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photo of Hadiya Pendleton Park, seen from the 43rd Green Line station platform.

Traffic calming around Chicago schools and parks

July 26, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

Reducing the number and speed of automobiles near schools and parks is a proven way to reduce the number of traffic crashes involving children, part of a practice known as “traffic calming”. In Chicago a key way to do that has been to “cul-de-sac” (which I’m using as a verb) a street to prevent through traffic (reducing the number) and preventing speeding (reducing the speed).

in menlo park there's an elementary school where they just turned the crosswalk into a little plaza with u-turns for cars on either side. and like that's easier to do with a divided boulevard like that but tbh it works with any street pic.twitter.com/9mFHSbfJjr
— Coba Weel @weel@towns.gay (@weel) June 6, 2023

My study of this was inspired by the above tweet, where the person is accurate when they say, “it works with any street”. Indeed: Full access to the school or park and to every property on the block is maintained, but drivers are not able to go through while pedestrians and bicyclists can (another practice called “modal filtering“).

My favorite example in Chicago is Hadiya Pendleton Park, at 4345 S Calumet Ave. This project created two mid-block cul-de-sacs and a park in the middle of a block, using vacant city-owned land on both sides. Creating new open space is a common corresponding outcome of the cul-de-sac application, which is what occurred at Funston Elementary School (see the before and after aerial photos below).

two black and white aerial photos taken of Funston Elementary School, one in 1998 showing a 4-way intersection of McLean Ave and Central Park Ave and one in 2003 showing a cul-de-sac on McLean Ave west of the school and landscaped area between the cul-de-sac and the three-way intersection of McLean and Central Park.

Through Twitter I solicited additional examples of where the city has created traffic calming near schools and parks using cul-de-sacs. Examples were submitted by Roland, Emily (who mentioned Funston), Matt, Steven, and another tweeter.

Using OpenStreetMap, Overpass Query Language, and Overpass Turbo, we can find all of the schools and parks that are within a specified distance of a cul-de-sac. It turns out there are 153 schools and parks in Chicago that are within 150 feet of a cul-de-sac. (This considers only schools, parks, and cul-de-sacs, tagged as “turning circles”, currently mapped in OSM, and I have not verified each of the 153 instances.)

Map showing parks, schools, and adjacent cul-de-sacs, the results of the Overpass Turbo query. An inset map shows a zoomed in portion of the map to illustrate the different types of features captured in the Overpass Turbo query (specifically it shows Graham Elementary School and McInerney Park).

The query below will find all of the cul-de-sacs (mapped as “turning circles” in OSM parlance) that are in Chicago, all of the schools and parks in Chicago, and then all of the two categories of features that are within 45 meters of each other. (Run the query and show the map, which will always grab the latest data.)

/*
example from OSM wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_API_by_Example
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// fetch area “Chicago” to search in
{{geocodeArea:Chicago}}->.searchArea;

// get cul-de-sacs
(
  node["highway"="turning_circle"](area.searchArea);
)->.turning_circles;

// get parks and schools
(
  way["amenity"="school"](area.searchArea);
  way["leisure"="park"](area.searchArea);
)->.schoolsParks;

// find parks and schools near cul-de-sacs
(
  way.schoolsParks(around.turning_circles:45);
)->.matchingSchoolsParks;

// find cul-de-sacs near parks and schools
(
  node.turning_circles(around.schoolsParks:45);
)->.matchingTurningCircles;

// output results to the map
(.matchingSchoolsParks; .matchingTurningCircles;);
out geom;

Read the three other blog posts I’ve written about using Overpass Turbo to quickly sift through and extract desired mapping data from OpenStreetMap.

Netherlands, day 2 (day 11 of the trip)

July 16, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

My friend and I took an afternoon ride around Zoetermeer and Bleiswijk, two suburbs of The Hague with 125,000 and 10,000 people, respectively. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 11

Friday, May 12, 2023 – 195 photos taken – find more on Flickr

I don’t remember what I did in the morning – I probably worked.
My friend and I left his flat on our bikes at 15:00 and met my other friend to eat at Mecca, where Zu, a neighborhood cat, wandered in.
After this late lunch my friend and I started our bike ride along the Rotte River (how Rotterdam got its name) towards Bleiswijk.

