Steven Vance

While I was browsing Andrew Salzberg's map showing how much development is allowed near transit stops, I noticed a dark spot  -- a site where a taller building is allowed -- at the southwest corner of Ashland Avenue and Division Street. Then I remembered the development underway there, the "1601 Tower," on the site of a shuttered Pizza Hut restaurant. The interesting thing about this 11-story, 99-unit building is that it will provide no car parking spaces for residents.

Chicago just got a step closer to first-class bus rapid transit. Today the CTA and the Chicago Department of Transportation released proposed lane configurations for the Central Loop East-West Transit Corridor, a downtown circulator route connecting Union Station with Navy Pier, as well as renderings for a new transit center next to the train station. The corridor would include bus-priority lanes on two miles of streets: Canal, Washington, Madison and Clinton. This downtown BRT service is slated to launch next year.

An expensive new interchange expansion that the Illinois Department of Transportation is pushing for downtown threatens to dump more traffic on Chicago streets, but the project still needs approval from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning to move forward. While IDOT is simultaneously proposing some improvements for biking and walking in the area, all of those could be implemented without the new highway components. The deadline for public comments to CMAP about the project is Monday.

This advertisement for safe driving has been posted for a couple of months on a bus stop shelter for the 56-Milwaukee at California Avenue. It's sponsored by the Auto Alliance and the American Association of Orthopaedic Surgeons (the kind who will fix your broken bones after a car crash).

At an event last week for traffic and transportation engineers hosted by the Congress for the New Urbanism, I had the chance to talk to Rock Miller, who served as president of the Institute of Transportation Engineers last year. ITE and CNU teamed up in 2010 to produce a new guidebook, Designing Walkable Urban Thoroughfares, which Miller was promoting to other engineers at the event.

The Chicago Department of Transportation plans to implement pedestrian safety measures at 50 high-priority sites near schools and parks this year, the agency revealed at last week's meeting of the Mayor's Pedestrian Advisory Council. The changes will include the addition of speeding enforcement cameras, high-visibility crosswalks, and signs to show drivers how fast they're traveling.

On Wednesday, the Chicago Transit Authority announced that it's planning to upgrade its train fleet with more than 800 new rail cars. As the agency looks into what manufacturers can provide, this should be the time when Chicagoans influence the process and push for the best possible redesign.

Chicagoland has a lot of traffic congestion, according to this year's Urban Mobility Report from the Texas A&M Transportation Institute [PDF], yet we continue to build more roads while transit service and walking and biking facilities don't seem to increase as fast. Meanwhile, gas taxes and other fees on drivers fail to pay for all the roadbuilding, meaning we're subsidizing a very ineffective, inefficient system. A local campaign to implement congestion pricing holds the promise of easing congestion, reducing road subsides, and increasing investment in transit, biking, and walking -- but only if Chicago gets it right.

Last month we noted that the Illinois Department of Transportation prevented the installation of a protected bike lane planned for Jackson Boulevard, allowing only a buffered bike lane on the segment of the street it controls. Now we know why: IDOT will not allow protected bike lanes to be installed on Chicago streets under its jurisdiction until mid-2014, at the earliest, because the agency wants to see three years of data (presumably crash data) before signing off on this type of street redesign.