Streetsblog Chicago

A South Shore Line car with high and low level boarding doors. Photo: David Wilson.

Two weeks ago, at a friend’s suggestion, I started a petition to lobby the South Shore Line to allow bicycles on trains, which currently has 125 signers. Our motivation was mostly selfish: We want to be able to travel to the Dunes National Lakeshore and other places in northwest Indiana with our bikes. So I reached out to Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, the agency that operates the South Shore Line. Yesterday afternoon, when I called John Parsons, NICTD’s planning and marketing director, he said he was expecting me since he had already received many emails about bikes on trains (the petition website automatically sends them).

Note: Passengers may bring bikes if inside luggage and can fit in the luggage rack. 

Parsons said he appreciated the petition emails because they told him why people want to take their bicycles on the South Shore Line. Many people, like me, want to visit the Dunes, while others want to be able to visit family in South Bend without having to be driven to and from the station. People left comments about how bicycles can fill the “last mile” gap to your final destination – that leg of the trip where there’s often no transit service – and that allowing bicycles on trains could increase ridership.

The signatures weren’t all from Chicagoans. Bruce Spitzer from South Bend wrote, “This is South Bend’s ‘direct connection’ to Chicago! Yet we bicyclists cannot enjoy easily taking our bikes to Chicago. We’d love to bike in Chicago via the South Shore!” Russ Perdiu from Tippecanoe, IN, said, “With gas pricing sky high and traffic a total disaster no matter what city you are in it is important to allow access to alternative travel options.”

So why can’t bikes go on South Shore Line trains? Parsons said the limitations are pretty straightforward. A lot of the route’s 19 stations have low-level boarding that requires people to enter trains via narrow stairs and doorways at the end of the cars. “You literally cannot bring a bike up these stairwells,” he explained. The agency is converting more stations to high-level boarding in order to use the cars’ middle doors, which would improve access for people with disabilities.

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Chicago/Ogden/Milwaukee, one of the city's worst intersections for bicycle crashes, slated for improvements as part of the Milwaukee protected bike lane project. Photo by John Greenfield

[This article also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield's weekly column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

Last summer when I visited Copenhagen, I hung out with with Mikael Colville-Andersen, one of the world’s most influential and controversial bicycle advocates, in his lush back yard while his kids practiced soccer and picked flowers. Colville-Andersen heads the consulting firm Copenhagenize, advising politicians, planners and advocates on ways to copy the success of the bike-friendly Danish capital, but he’s probably better known for his wildly popular photo blog, Copenhagen Cycle Chic.

Among the many topics we discussed was his attitude toward bike helmets. He thinks they’re totally unnecessary for urban commuting, and he believes that promoting helmet use is actually counterproductive to making cycling safer. In northern European bicycle meccas like Copenhagen and Amsterdam, more than a third of all trips are made by bike, almost nobody wears a helmet, and yet injury rates are much lower than in the United States, where lots of people wear helmets.

One reason crashes are relatively rare in these cities is the safety-in-numbers factor. There are so many cyclists in these places that drivers are always looking out for them, and wouldn’t dream of making a right turn or opening a car door without first checking that the coast is clear. And part of the reason there are so many people on bikes is because cycling feels so safe that strapping a Styrofoam and plastic shell on your head really does seem superfluous.

Mikael Colville-Andersen with his kids Felix and Lulu. Photo by John Greenfield.

Colville-Andersen doesn’t have a problem with folks choosing to wear helmets if it makes them feel safer. But he argues that, in the long run, cycling with no helmet is a lot better for your health than not biking at all. “In Europe … we want to get more people onto bikes,” he says. “You really sense that in America the general focus is getting people into helmets.”

It’s easy for Colville-Andersen to say that helmets are unnecessary when he lives in a pedaler’s paradise. Copenhagen cyclists never have to share the road with high-speed traffic. Virtually all major streets have raised bicycle lanes, elevated a few inches above the roadway, and neighborhood streets are designed so that cars must travel at a mellow speed.

