Bus Transit

Proponents of effective public transportation made a strong showing at last night’s South Side hearing on the city’s plan for bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue. Dozens of people showed up for an Active Transportation Alliance rally beforehand at the Punch House tavern, 1227 West 18th in Pilsen. Then they marched to the open house at Benito Juarez Community Academy, 1450 West Cermak, where supporters seemed to far outnumber opponents of the plan.

Last Sunday, on a trip to New York, I rode the M15 Select Bus Service route on First Avenue in Manhattan. SBS incorporates components of bus rapid transit but it doesn't rise to the level of real BRT, according to standards laid out by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Riding the M15 from 14th Street to 67th Street, I could tell that SBS is a significant improvement over typical bus service, but I also got a sense of its limitations. This revealed a lot about Chicago's BRT plans, and the reasoning behind the proposed design for BRT on Ashland Avenue. Simply put, Ashland BRT will avoid the shortcomings of SBS.

Even when I’ve disagreed with him over his recent comments on transportation and public space issues, I’ve always used the word “progressive” to describe 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waguespack, but it might be time to drop that adjective. He has been an important independent voice at City Hall, most notably in his opposition to Richard M. Daley’s disastrous parking meter deal and Rahm Emanuel’s fishy reboot of the contract. He’s a nice person and a regular bike commuter. But Waguespack's statements in a recent article on bus rapid transit in Our Urban Times community newspaper reveal a strange hostility to building an effective, equitable surface transit system.

Traffic jams cost Chicagoland residents more than $7.3 billion every year in wasted time and fuel, according to the Metropolitan Planning Council’s 2008 report “Moving at the Speed of Congestion.” And we're not headed in the right direction: The share of drive-alone commuters in the region increased from 46 percent to 51 percent from 1990 to 2008.

In the wake of the recent Metra patronage scandal, the Regional Transit Authority has come under intense scrutiny. Many journalists, elected officials and policy experts have argued that the current system of separate boards for the CTA, Metra and Pace, overseen by the RTA, lends itself to interagency competition and corruption that gets in the way of improving the area’s transportation network. However, given the complex nature of politics in Illinois, overhauling the system is a daunting task.

At next week’s open house meetings (see details below) on the CTA’s plan to create fast, efficient bus rapid transit on Ashland Avenue, there will probably be plenty of project opponents grumbling that the agency didn’t do a good enough job of publicizing the events. On Saturday, Roger Romanelli, leader of the anti-BRT group the Ashland-Western Coalition, emailed members, complaining that the hearings are being held “with minimal public notice.”

As part of Chicago’s pantheon of curmudgeonly, bike-baiting opinion writers, an elite group that includes Tribune columnist John Kass and guest contributor John McCarron, DNAinfo’s Mark Konkol is a bit of an odd duck. After writing a series of rants against the Kinzie protected bike lanes for the Sun-Times, his former employer, Konkol seems to have softened his position on cycling a bit.

The Chicago Transit Authority has been planning an extension of the Red Line from its current terminus at 95th Street for decades and I joined a tour group at the Congress for New Urbanism’s transportation summit last week to see the proposed station locations. Development Communities Project's board member Phyllis Palmer led the tour because the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning has provided DCP with a Local Technical Assistance grant to prepare the Greater Roseland communities for the extension.

On Tuesday, the Active Transportation Alliance honored several movers and shakers in the local sustainable transportation scene at an awards reception in the Revolution Brewing taproom. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was given the Extra Mile Award in recognition of his role in implementing bike-share, bus rapid transit, the Red Line South rehab, and protected bike lanes.