Bus Transit

There are many things to like about McCaffery Interests’ proposal to build apartments, condos, senior housing, and retail on the former Children’s Memorial Hospital site, centered on a triangular lot at the southeast corner of Fullerton, Halsted and Lincoln in Lincoln Park. The site, which has sat vacant since the hospital relocated to Streeterville in 2012, would be occupied by three new apartment towers, and several historic buildings would be rehabbed and repurposed.

Readers, rejoice! Perhaps you feared that you would never get to sit in on nearly an hour of transit talk between world-renowned brainiac straphangers Jeff Wood and Yonah Freemark. But ho! Fear no more.

Appearing on Chicago Tonight last month, 12th Ward Alderman George Cardenas made a number of ill-informed statements about the plan to create fast, reliable transit on Ashland Avenue. Most egregiously, he painted BRT as an "expressway" where "no one’s going to stop," when in fact the project is going to help more people access Ashland Avenue.

[This piece also runs in Checkerboard City, John's column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

The Chicago Department of Transportation recently released a preliminary design for the Loop bus rapid transit corridor’s shelters, heavily influenced by the winner of the NEXT STOP: Designing Chicago BRT Stations contest. Construction on the downtown express bus corridor, featuring dedicated lanes on Washington, Madison, Canal, and Clinton, is slated for this spring, with service launching by the end of the year. Washington and Madison will each get four stations, according to Chris Ziemann, the city’s BRT manager.

It looks like the next Chicago Department of Transportation commissioner will be following in Gabe Klein’s progressive footsteps. This morning the mayor’s office announced that Rahm Emanuel has selected Rebekah Scheinfeld, the CTA’s chief planning officer, to fill the vacancy, pending city council approval.

As I’ve written many times on this website, 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waguespack has done some good things for the city, and he’s a likeable person. So it’s painful to see him take an increasingly reactionary stance against the CTA’s plan to create a more efficient and equitable Ashland Avenue by building a bus rapid transit system.

One of the most controversial aspects of the CTA’s plan to create bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue is the prohibition of most left turns from Ashland. Since the buses will operate in dedicated lanes next to the median, any left turns by vehicles from the mixed-traffic lanes will require that the buses get a red light while the turning vehicles get a green arrow. Watering down the BRT route with too many left turns would significantly slow down the buses.