Interviews

Local architect John Krause sees the reconstruction of North Lake Shore Drive, one of Chicago's most scenic locations, as a chance to think big -- not just about the road, but also about parks, transit, trails, the shoreline, and the future of the city alongside it. The Illinois Department of Transportation isn't used to thinking like that, though, and so Krause sees its "Redefine the Drive" project as a process "that looks and feels suboptimal."

Since former Chicago Department of Transportation commissioner Gabe Klein stepped down in November, he has been far from idle. He's been active as a visiting fellow with the Urban Land Institute and a board member with the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and last month he joined the board of OpenPlans, the parent organization of Streetsblog and Streetfilms.

In this final installment of my interview with Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld, we talked about the Divvy expansion, traffic cameras, protected bike lanes, and her overall goals as CDOT chief. Read the first and second parts of the interview here and here.

I recently sat down with Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld to discuss the city’s efforts to create safer, more efficient conditions for walking, transit and biking. We’ll be publishing the interview in a few installments, starting with this conversation about plans for bus rapid transit in the Loop.

Neighbors of a Trader Joe's grocery store, proposed by Smithfield Properties for the corner of Division Street and Honore Street in Wicker Park, fear that the development will harm the work they've put into crafting a pedestrian-friendly street lined with locally-owned businesses. The store is welcome in Wicker Park, but neighbors say that the proposed location at Division Street and Honore Street isn't the right one.

Divvy announced the Divvy Data Challenge's six winners this morning on its website. I talked to three winners to learn how they created their submissions, and what they learned about Divvy users in the process. The Data Challenge began February 11, when Divvy released data about 759,788 trips taken in 2013 and asked the public to create visualizations of numbers and patterns about bike-share in Chicago.

Divvy's data release last month raised as many questions as it answered about bike-share use in Chicago. Chicago Spectrum was the first to point out that there's a large gap between male and female Divvy members. Women make up 31 percent of the membership, but the trip data showed that women made only 21 percent of the trips.

For years Chicago’s zoning ordinance, which requires large amount of off-street car parking as part of most new residential buildings, has prevented developers from taking full advantage of transit-friendly locations. However, a transit-oriented development ordinance that passed last year lowers the required number of parking spaces for buildings near transit stations. As Steven Vance reported, Centrum Partners is proposing to build a five-to-seven-story rental building next to the Brown Line’s Paulina stop at 3400 N Lincoln Ave, which would be the first known development to take advantage of the parking minimum reduction.

Yesterday Blue Cross spokesman Michael Deering told me about how the Central Loop Bus Rapid Transit project will make it faster and easier for hundreds of the corporation’s employees to access it downtown headquarters. This morning I spoke with Peter Vilim, co-chair of the real estate investment firm Waterton Associates, about why his company supports BRT.