Things are different here in Chicago and other North American cities where biking is relatively rare and fast, reckless, distracted and/or drunk driving is common. Ask Dustin Valenta, who was doored by one motorist in Wicker Park last February, then run over by a second who fled the scene. Miraculously, he survived, but he suffered a cracked skull and vertebrae, broken shoulder blades and pelvis, twenty-three fractured ribs and a punctured lung.

Or talk to Justin Carver, who’s making an amazing recovery from serious brain damage, after being “left-hooked” in Berwyn last December by a teenage driver who tested positive for marijuana. Their cases are a sobering reminder that even if you’re doing everything right on a bike, you could be the victim of someone else’s dangerous behavior, suggesting that it’s a good idea to wear a helmet while biking Chicago-area streets.

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A study out of Nashville by Smart Growth America provides more evidence that building walkable development in existing communities is best for a city’s bottom line.

Nashville's "The Gulch" -- a mixed-use development downtown -- generates a much greater public return than more suburban developments in the same city. Image: Cumberland Region Tomorrow

SGA recently examined three different developments in the Music City. One was a large-lot, traditional suburban-style development called Bradford Hills built on greenfield site. Another was a “new urban”-style, mixed-use, walkable development also built on a greenfield, called Lennox Village. The third — known as The Gulch — was a mixed-use, compact housing and office development with retail and dining, built on a brownfield between Nashville’s Music Row and downtown.

The study compared the costs of local services to each new development with the revenues returned. Overall, the urban, infill development was far and away the best value for municipalities.

The Gulch — a 76-acre project, including 4,500 housing units and 6 million square feet of office space — yielded the highest returns in the form of “property taxes, sales taxes, and other recurring revenues,” according to SGA. Per unit, the development produced a total of $3,370 in public revenue annually, while costing the local government about $1,400 per year in infrastructure maintenance, policing, fire response, and other general fund obligations. In comparison, the traditional suburban development Bradford Hills generated only half the revenue — $1,620 per year — and cost more to service — $1,600 — making it basically a wash for local taxpayers.

Per unit, the performance of new-urbanist Lennox Village barely beat out the large-lot suburban development, generating $1,340 for the municipality annually while costing about $1,300.

When you factor in density, the differences between the three models really crystallize. The Gulch, filled with condo towers, generated $115,720 in net revenue per acre annually. That’s an astounding 1,150 times greater than Bradford Hills, which generated a total of just $100 per acre. The downtown development also performed 148 times better for the local government’s bottom line than new urbanist development Lennox Village, which yielded $780 per acre.

Developers often shy away from urban brownfield sites, fearing the cost of cleaning them up. Given the incredible benefits to the city of that kind of development, there should be better incentives for developers to look to infill, rather than greenfields, for their next project.

Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

Offering employees just $90 a year not to drive to campus was enough to entice many of them to use transit, carpools, or bicycles. Meanwhile, the annualized cost of each parking space can range from about $650 for surface spots in suburban locations to over $4,000 for structured spaces in cities, according to the Victoria Transport Policy Institute [PDF].

Biking means big savings at Stanford. Image: FHWA

Stanford offered further incentive by raising parking prices 15 percent. Then, it invested $4 million in bicycle facilities, including turning a main road through campus into a bike and transit mall. This $4 million enticed 900 people out of their cars and onto bicycles, according to a case study in Transportation & Sustainable Campus Communities, by Will Toor and Spenser Havlick. Building parking facilities to accommodate those 900 people would have cost $18 million.

What Stanford had discovered was “transportation demand management,” or strategies to minimize transportation costs by reducing driving. Today almost every college and university in the country employs some form of TDM, whether it’s providing discounted transit passes for students or offering special parking rates to carpoolers.

Colleges and universities — by nature of their fixed locations and limited resources — are excellent laboratories for transportation innovation, says Tumlin, who now works for the firm Nelson\Nygaard.

“Even the well-funded institutions have to make a choice about putting money into parking or putting money in a classroom,” said Tumlin.

Many schools are now well ahead of even the most progressive cities and state DOTs when it comes to saving money and improving public health by reducing car trips.

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The Cleveland Health Line express bus service, rated silver by the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy. Photo by Robert Dupuis.

