Streetsblog Chicago

Deputy commissioner Scott Kubly speaks to WBEZ reporter Robin Amer about Divvy.

Two of the major topics of the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council meeting on Wednesday were bike-share and the Dearborn Street bike lane.

Divvy bike-share was supposed to launch with 40 stations today during the Bike To Work Day Rally, but on Tuesday, the company announced that the system would launch on June 28 with 75 stations. Sean Wiedel, assistant commissioner for the Chicago Department of Transportation, said that a proprietary bolt used in the stations had just arrived this week. Meanwhile, New York’s recently-launched bike-share system, Citi Bike, which uses the same components and software as Divvy, has experienced some bugs in the beginning, including occasional power failures at the stations. Still, in the 19 days since launch, over 212,000 trips have been made.

The Divvy station neighborhood map.

Metropolitan Planning Council Vice President Peter Skosey, an MBAC member, asked that since the Tribune reported “no one is going to use bike sharing, how many members are there?” Wiedel replied that more than 1,300 people have purchased an annual membership. This is lower than the sign-up rate for Citi Bike, which sold 10,000 annual memberships in 30 days, but since New York launched with more than 300 stations, it’s more or less proportional, given the smaller size of Chicago’s initial bike-share network.

Some companies are also signing up for corporate memberships, which give their employees a discount on bike-share subscriptions. Skosey mentioned that MPC has added a free membership for Divvy to their employee benefits package.

The first Divvy station was installed Thursday night at the southeast corner of Daley Plaza (at Washington and Dearborn Streets) with 23 docks. Wiedel said that four more would be installed on Friday, as part of training the crew, who will then work in two teams of four to install eight stations a day until June 28. Each station has two neighborhood maps — one showing the area within a 5-minute walk and the other showing a 5-minute biking radius. “It will show cultural institutions, libraries, and ‘business districts,’ so as not to show favoritism,” Wiedel explained.

Also revealed at the meeting: Dearborn Street will be receiving some much-needed upgrades soon, including fresh green paint and longer-lasting, more visible thermoplastic pavement markings. Additionally, to mitigate conflicts between cyclists and other street users at alleys and driveways, CDOT will add “rumble strips” for cyclists in the form of thicker thermoplastic. Rumble strips tell bicyclists to slow down and green paint should make it more obvious that this is a lane for a biking.

Read more…

Emanuel surprised the crowd by taking a lap around Daley Plaza on a Divvy. Photo: John Greenfield

The annual Bike to Work Rally serves as a state of the union for Chicago cycling, and this year there’s a lot of news to report, with the impending launch of the Divvy bike-share system, completion of the Milwaukee protected lanes, and financing secured for the Chicago Riverwalk. This was the first time Mayor Rahm Emanuel has appeared at the rally and he seemed to enjoy soaking in the crowd’s enthusiasm for the many bike initiatives that have launched since he took office about two years ago.

Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein kicked off the speeches by announcing the recipients of the Mayor’s Bike Advisory Council Awards. Commissioner Rosemary Krimbel of the Department of Business Affairs Consumer Protection was recognized for helping to develop anti-dooring stickers for cabs. Brian Bonanno from the Andersonville Development Corporation has helped get a People Spot parklet and two on-street bike parking corrals installed on Clark Street, with four more corrals and another parklet debuting this summer. Longtime bike activist Kathy Schubert was recognized for her letter-writing campaign that resulted in metal-grate bridges being retrofitted with non-slip “Kathy plates.”

Klein said he rode to the rally in his suit. “It’s to send a message: you can wear a suit and bike to work,” he said, an apparent dig at the Trib’s Jon Hilkevitch, who recently questioned whether such a thing was possible.

The crowd at the Bike to Work Rally. Photo: John Greenfield

The commissioner heralded the opening of the Milwaukee lanes. “That would not have happened – it wouldn’t have happened this quick – without our mayor,” he said. “Every time I met with him he said, ‘The bike plan looks great, but what about Milwaukee Avenue, when are you doing that?’ And so with his support and leadership and pushing me, we got that done for Bike to Work Week. I’m really proud of that.”

