Streetsblog Chicago

Good news for rail fans: Recently, Illinois legislators discussed a groundbreaking bill to launch statewide train service.

On Thursday, I heard the tragic news that groundbreaking singer-songwriter Jill Sobule had passed away at age 66, in a house fire early that morning while she was visiting the Twin Cities. Among many other great folk and pop tunes, she was known for her 1995 hits "I Kissed a Girl," the first LGBTQ-themed recording to make the Billboard Top 20, and "Supermodel," which appeared on the soundtrack for the movie "Clueless." She had been booked to perform in her hometown of Denver on Friday evening, but instead the venue hosted an impromptu memorial.

Last week, I took a fairly deep dive into the recurring traffic crash epidemic near Loyola University. Read the article to get up to speed on the situation. It has included two bus-pedestrian collisions within a week in February, at or near Sheridan Road and Kenmore Avenue, between the main campus and the Kenmore bike-pedestrian mall.

Plus a discussion of why at many Metra stations, if you're not a daily commuter, it can be maddeningly non-obvious which platform you need to wait on.

On Monday, April 7, at around 5:09 a.m. a pickup driver, 26, fatally struck a 72-year-old male pedestrian at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and DuSable Lake Shore Drive, just west of the Museum Campus. It was reported that the victim had been trying to cross the highway on foot, although it's illegal to do so there.

Chicagoland faces a $770 million total public transportation fiscal cliff, which would result in austerity measures – extreme service cuts – in 2026. That is, unless Illinois legislators take decisive action by the end of next month to address the budget gap.

• ATA: "State lawmakers must fully fund transit operations before it’s too late"

• Letter from RTA Chief Kirk Dillard: "If the state would fund its mandates, the RTA wouldn’t be faced with such a fiscal crisis" (Tribune)

Milwaukee Avenue, the diagonal street that runs about 11 miles northwest-southeast between downtown and Superdawg Drive-In in the Norwood Park neighborhood, is Chicago's most important cycling street. It's got the highest ridership of any roadway in our city, and since it's the most direct route from the Loop to Wicker Park, Logan Square, and Avondale, some call it the "Hipster Highway."