Infrastructure

This post focuses on the Chicago Mobility Collective breakout session that focused on street design to improve bus service. Streetsblog may run coverage of other breakout sessions that focused on pedestrian and bike matters in the future. The meeting took place during the same time as the ghost bike installation for youth mentor Sam Bell, 44, in River West. To highlight Chicago's traffic violence epidemic, some people Zoomed in to the meeting from the memorial using a background with a white bicycle and the words "I'm currently at the ghost bike vigil for another cyclist killed on Chicago streets." Others posted a "Vision Zero Chicago 2022 Report Card" with crash fatality stats. About 140 people attended the meeting altogether. - Ed.

Thanks to the CTA’s staff for volunteering their time and efforts to throw a 75th birthday party – not for themselves, but for all of us who value transit and appreciate its long history in Chicago.

This was highly symbolic, since an ongoing project to expand the interchange has cost $800 million so far in taxpayer money, but it has little or no direct value for people who don't own cars.

Over a roughly six-week period, at any given point about one in five stations has no "classic" bikes (the original blue non-electric cycles) for rent and one fifth of docked bikes were flagged as broken.

While the monitor project probably won't revolutionize CTA safety, it should give the CAs a better sense of what's happening in their stations, allowing them to respond to emergencies more quickly.

"Over the past 50 years, Critical Mass has made Chicago a bike-friendlier town," said cofounder and prankster Michael Burton said in a statement. "Despite these many gains, there's much work still to be done."

It's always nice to kick off the weekend with a feel-good story of a win for livable streets.

The culmination of the rally, a dramatic "die-in" protest on DuSable Lake Short Drive next to Buckingham Fountain, deserves a little more discussion.

Multiple advocacy groups made that argument once again with an open letter to local decision-makers calling on them to include physically-protected bike lanes along as part of the upcoming Lincoln Avenue Streetscape and Plaza project