Category: Business

The Chicago Fire Department has one of the least useful Twitter feeds, but sometimes it’s hilarious

June 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

20 minutes ago, when the Twitter outage probably corrected itself, the Chicago Fire Department’s Office of News Affair tweeted three photos, without comment. I’ve posted them in reverse order.

Tweet 3

The third photo (above) shows a BMW X5 SUV on top of a Jaguar sedan and Mercedes E320 sedan in a multi-level parking garage. The parking garage appears to be a split-level, and it seems the BMW SUV was moved forward from an upper level to the tops of these cars, which you can see in the second photo (below).

Tweet 2

Tweet 1

The photos appear to have been taken with a cellphone, using the flash. The license plates are obscured by their reflection of the flash. The car broke through the cables leading me to ask two questions: What is the level of tension on the cables? How fast did the car travel?

The @CFDMedia account is often cryptic. The Chicago Sun-Times provided more information an hour later:

A 74-year-old man driving a 2012 BMW X5 crashed through cable barriers separating two levels of a Loop parking garage Thursday — and his SUV came to a stop atop a 2005 Jaguar and a 2003 Mercedes-Benz parked on the level beneath him, police said.

Police cited the 74-year-old with driving too fast for conditions.

Updated 16:18 to add a report from the Chicago Sun-Times.

GM hired a transit rider to promote their Volt, I think

May 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A screenshot of the GM Chevy Volt ad I saw on Hulu. 

If you’re like me and most Americans, you probably see an advertisement for a car at least once a day. In an ad I watched on Hulu tonight, it appears GM filmed someone who takes buses and trains (or rides her bike) to sell people on the Chevy Volt.

The woman (the ad’s overlay text makes it seem like she’s a real owner) says, “I don’t event know what it’s like to stop and get gas” and “I am probably going to the gas station about once a month, probably less”.

With a car that only gets 35 MPG city, 40 MPG highway,* and has a range of 379 miles, she must be taking the bus for all those other trips she has to make each month! Or she walks to work each day and bikes to the grocery store on weekends. Or she just rarely leaves the house. But I don’t think the ad implies any of these things: instead it’s telling viewers that this automobile has amazing gas mileage (the ad never mentions it has an electric motor component).

The “average American” makes 3.79 trips per day with an average trip length of 9.75 miles. If this Volt driver was that average person, she would be driving 1,108.58 miles every 30 days. And her car doesn’t have that much range. It has a third of that.

She might have bad memory, though, about visiting gas stations.

The Toyota Prius, for comparison, gets 51 MPG city, 48 MPG highway,* and starts at $7,000 less.

* These are only estimates. The Chevy Volt gets 94 MPGe when running on purely the electric motors.

N.B. The Chevy Volt website shows a photo of the car in the position where it will spend most of the time: parked. I appreciate that accuracy!

Dealing with the four-wheeled foe

February 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

My comment on the Streetfilms post. 

First, Streetfilms’s Clarence Eckerson posts a video showing Mazda’s support for the movie “Lorax”, which is based on the Dr. Seuss book about destroying the environment.

Then, I commented on Bikes Belong’s partnership with Volkswagen that was announced almost a month ago but I had just found the news yesterday.

It’s about as crappy as Bikes Belong partnering with Volkswagen.
In January 2012 they announced a “two-year partnership to help develop biking-friendly communities, foster healthy lifestyles and create a cleaner environment.”
I thought Volkswagen’s job was to market its cars, but it seems now it will market its goodwill which must have a calculable impact on increased car sales.

Bike Portland and road.cc both wrote about it. One commenter, Hart Noecker, wrote on Bike Portland:

Agreed. They recognize their oncoming irrelevance and are trying to re-image their brand while still promoting unsustainable automobiles that incentivize McStripmall sprawl.

And “9watts” replied:

As someone who has long felt that VW offered some of the most fuel efficient cars available, and was therefore to be lauded, patronized, etc. I’m inclined to agree with Hart. VW is really good at selling cars, and their commitment to fuel economy (which is a far cry from what we need now: a phaseout of car-dom, which isn’t going to come from the car industry anymore than a phaseout of coal consumption is going to come from the electric utilities) is only skin deep.

Crumbs for bikes, and a slick PR move that might even help them sell more cars. Never underestimate the middle class’s eagerness to swallow feel-good nostrums.

Today it seems the pact is getting attention again, brought to the forefront by the Mazda + Lorax (Universal films) deal – at least among a few people I follow on Twitter. Hopefully for its inanity. Car manufacturers, the bull in the china shop as Mikael of Copenhagenize talks about it, have been shutting down bicycles as a mode of transportation for decades. They’ve even thrown support behind making jaywalking criminal.

The Volkswagen deal with Bikes Belong is nothing more than buying goodwill. If there was a store for companies looking to improve their environmentally friendly image, partnerships with cycling advocacy organizations would be in aisle one.

