Streetsblog Chicago

A display board calling for resurfacing streets at Wednesdays budgeting expo. Photo courtesy of PBChicago.org.

The participatory budgeting process lets citizens brainstorm ideas and then vote on how ward money will be spent, but 5th Ward Alderman Leslie has decided to remove most transportation projects from consideration. The district, which includes parts of South Shore, Grand Crossing, Woodlawn and Hyde Park, is one of four wards where citizens will help decide how to use their alderman’s $1.3 million in discretionary “menu” money this year, and the only one on the South Side.

“Participatory budgeting allows the community to bring up ideas that we might not have known about otherwise,”  said 5th Ward Chief of Staff Kimberly Webb. “It’s a chance to be transparent and inclusive. Our constituents are just so enthusiastic and grateful to be part of the decision process, and Leslie really appreciates everything the community has contributed to the process.” The ward held five community assemblies last fall and winter to get ideas from residents for the budgeting ballot.

In the Far North Side’s 49^th Ward, where Alderman Joe Moore first pioneered participatory budgeting in Chicago in 2010, citizens have voted to spend menu funds on a number of sustainable transportation projects. These included a new traffic/pedestrian signal, sidewalk repairs and heated ‘L’ platform shelters, plus bike lanes, paths and parking racks. Many of these projects have already been completed. Alderman John Arena’s 45th Ward, on the Northwest Side, and Alderman James Cappleman’s 46th Ward, on the North Lakefront, are currently considering sustainable transportation projects for their budgeting ballots.

The transportation committee for the 5th Ward’s budgeting process came up with 23 ideas to improve travel options in the district. These included pedestrian safety upgrades at 55^th and Kenwood, near the Hyde Park Neighborhood Club; new bus shelters and concrete bus pads; improving the Lakefront Trail and multiuse paths in Jackson Park; and fixing potholes and speed humps. However, in February the committee learned that Hairston decided to designate these ideas as “service requests” that should be paid for by the Chicago Department of Transportation, the CTA and the Chicago Park District. The projects were therefore ineligible for the budgeting ballot.

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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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People get to Wrigley Field by all modes. Photo: Wally Gobetz.

The Cubs are expected to announce a deal with Alderman Tom Tunney of the 44th Ward later today that would add a large parking garage and a hotel to the area near Wrigley Field, as well as modifications to the stadium itself. The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday that “the Cubs have agreed to create extra parking in Wrigleyville” with up to 500 spaces on what is currently a gravel lot at Clark and Grace Streets.

Building a parking garage in this transit-accessible, walkable neighborhood is the wrong move. Instead of alleviating frustrations, it will only bring more car traffic to the area and make matters worse. Existing parking problems – a common complaint, for instance, is that residents cannot park in front of their homes because visiting drivers have violated the parking permit rules – are solvable without building an unsightly, anti-pedestrian, traffic-generating structure.

In fact, a garage will cause more problems than it solves, said civil engineer Ryan Wallace, who’s also a Lakeview resident and Cubs fan. A 500-car parking garage won’t just hold 500 cars that fans are already driving to Wrigleyville, he said. It will induce more car trips, since fans will know there’s more parking available. “You’re going to cause a greater amount of car trips than there are spaces to hold them,” Wallace said.

Wallace said the real capacity problem that needs to be solved is on the sidewalk. There’s not enough room for all the pedestrians trying to get to the stadium, who crowd the sidewalks alongside residents just trying to get home from the train stations. “People routinely spill over into the street,” he said.

It’s possible that the Cubs might add more than 500 parking spaces. Tunney’s website says “a strong majority of residents support requiring Wrigley Field to use neighboring land owned by the Cubs to provide parking for at least twenty percent of their capacity.” That would mean a structure that could hold thousands of cars.

The lot at Clark and Grace is zoned as a planned development, giving Zoning Administrator Patricia Scudiero – in addition to Tunney – some control over how many spaces would be here and what the structure would look like.

Wallace disagrees that a strong majority of residents support the parking structure. “I think he’s getting a lot of influence from the leaders from neighborhood groups, Lake View Citizens Council, the chamber of commerce – they are the vocal minority,” he said.

Eric Hanss, who lives near the stadium in the 46th Ward, has started a petition to ask Tunney and the Cubs not to “turn Lakeview into a parking lot.” It states:

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CDOT is patching potholes with tar. No, not Tar, the 1990s Chicago post-hardcore band. Photo courtesy of Touch and Go Records.

