The Freedom of Information Act is my favorite law because it gives the public – and me – great access to work, information, and data that the public – including me – causes to have created for the purpose of running governments.
FOIA requires public agencies to publish (really, email you) stuff that they make and don’t publish on their own (which is dumb), and reply to you within five days.
All you have to do is ask for it!
BUT: Who do you ask?
AND: What do you ask them for?
This is the hardest thing about submitting a FOIA request.
Lately, my friend and I – more my friend than me – have been trying to obtain data on the number of traffic citations issued to motorists for opening their door into traffic – a.k.a. “dooring”.
It is dangerous everywhere, and in Chicago this is illegal. In Chicago it carries a steep fine. $500 if you don’t hurt a bicyclist, and $1,000 if you do.
My friend FOIA’d the Chicago Police Department. You know, the agency that actually writes the citations. They don’t have bulk records to provide.
Then he FOIA’d the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Chicago Department of Administrative Hearings, and the Chicago Department of Finance.
Each of these five agencies tells you on their website how to submit a FOIA request. You can also use FOIA Machine to help you find a destination for your request.
None of them have the records either. The “FOIA officer” for the Administrative Hearings department suggested that he contact the Cook County Circuit Court. So that’s what we’re doing.
Oh, and since the Administrative Hearings department doesn’t have this information (even though they have the records of citations for a lot of other traffic violations), I figured I would ask for them for a list of citations that they do have records of.
And here’s the list, all 3,857 citation types. You’ll notice a lot of them don’t have a description, and some of very short and unclear descriptions. Hopefully you can help me fix that!
I can grant you editing access on the Google Doc and we can improve this list with some categorizations, like “building violations” and “vehicle code”.
Updated Oct. 10 with more examples of why this could be a problem. Updated Oct. 13 to include CMAP’s review of the amendment. I also posted an alternative version on my new Medium account.
Illinois voters are being asked in the current election – early voting has started – to support or opposed a constitutional amendment that would restrict spending of certain revenue sources.
The amendment to the Illinois constitution says that revenues derived from transportation sources – gas and related taxes, license and registration fees, sales taxes for transit, airport fees – can only be used to fund transportation initiatives. (see full text below).
The problem this amendment intends to solve is that sometimes Illinois legislators spend transportation funds on non-transportation projects, people, and services, depending on their priorities at the time – even when existing laws says they can’t.
Your ballot says: “The proposed amendment adds a new section to the Revenue Article of the Illinois Constitution. The proposed amendment provides that no moneys derived from taxes, fees, excises, or license taxes, relating to registration, titles, operation, or use of vehicles or public highways, roads, streets, bridges, mass transit, intercity passenger rail, ports, or airports, or motor fuels, including bond proceeds, shall be expended for other than costs of administering laws related to vehicles and transportation, costs for construction, reconstruction, maintenance, repair, and betterment of public highways, roads, streets, bridges, mass transit, intercity passenger rail, ports, airports, or other forms of transportation, and other statutory highway purposes, including the State or local share to match federal aid highway funds.”
A “yes” vote means you want the Illinois Constitution to have this amendment.
A ChiHackNight member asked the #transportation channel in our Slack about this amendment.
Just got my copy of Proposed Amendment to the Illinois Constitution and bicycle and pedestrian paths are perhaps intentionally not listed as possible places to spend transportation tax revenue. Thoughts?
Very little (oh, so little) money is spent on bike and pedestrian things. Despite what you’ve read, there’s no way to guarantee that the recovered money – the small portion that’s being diverted – would be used to enlarge the pot spent on bike, pedestrian, or transit projects.
Existing laws dictate how the money is supposed to be spent
Many of the money categories in the amendment are already protected by either state or federal law. For example, the Passenger Facility Charge that each airline traveler pays to each airport on their itinerary can only be used on certain capital improvement and maintenance projects at that airport. The PFC differs by airport.
And just so we’re clear, there is no such thing as a “road tax” or “driving tax” in any part of Illinois. There is no fee for anyone to use the roads. What gas taxes are supposed to be spent on, first, and then allowed to be spent on, second, are defined in 35 ILCS 505/8 (from Ch. 120, par. 424).
Bike lanes and sidewalks are rarely called out separately because they are part of streets and roads, which are funded, and I don’t think it’s significant that the constitutional amendment doesn’t list “bicycles” and “pedestrians”.
