Scott Kubly

Last Tuesday was Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein’s last day on the job. Three days later Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly, one of Klein’s key lieutenants, announced his resignation as well.

[A shorter version of this article ran in Checkerboard City, John’s column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

With two and a half years of service under his belt as the transportation commissioner -- not to mention 300 bike-share stations -- Gabe Klein announced that he will be resigning at the end of November.

On Friday the Chicago Department of Transportation announced that nine automated speed enforcement cameras near four neighborhood parks have issued warnings to more than 200,000 speeders in the first 40 days of operation. Of those violations, more than 200 involved drivers going over 60 mph, at least twice the 30 mph speed limit. Ten were traveling over 80 mph, and one motorist was driving a terrifying 90 mph on city streets.

It’s the end of an era. After serving as Chicago’s first and only bike program coordinator since 1996, Ben Gomberg says he has left the city’s transportation department for greener pastures. “After 17 years coordinating Chicago's bike program I felt it was time to move on,” he told me. “I'm proud of establishing the largest and best bike program in the U.S., and helping launch the Divvy bike sharing program. But it was time for new challenges, new things to do, and more time with my kids.”

Yesterday a number of heavy hitters in the local transportation scene showed up for a roundtable on sustainable transportation issues at the CTA headquarters hosted by U.S. Representative Mike Quigley (IL-05) and University of Illinois President Robert A. Easter. Quigley, whose district, formerly presided over by Rahm Emanuel, covers a large swath of Chicago’s North Side and a few inner-ring suburbs, sits on the House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee for Transportation.

To use Divvy you must have a debit or credit card. Currently, there's no way around that, so even though an annual Divvy pass is a bargain at $75, the system is unavailable for many Chicagoans. A significant share of city households -- 12.7 percent -- don't have bank accounts, according to graduate research by Michael Carney at the University of Illinois at Chicago's College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs. That translates to at least 135,000 people and perhaps more than twice that number, Carney's demographic research indicates.

Steven Vance is the self-described “data geek” at Streetsblog Chicago, but even a right-brained type like myself couldn’t help but be intrigued by some recently revealed stats and charts about Divvy bike-share use patterns. Chicago Department of Transportation Deputy Commissioner Scott Kubly shared them during a talk at last week’s Complete Streets Symposium, hosted by CDOT, the CTA and the professional group the Intelligent Transportation Society, which kind of sounds like an '80s synth-pop band.