Events

The Chicago Department of Transportation will redesign Broadway between Montrose and Foster, a mile-long stretch that's currently a very car-centric four- to five-lane road. The street is so inhospitable that one resident at a public meeting Wednesday night said she doesn't drive, walk, or bike on it.

At yesterday's press conference touting the CTA's claim of saving $10 million by cracking down on absenteeism, I asked the Mayor Rahm Emanuel why he's in favor of reconfiguring Ashland Avenue to create "gold-standard" bus rapid transit. I also asked how he plans to overcome the resistance to turning two of the four car lanes into bus-only lanes. However, as urban planner Steve Schlickman argued at a recent forum on BRT, the best way to convince people of the merits of the street redesign may be simply "doing it." The mayor's response provided a decent summary of the city's current strategy for improving transportation: working on multiple ways to move people around the Chicago more efficiently, not just people in cars.

Steven Vance is the self-described “data geek” at Streetsblog Chicago, but even a right-brained type like myself couldn’t help but be intrigued by some recently revealed stats and charts about Divvy bike-share use patterns. Chicago Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly shared them during a talk at last week’s Complete Streets Symposium, hosted by CDOT, the CTA and the professional group the Intelligent Transportation Society, which kind of sounds like an '80s synth-pop band.

The safety problems on Clark Street between North Avenue and Lincoln Park West are well known. The roadway is too wide, leading too many drivers to speed. Back in 2011, Bike Walk Lincoln Park co-organizer Michelle Stenzel wrote that Clark Street needs a road diet:

Although Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities to consider staging a ciclovía, a Latin-American-style event that creates temporary car-free street space in order to encourage healthy recreation, community interaction and commerce, we’re currently way behind peer cities. New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco are each hosting several ciclovía events this year on routes that are several miles long. Meanwhile Chicago will be hosting one event, called Open Streets, on Sunday, September 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., on a 2.6-mile stretch of Milwaukee Avenue between Division Street and Kedzie Boulevard in Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square.

The north portion of Lake Shore Drive, from Grand Avenue to its northern terminus at Hollywood Avenue, will be rebuilt in the next five years. It's a major transportation project and a huge opportunity for Chicago, but will we make the most of it?

The "Commuter Challenge" is an annual competition held in many cities, in which companies compete to get the most employees to bike commute during Bike to Work Week in June. It's a good opportunity to start converting people who are "interested but concerned" about biking for transportation into regular bike commuters: Workplaces host events on how to do it, team leaders at each office answer any questions, and some companies even reward employees with cash. The competition is basically a fun way to raise awareness about how bicycling to work is a viable option for many people.

As the Illinois Department of Transportation launches the public input process for the state’s first-ever statewide bicycle transportation plan, the elephant in the room is IDOT’s prohibition of protected bike lanes on state jurisdiction roads in Chicago. Protected lanes have been proven to improve safety for all road users, based on several years worth of data in other American cities like New York, which has been installing them since 2007.

It was a sign of the times when the Chicago Department of Transportation celebrated the city’s 13th on-street bike parking corral this morning at the Cheetah Gym, 5248 North Clark in Andersonville. Nine years ago, when I worked as CDOT’s bike parking manager, I put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into trying to get a corral installed at this very same location. The gym’s owner was ready to bankroll it, and we had the blessing of the local chamber of commerce and alderman, but the CDOT higher-ups deep-sixed the plan, questioning the safety of placing racks in the street, although corrals were already common on the West Coast by then.