Daniel Hertz

Bus riders who take buses on Ashland and Western Avenues are getting faster, more reliable service. The Chicago Transit Authority is bringing back the old express bus routes on these streets, and they're also adding transit signal prioritization and cutting little-used stops on the local bus runs. While these are welcome improvements, the city should move forward with its plan for full-fledged bus rapid transit service on Ashland, which would be much faster than the express buses.

There must be something in the water along Milwaukee Avenue, since lately Logan Square NIMBYs have been giving their Jefferson Park counterparts a run for their money. Exhibit A is an unintentionally hilarious flyer protesting plans for transit-oriented development in Logan, circulated by the local group Save Our Boulevards.

The city of Chicago has been pretty quiet on the subject of its Ashland bus rapid transit plan lately, but recently there have been encouraging signs that even some skeptics are warming to the concept.

On his blog City Pages, Daniel Hertz has an effective critique of yesterday’s Atlantic Cities piece on the Ashland bus rapid transit plan. The story by Matt Dellinger is a fairly standard “two sides to every story” report on the issue, giving roughly equal weight and credibility to the project’s advocates and opponents. And the piece does contain a few astute lines about Chicago’s schizophrenic nature as a city that is both transit-friendly and car-centric:

After old-school traffic engineer Tom Kaeser was featured in the Sun-Times for his ten-page letter to the CTA predicting the Ashland BRT plan could be “a dagger in the heart of Chicago,” we deconstructed his arguments, as did City Pages’ Daniel Hertz. Earlier this week, a quartet of heavy-hitters from the local transportation scene got in on the action.

A recent Sun-Times piece gave airtime to old-school Chicago Department of Transportation traffic engineer Tom Kaeser, gloomily predicting that the CTA’s Ashland bus rapid transit plan will cause carmageddon. Last week, in the wake of that article, University of Chicago public policy grad student Daniel Hertz cleverly debunked some of the arguments against creating fast, reliable Ashland bus service on his blog City Notes.