He outlined how the new bike-share system will work for Chicagoans. “If you need to go to work: Divvy. If you’re jumping off the CTA, need to get that last mile to your destination: Divvy. If you have friends visiting and want to show them Chicago and go from point to point to point: Divvy. So Divvy is for everyone and anyone that needs to get somewhere.”

When the mayor took the mic, he had an additional suggestion. “In case you have family come visit and you want to get them out of the house: Divvy. Yes, you can go see our neighborhoods, but get out my house, man, you’re driving me crazy at this point.”

Read more…

Swartz, Iacobucci, Schlickman, Burke and Ziemann. Photo: John Greenfield.

Last week GOOD Chicago, a progressive think tank, hosted a panel discussion at the Chicago Cultural Center about the city’s plans for bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue between 95th and Irving Park. The project will start with an initial segment running from the Orange Line at 31st to Metra’s Clybourn stop at Cortland. The panel, moderated by Tracy Swartz, RedEye’s CTA reporter, featured Active Transportation Alliance director Ron Burke; CTA Manager of Strategic Planning Joe Iacobucci; Steve Schlickman, head of UIC’s Urban Transportation Center; and Chris Ziemann, the city’s BRT manager. After the roundtable, George Aye of Greater Good Studio led a hands-on workshop to design BRT bus stop prototypes.

The panelists outlined key elements of the 16-mile BRT route, featuring center-running buses and dedicated bus lanes, which will require the removal of travel lanes for other motorized traffic. There are also plans for signal prioritization and pre-paid, level boarding, so Ashland would be the first U.S. bus route to achieve the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy’s gold-standard rating. When the floor was opened for questions, I asked how they’re going to persuade residents that it’s worth it to turn car lanes into bus lanes.

John Greenfield: It seems like the hardest thing about this project is going to be convincing people it’s a good idea to take traffic lanes off of Ashland. What’s your strategy for winning people over to this?

Steve Schlickman: Doing it. Really, just get it out there. That’s why I think the incremental approach is a good one, because you’re not trying out too much that’s going to scare too many people. Doing it just on Ashland from 31st Street to Cortland and showing how people how it works, and will allow it to grow in the future and take away that worry from other areas where you’re going to see BRT.

Joe Iacobucci: And I’d say our communication has been very strong. I think that if you see the fact sheets, you’ll see that part of what we do is infographics. We want to make sure that the information and the value of the project, and what we’re trying to do with this project is digestible for folks. So if you show people how many hours a year they’re going to save, they can understand the value.

The second part of that is explaining the impacts, right? Understanding what the impacts are of the loss of travel lanes – that’s a thing that we take very seriously. As part of our first phase of planning [when the city was considering building BRT on Ashland, Western or both], we had people go out and count every single parking space along both Western and Ashland. We’re talking about 32 miles of roadway. We also want to see the utilization data for that.

That way we can tell a business owner, if we’re looking at impacting his parking spots, we could say that on a Saturday afternoon, only three of the spots are being utilized and that’s the most utilization of a lot of these spots. There’s a lot of overnight parking. So the impacts are something we take seriously and something we’ve been candid about.

At the same time, we’ve been able to communicate the value of this project. When we look at some of the demographic shifts, the younger is generation driving less now. Even things like car-sharing are becoming mainstream now. Both of Chicago’s car-sharing companies are actually profitable businesses, right? It’s a great testament of what we’re going through in Chicago right now.

Read more…

A memorial for Bobby Cann on Clybourn Avenue.

Robert “Bobby” Cann was cycling on Clybourn Avenue last Wednesday when he was hit and killed by Ryne San Hamel, 28, of Park Ridge, driving a Mercedes sedan at 50 MPH, with a blood-alcohol content of .127, according to police. San Hamel appeared in court on Saturday where he was charged with reckless homicide, aggravated DUI, misdemeanor DUI, reckless driving, and failure to stay in the lane. He is being held on $100,000 bond and had his passport revoked.

