Streetsblog Chicago

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

“The built environment plays a huge role when it comes to people being able to be physically active,” says Grant Vitale, community programs manager for the Consortium to Lower Obesity in Chicago Children (CLOCC). The group, based out of the Lurie Children’s Hospital, is an association of many local, statewide and national organizations working to help kids maintain healthy weight levels by encouraging better nutrition, as well as walking, biking and active play.

The rate of childhood obesity in the U.S. has more than tripled over the last three decades, and in 2008 Chicago’s obesity rate for young kids entering school was 22 percent, more than twice the national average. In some neighborhoods, mostly low-income African-American and Latino communities, over half of all children are overweight or obese. These areas tend to have less green space and higher pedestrian crash rates than wealthier neighborhoods, which discourages active transportation and recreation.

Over the last two years, CLOCC has partnered with the Chicago Department of Public Health on a $5.8 million, federally funded anti-obesity campaign called Healthy Places. The program has focused on creating safe streets and parks, as well as creating healthier schools, eliminating food deserts and promoting breast feeding.

“Through Healthy Places we were able to provide financial support to ten community-based organizations across the city to implement community interventions,” Vitale says. “One intervention that we asked all the groups to implement was a walkability initiative. We trained them on CLOCC’s neighborhood walkability assessment tool, which helps identify barriers to walking and biking.” An assessment might show the need for traffic calming, like speed bumps, or infrastructure to make crossing the street safer, such as curb extensions or pedestrian refuge islands.

One of the community groups that Healthy Places funded was the Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, based in a predominantly Latino area on the Southwest Side, which wanted to make it easier for kids to access Kelly Park, 2725 West 41st. “Using our walkability tool, they looked at routes to the park,” Vitale says. “For example, they identified crosswalks that needed restriping. Many parents called 311 in an organized way and were able to get those crosswalks restriped in a short amount of time.”

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Traditionally, Chicago aldermen choose to spend their discretionary “menu” funds on meat-and-potatoes infrastructure projects like street repaving, sidewalk repair, and streetlight replacement. This week, however, residents in four different wards are voting in participatory budgeting elections, helping to decide how their district’s $1.3 million in menu money will be spent. Three of the wards will have innovative walking, biking, and transit proposals on the ballot, but one of them won’t.

In Joe Moore’s 49th Ward, the Far North district that first pioneered the PB process here in 2010, options include shared-lane markings for bikes on Clark, bus stop benches, a 150-foot-long Metra platform shelter, and a pedestrian safety study for Sheridan Road. Constituents in John Arena’s 45th Ward, on the Far Northwest Side, can vote for buffered bike lanes on Milwaukee and Lawrence, bike parking corrals, and a pedestrian crossing light at the Jefferson Park Transit Center, which will also improve bus access.

James Cappleman’s 46th Ward, on the north lakefront, has several forward-thinking transportation items on the ballot: new bike lanes, a traffic-calmed “neighborhood greenway” on Leland, and pedestrian safety infrastructure like sidewalk bumpouts and countdown signals. One proposal calls for connecting a traffic island at Broadway/Sheridan/Montrose to create a new public space dubbed “SherMon Plaza.”

As I reported last month, there will be no nontraditional transportation projects on the ballot in Alderman Leslie Hairston’s 5th Ward, the only South Side district to participate. It’s not because her constituents don’t want them. During community meetings last fall to brainstorm items for the PB election, residents put forth 23 different proposals to the transportation committee, including many ideas to improve conditions for walking, biking, and transit.

They proposed new curb cuts to provide wheelchair access; realigning bus stops so that people exiting would step onto concrete, not muddy grass; new bus benches and shelters; and pedestrian safety improvements by the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club. Ideas to promote cycling included repairs to the Lakefront Trail and paths within Jackson Park; building a buffered bike lane delineated with flexible posts on 67th; and bike parking racks at Metra stations.

However, at a Valentine’s Day meeting, the transportation committee was told Hairston had designated all 23 ideas as “service requests,” which should be paid for by agencies like the Chicago Department of Transportation, the CTA and the park district. Therefore, none of these ideas would be on the PB ballot. “We don’t need to spend ward money on [those projects],” 5th Ward Chief of Staff Kimberly Webb told me last month. In my post on the subject I stated, “[Participatory budgeting] is not a truly a democratic process when all ideas for improving walking, biking, and transit are taken off the table.”

Two weeks after I sent a link to the article to Hairston’s publicist Carole Parks, she wrote to say my statement that the alderman had eliminated sustainable transportation proposals from the process was false. “Some of those projects will be on the ballot,” she said. “Kimberly Webb made clear to you the alderman committed to ensuring the other PB5-generated projects would also be implemented by the respective agency.” She directed me to the ward’s page on the PB Chicago website, which features a slideshow from one of the community expos for the process. The slideshow includes the proposals for realigning bus stops and improvements to the lakefront and Jackson Park bike paths.