It’s up to IDOT and other agencies that have jurisdiction over a road to choose to include those things as part of larger road changes. This constitutional amendment won’t change any policies, which are already mildly supportive of bike and pedestrian infrastructure.
Priorities and policy makers are the problem
I oppose this on the grounds that it restricts setting state priorities while it doesn’t actually prioritize anything within transportation.
Sometimes there are things that are more important than what the state buys with transportation money.
I have a huge problem with those things it buys, though. The priorities that Illinois legislators have for spending transportation moneys isn’t going to improve.
The state built the MidAmerica-St. Louis airport in Mascoutah for $313 million to serve as a “secondary” airport to the St. Louis airport. It opened in 2000. There are only flights to tourist destinations in Florida; the St. Louis airport never had a capacity problem.
The Illinois Department of Transportation wants to extend the St. Louis light rail through rural areas for 5.3 miles, but is still obtaining funding. However, they are spending about $300,000 annually on something for this project.
A screenshot of the Illinois FY17 enacted appropriations showing spending $330,010 annually for a project to extend a light rail station to an underused airport that cost the public $313 million.
That is exactly the kind of thing that has to stop and this amendment doesn’t do it. That money can still be spent on bad projects. There’s no shortage of bad projects, but there’s also no shortage of good projects that don’t get funded. States are already spending most of their money on new roads instead of maintaining existing ones.
Since projects are often selected and prioritized to serve political needs, and politicians oversee specific geographies, good projects will still linger in some geographies while bad projects are implemented in others.
In other words, the $300,000 on spending for the light rail extension to the underused airport can’t go to build pedestrian overpasses along well-used multi-purpose trails in DuPage County. It’s going to stay in that downstate legislator’s district because “economic development”.
Staff at the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, Chicagoland’s designated regional planning organization, issued a memo to the board a few days before I wrote this describing that the amendment is “unclear” on so many topics. They cite their discussions with unnamed amendment proponents who explain how the lack of clarity won’t be a problem because the General Assembly can pass laws clarifying that bike lanes won’t need a dedicated user fee if the amendment passes and that it doesn’t impinge on the rights of home rule cities to use gas taxes as they need to.
Spending is based on politics, not performance or need
With the amendment, the state will have to dream up some other transportation project in that district – I see a highway widening in their future. Without the amendment, the state could use that money for an important project in that area, but even that isn’t supposed to happen because the state already has laws dictating how project-specific bond funds can be spent.
This is also the problem with the Illiana Tollway that Governor Quinn so much wanted to build to gain favor with Southland legislators.
Whatever the case is, adhering more to performance (merit) measures on transportation spending – rather than political and district appeasement – is the most important change we can make.
It makes us inflexible
Finally, I question the amendment text. It’s hardly possible or easy for us non-legislators to know if the text covers everything that transportation funds are currently allowed to be spent on. What if there’s some project that turns out not to be an eligible recipient for these funds? Do we wait for the next election when we can get another constitutional amendment on the ballot, or hope that the Illinois Supreme Court will interpret the amendment to favor that project?
In fact, we already have a lot of laws that say how transportation-derived moneys are to be spent. The amendment, then, is a solution to the problem of trusting our state legislators.
The Civic Federation says that money is transferred from the various transportation funds to close budget gaps. “Limiting access to transportation-related revenues such as motor fuel taxes and motorist user fees could put additional strain on the State’s general operating resources” and “similarly affect local governments”. They also said that year-to-year figures of transfers and diversions have been calculated differently.
Additionally, DOT workers’ pensions may be paid for by transportation funds. Does this amendment cover that provision? If not, where else in the state’s budget would their pensions be funded?
Some of the work done by staff at other state departments is funded by some transportation user fees. Would the lockbox cut off their funding supply? A little of the work each department can be considered transportation related, but will the road lobby proponents of this amendment see it that way?
I dislike the inflexibility the amendment creates. Constitutions are meant to protect our rights. I don’t think that there’s a right that gas taxes must be used to pay for roads, while a sliver goes to build new CTA stations.
My writing partner at Streetsblog Chicago, John Greenfield, wrote an article that interviewed leaders at three transportation advocacy groups who were all in favor of the proposed amendment. The Tribune editorial he responded to is against it because it seems like a scam that the road lobby is promoting.
A “house” in Bridgeport at 3302 S Normal Avenue. The photographer, Eric Allix Rogers, noted in the caption that he saw on the Recorder of Deeds website that it was in foreclosure (in 2010).
