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Bike friendly neighborhoods, in Chicago and beyond

November 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Local professional bike commuter and amateur racer Brian Morrissey has written a series of guides to Chicago neighborhoods with a particular bicycle friendliness.

Think of these great neighborhoods to visit on your bicycle (they have bike facilities, bike shops, and they’re especially easy to get to) and spend some time there eating good food. I consulted Brian on one of the neighborhoods, where I lived for two years. I’ve written about Pilsen on my blog several times (and here). Even without all the wonderful burritos and the friendliest bike shop, I’d still call it my favorite Chicago neighborhood.

Here’s the list of Brian’s guides to Chicago’s bike friendly neighborhoods:

What neighborhood should he write about next?

What makes a neighborhood bike friendly? Let’s find out!

First, we’ll ask the League of American Bicyclists. The LAB uses a rating system akin to LEED certification of green buildings. And cities want to achieve bike friendly status just as much as developers want to achieve “green” status. Bicycle friendly communities must be able to demonstrate achievement in the five “E” categories.

  • Engineering – Infrastructure, facilities, bikeways, bikeway network, and accommodation of cyclists on roads.
  • Education – Programs to teach bicyclists, motorists; availability of information and guides.
  • Encouragement – How the community promotes bicyclist; BMX track, velodrome, Bike to Work Week, wayfinding signs.
  • Enforcement – Connecting law enforcement, safety, and bicycling.
  • Evaluation & Planning – Data collection, program evaluation, bike plan, and how to improve.

Next we visit Bicycling magazine to learn how they consider the Best Cities for Cycling (full list). The editors’ criteria is not as transparent as LAB, but I’ll take a crack at decoding their articles.

  • Visibility – Bicycling wrote this about Portland, Oregon: Just hang out in a coffee shop and look out the window: Bikes and riders of all stripes are everywhere.
  • Facilities – Chicago made the list, “Still The Best:” Richard Daley…has ushered in a bicycle renaissance, with a growing network of bike lanes, a bike station with valet bike parking, showers and indoor bike racks.
  • Ambition – Bicycling commended Seattle for having the goal to “unseat Portland as the best U.S. city for cycling.” Their bike plan calls for expanding the bikeway network to 450 miles.
  • Culture – In San Francisco, a lawsuit brought bikeway construction to a halt, but Bicycling says “[t]he local bike culture has stood strong, and the number of cyclists increased by 15 percent last year alone.”
  • Education – Because of Boulder’s Safe Routes to School Program, at least “one school reports that 75 percent of its students now bike or walk to school.”

Finally, on our journey to find out what makes a community or neighborhood “bike friendly,” we come to me. I’ll tell you it’s a combination of the built environment (infrastructure) and its wider connections (bikeway network), as well as the residents who bike and don’t bike (like motorists).

  • Infrastructure – A city must build on-street and off-street bikeways that increase the perception of safety. (I was unable to find any conclusive studies that attribute the presence of bikeways to lower fatality and injury rates, but I didn’t find anything that reported the contrary is true, so that’s good.) Secondly, when you arrive to your destination, you should find secure bike parking.
  • Network – When you built on-street and off-street bikeways, you must ensure they connect to each other. It’s discouraging to come to the end of a bike lane when it doesn’t reach your destination or another segment of the bikeway network. A good network leads to important and popular destinations, like major work centers and schools. Bicycling is more prevalent in areas with colleges and universities, see Baltes report (PDF). Almost as important as creating a network is publishing information about your network – where does it go and what should I expect to see or find on my route? A paper bike map showing the locations of local bike shops, parks, and schools goes a long way to assuage nervous bicyclists.
  • People – Lick your finger and put it up to the air to test the attitudes of those around you and how they feel about bicyclists sharing the streets with pedestrians and motorists. Residents supporting or hampering positive change to make bicycling a common activity or transportation and improve the safety of bicyclists is the most important way to determine how “friendly” a community is to bicycles and their riders.

If you’re familiar with those neighborhoods in Brian’s guides, try to apply the criteria sets from League of American Bicyclists, Bicycling magazine, and myself and do your own analysis of the bike friendliness in those neighborhoods.

What do you think makes a community bicycle friendly?

Making cycling normal: Cycle chic movement

November 1, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Making Cycling Normal is a three-part series about how to increase the rates of people riding their bikes for everyday trips. Increasing this rate, also called the “modal split” or bicycle’s “mode share,” is a common goal amongst bike plans in major cities around the United States. No city in the United States has a bike mode share higher than 5% of all trips, or even all trips to work, where the rate reaches 40% in some European cities.

Cycle chic is an internet-based movement to promote “normal” cycling. At the root of normal cycling is riding your bike in your everyday work, school, or wherever clothes. No lycra, spandex, or bringing a change of clothes. Some may say it’s bicycling in fashionable or elegant clothes, but the dress up concept is open to individual interpretation.