Attorney Mike Keating provided an excellent summary of what these charges mean on his blog:

Reckless homicide is when a person unintentionally kills another person while behaving recklessly. Unintentionally means that there was no criminal intent to kill the person. Reckless means that the person was acting with total disregard for the safety and welfare of others. The difference between a murder charge and a reckless homicide charge is the idea of “criminal intent” and whether the person was actually setting out to kill the other person. Keep reading.

Critical Mass visits the crash site.

On Friday evening, the monthly Critical Mass bike ride passed by a memorial to Cann. Riders raised their bikes in a salute to Cann, held a moment of silence, and then applauded.

On The Chainlink, a discussion has started about the significance of pushing for protected bike lanes across the city, as well as blaming the driver for choosing to get behind the wheel while drunk. The question is, if San Hamel had a BAC of less than 0.08, the legal limit, would he still be blamed for the crash? Would it have just been an “accident” that protected bike lanes might have prevented? A barrier is the only way to protect a bicyclist from a car traveling at 50 mph, whether the driver is drunk or sober.

San Hamel is scheduled to appear at the Cook County courthouse at 26th and California on July 17 at 9 a.m., and 18th District police officers are seeking volunteer court advocates. A post on Velocipede Salon explains that this means “the police coordinate with concerned citizens who appear in court to show their support for the case. The sense is, when the community gets involved it sends a signal to the judge that this isn’t ‘just another DUI’ and helps to encourage stricter sentencing.” You can contact the 18th District CAPS officers at 312-742-5778 for more info. Updated: More details on The Chainlink from Active Transportation Alliance’s Jason Jenkins.

Bob Kastigar, a longtime Chicago bike activist and Critical Mass rider, has started a petition demanding that the county’s top prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, send the case to court instead of making a plea bargain. People from around the United States, and one from Canada, are signing on to have San Hamel stand “in open and public court.”

As it stands, the Chicago Department of Transportation can not install protected bike lanes, which shelter cyclists from out-of-control cars, on Clybourn. This is because the Illinois Department of Transportation has prohibited the installation of protected lanes on state jurisdiction roads until CDOT collects three years of “safety data” on existing Chicago PBLs. IDOT has not blocked installation of buffered bike lanes.

Perhaps responding to our coverage of the crash, which mentioned the PBL issue, and/or online discussions that followed on venues like The Chainlink, on Friday IDOT tweeted a two-part message that they support CDOT’s efforts to install buffered lanes on Clybourn.

Read more…

Testing out Divvy.

Divvy bike-share bicycles were on display at yesterday’s Bike the Drive post-ride festival in Grant Park, giving the public its first peek at the blue bikes which just arrived in town on Saturday. I took a spin around the block with Scott Kubly, deputy commissioner at the Chicago Department of Transportation. This was my first time riding a bike manufactured by the BIXI company. They’re available in Toronto (where Anne Alt reviewed her experience), Washington, D.C., Minneapolis, Montreal, and Boston. The bikes are good-looking, sturdy, and comfortable. They weigh about 45 pounds, which is 20 pounds less than my daily Dutch cargo cycle.

Active Transportation Alliance Deputy Director Melody Geraci gives her approval.

Registration for annual memberships opens this week. The cost for unlimited 30-minute trips is $75 per year or $7 a day. Founding memberships, which will include perks-to-be-named-later, will be $125. Divvy staff were giving away $10 off coupons for the annual pass. Let us know how you plan to use Divvy in the comments section – the most interesting response will win a coupon.

Kubly, myself, and graphic designer Nick Adam (who collaborated on the Divvy branding for Firebelly Design). Photo: Mark Wagenbuur.

