Loop

Currently, the Green Line’s Morgan station, with its sleek green glass canopies, has my vote for the most attractive CTA stop. That’s about to change, as the Chicago Department of Transportation gets ready to build a new superstation at Washington and Wabash featuring dramatic undulating awnings, designed by Teng + Associates. The city says the faceted skeletal steel and glass structures refer to the curving forms of the lakefront and Grant Park, as well as the historic Jeweler’s Row district on Wabash; I think they resemble a ribcage. Either way, they’ll be a striking addition to the city.

Yesterday I looked at crosswalks that were installed in November at the Logan Square traffic circle and are already vanishing. This afternoon I dropped by the city's only pedestrian scramble intersection, downtown at State and Jackson, where X-shaped crosswalks were striped last May and are now almost completely gone.

A huge complaint during this #Chiberia season has been the lack of snow removal from sidewalks. The problem is nothing new, but complaints are rising along with the frequency of the snowfall -- it is the fifth snowiest winter, after all. The issue was discussed at February's Mayor's Pedestrian Advisory Council, and last week CDOT released stats on how many 311 reports residents have submitted requesting snow removal.

Biking downtown has improved substantially with the addition of protected bike lanes on Kinzie Street and Dearborn Street, but much work remains to be done to create a safe, cohesive bike network linking people to Chicago's biggest employment center.

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.

I visited several Divvy bike-share docking stations on my way downtown from the Northwest Side this safternoon, but didn't see much activity, save for Divvy staffers standing by to assist customers.

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.

Frequent Dearborn Street bike lane user Justin Haugens sends us these photos from his way to work in the South Loop. At the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting two weeks ago, a CDOT staffer said that Dearborn Street would be receiving a slew of upgrades to better identify areas of conflict between people driving and bicycling, and to reduce the incidence of people parking and blocking the bike lane.

Kevin Zolkiewicz sent us these photos on Saturday showing the new pedestrian crossing signals pointing diagonally across the intersection of State Street and Jackson Boulevard, right outside DePaul University's Loop campus. We're waiting for confirmation from CDOT, but it looks like these signals are designed to work as part of an exclusive pedestrian phase -- known as a pedestrian scramble or Barnes Dance -- in which people on foot can cross the intersection in any direction. This treatment is common in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tokyo.