Payton Chung

The current debate over rideshare legislation within City Hall and in Springfield has aired the resentment that Chicagoans have towards their taxicab drivers.

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The northwest suburban village of Rosemont has always been divided by busy transportation routes that funnel people through a crossroads. Occupying the geographic center of the town is a giant interchange, where the Kennedy Expressway, the Jane Addams (Northwest) Tollway, the Tri-State Tollway, and the I-190 spur to O'Hare Airport tangle over 300 acres of land -- an area larger than Grant Park and Millennium Park combined. Overhead, a steady stream of jets roar into O'Hare. CTA Blue Line trains roll down the Kennedy's median, toward the airport or a CTA facility within the interchange.

All across America, city buses are waiting. Waiting at stoplights, waiting behind long lines of cars, waiting to pull back into traffic, waiting at stops for growing crowds of passengers. And no, it's not just your imagination: Buses are doing more waiting, and less moving, than they used to. A recent survey of 11 urban transit systems conducted by Daniel Boyle for the Transportation Research Board found that increased traffic congestion is steadily eroding travel speeds: The average city bus route gets 0.45 percent slower every single year. That's especially discouraging given how slowly buses already move, with a typical bus averaging only 13.5 mph.

Streetsblog's Parking Madness competition has highlighted the blight that results when large surface parking lots take over a city's downtown. Even though Rochester, winner of 2014's Golden Crater, certainly gains bragging rights, all of the competitors have something to worry about: Cumulatively, the past 50 years of building parking have had a debilitating effect on America's downtowns.

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University of Chicago economist Casey Mulligan, over at the New York Times' Economix blog, dug up a 2012 study by Cheng Cheng of Texas A&M University that tells the world nothing new about the currently confused state of laws against distracted driving, and in particular bans on handheld phone use. "Perhaps lawmakers overestimated the benefits of regulating this sort of driver behavior," Mulligan writes. Or perhaps lawmakers didn't pass laws that effectively protect vulnerable road users from dangerous, distracted drivers.