure process for vacant, abandoned homes while providing financial resources to foreclosure prevention efforts.

mepodmolik@tribune.com

Twitter @mepodmolik

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Chicago commute one of nation's most unpredictable: study

You can predict with a high degree of confidence that the time it takes to drive from Point A to B on any given day is unpredictable.

And it's not just snowy or rainy days. It can be any day.

If there is a bright side, it's that Chicago was not the worst.

Residents of the Chicago area are accommodating that increasing uncertainty by setting aside more time each day — just in case — for the commute, new research shows.

For the most important trips, such as going to work, medical appointments, the airport or making a 5:30 p.m. pickup at the child care center to avoid late fees, drivers in northeastern Illinois and northwest Indiana should count on allotting four times as much time as it would take to travel in free-flowing traffic, according to the "Urban Mobility Report" to be released Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The analysis is based on 2011 data, which are the most recent available.

It is the first time that travel reliability was measured in the 30-year history of the annual report. The researchers created a Planning Time Index geared toward helping commuters reach their destinations on time in more than 95 percent of the trips. A second index, requiring less padding of travel time, would get an employee to work on time four out of five days a week.

"If you plan only for average traffic conditions on your trip in the Chicago area, you are going to be late at least half the time," said Bill Eisele, a senior research engineer at the Transportation Institute who co-authored the study.

The constant unreliability that hovers over commuting is stealing precious time from other activities, crimping lifestyles, causing mounting frustration for drivers and slapping extra costs on businesses that rely on just-in-time shipments to manage inventory efficiently, researchers found.

The Chicago region ranked No. 7 among very large urban areas and 13th among 498 U.S. cities on a scale of the most unreliable highway travel times. The Washington area was the worst. A driver using the freeway system in the nation's capital and surrounding suburbs should budget almost three hours to complete a high-priority trip that would take only 30 minutes in light traffic, the study said.

The Washington area was followed on the list by the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York-Newark, Boston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Seattle.

Rounding out the top 10, the Chicago metro area was trailed by San Francisco-Oakland, Atlanta, and Houston.

Truck driver Frank Denk said he usually adds an hour or two to his trip through the Chicago area. Sometimes, it's not enough, other times traffic isn't a problem, he said. The one constant, Denk said Monday afternoon while taking a break at the O'Hare Oasis on the Tri-State Tollway, is that it is almost impossible to anticipate correctly.

"Job-wise, it can be very detrimental to truckers," said Denk, who is based in Green Bay, Wis. "All of a sudden, you're not able to make your delivery."

But quadrupling the time to travel back and forth each day? That's excessive, said Mike Hennigan, a 64-year-old accountant who regularly commutes from his Evanston home to his office near the junction of the Kennedy and Edens expressways. He recommends doubling the anticipated travel time.

"I can predict when it's going to be bad," Hennigan said, although he is less optimistic about his travel times when he heads toward downtown.

"Coming into the Loop can be deadly, especially later in the week," Hennigan said.

Overall, traffic congestion in the Chicago region is getting worse as the economy improves, although it's not as severe as the grip that gridlock has taken recently on some other very large metropolitan areas in the U.S., according to the report. The Washington area again topped the list, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco-Oakland, New York-Newark, Boston, Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

No longer being ranked at the very top of the congestion heap provides little consolation for Chicago-area drivers.

What should be a 20-minute jaunt across town in Chicago or the suburbs if highway capacity were sufficient to permit vehicles to travel the speed limit now becomes about an 80-minute ordeal, according to the Texas A&M study. Scheduling 80 minutes for the trip would ensure an on-time arrival 19 out of 20 times, the study concluded.

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