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Highlights From the March Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council Meeting
The quarterly Mayor’s Bike Advisory Council meetings, held on the 11th floor of City Hall, are an excellent way to get up to speed on local cycling initiatives. At Wednesday's meeting Mike Amsden, who manages the Chicago Department of Transportation’s bikeways projects, discussed the agency's proposal to build protected bike lanes on Milwaukee Avenue between Kinzie and Elston avenues, which would require parking removal. New on-street bike parking corrals, bike share kiosks and “People Spot” parklets might be part of the plan. “There are quite a few bars and restaurants, so we’ll be making sure, hey, if they’re losing a parking space they get a nice bike corral or a bike share station,” said CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein.
March 15, 2013
CDOT Reorganizes With an Increased Focus on Complete Streets
For weeks, rumors have been circulating that there has been a re-shuffling of job responsibilities at the Chicago Department of Transportation, but the agency hadn’t made an official announcement about the changes. Most notably, word on the street was that Ben Gomberg, Chicago’s bicycle program coordinator since 1996, was no longer managing the day-to-day operations of the bike program but was instead focusing his efforts on the city’s new bike-share system. After we contacted the department for more info, Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly offered to provide details on the reorganization, which has actually been in effect since late January.
March 13, 2013
Why Chicago Is Lagging Behind Other Cities on Bike Parking Corrals
Not surprisingly, Portland, Oregon, leads the nation in on-street bike parking corrals, with 97 installed since 2004 and about 20 more going in each year. San Francisco, which installed its first corrals on Valencia Street in May 2010, now has 32 of them. New York City, which began installing corrals in August 2011, currently has 12. But Chicago, which debuted its first on-street racks, in front of Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Building, a month before New York, only has four corrals so far, with a fifth slated for Logan Square’s Revolution Brewing this spring.
March 8, 2013
It’s Up to Chicago to Set a Bold New Standard for American BRT
“We knew how important it was for federal policy makers to see innovation and new ideas bubbling up from important cities around the country,” said Nick Turner, managing director of the Rockefeller Foundation at a bus rapid transit roundtable last Friday. The foundation has provided roughly $2.8 million in grants to Chicago's BRT program for research, technical support, land-use planning, project management, community engagement, branding and communications. “That’s why we started to get interested in the work here in Chicago.” The seminar, Bus Rapid Transit on a Roll in Chicago, took place at the Loop offices of the Metropolitan Planning Council, which promotes sustainable development and transportation in the region.
March 4, 2013
CTA and CDOT Unveil Proposed Designs for Central Loop BRT Corridor
Chicago just got a step closer to first-class bus rapid transit. Today the CTA and the Chicago Department of Transportation released proposed lane configurations for the Central Loop East-West Transit Corridor, a downtown circulator route connecting Union Station with Navy Pier, as well as renderings for a new transit center next to the train station. The corridor would include bus-priority lanes on two miles of streets: Canal, Washington, Madison and Clinton. This downtown BRT service is slated to launch next year.
February 20, 2013
CDOT Targets 50 Sites Near Parks and Schools for Ped Safety Fixes in 2013
The Chicago Department of Transportation plans to implement pedestrian safety measures at 50 high-priority sites near schools and parks this year, the agency revealed at last week's meeting of the Mayor's Pedestrian Advisory Council. The changes will include the addition of speeding enforcement cameras, high-visibility crosswalks, and signs to show drivers how fast they're traveling.
February 12, 2013
Eyes on the Street: Crew Out in the Cold Fixing Bike Lane Cave-In
Nine days ago Streetsblog forwarded South Shore resident Deborah Harrington's photo of a pavement cave-in in the bike lane at 7300 S South Shore Drive to the Department of Transportation. Today Deborah excitedly emailed me some photos she took of the site, where Department of Water Management crews are now diligently working in 10°F weather to repair it properly. She writes:
February 1, 2013
Making the Whole Route to School Safer for Walking and Biking
Earlier this week, the Chicago Tribune published an analysis of Chicago traffic crash data, finding that "from 2007 through 2011, nearly 1,700 youths, ages 5 to 18, were struck by vehicles in Chicago within about a block of a school." Half of all pedestrian injuries to children occur near schools, and it's great to have the local press draw attention to the problem. The next step is to start thinking about how to make entire routes to school safer for walking and biking.
February 1, 2013
The Problem With Wolf Point and Its 1,285 Parking Spaces
The Wolf Point site, just south of the Apparel Mart and Chicago Sun-Times building at the confluence of the Chicago River's three branches, has been begging for more productive uses for decades. Momentum has been building since developers associated with the Kennedy family proposed a plan for three towers at Wolf Point in 2007, and the proposal picked up speed in 2012 as it began accumulating the various permissions needed to move forward. Last Thursday, all 21 members of the Chicago Plan Commission signed off on the project, at a hearing that revealed one of the key flaws in the way Chicago manages growth and development.
January 30, 2013
Branching Out: The North Branch Trail to Extend Further South, East
Local cyclists have long dreamed of a complete network of bicycle paths along the various branches of the Chicago River. This fall we’ll be moving three miles closer to that goal when the Cook County Forest Preserve District begins construction on a southern extension of the North Branch Trail. Meanwhile, the trail is also being expanded about a mile east from its northern terminus to connect with the Green Bay and Robert McClory trails.
January 23, 2013