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The Edgewater neighborhood along the north lakefront should be a pleasant place to walk. It's the second-densest community area in the city, with 56,521 residents in an area just 1.5 miles across, and boasts lively commercial areas like Andersonville. Yet local residents say that their neighborhood is effectively cleaved into two by a roiling river of car traffic. The north end of Lake Shore Drive pumps tens of thousands of cars through the neighborhood, first onto Hollywood and then to Broadway or Ridge and onto Clark and Peterson.

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development wants to dispel the notion that "transit-oriented development" only means high-rises. The agency will host two public meetings to gather ideas from residents who live near the city's 77 Metra stations on the kinds of development and station changes they'd like to see in their neighborhoods. The meetings are part of a "typology study" to classify Metra stations relative to their surrounding neighborhoods' shared characteristics and potential for development and public space improvements.

Washington, DC, has the same "vision zero" goal to eliminate traffic deaths as Chicago. In this new public service announcement, DC police chief Cathy Lanier says, "High speed collisions are much more deadly than other collisions." Exactly. When you compare the severity of injuries that pedestrians suffer in speeding-related crashes to non-speeding crashes, you see what Lanier is talking about.

Without a doubt, 2013 has been a banner year for bike-share in the United States. Major systems were implemented in New York City and Chicago, and many others debuted or expanded in other cities. In fact, Citi Bike users have biked over 10 million miles and the system is closing in on 100,000 annual members!

What would you do if you were driving northbound on Lake Shore Drive near Ohio Street and pulled up on a young woman riding a Divvy bike by the median of the high-speed highway, obviously lost and terrified? I’d like to think most of us would slow down, roll down the window, ask the woman if she’s OK, and offer directions on how to safely exit the drive at Chicago Avenue.