CTA

[This article also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield's weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Wednesday evenings.]

On a recent trip on my "other bike," AKA the 'L,' I spotted two advertisements promoting Zipcar that could have easily been converted into advertisements for bike-share. Car-share and bike-share serve different purposes, but there's also some overlap -- car-share providers want to capture some trips that you could also make on a public bike. With Chicago's Divvy bike-share system set to launch soon, let's see whether we can adapt these Zipcar ads to the bike-share context.

After a year of study and outreach, today Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago Transit Authority, and the Chicago Department of Transportation announced plans for center-running Bus Rapid Transit on Ashland Avenue. Once implemented, the project could set a national precedent for high-quality BRT, improving transit speeds as much as 80 percent during rush hour, according to today's announcement.

Editor's note: Streetsblog accepts guest posts with viewpoints different than our own. Lynn Stevens is an urban planner, blogger at Peopling Places, and long-time neighborhood booster for Logan Square where she’s been an active participant in Bike/Walk Logan Square, the Milwaukee Avenue Arts Festival, the Logan Square Corridor Development Initiative, and the (now defunct) Zoning Advisory Committee.

Ventra, you may have heard, is the new fare payment system for Chicago Transit Authority and Pace. (Metra will not be joining the Ventra system, and is currently testing other fare payment methods.) CTA is switching to Ventra to save $5 million per year on maintaining outdated fare collection technology, according to spokesperson Lambrini Lukidis.

Last week, the Chicago Transit Authority finished construction of a partially-sheltered bike parking area on Lunt Avenue under the viaduct at the Morse Red Line station. The area is well-lit but surrounded by a tall fence with a single opening, on the alley. Instead of making the bike parking area more secure, this fence may actually decrease the perception of safety here.

“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.

The Wells Street bridge is under construction until early morning Monday, March 11, and Brown and Purple Line Express trains have modified service. The Chicago Department of Transportation is replacing part of the southern bridge leaf in a 9-day stretch; a part of the northern leaf will be replaced in April.

Let's step back from the discussion about how Chicago is implementing rapid bus routes and take a long view of how transit in Chicago might transform if these first BRT routes are successful.