North Center

Traffic headaches by CloudKitchens' North Center locations show that our city would be better off if more food was delivered by bike.

The area needs a land use that supports local businesses and makes the area more pedestrian- and bike-friendly, rather than an "anti-transit-oriented development" that undermine those goals.

The city cleverly legalized westbound riding on this low-stress street with a block of contraflow bike lane. A couple more short stretches of contraflow further east could make Grace even more bikeable.

It's encouraging to see that more and more business owners have come to understand that accommodating people, rather than automobiles, is good for the bottom line.

A score of Streetsblog Chicago readers joined John Greenfield and me last Saturday to pedal to 12 sites where developers are taking advantage of proximity to train stations by building dense housing with fewer parking spaces than usual. The buildings, in different phases of approval and construction, are all near Chicago Transit Authority 'L' stops.

Developer David Brown wants to bring a neighborhood restaurant to a site right outside the the Chicago Transit Authority's Montrose Brown Line station, along with 24 apartments, a small office space, and 10 car parking spaces. The city's zoning ordinance would ordinarily require him to fill the entire ground floor of his proposed five-story Montrose Green building with 24 parking spaces. However, Brown has requested that 47th Ward Alderman Ameya Pawar change the site's zoning to permit more housing and less parking, under what the city terms transit-oriented development.

Berteau Avenue from Lincoln Avenue to Clark Street is en route to becoming Chicago's first neighborhood greenway. The project resembles a "bike boulevard," allowing two-way bike traffic where car traffic is one-way only and adding traffic calming elements like curb extensions at intersections. Construction started in late August, a couple of months later than projected.