When you vote in Cook County the general election this fall, which has already started here, you’ll find a question on the ballot asking you if the Recorder of Deeds office should be folded into the Clerk’s office.
It should.
The referendum is binding, and would take effect in 2020, the year of an election for a county recorder. There’s an election this year for county recorder and incumbent Karen Yarbrough is the only candidate.
The move will save taxpayer money, according to the Civic Federation, but which Yarbrough doubts. The consolidation is one step towards having a single office manage all of the county’s property records.
Currently four offices – all of which are elected – manage information about property: The recorder keeps track of property ownership and transaction; the assessor determines property value; the treasurer collects property taxes; and the clerk sets the tax rates.
Yarbrough deserves credit for the electronic record keeping innovation she brought to the office. A consolation is a further innovation. Yarbrough is correct that the recorder and clerk offices don’t have overlap, but there are efficiencies that can be devised and implemented as these two offices – along with the other two offices – exist for the same purpose: to collect property taxes.
Chicago Cityscape also advocates that the four property tax offices adopt open data policies that make property ownership, value, and tax rate info accessible.
Most of the urban block pattern in Barcelona is this grid of right angles (like Chicago) with roads between blocks that range from small to massive (like Chicago). Barcelona’s blocks, called “illes”, for islands*, are uniform in size, too. This part of Barcelona is called Eixample, designed by ldefons Cerdà in 1859.
The city is rolling out its urban mobility plan from 2013 to reduce noise and air pollution, and revitalized public spaces. Part of this plan is to reduce car traffic on certain streets in a “superblock” (the project is called “superilles” in Catalan) by severely reducing the speed limit to 10 km/h.
My favorite quote from the video is when someone they interviewed discussed what tends to happen when space for cars is converted to space for people:
“What you consistently see is when people change their streetscapes to prioritize human beings over cars is you don’t see any decline in economic activity, you see the opposite. You get more people walking and cycling around, more slowly, stopping more often, patronizing businesses more. That center of social activity will build on itself.”
A superblock is a group of 9 square blocks where the internal speed limit for driving is reduced to 10 km/h, which is slower than most people ride a bicycle. That’s the second phase, though. The first phase reduces it first to 20 km/h. During phase 2, on-street parking will disappear. In addition to the reduced speed, motorists will only be able to drive a one-way loop: into the superblock, turn left, turn left, and out of the superblock, so it can’t be used as a through street even at slow speeds, “allowing people to use the streets for games, sport, and cultural activities, such as outdoor cinema” (Cities of the Future).
A grid isn’t necessary to implement the “superblock”; it can work anywhere.
In Ravenswood Manor, the Chicago Department of Transportation is testing a car traffic diverter at a single intersection on Manor Avenue, where drivers have to turn off of Manor Avenue. This effectively creates a small superblock in a mostly residential neighborhood, but one that is highly walkable, because schools, parks, a train station, and some small businesses are all within about four blocks of most residents.
The trial is complementary to an upcoming “neighborhood greenway” project to use Manor Avenue as an on-street connection between two multi-use trails along the Chicago River.
The Vox video points out that “walkable districts are basically isolated luxury items in the United States”. I agree that this is often the case, although NYC, pointed out as a place where people spaces are being made out of former car-only spaces, is spreading its “pedestrian plaza” throughout all boroughs.
Ravenswood Manor is a wealthy area, but the reason this project is being tried there and not one of the dozens of other places where a lot of car traffic makes it uncomfortable or dangerous to walk and bike is because of the need to connect the trails.
These temporary car traffic diverters are set up at Manor Avenue and Wilson Avenue to force motorists to turn off of Manor Avenue while still allowing bicyclists and pedestrians to go straight. Photo: John Greenfield
The diverter should drastically reduce the amount of through traffic in the neighborhood. Its effect on motorists’ speeds will be better known when CDOT finishes the test in November.
A worker installs a barrier identifying the entrance to a “superilla” (singular superblock) last month. Calvin Brown told me, “I prefer the name ‘super islands’ because it is more poetic and captures the peaceful setting that they create.” Photo via La Torre de Barcelona.
I see a connection between the “superilles” plan in Barcelona, and what CDOT is piloting in the small neighborhood. The next step for CDOT is to try iterative designs in this and other neighborhoods and start converting asphalt into space for other uses, but we may have to rely on local groups to get that ball rolling.