The Netherlands has a signed water route network for people driving boats

We biked atop a lot of dikes, through several rural neighborhoods, and past the Willem-Alexander Baan (a rowing course in an artificial lake).
We also biked under a temporary bridge. As I’ve written before I believe the Dutch are very good at building infrastructure, and that extends to temporary infrastructure as well including modular and prefabricated pieces like a bridge!
At one point it was time for a McFlurry. We turned off of the intercity bike path, through a comfortably large bike tunnel under a motorway, and into the McDonald’s parking lot, where was plenty of bike parking and e-bike charging points (I suspect that many of the bikes parked here belonged to the employees).
The McDonald’s was in a commercial area full of fast food restaurants and logistics and distribution centers nestled in one corner of a motorway interchange but throughout all of this was well-designed, separated bike and pedestrian infrastructure.

Electric bike charging at a highway-side McDonald’s

After the ice cream break we headed over to an odd new transit interchange station called Lansingerland-Zoetermeer. Here people can change between a small park and ride, a kiss and ride, buses, sidewalks, and bike paths, to a ground-level intercity train station (to The Hague or Gouda) or to an elevated light rail station to The Hague. Service to Rotterdam is also possible via two bus routes to a nearby Rotterdam Metro station but I’m not sure why you would have gotten into a situation where you would need that connection.
(I’m calling it light rail for simplicity, but if you’re looking at how the street and sub-street rail transit networks overlap in Rotterdam-The Hague-Delft you could get easily confused. For example, there is a Rotterdam Metro [light rail] line to The Hague but which is also called RandstadRail, a RandstadRail line from The Hague to Zoetermeer, trams in The Hague, and different trams in Rotterdam, as well as a single tram line from The Hague to Delft but no Rotterdam Metro and no Rotterdam tram to Delft – there are Sprinter and Intercity services instead.)
I think something that is really neat about the station’s design: if you arrived there for the first time via the light rail then it would be very hard to tell that you would be standing on a bridge over an intercity track and a motorway after disembarking. The station looks very typical and uses vegetation and a wall to block the sound of high-speed vehicles below.

Southern entrance to the station (ground level)

Next we arrived into Zoetermeer, greeted by two cats. (There are a lot of cats roaming the traffic calmed neighborhood streets in the Netherlands.)
Zoetermeer is a “new town”, in that its prime development period was in the second half of the 20th century after many urban planning principles had changed, the automobile was a major factor in city design, and European countries were still rebuilding many cities after World War II – growth started in earnest in the 1960s when new housing was needed.
The population growth, in typical modern Dutch fashion, happened in a way that planned residential, commercial, and retail land uses, transportation, and green space, in concert with each other. These compact and mixed-use patterns – where most of what one needs is accommodated for or provided nearby – are repeated easy to discern even if you only visit a few towns, including Zoetermeer, Almere, Houten, Diemen, and the newer, outer parts of Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.

Cat walking in the middle of the street in Zoetermeer

At this time we had been cycling for less than three hours but it felt like longer because of the seemingly large gaps between stops (in fact, they’re not that large, it’s that they’re separated by wide expanses of open space or industrial areas rather than continuous low-density built up area like you would see in the United States).
We turned around to go home, via another way (see the Strava map below). The return route took us on a path that paralleled the bus-only road that carries two routes between the Lansingerland station and the nearest Rotterdam Metro station at Berkel en Rodenrijs, adjacent to where I was trainspotting yesterday (as well as some intermediate stops to reach the greenhouses).
The bus-only road has a self-enforcing design. There is a “bus sluis”, or “bus sluice”, or “bus gate” (see my photo), which is a dip in the road where car wheels go but a height increase in the road between the wheel area. This means that if you’re driving a vehicle that is not high off the ground like a bus or a farm equipment you will severely damage the underside of the vehicle.
Oh, yeah, this area is the greenhouse zone of the country where lettuce and tomatoes and other vegetables are grown for the country and for export, propelling the Netherlands to have one of the highest agricultural GDP in the world.

