Little Village

The 4000 block of West 26th Street.

Chicago Department of Transportation crews are continuing their work this summer, building new bikeways and upgrading existing ones. Yesterday, I took a spin around the Loop and the South Side to check out the latest improvements on Randolph, Harrison, California, 33rd, and King.

[This piece also runs in Checkerboard City, John's column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

Earlier this week, I reported that the proposal for a north-south neighborhood greenway in Rogers Park was left off the 49th Ward participatory budgeting ballot, but that bike-priority route is still expected to become a reality. Similarly, 22nd Ward PB voters didn’t elect to fund a proposal for an east-west greenway in the Little Village neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean the idea is dead in the water.

The crash site, from the driver's perspective.

Last night about 30 people showed up to discuss car parking issues on Marshall Boulevard in Little Village, at a meeting hosted by 12th Ward Alderman George Cardenas at the Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy. The redesign of Marshall Boulevard last fall added a protected bike lane on one side of the street and a buffered lane on the other, significantly reducing the incidence of speeding. Confusion about the new parking rules post-implementation soured some residents on the project, however, and CDOT was in a defensive posture last night, promising to add 74 parking spaces to the area.

Tonight the future of the Marshall Boulevard bike lane could be at stake at a community meeting hosted by 12th Ward Alderman George Cardenas.

Imagine if almost everybody who rode the Chicago Transit Authority, a public transportation system subsidized with taxpayer money, was Caucasian. Denver found itself in an analogous situation last year, when a survey revealed that, in a city where almost half of residents are people of color, 89.9 percent the people using the publicly funded Denver B-cycle system were non-Hispanic whites.

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.