I had the great fortune of visiting Barcelona a year ago, and I had no idea about the plan – but I was impressed by Cerdà’s design of Eixample. I will return, and next time I’ll spend a little time bicycling around.
Taking regional trains from a city of 12,000 to a city of 155,000 is a piece of cake
Trams and buses run frequently to and from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof (main station) in the German state Baden-Württemberg. In the story below, this is the origin of a trip by tram. And it’s one of the stations highlighted in an interactive map that you can learn how to make with Transitland’s API, the Tangram Play map style editor [which is no longer available], and a bit of QGIS too.
In June my sister and I traveled to Germany. I went to visit a friend I met in Chicago and it was my sister’s first trip in Europe. We stayed with my friend in Ladenburg, a village of about 12,000 people in the state Baden-Württemberg, and equidistant to Mannheim and Heidelberg.
Ladenburg has a train station with three tracks and two platforms. During our stay there the third track was under construction. We visited Heidelberg twice, taking trains from Ladenburg on both days.
We traveled at the same time each day – between 12:00 and 14:00 – so it caught my attention that the second journey into Heidelberg – a city with a large, well-known university – took a different route than the trip the day before.
On the second day the same trip – starting in Ladenburg and arriving in Heidelberg – had us taking a different route by requiring a transfer at the Mannheim-Seckenheim station.
For a city of 12,000, I was impressed that there was regional train service six times per hour between Ladenburg and Heidelberg. Back home, in Chicago, commuter trains come once an hour outside of rush hour periods.
Integrated transit service increases frequencies
The train service and connections were so incredibly well-timed and on-time that we waited less than eight minutes between trains. Overall the two-train journey took about 12 minutes longer than the single-train journey the day before, and, owing to good fare integration, cost the same. Two of the train services each hour are 15 minutes, non-stop. Our service, part of two other services each hour, was 27 minutes, including the eight minutes transfer, and the third service with twice-hourly trips takes 37 minutes because of a longer transfer in a different city.
To further illustrate the level of connectivity on this route, the first train was an inter-regional train of the RegioBahn (RB) class, and the second was an S-bahn class. Different companies operated each.
This kind of rigid, rider-friendly timing on a two-seat ride wasn’t devised by mistake. It’s often prohibitively expensive to run transit routes non-stop between every origin and destination. Airlines don’t do it exclusively, and though the Personal Rapid Transit system in Morgantown does that during off-peak hours, it has five stations and only the smaller, less-used PRT at Heathrow airport has been built since.
Running a transit system where vehicles, operated by one or more companies, as in Germany, “meet” each other is a hallmark of a well-integrated system.
How local & regional transit are organized
When we arrived in Heidelberg we took a tram from the Hauptbahnhof (main station) east to the edge of the historic city center and pedestrian shopping area at Bismarckplatz. Our regional train wasn’t necessarily timed with the tram because as a “rapid transit” service coming every few minutes, the need for a timely transfer isn’t as great.
The current organization of public transport in Germany lends itself to high-quality service characteristics like low headways (the time between vehicles at a particular stop) and high frequency, and short waits for a transfer vehicle. German local and regional transit operations are more complex because of the interconnected relationships among governments on all levels, public and private companies, and companies that are simply in charge of scheduling.
In the USA, there are typically two structures. The first, most commonly found in the largest cities, is that all transit service is provided by a governmental corporation created by authority of the state’s legislature. In Chicago, where I live, the Chicago Transit Authority, Pace, and Metra, are state-owned but independently operated corporations. They were created by the state legislature and can only be dissolved or merged by an action of the state legislature.
The second structure is for the transit agency to be a department of a city or county’s transportation or public works department.
In Germany however, there are multiple layers, and they start with regions, not states. Heidelberg, Ladenburg, and Mannheim, for example, are all in the Rhine-Neckar Metropolitan Region, named after the two rivers that converge in Mannheim.
Peeling back the layers of transit organizations in Mannheim & Heidelberg
The Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (Rhine-Neckar Transport Association, VRN) is a “network” that sets the fares and coordinates routes and timed transfers for transit in the region – including both public and private agencies that operate buses and trains in the area.
The VRN is singly owned by the Zweckverband Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (ZRN), a special purpose group specific to Germany that allows local government authorities to form an association. Other examples of zweckverbands in Germany include consortiums that run hospitals and ambulance services and monitor traffic. The three states, and 24 cities, city districts, and counties in the Rhein-Neckar region make up the ZRN.