A new housing development at the edge of Zoetermeer

Amidst the greenhouses is the HSL (the high-speed line between Amsterdam Schiphol airport and Rotterdam Centraal). I stopped at least once to take some photos and videos of the Thalys, Intercity Direct, and Eurostar trains that ply this route.
Along the route I saw what looked like an amazing playground called Tuin van Floddertje. Floddertje is a children’s book character, a girl who gets into all kinds of dirty messes immediately after washing up.

Tuin van Floddertje (adventure playground) #1

We rolled back into the neighborhood where my friend lives and said hi to “Loofje”, the yellow tabby cat that I named “Little Loaf” using a fake Dutch word I invented that’s pronounced “loaf-juh”.
This is also when I saw the neighborhood square that helps make this a complete neighborhood, since it’s 20 minutes away from the city center.

Château-inspired high-rise residential building

Get yourself an air purifier

June 27, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

The air quality in the Midwest sucks a lot right now, due to smoke coming from forest fires in Canada. You need an air purifier to clean the air inside your home.

I’ll describe what I personally look for in an air purifier and guide you to a couple of models. I can only recommend the one I have, since it’s one of two that I’ve used, but I would rather have a different model.

I use a Coway Airmega 200S. I bought it for about $180. I bought this model because it can cover a large room (my entire studio is about 550 s.f.), has “auto” and “eco” modes, an air quality sensor, and three filters (a washable screen, a charcoal filter to remove odors, and a HEPA filter).

ComEd customers should look for Energy Star-rated air purifiers because there is a $50 rebate. Even if the manufacturer doesn’t specify or show the blue logo, it may still be rated, including the Coway Airmega 200S!

What I look for in an air purifier

Auto mode. I want the machine to have a sensor to turn itself on to clean the air when it detects the air is dirty, and to run at the fan speed commensurate with the dirtiness.
Eco or sleep mode. This runs the fan at an even slower speed and I use this when I’m not home.
Washable screen or pre-filter. This catches larger objects like dirt and hair and presumably prolongs the life of the other filters. It also satiates the desire to clean and know that things are clean after you’ve cleaned them.
HEPA filter. This should go without saying. If it doesn’t have this, it shouldn’t be labeled an air purifier.
Reasonable filter prices, and available. I am skeptical of the proliferation of identical looking air purifiers on Amazon and their ability to consistently stock replacement filters six months and 12 months from now. I don’t want to be in the position where I’m questioning if a given filter is the right one for my air purifier model.
Filtration rate, expressed as CADR (higher numbers are better). There are many ways that air purifier companies will describe this, the most common or first shown being the floor area of a room. The floor area, however, is not a filtration rate. My favorite way is when the manufacturer has a graphic showing how many air changes per hour the air purifier can manage.

In the graphic below, the air purifier was advertised as being able to cover a living area up to 1,837 s.f., which is the size of a four-bedroom apartment, but it could only change the air once per hour, which is too slow to respond to changes in air quality. On the other hand, in a 527 s.f. space, which is about the size of my studio apartment, the air purifier can manage five air changes per hour – I think that’s more than sufficient.

Which air purifier should you get

Note that many air purifiers have a “smart” option, which means they come with wifi and an app. Sometimes these apps connect to Google or Alexa voice assistants. Rarely will they connect with Siri, due to higher Apple licensing or certification costs. This is unnecessary but could be fun to use to track PM2.5 levels in your home if you don’t have a standalone air quality measuring device.

All models listed are Energy Star rated and are ones I would get my for studio apartment

Levoit Core 300, or the smart version – smart version on sale at Target for $120
Coway Airmega 200M – this model is the runner-up on Wirecutter’s review of air purifiers
Blueair Blue Pure 411i Auto Max and it’s not-smart sibling the 411a – I think these might have the best look of the group

IKEA also sells air purifiers but I haven’t determined if they are Energy Star rated.

