Steven Vance

A mysterious dumpster blocked both lanes of the Dearborn protected bike lane this morning, causing Chicagoans to tweet their displeasure.

Mike Brockway of the Expired Meter has a story on DNAinfo today breaking the news that non-government workers have been issuing parking tickets since 2010. Brockway reports that people who work for LAZ Parking -- hired by Chicago Parking Meters, the city's private concessionaire -- and not for the city have been enforcing parking regulations.

For a very new American bike-share system, Divvy is doing well, but it has a lot of room to improve, according to the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy's new Bike Share Planning Guide [PDF]. The guide includes best practices for designing, distributing, and marketing this new form of transit. While Divvy is still growing and hasn't gone through a full peak season yet, the guide illustrates one area where Chicago should focus on improving its bike-share system: station density.

I don't remember the first time I met Carmelita Sams, the well-loved bike mechanic and instructor who recently passed away, but I do remember one of the last times I saw her. Carmelita was a volunteer at West Town Bikes, a bike education center in Humboldt Park, as well as the only female staffer at its attached shop, Ciclo Urbano. In July I organized Cargo Bike Roll Call at West Town. It was a chilly afternoon and I told her I was cold. She offered to run home and get one of her son's sweatshirts for me, and came back with a double XL bright orange hoodie that fit me perfectly.

This week's snow storm -- which is still coming down -- has made a lot of sidewalks tough to navigate, but here's one case that's worse than most.

Washington, DC, has the same "vision zero" goal to eliminate traffic deaths as Chicago. In this new public service announcement, DC police chief Cathy Lanier says, "High speed collisions are much more deadly than other collisions." Exactly. When you compare the severity of injuries that pedestrians suffer in speeding-related crashes to non-speeding crashes, you see what Lanier is talking about.

The Chicago Transit Authority will spend $492 million rehabilitating tracks and stations on the Blue Line between the downtown subway and O'Hare airport in an effort to speed service and improve the customer experience. But the project will make only one station accessible to people with disabilities, out of 11 stations slated for a rehab that are currently inaccessible. (A total of 13 stations are being renovated and upgraded.) The one station that will receive accessibility upgrades is Addison.

At last Wednesday's Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting, assistant transportation commissioner Sean Wiedel shared Divvy's cold-weather operating strategy.

The recently released update to the Chicago Department of Transportation's first-ever two-year plan, the Chicago Forward Action Agenda, fails to give a status report on critical street safety metrics. The two-year update to Chicago Forward [PDF] does say a lot about what CDOT is doing to improve safety, but it doesn't provide information on traffic crashes and injuries.

At yesterday's Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council, Chicago Bicycle Program project manager Mike Amsden revealed a new detail about the missing piece of the Clybourn Avenue buffered bike lane. The Chicago Department of Transportation is working with the Illinois Department of Transportation to install a protected bike lane on Clybourn that may be separated by a curb.