Funding & Finance

John McCarron, a freelance writer, adjunct lecturer at DePaul University, and contributing columnist for the Tribune, suffers from Jeckyll-and-Hyde syndrome when it comes to writing about transportation.

While the CTA goes forward with the environmental analysis and conceptual engineering phase of designing the first 5.4-mile stretch of bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue, the NIMBY crowd is also on the move.

Last Thursday evening in a tidy storefront at the bustling, multicultural intersection of Lawrence and Kedzie in Albany Park, ten teenagers were hard at work wrenching on bikes as pop-punk played through someone’s laptop. One boy scrubbed the headset of a green BMX with a wire brush. Nearby a girl was installing a derailleur cable on a white mountain bike. Another boy in a striped knit cap was installing a crank on a navy-blue road cycle. There was an atmosphere of intense, professional concentration, broken up occasionally by exchanges of repair tips and good-natured ribbing.

A recent discussion of Ventra, the new fare payment system for the CTA and Pace, with CTA spokesman Brian Steele, has allayed some, if not all, of my concerns about the impact on low-income Chicagoans. The cost of a single-ride ticket will rise from $2.25 to $3. This price hike can be avoided by purchasing a reusable Ventra card for $5, which is refunded as a transit credit when you register the card. However, registering the card requires access to a phone, the Internet, or the CTA headquarters, which might be a barrier for very low-income individuals.

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.

Sometimes transportation and food intersect in curious ways. The northwest Chicago suburbs of Arlington Heights, Mount Prospect, and Elk Grove Village are home to the region’s largest Japanese expat community. I was bummed to find out that Mount Prospect’s Torishin, my favorite izakaya (Japanese pub-eatery) recently shut its doors. The tavern was a popular place for local salarymen to hang out after work over drinks and delectable bar snacks.

The Circle Interchange highway expansion project began construction Wednesday. At a press conference on the Peoria Street bridge, Governor Quinn stressed the job creation aspect of the $475 million project. What Quinn didn't mention is that any $475 million infrastructure project would create a lot of jobs.

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.

Imagine if almost everybody who rode the Chicago Transit Authority, a public transportation system subsidized with taxpayer money, was Caucasian. Denver found itself in an analogous situation last year, when a survey revealed that, in a city where almost half of residents are people of color, 89.9 percent the people using the publicly funded Denver B-cycle system were non-Hispanic whites.