The transit operator in this region is a separate company called Rhein-Neckar-Verkehr (RNV). RNV was created and is owned, jointly, by the five former transit operators in the region. On trams in Heidelberg you’ll see the RNV logo, but the logo for the old HSB, or Heidelberger Straßen- und Bergbahn, is also there!
RNV, the main transit operator, and the Unternehmensgesellschaft Verkehrsverbund Rhein-Neckar (URN), a union of over 50 transit operators, are members of the VRN network.
Trams and buses run frequently to and from the haltestelle (stop) at Bismarckplatz at the western end of the pedestrian shopping street. In the story, this is the destination of a trip by tram.
The RNV, like many other operators in Germany, has its own subsidiary company, operating buses in Viernheim, Hesse. John Pucher and Ralph Buehler wrote in their 2010 paper Making public transport financially sustainable that companies use new subsidiaries to control labor costs because employees of the new companies have new contracts, that may have different wages and work rules, but also to grow the company. “Transit agencies are planning to use these new subsidiaries to win bids in future calls for tender in other cities and regions—thus potentially increasing the company’s market share and geographic reach.”
Proof that we rode a tram in Heidelberg on the first day. We rode a bus on the next day because it departed first.
At the end of the day, this integrated web of companies, subsidiaries, operators, networks, and schedules doesn’t really matter to the rider: which company operates which route has no bearing on the rider. A single organization – VRN, the “network” company for Heidelberg – is in charge of the timetables, and in providing GTFS feeds for Transitland. VRN is in charge of standardizing fares across and between cities and operators, so costs are the same for similar distance trips, no matter which operator happened to be driving.
A pedestrian shopping street is common to (probably) all municipalities in Germany.
The three agencies in Chicago are moving slowly to have fare integration, but there are no visible efforts to coordinate transfers or consolidate fares. Last year it became possible to use a single online payment account to pay for rides on CTA, Pace, and Metra, although with two fare mediums. Riders use a chip card to ride CTA and Pace, but must have an app to buy Metra tickets using the same electronic fare money.
Using the Transitland API I can find which tram and bus routes would carry my sister and I from the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof to Bismarckplatz, the start of the pedestrian shopping area. First I need to find the onestopId for the two stops.
Klokan’s BoundingBox website gives me the coordinates for any rectangular area on the earth, that I can use to call the API to return the stops in that area.
# Standard call: https://transit.land/api/v1/stops?bbox=8.66272,49.396005,8.704262,49.419237 # Return as GeoJSON: https://transit.land/api/v1/stops.geojson?bbox=8.66272,49.396005,8.704262,49.419237
I used QGIS, a free and open source GIS application, to inspect a GeoJSON file of those stops in Heidelberg I fetched using the bounding box
Once I have the stops’ Onestop IDs I can plug that into the route_stop_patterns API endpoint, like this:
# Standard call https://transit.land/api/v1/route_stop_patterns?stops_visited=s-u0y1j3y5c4-hdhauptbahnhof,s-u0y1jff1q1-bismarckplatz # Return as GeoJSON https://transit.land/api/v1/route_stop_patterns.geojson?stops_visited=s-u0y1j3y5c4-hdhauptbahnhof,s-u0y1jff1q1-bismarckplatz
That call returns an array of 38 route stop patterns, which are a custom identifer that are uniquely defined by a route, a stop pattern, and a line geometry. In the 38 RSPs there are three tram routes. Tram route 23 has two RSPs that service the trip between the Heidelberg Hauptbahnhof and the Bismarckplatz stations; route 9 has four RSPs, and tram route 5 has 32 route stop patterns (its onestopId is r-u0y1-5).
Those GeoJSON calls become the source data in my Play “scene” that tells the embedded Tangram map what and how to display it. The green line is tram route 5, and the blue line are the other two tram routes. All three carry riders between “HD Hauptbahnhof” and “Bismarckplatz”, the only two stops labeled. The tram lines don’t follow the rides because RNV’s GTFS feed doesn’t provide the shapes.txt file so Transitland has derived the route shape by drawing straight lines between stops.
Bonus thought on transit integration
DB is a singular authority on transit timetables and routing for the entire country. They have every regional transit operators’ schedules available on Bahn.com for routing within and between cities, and even on intercity trains across Europe.