The toughest part of the city’s effort to create bus rapid transit in the downtown East-West Transit and the Western/Ashland BRT corridors will be convincing Chicagoans that it’s a good idea to remove travel lanes on major streets to make room for dedicated bus lanes. Help arrived today in the form of a $1.2 million Rockefeller Foundation grant that will be used to build local understanding and support for BRT in Chicago, as well as Boston, Nashville and Pittsburgh.

The funding, which will be shared by each city as needed, will support research, communications and community outreach efforts. The public affairs agency Global Strategy Group is managing the grant for Rockefeller; In Chicago GSC is partnering with the local firm Grisko LLC to run the campaign. Grisko will work with the CTA and Chicago Department of Transportation, plus various nonprofits and transportation advocacy groups, to engage local businesses and residents, and raise awareness of the benefits of BRT. (Disclosure: a separate grant from Rockefeller provides funding to the Chicago Community Trust that in turn funds Streetsblog Chicago.)

This is the latest of several grants from Rockeller to bolster BRT efforts in Chicago. Prior to today’s announcement, the foundation had provided nearly $1.8 million towards the city’s BRT program for several facets of the program, including technical assistance for a system network plan and overall coordination; branding and community outreach; and land-use planning around the Western/Ashland corridor.

“I thank The Rockefeller Foundation for its continued support of Chicago’s Bus Rapid Transit efforts,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel in a statement. “With this latest commitment, there is a real opportunity to collaborate among cities, and share information on what is important to various stakeholders as we all undertake this forward-thinking project. We want BRT service to be equitable, high-quality, and welcomed by residents and businesses. The Rockefeller Foundation’s support is key to these efforts.”

For more details about the new grant, and Rockefeller’s continuing support for BRT in Chicago, I called the foundation associate director Benjamin de la Peña.

John Greenfield: Why is Rockefeller interested in promoting bus rapid transit?

Benjamin de la Peña: We have two big goals. It’s about growth with equity, and resilience. We’ve been doing transportation work in this country for the last five years, trying to change the way we choose and fund transportation projects at the federal level and also at the state level. One of the things that’s clear to us is that Americans are vulnerable when it comes to transportation. Half of the country doesn’t have any transportation other than having to own private cars. Lower-income households tend to spend 30 percent or more of their household income on transportation because they have to buy a car and pay for it and pay for gas. And so when gas prices swing they’re very vulnerable.

On the flip side of that, it takes us forever to build mass transit. It takes literally decades to get a transportation project going. The appeal of bus rapid transit is that you can deliver very high quality transit in two to three years. Some cities have done it in less time. It’s very reliable, dependable public transit that has all the great elements of fixed transit but all of the flexibility of bus. And also in this era of declining resources, we need to get more bang for our buck. You can build gold-standard BRT for a fraction of the cost of fixed rail.

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Which city has the ugliest asphalt expanse? The deadest downtown? The most awful place to sit and eat lunch? Those are the questions you must ask yourself as we approach the finale of Parking Madness, our hunt for the worst parking crater in the U.S.

We’re wrapping up Final Four competition today with Tulsa and Houston vying for the chance to take on Milwaukee in the championship game.

Here we have Tulsa, where the south half of downtown has pretty much been replaced with thousands of 9 foot-by-20 foot stalls:

Our friend Steve Lassiter in Tulsa sent along these shots to give us some historical context. Here are views of downtown Tulsa, facing north from the same point, in 1978 and 2005:

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Unlike New York City's High Line, the Bloomingdale trail will serve as a transportation corridor and neighborhood park.

The High Line in New York City has been lauded for transforming abandoned freight rail tracks into an elevated walking path and park on the west side of Manhattan, but The Bloomingdale (formerly known as Bloomingdale Trail) will be even better. This is simply because the High Line acts as a tourist attraction, while The Bloomingdale will serve as a neighborhood park in areas that sorely need more green space, and a very useful car-free transportation link for people walking and biking.

I took journalist David Lepeska on a tour of the Bloomingdale back in January. We climbed up the embankment in Julia de Burgos Park, then we walked all the way to Damen and perhaps even a bit further.

