Beyond Chicagoland

Amtrak riders tested new bike racks in the snack car of a train to Michigan last month, as the railroad prepares to launch roll-on service for trains to Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Lansing. Derrick James, the director of government affairs for the central region of Amtrak, sent these photos of the event.

On Monday, the month-long Dinner & Bikes tour, featuring bicycling author Elly Blue, writer and filmmaker Joe Biel, and vegan chef Joshua Ploeg, documented by Chicagoist contributor Aaron Cynic, made its final stop at Chicago’s Heritage Bicycles and Coffee. The event featured a vegan buffet prepared by Ploeg, a discussion of transportation planning and utility cycling by Blue, and a screening of Aftermass, Biel’s documentary about the history of bike planning, advocacy and activism in Portland, Oregon.

Converting a travel lane in each direction on Ashland Avenue to center-running bus lanes, greatly improving transit performance on the corridor, won't lead to Chicago's own version of Carmageddon (which actually never materialized).

Guest author Jack Cebe is a planner and designer with Alta Planning + Design in Chicago, a firm dedicated to creating active communities where bicycling and walking are safe, healthy, fun, and normal daily activities.

Two weeks ago, at a friend's suggestion, I started a petition to lobby the South Shore Line to allow bicycles on trains, which currently has 125 signers. Our motivation was mostly selfish: We want to be able to travel to the Dunes National Lakeshore and other places in northwest Indiana with our bikes. So I reached out to Northern Indiana Commuter Transportation District, the agency that operates the South Shore Line. Yesterday afternoon, when I called John Parsons, NICTD's planning and marketing director, he said he was expecting me since he had already received many emails about bikes on trains (the petition website automatically sends them).

[This article also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield's weekly column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

A study out of Nashville by Smart Growth America provides more evidence that building walkable development in existing communities is best for a city's bottom line.

Jeffrey Tumlin was managing transportation programs at Stanford in the mid-1990s, when he made an important finding: It was cheaper for the university to pay people not to drive than to build new parking structures.

The toughest part of the city’s effort to create bus rapid transit in the downtown East-West Transit and the Western/Ashland BRT corridors will be convincing Chicagoans that it’s a good idea to remove travel lanes on major streets to make room for dedicated bus lanes. Help arrived today in the form of a $1.2 million Rockefeller Foundation grant that will be used to build local understanding and support for BRT in Chicago, as well as Boston, Nashville and Pittsburgh.