Here’s a tip for local bicycle shop owners: start advertising bikes you sell with similar features as the Divvy cycles. These bikes are very user-friendly since they’re equipped with all the necessary accessories for urban riding: lights, fenders, chain guard, and gears and brakes located within the hubs. Bike-share systems have been shown to influence their members to start using their own bikes more, or to buy a bike if they don’t already own one. After using Divvy, people will be coming to your shop looking to purchase a similar ride.

The Milwaukee/Grand/Halsted intersection. Photo by Steven Vance.

If you live or work on the Near Northwest Side and/or bike commute regularly on Milwaukee Avenue, try to stop by tonight’s community meeting on the city’s proposal for buffered and protected bike lanes on Milwaukee between Kinzie and Elston. The meeting takes place from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Intuit arts center, 756 North Milwaukee.

Milwaukee has been designated as a bike-priority “spoke route” in the Chicago Department of Transportation’s Streets for Cycling Plan 2020, and this .85-mile segment is the missing link between existing protected lanes on Kinzie and Elston. Since this stretch of Milwaukee is only 50-to-52 feet wide and has significant bus and truck traffic, CDOT considers it too narrow to accommodate parking lanes and protected bike lanes on both sides of the street.

Earlier this year the department proposed “consolidating” parking, removing spaces from one side of the street to make room for protected lanes. To replace some of the lost spaces, CDOT proposed converting curbside spots on some of the wider adjacent side streets from parallel parking to diagonal, which would make room for more spaces. In March, 27th Ward Alderman Walter Burnett’s office expressed skepticism about removing any parking spaces. Local business owners I spoke with said they supported safer biking conditions on Milwaukee, as long as they didn’t lose nearby parking.

View Milwaukee Avenue bike lanes in a larger map

Stretches with buffered lanes (blue), protected and buffered lanes (red) and design-to-be-determined (green).

CDOT recently posted proposed street configurations for Milwaukee that seems to represent a compromise between the totally protected bikeway many cyclists wanted and Burnett’s desire “to keep parking wherever possible.” A .2-mile section starting a block north of Kinzie, from Hubbard to Ohio, just south of the bridge over the Ohio Feeder to the Kennedy Expressway, would get buffered lanes with no parking removed.

A .1-mile segment starting north of the bridge, from Erie to Morgan, a block south of the Chicago/Ogden intersection, would have parking stripped from one side to make room for a protected lane on one side, and a buffered lane on the other. CDOT has not released plans for the stretch of Milwaukee from Morgan to Elston, including Chicago/Ogden, a six-way that is one of Chicago’s most crash-prone intersections. CDOT Project Manager Mike Amsden said this stretch will be discussed at tonight’s meeting.

Bike advocates may be disappointed that these preliminary plans call for only a short stretch of protected bike lane, on only one side of the street, so it’s really not an “8-to-80” facility, suitable for use by kids and seniors. On the other hand, stripping parking to make room for a protected lane is an unprecedented step in Chicago, perhaps a foot in the door for bolder street reconfigurations in the future.

At any rate, it’s probably best to withhold judgment until CDOT provides more details on the plan at tonight’s meeting.  If you show up tonight, be sure to voice your support for protected lanes on the stretch from Morgan to Elston.

One of the projects 49th Ward residents can vote to fund would replace this Metra shelter with a structure that offers more protection from the elements. Photo: Jeff Zoline.

Residents of the 49th Ward, which includes Rogers Park and the Loyola University Campus, can now vote on how to spend their alderman’s discretionary “menu” money. In 2010, Alderman Joe Moore became the first U.S. politician to implement this democratic budgeting process, called participatory budgeting. This year he’s allocating $1 million of the ward’s $1.3 million in menu funds for projects proposed and approved by his constituents. As in the other three wards participating in the participatory budgeting process, residents 16 and older can vote.

The first question on the ballot is what percentage of the funds should be allocated to street repaving. This year, any street repaving allocation will be combined with street lighting upgrades, with one dollar being spent on lighting for every three dollars spent on paving. That means, for example, that if voters choose to allocate 50 percent of the $1 million to street repaving, then eight blocks would be resurfaced and two blocks would get new lights, leaving $500,000 for other projects.

