Cook County

Cook County's new "Long Range Transportation Plan," released last week, is the first such document published since 1940 and is a policy platform that will guide decisions about transportation spending for the next 24 years. To the credit of county officials, the plan voices strong support for improving walking, biking, and transit, which represents a major change for a governmental body that has focused on facilitating driving for many decades. However, I'd argue that the document, called "Connecting Cook County," falls short of being a plan when it come to setting concrete goals for promoting sustainable transportation, and that's a missed opportunity.

Streetsblog Chicago is on vacation from July 13-17 and will resume publication of Today’s Headlines and daily articles on Monday, July 20. We'll keep in touch this week via social media and occasional posts. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from this week's Checkerboard City, John's transportation column, which appears in print in Newcity Magazine.  

The Forest Preserves of Cook County recently announced that they will be offering bike rental at six locations this summer. The forest preserve district’s board approved a contract with Bike and Roll, Chicago’s largest bike rental company, which will be setting up automated rental stations, plus a staffed facility at the Dan Ryan woods. "We're really excited to have another way to encourage people to visit the forest preserves and engage in physical activity when they get there," said district spokeswoman Lambrini Lukeidis.

Earlier this year, Cook County embarked on its first transportation plan since 1940, asking residents to weigh in on how and where to improve transportation across the second most populous county in America. That feedback has helped the transportation department to draft a new vision statement [PDF] – that world-class transportation will spur economic growth and enhance quality of life – plus four scenarios for the future [PDF], which the public can vote on in an online survey. 

The Transit Future campaign sure did arrive with a bang. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle both spoke at its April announcement, which was accompanied by a splashy map and website. It seemed like a huge expansion of the region's transit network was closer than ever, once Cook County and Chicago officials rallied around the idea (imported from Los Angeles) to use local taxes to leverage big dollars for projects. But ever since then, though, its backers -- the Center for Neighborhood Technology and Active Transportation Alliance -- have been fairly quiet.

Toronto's suburban commuter rail service, GO Transit, used to run its trains on a schedule that would seem familiar to Metra riders -- bringing commuters from the suburbs in by 9 a.m. and shuttling them from the city after 5 p.m. Last year, though, it launched a new schedule that doubled mid-day frequencies on its two Lakeshore rail lines, from once per hour to every 30 minutes, "turning GO from a bedroom commuter service into full, regular transit," said Ontario transportation minister Glen Murray. Their reward: a 30 percent increase in ridership on those lines in a year's time.

Cook County has begun the process of creating its first transportation plan since its 1940 highway plan. The Cook County Department of Transportation and Highways is collecting feedback from residents on present and future transportation needs.

Transit-oriented development in the Chicago region is falling behind cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco, according to a report released in May by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a local "think and do tank." In "Transit-Oriented Development in the Chicago Region" [PDF], CNT warns that Chicago's failure to focus housing and jobs near transit is creating additional financial burdens for households who have no choice but to shoulder the costs of car ownership.