Cycle chic began with photographer Mikael Colville-Andersen’s website called Copenhagen Cycle Chic, a blog where he posts photos of bicyclists in the capital city of Denmark. The photos tend to be of women dressed in trendy and fashionable clothing. The goals are promoting the city of Copenhagen, and riding one’s bicycle is a completely normal activity and mode of transportation for any trip no matter its purpose (and the Danes ride their bikes in all weather, with the cycling rate apparently only dropping 20% through winter – see Mikael’s photo below).

Mikael travels around the world promoting cycling culture as part of a company called Copenhagenize Consulting and also as Danish individual. He also writes a blog called Copenhagenize where he discusses the issues prevalent to bicycle and motorist cultures.

The cycle chic blog model has been imitated by bicycling bloggers around the world. Amsterdamize does the job for that Netherlands city. There’s also Los Angeles, Chicago, London, and Moscow. Visit Los Angeles to find a list of plenty more cities. If you find your city, get to know your local Cycle Chic Ambassador. Check out this blog’s author (me) test riding a Dutch bike from a local retailer in some fashionable clothing at a party. A former coworker, Christy, inspired me to start adopting cycle chic.

I don’t think there’s a cycle chic blogger for Milwaukee, Wisconsin, yet, but I think this guy could start it up (sorry for the blur):

How will these blogs increase cycling rates?

The blogs and their authors promote cycling as something you can do without gear, special clothes, or a significant lifestyle change. In their own ways, and targeted to readers in their own cities, they discuss how people can incorporate bicycling into their lives where normally a bus, train, or car would transport them. They show that bicycling can be fashionable, popular, and not something that “other” people do.

However, this stylish promotion of cycling will only go so far. Bicycle trip rates will also increase when cycling is safer (part two of the Making Cycling Normal series) or when we educate people about bicycling (part three).

UPDATE: Dottie from Let’s Go Ride a Bike (Chicago’s local cycle chic blogger) has picked up on a similar topic, how to promote cycling (and part two), and Cyclelicious has reblogged the topic and Dottie’s article.

Google Maps and Earth is the poor man’s GIS

October 28, 2009 / / 0 Comments

For over four years, Google’s geography products have become the most popular geographic information systems on the Earth (no, the earth). Google is now as much a platform of GIS for computers and users as ESRI, the number one GIS software maker.

To continue its corporate goal of organizing the world’s information, Google has made sure to also organize the world’s (and other realms) geographic information.

Google’s free tools and products manipulate, map, reproduce and analyze geographic information:

  • Maps – the simplest source of satellite imagery for the public, although Microsoft’s TerraServer was probably first
  • Street View
  • Transit – including travel directions for trips on Transit
  • Ocean
  • Earth desktop software – includes Moon, Mars, Sky
  • My Maps
  • Yellow pages-style business listings
  • Driving and Walking Directions – including automobile traffic overlay
  • Keyhole Markup Language (KML) – a file format based on XML that allows for the easy sharing and portability of data about locations. I wrote about it here.
  • Maps API – this allows developers to include maps in their own applications and websites as well as build features on top of maps

These applications now allow anyone in the world with an internet connection* and a computer to start thinking about the world and neighborhood in which they live in terms of space, distance, the environment, land use, and most important of all the relationships between real life places and these greater themes. But not only will these instruments influence the thinking of individuals and the groups to which they belong, but they will give people tools to create.

What have people created with Google’s GIS tools?

I created a map that shows the locations of open grated metal bridges on bikeways (featured in the bike map) in Chicago. This is important to bicyclists because open grated metal bridges can be hazardous to them, especially those with high centers of gravity or narrow tires on their bikes. Bicyclists will most often encounter these bridges on trips into and out of the Central Business District. This map will help bicyclists find routes that avoid these bridges. Precipitation exacerbates the danger, especially if it’s actively raining, or snow isn’t melting.

UPDATE 12-03-10: I was looking for information on an upcoming Chicago Cyclocross meet and I found a great example of using the tools Google has created for everyone. See a screenshot of the map below:

I’m posting this image to show how easy it is to create a map that tells a story. The story here is a guide on how to be a participant or spectator at the meet. It points out places where people can park, cannot park, and where the restrooms are in relation to parking or the race course. See the full map.

What have you created? Leave a comment below.

