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What SOAR said at the CTA budget hearing

November 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A view of the Dominick’s and AMC River East movie theater in Streeterville at Columbus Drive and Illinois Street, by Ian Freimuth.

Gail Spreen spoke at the November 7, 2011, Chicago Transit Authority budget hearing on behalf of SOAR (Streeterville Organization of Active Residents). Here’s a summary of her speech:

We don’t have a CTA station, so we rely on buses. We appreciate transit trackers that makes them more predictable to use. There’s significant growth potential in the neighborhood because we have much undeveloped land. We ask that our service be continued and hopefully expanded in the future. The medical institutions are growing and are active users of transit. The encouragement and possible requirement for using transit may come into play. We appreciate the good communication between CTA and SOAR. Our goal is to make Streeterville the greenest neighborhood in the city. You can read the full text on their site (but the PDF’s not accessible).

From Wikipedia: Streeterville is a neighborhood in the Near North Side community area bounded by the river on the south, the Magnificent Mile portion of Michigan Avenue on the west, and Lake Michigan on the north and east, according to most source. The majority of the land in this neighborhood is reclaimed sandbar.

Too much talking, not enough documenting

November 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I took this photo for several reasons: to show a sidewalk reconstruction project that forces people to walk in the street; to show that people bicycling will advance from where I took this photo to the location across Grand Avenue to get a “head start” on cycling across Halsted Street to Milwaukee Avenue. 

Or doing.

I talk to a lot of people about cycling in Chicago and they’ve good stories to share. Stories about positive experiences they’ve had, about negative experiences, or of problems they’ve seen others encounter. I always encourage people to do something about this experience. My advice almost always involves them documenting it in some way; things like reporting a bike crash to the police, even afterwards, or taking a photo of a major pothole. I might suggest they write down their thoughts to share privately with close friends. Or it might be as simple as calling 311 to report an abandoned bike.*

There are lots of things that we want to change. Keeping track of what they are can help focus energy on making that change happen. (That’s why I carry my camera with me at all times outside my home.) One way I’ve started to document and share is by writing about the good and “needs improvement” parts of Chicago transportation on my new blog, Grid Chicago.

If you cycle in Chicago, I implore you to attend the Streets for Cycling planning meetings – the first one is December 10th – so you can express your concerns and desires. There are one hundred other ways to be involved in supporting a change in Chicago, and I might be able to link you one you’re interested in.

Note: The CTA has started several online efforts to collect feedback from and communicate with customers, but they’ve always collected feedback through their email address, feedback@transitchicago.com, where they always respond. These new efforts are Facebook, Budget Ideas, and Twitter.

Let’s do this for bike crashes: I guess I’ll start a bike crash documentation project right now (January 5, 2012). Write up a report and share me a link, or leave a comment on one of these pages:

Another person bicycles across Grand Avenue to get that head start. 

*These are all things I do, but I encourage everyone to think creatively and do what interests them.

What downtown means

November 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Not the guy from the story. 

I was “downtown” photographing situations that make it hard to walk (hard to be a pedestrian) on Sunday, November 13, 2011. While waiting for the light at LaSalle and Adams, a man wearing a Bears jersey in the front passenger seat of a taxicab asked me if I had pizza in my Yuba Mundo’s Go-Getter bag.

“No”, I said, adding, “It has my backpack in there”.

“It’s a very large bag”, he replied.

Realizing that he was sober and that we could hold a conversation, I explained, “It holds a lot of groceries”.

“Oh, you live downtown”, he ascertained.

Not quite. “I live a few miles outside of downtown”.

The light turned green and the driver moved on, but the guy left me with, “Have a nice day”. I said, “You, too”.

After I got home and was looking through my photos and recounted this story, I  realized that to him, “downtown” meant the entire City of Chicago. To me, downtown meant the Loop community area and some surrounding blocks. I might define “downtown” as a place bounded by Kennedy, Division, Lake Michigan, and Roosevelt. But to this suburban football fan, downtown is that big place that one has to travel a ways to get to. I remembered that I had the same understanding of downtown when I lived in Batavia, Illinois, a suburb 40 miles west of Chicago. You can access it by driving on I-290 and I-88, or by taking the Metra UP-West line to Geneva.

There’s at least one other assumption I can make from this conversation: If I shop for and carry groceries on a bicycle, I must live in Chicago; people in the suburbs are never seen shopping for and carrying groceries on a bicycle.

Another photo from my photo mission on Sunday. It’s Roosevelt University’s vertical campus building on Wabash and Van Buren. 

Cycle mapping

November 10, 2011 / / 13 Comments

A screenshot of Critical Map: Milano. 

What are the sites that will let you either draw or upload a bike route to share with others?

And what are the sites or mobile apps that give you cycle routing?

A screenshot of Bike Share Map: London, UK.

And other bike-related maps?

I’m just simply researching and collecting links to cycling-related map mashups and apps.

Mobility education is one way the Netherlands is the safest country in which to travel and commute

November 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A woman pushes a child in a bakfiets trike (cargo bike), while another child cycles in front of them. 

What is mobility education?

It’s an expansion of driver’s education (driver’s ed) to include learning how to bicycle safely, how to walk safely, how to use transit, and how to drive a car around diverse transportation system users (those who aren’t in a car). In the Netherlands, this education starts at 10 and 11 years old. Watch the video below to see how elementary school kids use the “traffic garden” in Utrecht (I went there in January 2011) to learn how to be safe.

The Netherlands has the lowest crash rate in the world. And the lowest injury and fatality rate. Part of this is based on good design and engineering, but also education, enforcement, and different liability laws.