Eyes on the Street

We've got additional footage shot that suggests that California stops by drivers are the rule, rather than the exception, at four-way stop signs.

The city is tinkering with the Loop Link design.

Over the summer administrators and parents from the Chicago Academy for the Arts, a private school located at 1010 West North Avenue contacted us about their campaign to improve pedestrian safety near the school. In particular they were concerned about the Chicago/Milwaukee/Ogden intersection, one of the most crash-prone in the city, located a block west of the school.

In a recent post about the grand opening of the Argyle Shared Street, a pedestrian-priority makeover of Chicago's Southeast Asian shopping and dining district, I wondered out loud whether the red, green, and orange hues in the new streetscape were inspired by the vivid colors of the Vietnamese cuisine for which the strip is famous. Later I ran the question by Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey, who put me in touch with Ernest Wong, an architect with Site Design Group, which designed the shared street.

This afternoon in Uptown, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, 48th Ward alderman Harry Osterman, and other local officials cut the ribbon on the Argyle “shared street,” a pedestrian-priority design inspired by similar streets in Asia and Europe. By calming traffic and blurring the lines between spaces for walking and vehicles, as well as providing more room for sidewalk cafes and special events, the streetscape should increase safety while giving a boost to businesses on Chicago’s Southeast Asian retail strip.

The Chicago Riverwalk extension might not have gotten built if it didn’t function as a car-free transportation corridor as well as a space for recreation. The project was funded through the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Transportation Infrastructure Finance Innovation Act program, which provided a $98 million loan. The project also received $10 million in state funding.

An important new downtown bikeway recently became rideable. The Randolph protected bike lane runs from Michigan to Clinton, making an already-popular westbound route out of the Loop safer.

There was some good news for Chicago straphangers last week. TransitCenter, a New York-based foundation dedicated to improving urban mobility, awarded 16 grants, totaling more than $17 million, to civic organizations, universities, and municipalities, and the Active Transportation Alliance was one of the winners. The Active Trans proposal, called Speeding Up Chicago’s Buses, involves working with the CTA and the Chicago Department of Transportation to eliminate some of the roadblocks to faster transit and higher ridership.

This morning the CTA celebrated the completion of more than 50 percent of the Wilson station reconstruction project, shortly after all customer boarding was moved to the recently completed west island platform. Now that both sides of the new platform are completed and the transit agency is working on demolishing the old one, you can get a sense of just how big the station will be when both island platforms are in place. The entire track and platform combo will be the widest in the system, dwarfing even the double-island-platform at the Belmont Red/Purple/Brown station.