Promoted

Last Tuesday, Streetsblog Chicago published summaries of nine 2025 pedestrian and bike fatality cases on surface streets in the city of Chicago, which we hadn't previously covered in our Fatality Tracker posts.

Update 1/23/26, 11:30 AM: This morning I completed my annual Polar Vortex tradition of biking a couple miles from SBCHQ to Montrose Harbor to catch the sunrise. It was it was -5F and it’s gotten colder since then, but I was pretty comfy. (But, like last year, Polar Plunge folks [unsanctioned – the official one been cancelled this year due to the subzero weather] were more hardcore than me!)

The Active Transportation Alliance kindly asked Streetsblog Chicago to talk about what we saw last month during our Bike Lane Fest 2024 excursions.

Tragically, it appears that Chicago saw its first pedestrian fatality case of 2025, with the killing of Alex Rivera, 32, on Sunday, January 5, in the Chicago Lawn community area.

Two University of Illinois Chicago urban planning scholars have released a new report on public transportation access and commute disparities in Chicagoland. Associate Professor Dr. Kate Lowe and Assistant Professor David López-García from the Department of Urban Planning and Policy collaborated on the study. It's titled "Race, travel time, and earnings in Chicagoland: Comparing predicted job accessibility with the commuting burden of public transit."

In 2008, former transportation engineer Chuck Marohn founded the Strong Towns organization as an effort to make American cities more walk/bike/transit -friendly and fiscally sound. Nowadays, our city has a local branch of the movement, Strong Towns Chicago.

This week, the Chicago Transit Board appointed Dorval Carter’s Chief of Staff Nora Leerhsen to serve as the acting president for the agency, replacing the departing — and controversial — president until a permanent replacement is found. 

This week, the RTA announced intentions to seek more control over partner transit agencies as funding and service constraints continue to threaten regional public transit. And on Wednesday afternoon, RTA Chairman Kirk Dillard discussed the RTA’s “Transforming Transit” initiative — a $1.5 billion vision to create a fully funded, seamless, and accountable transit system that will be able to serve everyone in and around the Chicago area —during a luncheon at the City Club of Chicago. 

Today could have been the day when Chicago joined New York City, Boston, Seattle, Portland, and even neighboring suburb Evanston in voting in favor of reducing the speed limit in the city to 25 mph. However, questions and concerns among fellow City Council members were numerous enough for Ald. Daniel La Spata (1st) to take the expected vote off the agenda for today's City Council meeting.