Eyes on the Street

If you were planning on taking part in the solar eclipse festival at the Adler Planetarium today, bicycling was the way to go.

The North Branch Trail is a popular multi-use trail operated by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. It runs along the North Branch of the Chicago River and the Skokie Lagoons from the Northwest Side of Chicago to the Chicago Botanic Gardens in Glencoe. The trail was recently extended four miles south from its previous southeastern terminus at Devon and Caldwell in the city’s Edgebrook neighborhood to the Irene C. Hernandez Picnic Area at Foster and Kostner, near North Mayfair. This brings the total trail length to 22 miles.

An annoying issue on Elston has a silver lining -- it suggests that protected bike lanes could work on this stretch.

CDOT recently made some, ahem, concrete improvements to the stretch of Broadway between Irving Park and Grace in Lakeview.

The five-way intersection of Belmont, Western, and Clybourn, as well as the stretch of Western between the Chicago River and Lane Tech High, is friendlier to pedestrians and a lot less gloomy thanks to the just-completed project to remove the nearly 60-year-old Riverview flyover. However, the street makeover missed some opportunities to make the corridor safer and more accessible to all road users, maintaining the overwhelmingly car-centric nature of the corridor.

The Chicago Transit Authority is testing a prepaid boarding system during weekday rush hours at a few of its busiest stops along major routes to see if it will improve travel times.

It's common to see non-CTA drivers, especially operators of private commuter shuttles, illegally using the lanes. Here’s a cheap, fast, effective solution to this problem.

This morning city and park district officials cut the ribbon on the first completed section of the Lakefront Trail separation project between 31st and 41st Street. This provides a preview of what trail separation will look like on the rest of the trail between 71st and Ardmore – where there’s sufficient space to create different paths for pedestrians and bicyclists. Separation along the entire lakefront is slated to be completed in 2018.

The bike lane is part of a larger project to improve multi-modal usage of both Chicago Avenue and Sheridan Road.