Four of the eleven proposals on the ballot are transportation projects, including sidewalk repair, shared-lane markings, a shelter for the Rogers Park Metra station, bus-stop benches, and a pedestrian safety study. Residents can vote for four different projects.

The bikeway proposal would add shared-lane markings (AKA “sharrows”) to 1.3 miles of Clark Street, from Howard Street to Albion Avenue (a ward boundary). This would help close the bikeway gap on Clark Street between Edgewater Avenue and Howard.

The Metra shelter project would add a 150-feet long shelter with a full-length bench to the station’s inbound platform, at a cost of $125,000. The bus stop bench proposal would install black metal benches at 15 stops that don’t currently have seating, on Clark, Howard, Rogers Avenue, and Sheridan Avenue, at a total cost of $36,750.

Finally, residents can vote on whether or not to finance an engineering study to “explore measures to enhance pedestrian safety along Sheridan Road, including curb bump-outs and changes to traffic signal and pedestrian crosswalk timings.” The street, a de facto extension of Lake Shore Drive, could certainly benefit from these improvements. Justin Haugens lives at Lunt Avenue and Sheridan and sits on the traffic and public safety committee for the 49th Ward’s participatory budgeting process. He says committee members “saw people speeding and running red lights” on Sheridan. He also said “the lights seem timed in a fashion that allows drivers who exceed the speed limit to find a ‘cushion spot’ and meet consecutive green lights.”

Early voting occurs this week at four CTA stations and the alderman’s office:

Read more…

An early version of what became ChicagoCrashes.org

This is the edited text of a speech I gave Monday night for the City of Chicago’s Earth Data Celebration about the use of data in measuring sustainability performance measures in Chicago. 

As deputy editor of Streetsblog Chicago, and co-editor of Grid Chicago before that, one question I field quite often from readers is, “How many people are biking in Chicago?” Frankly, it’s nearly impossible to tell.

In 2006, the City of Chicago released the Bike 2015 Plan with two overarching goals: to increase bicycle use so that 5 percent of all trips less than five miles are by bicycle, and to reduce the number of bicycle injuries by 50 percent from current levels. Injuries are tracked consistently with crash reports and ER admittance records. Last year, the city commissioned the Active Transportation Alliance and the UIC Urban Transportation Center to analyze those; a report should be issued this year. But tracking bicycle use, be it the number of people bicycling on any given day, or the change in bicycling year over year, has been more elusive.

The crash and injury data is easy to obtain from the Illinois Department of Transportation, but it lacks a key complementary dataset: exposure. How many cyclists are out there, for how long, and where? I made a bike crash map in 2011, but without that information, I wasn’t able to tell people which intersection was the most dangerous when they asked about places they should avoid. I could only tell them which places had the most crashes, because I didn’t know how many people were bicycling by. The exposuire information would be factored into crash location analysis to help prioritize which locations need safety improvements the most.

There are many methods to track exposure, and new ones are coming to the forefront.

Read more…

Talking to an IDOT project staffer (left) at a Circle Interchange public meeting.

Tomorrow is the final day to enter a comment into public record about the Illinois Department of Transportation’s Circle Interchange expansion project. Here’s a quick rundown of what can realistically be influenced at this point:

It goes without saying that the project’s elevated highway ramps, or flyovers, will be an aesthetic blight and a detriment to the pedestrian experience. Flyovers are dark, dirty, and feel unsafe. They also cost a lot to maintain.

IDOT’s “preferred alternative,” known as 7.1C, puts an overpass above Halsted Street and within 22 feet of the apartment building at 400 S Green Street (note that this is 15 feet further away from the building than in IDOT’s previous proposal). Another option IDOT is considering would put the same ramp under Halsted Street, at the same level as existing lanes. According to IDOT documents, one reason the agency doesn’t favor this option is because drivers would be merging into I-290 at a maximum speed of 40 mph, not 55 mph; another reason is that it will cost $8 million more and require more closures during construction.