When it was time to get the word out about ways to report pothole locations for an upcoming repair blitz, the Chicago Department of Transportation opted for a strategy that was, as the saying goes, “so crazy it just might work.” The agency is encouraging citizens to alert the city about as many dangerous divots as possible from today through Sunday in a three-day “festival” of public input they’ve dubbed “Potholepalooza.” We were delighted to find an absurd, band-name-pun-riddled press release about the mock concert, including links to the Wikipedia pages for the groups, in our inboxes this morning. An excerpt is below; read the entire hilarious document here.

CDOT Encourages Chicagoans to Report Potholes in “Weekend Festival of Pothole Reporting”

Tired of Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ in Traffic over the Minor Threat of potholes in the Pavement?  Ready to see nothing but White Stripes on the roadway and not worry about The Cars swerving to avoid potholes? This weekend, if you are motorist or a Motörhead, participate in the first-ever “Potholepalooza,” the Chicago Department of Transportation’s (CDOT) call to Chicagoans to report as many street potholes as possible.  Then watch the show next week as CDOT has The Cure for your Moody Blues and fills all of the potholes reported from Friday, April 5 through Sunday, April 7 so that your car doesn’t do the Harlem Shake and give you Divine Fits.

Terrible pavement (not Pavement) performance near Wicker Park. Photo by Steven Vance.

Obviously somebody spent way too much time on this, but it’s not all fun and games. According to to the release, CDOT’s “Men at Work” have filled 250,000 bike-rim-bending depressions so far in 2013. In March alone they filled 116,000 ruts with over 1,200 tons of patching material, and they’ve fixed 20,000 more in April. “We are making great progress in filling potholes this spring, but we need Chicagoans to help us identify all of the locations where work needs to be done,” said CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein via the press release. “This weekend surge in reporting will allow us to address as many potholes as possible until we switch many of the pothole crews to street resurfacing in mid-April.”

Although the release is written from a car-centric viewpoint, obviously potholes are a major hazard for bus and bike riders as well, and it’s actually much easier and safer for cyclists to spot, pull over and report road craters than it is for drivers. Here are some ways you can take part in this pothole reporting jam session:

• Call 311
• Using the City’s website at www.cityofchicago.org/311 or various Open 311 smartphone apps including SeeClickFix, Fix311, and Chicago Works.
• Using ChiText by texting “Chicago” to 311311 to start the reporting process

It’s probably no coincidence that Klein majored in marketing in college, because the ridiculous press release succeeded in its mission to publicize the city’s anti-pothole crusade, garnering coverage in the Tribune, the Sun-Times, ABC and elsewhere. Kudos to CDOT for using a creative strategy to spread the word, and for giving shout-outs to relatively obscure punk and indie bands like Minor Threat, Tar and, of course, Pavement. However, we’re disappointed that they didn’t link to the Omaha rap-metal band 311.

Can you think of any other music / street repair puns they missed?

The J14 Jeffery Jump. Photo courtesy of the CTA.

Editor’s note: Last November the J14 Jeffery Jump bus launched as the CTA’s first attempt at creating an express bus service with some of the elements of bus rapid transit. While the 15 Jeffery Local makes 37 stops between 103rd Street and Lake Shore Drive, the Jump only makes 19 stops. Between 83rd and 67th streets, inbound buses travel in a dedicated lane during the morning rush hour and vice versa for the evening rush. This year the city will install a “queue jump” at 83rd Street, allowing buses to cut to the front of the line of stopped cars, and the stretch from 83rd to 73rd streets will get bus-priority stoplights, expediting transit trips.

A few weeks after the launch John Greenfield rode the entire 16-mile route from south to north during the morning rush hour and found that Jump service operated fairly efficiently. The were almost no unauthorized vehicles parking or driving in the bus lane, the express bus had no problem passing stopped local buses, and the whole trip took exactly one hour. To see if the service is still running smoothly, we recently asked James Porter, a journalist, musician, DJ and veteran CTA navigator, to ride the Jump route from north to south during the evening rush and report on its performance.

The CTA has been promoting their new Jeffery Jump route like it was the greatest invention short of the paperclip. As a South Side resident who has long used the regular Jeffery bus, I have been wondering what makes this new offshoot so miraculous. To find out, I rode the entire Jeffery Jump line on a weekday evening in March, and here’s what I experienced:

The Jeffery Jump at 71st Street on opening day. Photo by John Greenfield.

4:59 p.m. Six people, including myself, board the bus at the north end of the line at Jefferson and Washington. This being Chicago, a sudden late-winter snowstorm has caught us all by surprise. The bus heads east on Washington and then south on Clinton. That day all the newspapers covered the tragic story of six-month-old Jonylah Watkins who was shot and killed while her father was changing her diapers in a minivan. As we’re rolling, one of our fellow riders feels the need to tell everybody within earshot about it, as if he were the first to break the news. This unofficial town crier continues his commentary speaking to everyone in general and no one in particular.

