Promoted

By practically all accounts, New York City's congestion pricing initiative, which launched on January 5, is doing precisely what it's supposed to: easing traffic congestion. You can get up to speed on exactly how the program is designed, from this explainer by Streetblog NYC's Dave Colon.

The last time Chicago intercity bus service was making headlines was last fall, when the local Greyhound station, 630 W. Harrison St., was in danger of permanent closure. That would have made this the largest metropolis in the Northern Hemisphere without an intercity bus facility. That embarrassment was temporarily avoided when Greyhound owner FlixBus worked out a month-to-month lease deal with the station's landlord.

The Chicago Tribune editorial board members are probably not my biggest fans right now, since I recently pointed out questionable statements about bike lanes and Metra fares in their editorials.

State Sen. Ram Villavalam and a coalition of labor unions are backing the "United We Move" bill that would empower the RTA without merging the four transit agencies.

On Thursday the Chicago Tribune yet ran another editorial about construction on the Kennedy Expressway inconveniencing drivers that calls for some discussion. That reminded me that I'd been planning to update Streetsblog readers about a similar editorial last December that we'd asked the newspaper to correct. Let's talk about one, and then the other.

Update 2/12/25, 1:30 PM: The Chicago Department of Transportation will host another public meeting on this project Thursday, February 13, 6-7 p.m. on Zoom. Register at bit.ly/granville2025.

There was a changing of the guard today in Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. The bicycle store launched as Urban Bikes, then transformed into Uptown Bikes, rebooted once again as Broadway Bikes, with longtime wrenches Leah Plummer and Nina Hazelton now the owners.

Sometimes right now it feels like Chicagoland residents are on a runaway train (or a scene from the 1994 city bus thriller Speed?) hurtling towards our region's looming transit fiscal cliff. Federal COVID-era public transportation subsidies for the CTA, Metra, and Pace, overseen by the Regional Transit Authority, are projected to run out in 2026. That would leave the systems with a total budget gap that would be the better part of a billion dollars.

On January 13, the CTA announced that the agency's embattled President Dorval R. Carter was stepping down after more than a decade on the job. As Streetsblog discussed that day, elected officials and transit advocates had major problems with the way he ran the system, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. They cited major problems with reliability, crime, and cleanliness. As early as last April, everyone from the grassroots group Commuters Take Action to Governor JB Pritzker was calling for new leadership at the agency.