As they are a company interested in making money by selling cars, I’d like someone to help me understand if there are any other reasons they should promote cycling (which they admit reduces congestion and lowers a traveler’s impact on the environment). Maybe they want to start selling bikes?

Car culture is carnage culture. The way out is a balanced transportation system that focuses the highest investments into sustainable and efficient modes, and one that educates system users on the costs and benefits of each mode, for every trip. Photo by ATOMIC Hot Links.

Looking at multi-unit residential bike parking

January 9, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Residential complexes with eight or more units are required to have bike parking because they’re required to have parking. The zoning code requires a ratio of 1 bike parking space to 2 car parking spaces (the quantity of car parking spaces it needs is a determination the Department of Housing and Economic Development makes).

A Grid Chicago reader recently sent me some photos of the bike parking inside the parking garage at the 900 S. Clark AMLI South Loop Apartments (see map). I was not surprised by what they showed based on what I’ve seen at other residential complexes in Chicago.

The photo above shows a double-decker bike rack with height alternating bike parking slots. This means that bikes can theoretically be spaced closer together because one bike’s handlebars won’t interfere with the bikes on either side of it. The bike rack has 10 slots. There are at least 16 bikes in the photo (it’s hard to count them from just the picture) and it seems only 5 are actually in slots.

The Chicago zoning code that applies to this situation is section 17-10-0207-C. As the complex is providing over 200 car parking spaces in this garage (I counted them in Google Earth), the AMLI South Loops Apartments must be providing 50 bike parking spaces (17-10-0301-B says max 50). Granted, the remaining 40 spaces could be inside the apartment tower, I highly doubt it. I don’t have enough information about this location to know if zoning code was not correctly or fairly applied.

Aside from obviously not having enough bike parking spaces, here’s what else isn’t cool about this bike parking installation:

  • The rack design offers no locking points. I believe this rack was intended to hold bikes at a retail store.
  • It’s outside, so bikes are getting wet
  • It’s over 200 feet away from any residential unit
  • It’s in a far corner of the parking garage (but not the furthest from the garage entrance)
  • An upper level rack design is not easy to use: one must first lift their bike to the second level, and then awkwardly reach around the frame and wheels to lock it.

I’ve created the Simple Bike Parking website as a resource and tool for anyone who wants to install bike parking. It discusses the three rules I’ve developed over the 4+ years I’ve consulted on bike parking in Chicago. It’s simple to have good, useful, and desirable bike parking if it’s:

  • Close to the entrance where people commonly enter and exit
  • Of the right design (nothing hard to use, please)
  • Placed at least 36 inches away from anything else, on all sides

There are a lot of abandoned bikes on the streets of Chicago, but I’m sure there are plenty more in residential buildings. I’m blaming difficult to reach and hard to secure bikes for this.

Updated 1145h to correct the maximum number of bike parking spaces a developer must provide, based on a different reading of the zoning code prompted by a reader. Thanks, Erik. 

The local bike shop: first line of education for smart city cycling

December 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I left this as a comment on Better Bike, a campaign for safe streets in Beverly Hills, California, on a post about cycling and mobility education, and driver’s ed.

I don’t think cycling classes in Chicago are well-publicized. If someone asked me about them, I would just say, “Go see the Active Transportation Alliance website”. But I don’t actually know if that information is on there.

Occasionally the REI in Chicago holds free informational classes, but can someone sign up for a smart city cycling class there? Or anywhere?

In addition to the all of the things that the smart city cycling class you describe in the post offers the students who sign up (a self-selection bias to mobility and cycling education), bike shops are a place where people can receive education on how to ride safely, assertively, and defensively on urban roads. The bike shop salesperson or mechanic is the last person one sees and listens to before they put their new wheels on the asphalt.

I’ll add that bike dealers can do a lot of other things that make cycling more convenient for people:

  • Register bikes, at the sale point, with the police so if a bike is found the owner’s contact information is in the database
  • Teach people the ABC Quick Check, or whatever’s in vogue.
  • Invite the purchaser to ask questions at the sale time, and ask them to come back any time to ask questions. Create a relationship with the purchaser and set a tone that there are no bad questions.

I believe there are bike shops that do these things (I haven’t purchased a bike myself in a while, nor do I feel I need this education), but I feel that not enough do. I think that if bike dealers were educating customers I would be witnessing fewer hairy maneuvers on the road, and bikes in better condition (like tires with air).

This is next to impossible when so many bikes are purchased from department stores.

Note: Bike dealers in Chicago are required by ordinance to submit sale information to the Commissioner of Police: “Every person engaged in the business of buying or selling new or second hand bicycles shall make a report to the commissioner of police of every bicycle purchased or sold by such dealer, giving the name and address of the person from whom purchased or to whom sold, a description of such bicycle by name or make, the frame number thereof, and the registration number, if any, found thereon.” 9-120-080.

It doesn’t say when or how often. And it says “frame number”, which I don’t understand as this doesn’t identify the bike uniquely. A different ordinance requires bicycle purchasers to register themselves the serial number.