Steven Vance

In a huge front-page story Friday, the Chicago Tribune published yet another installment in its long-running vendetta against the city's photographic traffic enforcement program. Because the Trib chose to obscure key information about the severity of crashes, the story is worthless as an evaluation of the city's red light camera program.

Developer David Brown wants to bring a neighborhood restaurant to a site right outside the the Chicago Transit Authority's Montrose Brown Line station, along with 24 apartments, a small office space, and 10 car parking spaces. The city's zoning ordinance would ordinarily require him to fill the entire ground floor of his proposed five-story Montrose Green building with 24 parking spaces. However, Brown has requested that 47th Ward Alderman Ameya Pawar change the site's zoning to permit more housing and less parking, under what the city terms transit-oriented development.

The Illiana Tollway, a joint proposal by the Illinois and Indiana departments of transportation to build a 47-mile highway through thinly populated farmland about 40 miles south of Chicago, rolled over another hurdle yesterday when the Federal Highway Administration approved the project's environmental impact study. FHWA's approval allows IDOT and InDOT to proceed with soliciting bids for the highway.

An article in Monday’s Tribune confirmed what we already knew: Chicago’s “Stop for Pedestrians” signs have been taking a beating from careless drivers. In 2012, the city began installing the placards by crosswalks at unsignalized intersections. The Trib reported that 78 percent of the 344 signs installed have been replaced after motorists crashed into them.

Divvy bike-share stations were designed to be easy to move around, with their modular construction and off-grid solar power. Sure enough, plenty of Divvy members have had their routines disrupted by station moves lately: 8,000 Divvy members received word this year that stations they'd recently used were on the move. One Divvy member forwarded two such emails to Streetsblog and asked why the stations had to be moved, since the new locations didn't seem any more convenient than the prior locations.

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning last week floated its own proposal to fix the region's shortfall in transportation funding. It launched FUND 2040, a campaign calling upon the Illinois legislature to fund sustainable infrastructure through a quarter-cent sales tax across the Chicagoland region. CMAP says this increase would generate $300 million annually, which it would use to advance projects that fulfill the goals of its federally-required plan for the region, GO TO 2040.

The Bloomingdale Trail is attracting new investment along its length, including the construction of new multi-family and single-family housing. The blocks bracketing the multi-use path and adjacent parks (collectively known as the 606) saw less construction than their wider neighborhoods during the 2008-2009 recession -- but now construction is picking up. Investors and developers are confidently saying that the 606 will not just be a great amenity for their customers, but a crucial transportation link as well.

Late last month, over 100 people crowded into a public presentation to hear about a proposed development of 254 housing units, plus 72 car parking spaces and retail, on what's now a vacant lot around the corner from the California Blue Line 'L' station in Logan Square. The number of parking spaces proposed is 182 fewer than the city's zoning would typically require, but recent changes to city laws make it possible for exceptions to be granted on sites near transit, and an adopted plan for this area encourages taller buildings with less parking.

The South Loop-focused blog Sloopin reported last month that more residents in the Prairie District are using the Metra Electric service's 18th Street station to catch a fast, on-time ride into the East Loop. A trip from 18th Street to Van Buren or Millennium Stations costs $2.75 and takes 10-15 minutes. A similar ride on the Chicago Transit Authority's 3-King Drive bus would take over 20 minutes and cost $2.00, and no CTA rail stations are currently within walking distance.

In its proposed budget for 2015, the Chicago Transit Authority didn't take much of a leap of faith when forecasting continued growth in the record crowds boarding its trains. However, CTA also optimistically forecasts that a multi-year slide in bus ridership, which accounts for 57.6 percent of the system's total ridership, will end -- and that instead bus ridership will "stabilize" with a 0.4 percent rebound.