To comment on the project, you can email Steve Schilke, Paul Schneider, or Ann Schneider at IDOT. You can also call Ann Schneider at (217) 782-5597, or send a comment to:

Steve Schilke c/o Paul Schneider
Illinois Department of Transportation Bureau of Programming
201 W. Center Court
Schaumburg, IL 60196

There’s also the option to leave a comment online, though this seems less certain to reach the intended recipient.

View from the top of "Mt. Bridgeport" in Palmisano/Stearns Quarry Park. Photo by John Greenfield.

We’d like to give a warm welcome to urban planners from across the country who are coming to our fair city for the American Planning Association’s national conference, April 13-17. The APA has published an excellent, 46-page Planner’s Guide to Chicago, chock full of Windy City sights and activities that will appeal to attendees, as well as some fascinating historic and contemporary maps.

Those with an interest in bicycle culture might want to check out John Greenfield’s Visitor’s Guide to Biking in Chicago. We’d also like to offer this quick-and-dirty guide to a few of the local planning hotspots we love – and a few we love to hate.

View APA recommendations in a full screen map. Letters on the map pins correspond to the entries below.

The Bad

A. Greenwash Selfish-Park (60 West Kinzie) Billed as “Chicago’s first earth-friendly parking garage,” Greenway Self-Park’s logo features a VW Bug with leaves blowing out of the tailpipes rather than noxious fumes. But just how eco-friendly is a structure that warehouses 715 cars on prime downtown land, a stone’s throw from multiple transit stations? Please let us know if you actually see those corkscrew wind turbines rotate.

B. Chicago’s Dumbest Intersection (Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street) When Millennium Park opened in 2004, the increase in foot traffic on Michigan led to more conflicts between pedestrians and turning cars. The Richard M. Daley administration’s solution? Remove several crosswalks. This one is the worst example: while it used to be possible to walk directly from the Chicago Cultural Center to the park, now it’s necessary to make three street crossings.

C. Union Station Traffic Snafu (Canal Street and Jackson Boulevard) Best observed during the afternoon rush hour, this confluence of half a dozen bus routes, idling coach buses, hundreds of taxis and thousands of pedestrians per hour can make crossing the street here, or just driving or biking straight, an ordeal. The city has a Union Station Master Plan that recommends interventions, and the Chicago Department of Transportation is building an off-street transportation center just south of the station for bus/train connections that should make traffic more predictable.

The Greenway Self-Park "earth-friendly parking garage." Photo by John Greenfield.

D. Faux-HAWK (Monroe Street east of Michigan Avenue) After the Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago opened across from Millennium Park in 2009, many people made a hazardous mid-block crossing between the attractions. The museum paid for a talking crosswalk that doesn’t actually solve the problem. Speeding drivers still don’t always see, slow or stop for people crossing the street. A pedestrian-activated Rectangular Rapid Flash Beacon (similar to a HAWK beacon) was taken out by a car months ago, but a sign still tells peds to “Thank the driver” for stopping as you cross the roadway.

E. Fullerton Avenue Fiasco (Fullerton Avenue at Lake Shore Drive) Here’s another Daley-era design that eliminates conflicts between pedestrians and cars by removing the pedestrians. Formerly, it was possible to safely walk or bike under Lake Shore Drive to the lakefront via the sidewalk on the south side of Fullerton, a de-facto multiuse path. To make it easier for cars on Fullerton to turn south onto the drive, the sidewalk was removed to make room for a second on-ramp lane. Now pedestrians and cyclists are supposed take an extremely circuitous ramps-and-underpass route to the beach.

F. Chicago/Ogden/Milwaukee Crash Zone (intersection of Chicago, Ogden and Milwaukee avenues) Our city is known for its nearly seamless street grid, but not so much for its six-way intersections. A skewed street configuration, outdated traffic signal programming, and high car and bike traffic volumes makes this six-way one of the top locations for bike crashes every year. Last summer a speeding cabbie killed a pedestrian here.

Read more…