Chicago

At the first meeting of the new Chicago Mobility Collaborative on June 30, the Chicago Department of Transportation briefly presented a new plan for the Belmont and Kedzie intersection.  This is a complicated intersection, involving both grid and diagonal streets, an expressway exit and support columns, plus existing and new bike lanes.

On Thursday, July 8, Mayor Lori Lightfoot joined federal elected officials Senator Dick Durbin and Representative Jesus "Chuy" Garcia (IL-4) alongside state transportation officials in asking for federal funds for improvements to Chicago's Union Station and nearby tracks that would make the station a more comfortable and spacious place for passengers and reduce delays on certain Amtrak routes. 

This is the second disturbing incident this month in Chicagoland involving teens of color, bicycles, and alleged police violence.

The proposed Connected Communities ordinance has been released. We looked at some of the changes the ordinance proposes.

While ProPublica recently wrote that "wider streets with more lanes that lend themselves to speeding... seem to contribute to the [racial/ethnic] disparities in ticketing," the data doesn't support that theory. 

The goal of the legislation is to ensure that every time CDOT repaves a street, rather than simply restriping it the same way as before, it prioritizes the needs of people walking, biking, and riding transit.

Even amid death and trauma, people still have places to get, and public transit will, hopefully, still be there to serve them.

The transportation department could take one very simple action to help more broaden the demographics of who has a say in Chicago mobility projects, but for some reason it has resisted doing so.

CDOT should make sure the concrete protection is easy to see and the lanes are well maintained, and the department should be filling in non-protected gaps in the network.