Steven Vance

Frequent Dearborn Street bike lane user Justin Haugens sends us these photos from his way to work in the South Loop. At the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting two weeks ago, a CDOT staffer said that Dearborn Street would be receiving a slew of upgrades to better identify areas of conflict between people driving and bicycling, and to reduce the incidence of people parking and blocking the bike lane.

At a community meeting Tuesday night at the McCormick-Tribune YMCA, planners discussed the final designs, construction schedule, and new name for the trail and "linear park" formerly known as the Bloomingdale. The newly coined appellation "The 606" is an umbrella term referring to the trail as well as five adjacent parks that will serve as access points.

The Pedestrian Street, or P-Street, designation is a zoning tool to ensure that a street will remain safe and pleasant to walk on. It dictates, for example, that buildings should have have convenient pedestrian access and engaging ground floors, with human-scale entrances located on the main street, close to the sidewalk, and street-level windows.

Imagine if almost everybody who rode the Chicago Transit Authority, a public transportation system subsidized with taxpayer money, was Caucasian. Denver found itself in an analogous situation last year, when a survey revealed that, in a city where almost half of residents are people of color, 89.9 percent the people using the publicly funded Denver B-cycle system were non-Hispanic whites.

In November, Chicago Department of Transportation crews installed bike lanes on Marshall Boulevard from Sacramento Drive in Douglas Park to 24th Boulevard in Little Village, near Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. On most of this stretch the lanes are protected by parked cars on the west side of the street; to make room for the protected lanes, car parking was removed from the east side.

I went on a 25-mile bike ride yesterday to check up on livable streets projects around the city (final destination: Lao Beijing for dried chili chicken). On the trip I got a good look at the restriped bike lanes on King Drive in Bronzeville, the conversion of the Garfield Green Line station to a Green/Red/shuttle bus super station, the Red Line South reconstruction project, and lots of Divvy bike-share stations. I spotted three new Divvy locations and since my ride have heard about three more. Add the original Daley Plaza station and there are at least seven installed. Here's a quick recap of where you can find Divvy stations so far, and in a separate post I'll give a status report on the other projects.

Two of the major topics of the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting on Wednesday were bike-share and the Dearborn Street bike lane.

The annual Bike to Work Rally serves as a state of the union for Chicago cycling, and this year there’s a lot of news to report, with the impending launch of the Divvy bike-share system, completion of the Milwaukee protected lanes, and financing secured for the Chicago Riverwalk. This was the first time Mayor Rahm Emanuel has appeared at the rally and he seemed to enjoy soaking in the crowd’s enthusiasm for the many bike initiatives that have launched since he took office about two years ago.

Since the third week of May, 1.55 million Chicagoans (!) have received a double-sided leaflet called "Tips for Motorists" informing people how to "make our streets safer for everyone." The mailing, sent by the City Clerk's office with the car sticker renewal form, was three years in the making and likely has the lowest cost of any outreach that the Chicago Department of Transportation has ever initiated. CDOT paid $8,000 for printing and contributed about $1,000 in postage fees, according to bike and pedestrian safety manager Charlie Short.