5:03 p.m. As the Jump heads east on Monroe, stopping to pick up passengers every two blocks, the sun finally makes an appearance, remaining in the sky for the balance of the afternoon. The bus slowly fills up with the rush hour crowd. After we cross the Chicago River into the Loop, the town crier pats his seat motioning for a middle-aged lady to sit. The seat remains empty. The streets are now damp from that impromptu snowstorm. As we cross LaSalle the town crier gallantly offers the seat next to him to various female standees. By this point, the bus is crowded. Although there are three empty seats left, for some reason everyone chooses to stand.

5:12 p.m. At State Street the Jump empties out a little as riders depart for the Red Line, freeing up yet more seats. We turn south on Michigan and, strangely enough, the automated voice that calls out the stops, which has been silent for most of the ride so far, suddenly becomes audible again at Van Buren. The bus has been moving efficiently, with no noticeable delays. We’re making good time so far.

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Editor’s note: Streetsblog accepts guest posts with viewpoints different than our own. Lynn Stevens is an urban planner, blogger at Peopling Places, and long-time neighborhood booster for Logan Square where she’s been an active participant in Bike/Walk Logan Square, the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, the Logan Square Corridor Development Initiative, and the (now defunct) Zoning Advisory Committee.

Different ways to pay on CTA and Pace.

Man walks into a coffee shop, orders a cup of coffee, reaches in his pocket for cash.

Barista: “That’ll be $3.00.”

Man: “I thought coffee was $2.25.”

Barista: “It is, but we charge you 25¢ for the cream.”

Man: “But I don’t want cream.”

Barista: “We charge you for it whether you want it or not. And 50¢ for the limited use cup.”

Man: “That’s outrageous! That’s false advertising.”

Barista: “There is a way around it.”

Man: “Oh, okay. How?”

Barista: “You can buy our coffee card.”

Man: “Ok, let me do that.”

Barista: “That’ll be $5.00.”

Man: “What?! Now you’re going to charge me $5.00 for a cup of coffee?!”

Barista: “Well, after you buy your card, you can go online or call the 800 number and give them your name, address, phone number, date of birth, Social Security number… Ha ha. Just kidding about that last one! But you register the card and then you can immediately use the $5.00 value. It’s designed to save patrons time and money, and provides a unique opportunity to combine your coffee account with a debit card for other retail purchases.”

Man: “But I still only want a $2.25 cup of coffee.”

Barista: “You can use the balance on your card next time you come in.”

Man: “But it’ll be two years before I’m back in Chicago.”

Barista: “Oh,” said quietly and with disappointment.

Man: “What?”

Barista: “If you haven’t used the card in 18 months, we charge you $5.00 a month to make sure you don’t lose the $3.75 balance on your card.”

Man sighs with exasperation.

Barista: “Unless,” said with some hope.

Man: “What?”

Barista: “You could use a debit or credit card.”

Man: “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place? I just want a $2.25 cup of coffee…black…today.

After man swipes his credit card (without an RFID chip), the machine prompts him to verify the amount of $3.00.

Man: “What?!!!!!”

After reading his recent article on Ventra, I joked with Steven Vance that even he must acknowledge that he covered many points in order to make it “clear” that the Ventra card was “simple,” and that he updated the post to make it even more “clear.” Clear and simple it is not.

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Poster for participatory budgeting project expos in the 46th Ward.

Chicago’s participatory budgeting movement has exciting potential to democratize the way city money is spent, which could lead to innovative walking, biking and transit improvements. First pioneered in 1989 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, participatory budgeting allows citizens to recommend projects for public funding and then vote on how the cash is spent.

In 2010, 49^th Ward Alderman Joe Moore allowed his constituents to determine how to spend the district’s $1.3 million in discretionary “menu money,” the first recorded example of participatory budgeting in the United States. Since then, instead of just funding the usual street repaving, sidewalk repair and streetlight replacement, Moore’s constituents have also voted to spend money on new walk signals, transit shelters, bike lanes and racks, and other nontraditional projects.

49th Ward residents voted to spend menu money to install this contraflow bike lane on Albion Avenue in Rogers Park. Photo courtesy of CDOT.

Last year Moore invited the other 49 aldermen to a briefing to try to persuade them to try participatory budgeting. A handful of them expressed interest, and last fall the process launched in Leslie Hairston’s 5th Ward, John Arena’s 45th Ward and James Cappleman’s 46th Ward. Residents showed up for multiple community meetings, brainstorming ideas for ways to improve their neighborhood’s infrastructure. This winter, locals formed committees to evaluate hundreds of proposals to determine which ones should be included on ballots.