ComEd customers can apply for their $50 rebate as soon as they purchase an Energy Star rated air purifier.

The sweet water sea

June 26, 2023 / Steven Vance / 0 Comments

I guess some people in the world call large freshwater lakes “sweet water seas”. that would include Lake Michigan, a great lake.

The mouth of Belmont Harbor is a great place to photograph large planes arriving from Europe and Anchorage, charter fishing boats leaving the harbor, and pre- and post-war apartment buildings that overlook Chicago’s precious source of drinking water and recreation.

Flight UA763 from Denver to O'Hare — *Flight UA763 from Denver to O’Hare. There was also Lufthansa B747 in retro livery, Austrian B777, and Korean Air Cargo B747.*

King Fisher charter fishing boat on Lake Michigan — *King Fisher charter fishing boat heading out onto Lake Michigan from Belmont Harbor.*

All photos taken on iPhone 14 Pro. The 3x zoom lens is handy, but still not as good as a handheld camera with interchangeable zoom lens. I’ll bring that next time I’m going to be around Belmont Harbor at the time the jumbo jets arrive.

Netherlands, day 1 (day 10 of the trip)

June 12, 2023 / Steven Vance / 1 Comment

I arrived to Rotterdam via ferry over the English Channel from Harwich, England, on Wednesday evening (day 9). This part of the travelogue is about day 10. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 10

Thursday, May 11, 2023 – 289 photos taken – find more on Flickr

I woke up to have breakfast with my friends, who I was staying with. They were going to their offices in Amsterdam, but rather than travel with them I decided to get ready a bit slower and meet them in the evening for dinner.
I left their house at around 10 AM and started cycling, on the OV-fiets shared bicycle, owned by NS, the Dutch national railway company, that I picked up the day before. My destination was Rotterdam Centraal station so I could return the bike and hop on an Intercity Direct high-speed train to Amsterdam (the train runs high-speed between Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Schiphol airport). But I was distracted by the planes landing at the Rotterdam-The Hague (RTM) airport, which is five minutes from my friends’ house.
At this point I realized I didn’t really need to be anywhere soon, so I kept cycling. My friend D. had already pointed out a place to spot trains on the “HSL” (high-speed line) so I headed there, which is about 10 minutes north of their house, in between Rotterdam and a suburb called Rodenrijs. Dutch land use is quite compact. The built-up area ends with a hard line and then there’s either agricultural land or nature preserves. The area between their neighborhood and this suburb had a bit of both. From this location I spotted Thalys, Eurostar, and NS’s Intercity Direct trains in both directions.
Having enough of this I cycled back to the house to recharge my phone (I had already used half of the battery recording so many photos and videos in two hours). Only then did I cycle 18 minutes to the station and board the next ICD train. ICDs depart every 15 minutes, so I didn’t bother to target a timed departure. I also like to get an “American cookie” at Kiosk, a $5 cold cuts sandwich, and drinkable yogurt.
On the train I spotted my trainspotting spot (view it on a map).

At Schiphol airport station I changed trains to a Sprinter to Amsterdam Zuid (south) station, where I changed to the Amsterdam Metro so I could disembark at Jan Van Galenstraat station. Why? That’s the nearest station to where the bike I own lives. (It lives at another friend’s flat, who lend it to their visiting friends occasionally.)
Schiphol airport is a notable station: it has six platforms and trains to everywhere in the country, plus Thalys trains to Brussels and Paris stop here. My friend will sometimes take the train from Rotterdam, disembark here, and bike the rest of the way to his Amsterdam office to ensure he gets enough cycling in that day.
I unlocked my bike (which my friend had set out for me the day before) and rode it northeast towards the city center. My destination was the Allard Pierson Museum because I wanted to see their “Maps Unfolded” exhibit. The exhibit displayed maps created by Dutch people and over the last 400 years, showing the Netherlands, places colonized by the Dutch, and maps of the world made by Dutchies.
As usual, I missed a turn or two but serendipitously encountered a recent major streetscape change (basically a project that converted asphalt and space for cars to space for people and more landscaping – read about the changes at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal on Bicycle Dutch).
The upper floors of the Allard Pierson Museum gave me great views of the Rokin canal, the shops that front it, the cyclists that ride it, the tourists and Amsterdammers that lunch on the water’s edge, and the tour boats that slowly motor along.