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On Monday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel outlined some changes he’s proposing to the infamous parking meter deal the City Council approved in 2009 (henceforth to be referred to as “The Parking Meter Deal,” in recognition of its unique awfulness). Unfortunately, Chicago isn’t getting a better deal. In fact, the city’s parking policy is set to get worse.

The 75-year contract with Chicago Parking Meters, LLC has been panned by drivers and non-drivers alike: It raises fees every year, tied to inflation instead of the actual demand for parking, and it complicates moving or removing parking in order to use the curb lane for other purposes, like bike lanes or bus lanes. No one likes it except the investment bankers at Morgan Stanley who created CPM.

In his campaign, Emanuel said he would try to make the contract better for Chicagoans, and Monday was the big reveal for the results of that attempt. The proposal extends meter hours: In areas where metering ends at 9 p.m., it would extend to 10 p.m., and in River North it would extend by three hours. The proposal also eliminates paid parking on Sundays in “neighborhoods” — defined as any place outside of the Central Business District and the Loop.

This doesn’t make the contract better for Chicagoans. First off, Emanuel positioned this ploy as “relief for churchgoers” — a double standard for anyone who pays a transit fare to get to church, not mention the many religious Chicagoans who don’t have services on Sunday. Secondly, free parking on Sundays means more traffic: more people will drive through already-congested intersections like Milwaukee/North/Damen in Wicker Park, and Halsted/Fullerton/Lincoln in Lincoln Park.

This proposal is not good for business or for traffic in neighborhood commercial areas. Chrissy Mancini Nichols, transportation director for the Metropolitan Planning Council, said that people who live on streets with “side street” parking, which is metered until 6 p.m., will park their cars in front of the meters from Saturday night to Monday morning, eliminating any space for customers driving for brunch and shopping. “It’s a bad way to manage parking demand and will most likely result in a lower customer base and more congestion from people circling even more to find a parking spot,” she said.

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At last night’s community meeting at Intuit arts center, the Chicago Department of Transportation discussed its vision for innovative bike lanes on Milwaukee between Kinzie and Elston. The plan, which is actually much more ambitious than what was outlined on the CDOT website prior to the meeting, involves removing about half of the car-parking spaces along Milwaukee to make room for buffered and protected lanes on the entire segment. To really wrap your head around what’s being proposed, be sure to check out the department’s presentation on the plan.

Nearly all of these parking spaces could potentially be replaced by reconfiguring parking on side streets, CDOT staffers said. The project will also include street resurfacing, high-visibility crosswalks, countdown pedestrian signals and narrower travel lanes, which will deter speeding, so it would make conditions safer for people on foot and in cars as well. The street is scheduled to be repaved this month; pending continued community outreach and final approval, bike lane construction is slated for June.

View Milwaukee Avenue bike lanes proposal in a larger map

Milwaukee Avenue proposal: car-protected lanes are shown in green, buffered lanes (often delineated by flexible posts) are shown in blue.

CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein kicked off the presentation by discussing his hopes that the street rehab will give an economic boost to the area. “To me this is not just about creating a world-class bike facility but it’s also showing what making a street into a really complete street can do for the economic vitality of that street,” he said. “I’m personally very interested in measuring how retail stores are doing before and how much their business improved afterwards.”

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s being proposed, from south to north; we’ll provide more commentary on the details of the plan in the near future.

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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.

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:

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Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx just accepted President Obama’s nomination to be the next transportation secretary.

Before we get into the details of Anthony Foxx’s résumé and policy positions, let’s just take a moment to appreciate this: The White House has nominated a mayor to be secretary of transportation.

There is often a wide gulf between states and cities when it comes to transportation policy — with cities preferring to invest in multiple modes while states mainly spend on highways. One way to interpret Obama’s nomination of a mayor to head U.S. DOT is that he’s casting his lot with cities. In Foxx, he’s selected the chief executive of a southern city that has made significant progress on transit and walkable development the last few years.

“I know every mayor is thrilled today because one of theirs will become transportation secretary,” outgoing Secretary Ray LaHood said at Foxx’s nomination today. He said the appointment sent a message that “mayors count” and “cities count.”

“When Anthony became mayor in 2009, Charlotte, like the rest of the country, was going through a bruising economic crisis,” President Obama said. “But the city has managed to turn things around.  The economy is growing. There are more jobs, more opportunity. And if you ask Anthony how that happened, he’ll tell you that one of the reasons is that Charlotte made one of the largest investments in transportation in the city’s history.”