Evolution of Google’s GIS toolbox

I believe that Google will continue to expand its array of GIS-related applications, and also expand their existing ones. I would like to see them create new connections between the applications they’ve already created. For example:

  • Google can mimic the attribute table essential in desktop GIS software (like ESRI’s ArcGIS, qGIS, or GRASS) by integrating their Docs web application with My Maps. I want to save my information in a Google Docs spreadsheet (either inputted directly online or uploaded from my computer), then create a custom map and assign a location to each of the records in my spreadsheet. Then, using tools shared between Docs and My Maps, I can automate the creation of colored points and lines for the records based on categories or numbers in my spreadsheet, much like the classification and symbology tools of desktop GIS software. For example, on my “open grated metal bridges” custom map discussed above, I want to create a spreadsheet with a column that has a yes or no value to the question, “Is the bridge treated?” All records with “yes” will have green dots, and all “no” values will have blue dots.
  • The reverse situation could also be made possible by an integration between My Maps and Google Docs. Let’s say I’m a clerk at my church and I need to group the congregants into geographically close clusters for purposes of assigning community service work. I’ve inputted all of their addresses into My Maps and added a point for every house. There’re only 40 houses on the map and I can see see about 5 clusters (to keep it simple I won’t introduce arithmetic means of finding clusters). I use a selection lasso in My Maps and select the points in my first cluster. Using a new Classify function I label these points part of Cluster 1 and color them purple – I also assign Cluster 1 to work at the nearest park. I continue for the remaining four clusters, assigning each cluster to help clean a different park. Once I’ve completed grouping the houses, I tell My Maps to generate for me a spreadsheet that lists the names and phone numbers and clean up time for all the congregants. Now I can quickly call everyone in Cluster 1 and give them their community service assignment which is convenient to where they live.
  • Google should open up its many data layers. Google has many data layers in its table of contents: They recently added real estate data, but they also have the locations of transit stations and bus stops (including timetables and route information), the addresses and phone numbers of businesses (like the Yellow Pages), as well as terrain in some cases and bike trails in others. If the data in these layers were open, map users could perform some basic analysis like counting the number of check cashing businesses within 1 mile for a study of banking behavior in low-income neighborhoods. Or a map users could find the gain in elevation on a bike trail over 4 miles to determine their ride’s difficulty. Another map user could use the transit information to calculate the level of bus service in a neighborhood by counting the number of stops available and the number of buses scheduled.

I’ll have to figure out a way Google can extract revenue from these features if I want to convince Google to produce them, but sometimes the company builds products and features before it figures out how to make money.

Pollution fighting bike lane, coming soon to Pilsen

October 27, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Rendering of the project by CDOT. See all photos about this project.

A planner from the Streetscape and Sustainable Design Program in the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) came to speak to my Sustainable Development Techniques class at UIC about adding “green” to urban design.

Among other topics, he talked about CDOT’s streetscape project for Cermak and Blue Island in Pilsen, a near southwest side neighborhood a couple miles outside of downtown Chicago. The project, like all streetscapes, is one of economic development. But this project is unique in that the goal was to look at every element and make each as green and sustainable as possible.

You can read about the project through the Program’s presentation here (Flash slideshow). Please note there are many versions of the same presentation on the web and each my be different depending on their intended audience.

I will be discussing a single showcase element from the project: A bike lane on Blue Island between Ashland and Western where currently one does not exist. The bike lane and the adjacent parking lane (on the bike lane’s right side, as normal in Chicago) will be constructed with permeable pavers mixed with smog eating concrete. Wait? Smog eating concrete? Keep reading!

The bike lane will begin at Ashland/Cermak/Blue Island, a well-traveled intersection for heavy trucks, three bus routes, and many passenger cars. The bike lane will connect Pilsen to Little Village and extend the existing bike lane on Blue Island in Pilsen’s central shopping area. This segment is also a designated truck route and to safely accommodate the parking lane, bike lane, and travel lane, the road will be widened by reducing the width of the sidewalks. The sidewalks here are 20 feet wide, double the standard width, and four times wider than sidewalks in many parts of Chicago. There’s very low pedestrian volume here and very little residential use so the plan is to have 8 foot wide sidewalks, and a 5.5 foot planter, breaking occasionally for bus stop shelters.

The bike lane will be 5 feet wide (including striping) and the parking lane will be 8 feet wide. The novel part of the two lanes is that they will be made with permeable pavers.

This will be the first paver bike lane in the City of Chicago. The blocks will be oriented so that bicyclists feel the least amount of bumps and won’t get their tire stuck in a groove that could harm.

The smog eating concrete’s trade name is TX Active, invented by Italcementi Group, a large, multinational corporation founded and based in Italy. Since the original installation of TX Active cement on the Dives in Misericordia Church in Rome (designed by Richard Meier), Italcementi has developed two lines of photocatalytic cement, only one of which reduces pollutants in the area (TX Arca). The other cement is for architectural uses helps keep the concrete surface clean from dirt and particulate matter.