After the museum I checked out the new underwater bike parking garage. Read that again. The Dutch have built an underwater. bike. parking. garage. Watch this 1-minute time lapse video that shows how it was built. A canal area in front of Amsterdam Centraal station was dammed and emptied of water. The garage was built, with a watertight roof and vertical circulation and the water was replaced.
This bike parking garage has 7,000 spaces, on double decker racks that use pistons to assist bicyclists in lifting the upper racks up and down. Again, Mark W. has demonstrated this over and over again on his blog. Each of the numbered aisles indicates about how many spaces are free.
The garage replaces two other garages on the south side of the station, and is part of a long-term project to “clean up” the areas around the station. (The project includes enlarging waiting areas for the tram platforms, reducing lanes for cars, preventing vehicles that aren’t taxis and mobility transit from getting close to the station entrance, and decluttering bikes.)
Everyone who uses the garage must check in their bike using their OV-chipkaart (public transport smart card) or a contactless bank card or smartphone wallet. This way the garage automatically tracks that everyone who leaves with a bicycle was also tracked as entering with a bicycle (although the system doesn’t check that it’s the same bicycle).
The bike parking garage has a direct entrance to the Metro station and the train station (where one can board trains to anywhere in the country, as well as to Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and I think Czechia).

Entrance to the underwater bike parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal

The next new thing to see is the IJboulevard, an extension of land into the former bay called the IJ on the north of Amsterdam Centraal. (I really don’t know what to call it now, the Wikipedia article calls it a “body of water”.) The IJboulevard is a kind of linear plaza that’s as long as the train station shed, a new public space. It wasn’t hot when I was traveling, but I’ve recently seen complaints on Dutch Twitter that it’s oppressive without landscaping.
Also on the north side of the train station is the bus station, which is on level two (or level one if you’re European). It’s been there for many years, but it’s impressive due to its operations and the architecture.
The ferries are also on the north side of the train station. This station is truly a multimodal hub. It’s one of the most fascinating and bustling places to be in the city. There are two ferry routes here for pedestrians and bicyclists to the north side of the IJ, and another ferry route a quarter mile to the east. All the ferry routes are free and operate 24/7 because there are no bridges or tunnels for pedestrians or bicyclists (even if there were they would be sorely inconvenient because of their length and depth or height). Since 2018 there has been Metro service to the north side of the IJ; this allows bicycles but there’s a fare and doesn’t operate 24/7.
Ferries are designed to walk and roll on and go back and forth; they don’t need to turn around. They leave on a schedule – pay attention to the countdown screens at each dock – but must yield to boat traffic already in the IJ, which I got to watch.

It was time to move on, towards the restaurant where I would be meeting my Rotterdam friends. I biked to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s main park. Vondelpark is surrounded mostly by housing so it connects to side streets, but it’s crossed by a main street and buttressed at the south end by a main street separates it from Rijksmuseum and Museumplein.
Because of how it’s connected to so many side streets, and a couple main streets, Vondelpark makes a greater “intersection” for through-routes. But it’s also a wonderful place to cycle for people watching, recreation, or to cycle in circles, like I did. Using my new handlebar phone mount I recorded some video and captured this awesome scene of three bicyclists riding side by side by side all turning at the same time!

11-second video of what appears to be some very fluid and coordinated cycling in Vondelpark.

We ate dinner at a vegan burger restaurant called Vegan Junk Food Bar that dyed their buns hot pink as a fun gimmick (some of the food was good and some of it was mediocre) and afterward had beers at Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Brewery of the IJ).
From the brewery we walked about half an hour to Amsterdam Centraal station and boarded the next Intercity Direct train back to Rotterdam Centraal, and took the Rotterdam Metro back home – this time with my personal bicycle so I could have it for the next five days in Rotterdam, and a special ride around Texel island (in a future blog post).