Wicker Park

Over the past few years the city has built a handful of "neighborhood greenways," projects that involve small changes to side streets that can have a big impact in making them more bikeable, while connecting residential areas to the wider network of bike lanes. If the Chicago Department of Transportation picks up the pace on building these bikeways, it could actually create the kind of "8 to 80" bike network that the department says is its goal, and the Active Transportation Alliance and other advocates have been pushing for.

Here’s a chance to have your say on what Chicago’s newest piece of bike infrastructure will look like.

[The Chicago Reader recently launched a new weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership will allow Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We’ll be syndicating a portion of the column on the day it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]

Located just north of a Blue Line station, the North/Damen/Milwaukee junction is the epicenter of the Wicker Park and Bucktown shopping district and one of the busiest locations in town for foot and bicycle traffic. But it's also one of the city's most dysfunctional intersections in terms of traffic management.

We’ve done write-ups of many bikeways the city installed this year as part of their effort to reach 100 miles of buffered and protected lane, including facilities on South Sacramento, South State, Vincennes, Clybourn, Milwaukee, and Washington. However, there were a few more new lanes I’d been meaning to check out, and some others that weren’t on my radar because the Chicago Department of Transportation hadn’t announced them on the bike program’s Facebook page. Recently, however, CDOT provided this list of bikeways they built this year:

Instant gratification is great, when you can get it.

For two weeks now, 16 young adults have been walking back and forth on the Bloomingdale Trail, talking to trail users about the features of The 606 trail-and-park system, and providing etiquette tips. The new 606 Ambassadors come from neighborhoods near the trail, including West Humboldt Park and Austin.

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.

Way back in 2012, one developer proposed what was then a radical idea: tearing down what had been a cheesy restaurant and a moat of parking overlooking a faded corner, and replacing them with a gleaming tower housing 99 apartments, two shops, and just 16 car parking spaces. Ever since 1611 W. Division Street showed the way -- both from a legal and a market standpoint, developers have flocked to the adjacent blocks of Wicker Park to try and replicate its success.