Next month community members in the 49^th, 5^th, 45^th and 46^th wards can come to ten different project expos to check out info tables and talk to their neighbors about the proposals that will appear on the ballot; voting begins in May. If you live in one of these wards (look up your ward here) be sure to attend one of the upcoming expos, listed below, and show your support for biking, walking and transit projects on Election Day. Visit PB Chicago or contact your alderman for more info.

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Check your wallet. Do you have the "wave" logo on your credit or debit card? If so, you're ready to use Ventra, and all you have to do to add multi-day passes or receive transit tax benefits is register your card with Ventra.

Ventra, you may have heard, is the new fare payment system for Chicago Transit Authority and Pace. (Metra will not be joining the Ventra system, and is currently testing other fare payment methods.) CTA is switching to Ventra to save $5 million per year on maintaining outdated fare collection technology, according to spokesperson Lambrini Lukidis.

“We also print 35 million transit cards and passes each year,” she said. That’s a lot of waste! Lambrini also mentioned that the credit card industry is moving in the same direction and will be phasing out magnetic stripe cards in the next few years, saying, “We’re ahead of the curve on this, but our main motivation is to make paying more efficient and to mirror the retail experience.”

As with any transition, there will probably be an adjustment period, but the CTA doesn’t deserve the scolding about its communications that Jon Hilkevitch dished out in his Tribune column today. The transition is not as complicated as Hilkevitch makes it out to be. Here’s what you need to know.

The basics

The most important aspect of Ventra is that users will be able to pay fares with their own bank-issued credit or debit card. So you might be able to use the system without acquiring any new cards. This should make paying fares faster and convenient without adding any cost.

If you won’t be using your own bank card, you can get a Ventra Card at 145 train stations or more than 2,000 retail locations, over the phone, or via the Ventra website.

You can buy transit fares with cash or credit at the Ventra vending machines, but if you choose to receive a disposable paper ticket instead of buying a new Ventra Card or reloading an existing one (with cash or credit/debit), you will have to pay an extra 75 cents (for a single transfer and the cost of the paper ticket). CTA and Pace buses will still accept cash, and the fare will not change from $2 and $1.75, respectively.

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CDOT Project Manager Mike Amsden and Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly. Photo: Steven Vance

For weeks, rumors have been circulating that there has been a re-shuffling of job responsibilities at the Chicago Department of Transportation, but the agency hadn’t made an official announcement about the changes. Most notably, word on the street was that Ben Gomberg, Chicago’s bicycle program coordinator since 1996, was no longer managing the day-to-day operations of the bike program but was instead focusing his efforts on the city’s new bike-share system. After we contacted the department for more info, Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly offered to provide details on the reorganization, which has actually been in effect since late January.

A new “complete streets group” is combining most of the functions of CDOT’s bike, pedestrian and streetscaping sections. “Fifteen years ago you might have had a bike coordinator and a pedestrian coordinator and someone working on transit projects, but now the transportation field is recognizing the need for complete streets and multimodal planning.” Kubly said. “So the organization should reflect the reflect the policy we’re promoting. We’ve created a new complete streets implementation group, recognizing that all road projects we work on should be complete streets. That’s exciting because it institutionalizes the policy.”

As part of the re-org, traffic engineering responsibilities have been divided into three groups. The “traffic engineering group” is now responsible for “bread-and-butter” signal timing, Kubly said. The “safety engineering group” is handling automated red light and speed camera enforcement, as well as safety zones around schools and parks. And the “traffic technology group” is responsible for the city’s traffic management center and creating traffic signal priority for bus rapid transit.

The Chicago Department of Housing and Economic Development has divided the city into six regions for planning purposes, and CDOT’s new “citywide planning group” is a parallel transportation planning section, Kubly said. A new “traffic studies group” also divides the city into six sections to do traffic analysis. Cross-agency coordination in each of these six areas should help increase efficiency and cut costs.

The new “citywide services group,” headed by Sean Wiedel, formerly with Chicago’s now-defunct Department of Environment, is responsible for several environmental and sustainable transportation initiatives. Greencorps, the Chicago Conservation Corps, and the Sustainable Backyards program foster the growth of green jobs and environmentally friendly household practices. The group will arrange the installation of fueling stations for electric cars and vehicles that run on compressed natural gas.

The citywide services group is also responsible for a new “travel training” transportation demand management program launching this year that will educate Chicagoans about how to get around the city efficiently and economically. The city’s Bicycle Ambassadors and Safe Routes Ambassadors programs, both managed by Charlie Short, are also now housed in this section. And bike sharing is also part of the group.

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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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