David described our journey in a piece for Next City’s “Forefront,” a digital subscription publication. (You can buy each issue for $1.99, and I highly recommend it.)

These renderings show the different phases of landscaping and path development planned for the Bloomingdale. See more renderings in the Framework Plan.

David’s article makes the point that the High Line is more of a destination to see than a place to use: “Visitor surveys in New York show that people generally do not use that park to go from point A to point B, and that more than half come to the West Side expressly to visit the High Line.”

At a fundraiser in January, David reports, Chicago Deputy Mayor Steve Koch shared this perspective on the difference between the two projects:

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Okay, the preliminary stuff is over. It’s round two of Parking Madness — our hunt for the worst parking crater in an American downtown. By the end of this week, we’ll be ready down to the Final Four. But first things first: Atlanta takes on Dallas in our first Elite Eight match-up.

As a refresher, we’ll post the photos and descriptions we showed in the first round.

This is the picture that helped Atlanta beat Denver in the first round:

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Expanding NEPA to include climate impacts and adaptability won't necessarily mean a future free from this. Photo: Macomb Politics

Since 1970, the National Environmental Protection Act has required federal agencies to consider the impacts of their projects on air, water, and soil pollution — but not on climate change.

Until recently, carbon dioxide, which causes global warning, wasn’t classified as a pollutant and so couldn’t be regulated under environmental laws. The EPA in 2009 asserted its power to regulate carbon emissions but hasn’t applied it to NEPA analyses for infrastructure – until now.

President Obama hasn’t made the announcement yet, but Bloomberg reported Friday that he “is preparing to tell all federal agencies for the first time that they should consider the impact on global warming before approving major projects, from pipelines to highways.”

There’s more – projects could also be evaluated according to resiliency in the face of climate change. Would the new infrastructure be destroyed if faced with flooding, drought, or other severe weather? Bloomberg reports that the White House is also “looking at” requiring these climate adaptability and resiliency reports for projects “with 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions or more per year, the equivalent of burning about 100 rail cars of coal.”

Does this mean no more highways?

The conservative National Review’s headline about the changes was, “Did Obama Just Block Keystone?” Columnist Stanley Kurtz speculated that Obama could publicly approve the Keystone XL pipeline and then let the new environmental review process rule it out.

Could the same go for highway projects?

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The State Street mall in 1982. Photo by C. William Brubaker from the UIC Digital Collections.

[This piece also appears in Checkerboard City, John's weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

When I was a bicycle messenger in the early nineties, the State Street pedestrian mall, a car-free, bike-free zone between Wacker and Congress, was the bane of my existence. In 1979, under Mayor Jane Byrne, the city closed the Loop’s main retail corridor to all forms of traffic except buses, taxis and delivery vehicles in an effort to bring back customers who had been drawn away to suburban shopping centers and the burgeoning Magnificent Mile. That meant I had to detour around State and access addresses along the strip via intersecting east-west streets.

When done right, pedestrian malls can be safe, thriving public spaces that encourage human interaction and economic activity, but the State Street mall was widely deemed a failure, blamed for reducing the amount of shoppers and sales revenue. In 1996 under Mayor Richard M. Daley, the wide sidewalks were jackhammered to make way for private automobiles once again. That renovation, the $24.5 million State Street Renovation Project, which included attractive Beaux Arts street lamps, ‘L’ entrances and other fixtures, is credited with turning the historically prosperous street back into a bustling retail strip.

Beaux Arts subway entrance on State Street. Photo by trueself2000.

Laura Jones from the Chicago Loop Alliance provided background on the rationale behind removing cars from State Street. “When downtown started to empty out in the early seventies, business leaders from the Greater State Street Council went to the city with the idea of creating the pedestrian mall. They wanted to make State Street more like a suburban shopping mall, and also people were becoming more energy conscious, so they decided to try a transit mall.”

State was redone with the jumbo sidewalks and bumpouts to make bus loading easier, plus octagonal asphalt pavers, which tended to come loose. There were large bus shelters with bulbous Plexiglas roofs, info booths, carts selling popcorn, doughnuts and Italian ice, and several monumental abstract sculptures.

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