Gabe Klein

It’s the end of an era. After serving as Chicago’s first and only bike program coordinator since 1996, Ben Gomberg says he has left the city’s transportation department for greener pastures. “After 17 years coordinating Chicago's bike program I felt it was time to move on,” he told me. “I'm proud of establishing the largest and best bike program in the U.S., and helping launch the Divvy bike sharing program. But it was time for new challenges, new things to do, and more time with my kids.”

The Chicago Department of Transportation has so many balls in the air nowadays when it comes to sustainable transportation and livable streets projects, it can be hard to wrap your head around all of them. The department’s recently launched Chicago Complete Streets web portal is good starting point for getting a handle on the many current initiatives and resources intended to promote safe, efficient and pleasant conditions for everyone on the street, not just drivers.

The Mayor’s Pedestrian Advisory Council met last Wednesday, the day after an SUV driver struck and killed an 83-year-old man in Rogers Park, then fled the scene. At the meeting, Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein, co-chair of MPAC, along with Peter Skosey, vice president of the Metropolitan Planning Council, described the crash as “gruesome.” However, citywide the situation may be improving: There have been 16 pedestrian fatalities in Chicago through July of this year, down from 20 during the same time last year, Klein said.

It’s a pleasure to see Divvy docking stations, People Spot seating areas, on-street bike corrals, and other productive uses of the public way popping up around Chicago. They serve as reminders that there are much more effective ways to move people around the city and attract customers to business districts than focusing on facilitating car driving and parking. Today the Chicago Department of Transportation celebrated two of the city’s newest public space amenities, a docking station in the shadow of Wrigley Field, and a People Spot featuring bizarrely shaped, yet-comfy, seating fixtures.

Rahm Emanuel celebrated the one-month anniversary of the Divvy bike-share system at a ribbon cutting this morning for a new docking station at Fosco Park Community Center, 1312 South Racine. The mayor announced that with 117 stations scheduled to be online by the end of the day, Divvy will become the fourth-largest public bike system in the country, after New York City’s Citi Bike, Washington D.C.’s Capital Bikeshare, and Minneapolis’ Nice Ride.

Although Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities to consider staging a ciclovía, a Latin-American-style event that creates temporary car-free street space in order to encourage healthy recreation, community interaction and commerce, we’re currently way behind peer cities. New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco are each hosting several ciclovía events this year on routes that are several miles long. Meanwhile Chicago will be hosting one event, called Open Streets, on Sunday, September 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., on a 2.6-mile stretch of Milwaukee Avenue between Division Street and Kedzie Boulevard in Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square.

It was a sign of the times when the Chicago Department of Transportation celebrated the city’s 13th on-street bike parking corral this morning at the Cheetah Gym, 5248 North Clark in Andersonville. Nine years ago, when I worked as CDOT’s bike parking manager, I put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into trying to get a corral installed at this very same location. The gym’s owner was ready to bankroll it, and we had the blessing of the local chamber of commerce and alderman, but the CDOT higher-ups deep-sixed the plan, questioning the safety of placing racks in the street, although corrals were already common on the West Coast by then.

The Gateway, Chicago's first "People Plaza" seating area, recently opened at what Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein described as an "under-acknowledged public space" in the median of State Street between Wacker Drive and Lake Street. The installation is funded by the Chicago Loop Alliance, one of the downtown chambers of commerce, via a Special Service Area, and it was implemented as part of the Chicago Department of Transportation's Make Way for People public space initiative. Red and blue metal tables and chairs, several of them shaded by umbrellas, as well as several new flower boxes, dot the former concrete no-man's land. A couple weeks ago, at around 2 p.m., a handful of people were enjoying the space, including a group of women engrossed in conversation despite the traffic on either side of them.

In November, Chicago Department of Transportation crews installed bike lanes on Marshall Boulevard from Sacramento Drive in Douglas Park to 24th Boulevard in Little Village, near Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. On most of this stretch the lanes are protected by parked cars on the west side of the street; to make room for the protected lanes, car parking was removed from the east side.