Foxx has only been mayor since 2009, and the city was already heading in the right direction. Charlotte’s light-rail system, LYNX, launched in 2007, and its complete streets policy won an award before he took office. But Foxx has also made his own mark.

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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.

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

Most Chicagoans associate Englewood with poverty and crime, but local advocates and activists see it as a neighborhood with untapped potential, with excellent access to public transportation being one of the keys to its future success. “From the beginning, Englewood was designed to be a transportation and retail hub, and that does not come up often enough in the conversation,” says Demond Drummer, a resident who works for the Teamwork Englewood community development organization.

Greater Englewood is a predominantly African-American area, roughly bounded by Garfield, Western, 79th and State. It includes two Green Line stations, three Red Line Stops, Metra’s Rock Island Main Line (although trains no longer stop here), and multiple bus routes. The New Era Trail proposal would turn a nearly two-mile, dormant rail corridor into an elevated greenway along 59th between Hoyne and Lowe. The city is also considering building bus rapid transit on Ashland, which would create yet another travel option.

“The proximity to transportation is one of Englewood’s huge assets,” says Asiaha Butler, who works in the real estate industry and president of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE). “It can help revive the neighborhood by providing individuals with access to jobs in other parts of the city, and it can encourage new retail here. But we need businesses to be smart and strategic by locating near hubs like 63rd and Ashland, and the 63rd Street Red Line Stop.”

Drummer agreed to meet me in the neighborhood to discuss the role sustainable transportation can play in bringing Englewood back to its former glory. “In its prime, it was the number-one, non-central-city retail location in the entire country,” he says as we stand under the Green Line tracks by the Halsted/63rd station, another one of the community’s crucial transit nodes. Just north is Kennedy-King College, which relocated here in the mid-2000s; on the northwest corner is a twelve-acre vacant lot where the Englewood Shopping Center once stood before it was demolished in 2001.

Transit hubs like 63rd and Halsted should be a no-brainer for new business investment, but why did local enterprises like the shopping mall close in the first place? “It was an inward-facing shopping center where a parking lot was all you saw walking up to it, so that didn’t help,” Drummer responds. “But you also had retail consolidation, historic racism, redlining and divestment from the neighborhood, and the shutting down of the Green Line. [The line was closed from January 1994 to May 1996 for rehab work, and six South Side stations, several in Englewood, never reopened.] These things kind of created a vicious cycle of exodus.”

Still, Drummer is optimistic that Englewood can leverage its current and future transportation options, and even use its many vacant lots to its advantage, to make an economic comeback. Teamwork Englewood recently finished an eighteen-month land-use planning process with the city and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. “It asked the question, what do we do in the neighborhood with all these vacant lots,” Drummer says. “With the city’s new Green and Healthy Neighborhoods initiative they want to centralize retail around our transportation hubs.”

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After a year of study and outreach, today Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Transit Authority, and the Chicago Department of Transportation announced plans for center-running Bus Rapid Transit on Ashland Avenue. Once implemented, the project could set a national precedent for high-quality BRT, improving transit speeds as much as 80 percent during rush hour, according to today’s announcement.

By converting one general traffic lane in each direction to dedicated bus lanes, the design prioritizes transit on the highest-ridership bus route in CTA’s system. Limited stops, signal priority for buses, and pre-paid fares will also keep buses in motion instead of spending time stopped at stations and traffic lights (though it looks like passengers will be allowed to pay fares on the bus if they choose, according to the announcement). The vast majority of curbside parking and loading zones would be preserved.

The plan calls for a $160 million, three-phase implementation covering 16 miles of Ashland, from Irving Park Road to 95th Street. The first phase would run from Cortland Avenue to 31st Street, and today’s announcement marks the beginning of detailed design and public outreach for that 5.5-mile segment.

“Bus Rapid Transit is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to expand and modernize our city’s transit network for the 21st century and is an important component of my plan to create a world-class transit system,” Emanuel said in the statement. “We will work with our local communities to best determine how to maximize the positive impacts BRT would provide to riders, while boosting local economic development and improving quality of life for all city residents.”

Advocates welcomed the news today, with the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Active Transportation Alliance issuing a joint statement hailing the plan as “an important milestone in Chicago’s BRT vision that balances the needs of all street users, improves quality of life in local neighborhoods, provides better access to jobs and services, and makes local streets more attractive, safer and less congested.”

Streetsblog’s John Greenfield will have more on this story following a morning Q&A session at CTA headquarters.

To tide you over, here are a few more details from today’s press release about the BRT features planned for the corridor:

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