Design

[This piece also runs in Checkerboard City, John's transportation column in Newcity magazine.]

After Lakeview residents argued that a huge number of parking spaces was inappropriate for a building located only one block from a Red Line stop, the latest design for the Belmont-Clark tower is much less car-oriented. While the original design featured 100 rental units and 116 parking spots, the new one has 90 units but only 39 spots. That’s a major win for the community, since it will greatly reduce the amount of car traffic generated in this dense, transit-rich neighborhood.

With Divvy slated to expand by 175 stations this year, there’s an unprecedented opportunity to increase bike ridership in Chicago. There’s also an opportunity to rethink the Divvy bike design.

Although I currently live a stone’s throw from Lake Street's protected bike lanes, I almost never ride in them. I moved to East Garfield Park during this snowy winter, when the PBLs rarely seemed to get plowed. Now that it’s springtime, the lanes are often filled with broken glass and garbage, and many of the flexible posts that separated them from the parking lane are lying on the sidewalk or in the bikeway. As a result, I almost always take Fulton, Warren/Washington, or Jackson to get downtown – anything but Lake.

It’s a sure sign of spring when Chicago’s People Spot mini-parks start reappearing. Workers recently reinstalled the parklet at Addison and Southport in Lakeview, featuring undulating, vertebrae-like benches, assembled from some 375 wooden cross-sections. Yesterday the Andersonville Development Corporation, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable community and economic development, reinstalled the People Spot at the southwest corner of Clark and Olive, by the Coffee Studio café and Piatto Pronto deli.

A parking lot at 3030 N Broadway in Lakeview, formerly the site of a Dominick's grocery store, could soon be the home of a new development with a Mariano’s supermarket, an Xport Fitness health club, and four small retail tenants. This stretch of Broadway, designated as a Pedestrian Street by the city, is currently very walkable. The Active Transportation Alliance recognized this and included the street in its list of 20 Chicago thoroughfares that should be considered for pedestrianization. In the surrounding census tracts, 30 to 50 percent of the households don't own cars.

Yesterday’s Sun-Times update on the CTA's proposed South Red Line extension included some interesting details about the project, as well as a few misguided comments about transit from 9th Ward Alderman Anthony Beale, who is also the chair of City Council’s transportation committee.

The Illinois Department of Transportation has a long history of promoting driving before all other modes. However, its new Illinois Bike Transportation Plan, released this morning at the Illinois Bike Summit in Champaign, may represent a new direction for the department.

On Thursday, the Illinois Department of Transportation kicked off the feedback process for the the North Lake Shore Drive rehabilitation's future alternatives analysis, at the third meeting of the project's task forces. During the previous two meetings, it seemed like IDOT would insist upon just another highway project, with minimal benefits for pedestrians, transit users and bicyclists. Yet as the process of determining the lakefront highway's future has evolved, some hope that the project can be steered in a more positive direction.