CDOT will use the second line, TX Aria, in the top half inch of the pavers. The company has tested the product to demonstrate its effectiveness at reducing the presence of Nitrogen Oxides (commonly written as NOx, a family of toxic substances emitted by internal combustion engines) and published its laboratory results in an easy to follow report on its website (PDF). The technical report goes into more details and explains how the process works (through photocatalysis) and what substances their product can be designed to diminish. The technical report is unclear on whether or not all forms of the TX Active product abate all substances. It may be that the maker only tested its effects on Nitrogen Oxides levels.

I look forward to watching the construction progress and to breathing the cleaner air while bicycling to a new destination in Pilsen.

A LEED-related homework assignment and my response

October 7, 2009 / / 0 Comments

The assignment: Write a mock letter to the editor responding to this New York Times article: Some Buildings Not Living Up to Green Label (published August 31, 2009).

The class: Sustainable Development Techniques

How the class works: The professors invite working professionals to speak to the class each week. After the lecture from these guests, a short discussion ensues. The guests design the homework questions. The following week, the class discusses their responses with each other and the professors.

Dear Editor,

Buildings, as a category, consume more energy than any other category in the United States. The USGBC: U.S. Green Building Council (GBC) took the right steps by mandating an energy efficiency minimum to receive LEED certification. As it increases the standard building designers and owners need to reach to achieve the image of “green” or environmental responsibility, we should look for ways to make green building design cheaper and easier.

I have a few suggestions for how we can make that happen, but first I want to encourage your newspaper and its readers to send a message to their Congresspersons: They should pay attention to the fact that buildings consume the most energy of any category of energy use and include a section in climate change legislation that reduces buildings’ impact on the environment and their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change legislation will not be effective unless it mandates and encourages changes in buildings and how they use energy.

So how can we make LEED certification (or other similar certification programs) easier to achieve? First of all, do not reduce the ease of certification. This will have an ill effect on climate change and reverse the positive advances LEED and its certified buildings make.

  1. Certify buildings who meet the minimum energy efficiency requirements with a new label. Some building owners or developers may not care to receive full certification or medal, or create green roofs or offer alternative transportation to building workers, but would rather be recognized for making bona fide improvements to their energy systems and use. Hold the buildings to the same reporting standards as all other certification levels.
  2. Support and fund research that will be used to continually refine the certification process and identify the best and worst energy system changes and upgrades. The Center for Neighborhood Technology and the New Buildings Institute have researched LEED-certified buildings to gauge their energy use and determine how effective the buildings are in reducing energy use (not all buildings were able to reduce energy use).
  3. Offer short-term rewards when people make long-term changes that provide long-term benefits. Provide instant or near-instant tax rebates when residents who live in or own “energy poor” buildings and make upgrades that are proven to increase the building’s energy efficiency by a minimum amount. When people can see immediate benefits, they may be more likely to make the changes. Make the rebate requirements easy to understand – consult with retailers like CVS and Walgreens who provide some rebates immediately to their customers after a purchase is made. However, consult the best universities and researchers to ensure the program managing this system will not allow rebates for window installation when home insulation negates any positive effect the new windows would provide.
  4. Continue to provide support and funding for “green jobs” that will further these legislated programs. Jobs like researchers, product development, engineering; also, new jobs like “energy efficiency inspector” and consultant.
  5. Mandate programs that reduce the Top 10 energy wasters in offices so that individual workers must play a part in their building’s energy reduction. This might mean automatic computer suspension overnight and on the weekends, or eliminating paper intensive processes, or installing automatic hand dryers and lights. These programs should apply to every building with at least 10 workers. Be imaginative, though, to work around corporate resistance; perhaps a cap & trade element would satisfy some building lessees.

Please continue writing about this issue. I want all workers to be aware of how they use energy and contribute to their building’s energy use and how it relates to carbon emissions.

-Steven Vance

I believe that most letters to the editor are written in mind for the newspaper’s other readers. Many letters to the editor are indeed directed at the editor, the article author, or the newspaper as a company. I chose to write my letter in the former style because if I was going to be published where 800,000 people might read what I wrote, I want it to be something they will find interesting and can have a personal response.

Why did I write what I did? Two LEED experts at Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago, Illinois, came to speak to my class about their research project that analyzes energy and water usage for 27 LEED-certified buildings in Illinois (find buildings on the USGBC’s website). The twofold purpose is to provide a report back to the study participants about their consumption, but also point out exactly what the NYT article mentioned: there’s a disparity between LEED certification and energy efficiency. Should LEED standards be more stringent about energy reduction (for existing buildings) or efficiency (for new buildings compared to other buildings in its class)?

It turns out that U.S. Green Buildings Council will soon require that new buildings must meet a certain minimum number of points in the Energy Efficiency category. I agree with this change, and my suggestions in my letter to the editor complement that change and encourage making energy efficiency easier and something that individual homeowners and workers will take part in.