Tag: Bicycling

Illinois licenses the dumbest drivers

June 11, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I took this photo to capture the sign, which I think has design problems. I didn’t know when taking it that it’d help me illustrate this story. The issue is this: From the left lane, one can make a left turn at an obtuse angle or an acute angle, but not two obtuse left turns. The same is true for the right lane: you can make an acute or obtuse right turn, but not two obtuse right turns.

On my ride home from Pequod’s Pizza tonight, I stopped at a red light in the left-most lane (there are two lanes, see photo) at Clybourn Avenue and Belmont Avenue, getting ready to turn left from northwest-bound Clybourn onto westbound Belmont.

A guy in a car behind me peaks his head out the window and asks, “Buddy could you move right a little bit?”

“I’m turning onto Belmont”, I explain, while pointing in the direction of Belmont Avenue and my specific left turn.

“So am I”, he says.

“Then according to that sign [to which I pointed], we’re both in the correct lane!”, I reply. (See photo of the sign.) I don’t remember if he said anything beyond that. I made the left turn, with he behind me, and when he passed me in the left lane (while I was cycling in the right lane) he honked.

Illinois licenses the dumbest drivers.

What is Conversation Cycling?

January 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Mikael Colville-Anderson posted a link to this photo set called Conversation Cycling (his photo above). The concept of Conversation Cycling is simple:

Build a bikeway so two people can cycle side-by-side to have a pleasant chat. 

I want this for Chicago. When you ride with friends, how would you prefer to ride: yelling ahead in our narrow bike lanes or conversing to the side? This is sometimes possible on the Lakefront Trail, but not always: the Lakefront Trail’s maximum width is the same as the standard with for cycle tracks in Europe!

Bike lanes in the United States, when they’re available and not being parked in, are not even wide enough for one person to ride without danger of being doored. It’s not surprising this is the case. In addition to how we prioritize the movement of automobiles and the placement of parking before pedaling, the national minimum width for a bike lane is 4 feet (without gutter), or 5 feet when next to parked cars or with a gutter.

I gathered some hard evidence: My handlebars are 28 inches wide. The door of my roommate’s car is 32 inches wide. 28+32 = 60 inches, or 5 feet. And that’s without a buffer. Essentially, bike lanes as we’ve built them are not compatible with the rest of the street.

Two Department of Revenue workers cycle side by side, meeting the edges of the bike lane, on Armitage Avenue in Lincoln Park. Photo by Mike Travis. 

Door zone bike lanes are not unique to any American city. Illustration by Gary Kavanagh. 

A group cycles on Damen Avenue in and out of the bike lane. Photo by Eric Rogers. 

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.

Rambling about automobile crash data and cellphone distraction

October 4, 2011 / / 0 Comments

How often do bicyclists get involved with crashes because of cellphone distraction? See the table below. And how many crashes are caused by the bicyclist being distracted by a cellphone? We won’t and don’t know. 

The Chicago City Council will vote tomorrow on ordinance 02011-7146 to add a new section in Chapter 9 of the Municipal Code of Chicago: “9-52-110 Use of communication devices while operating a bicycle.”

In a Chicago Sun-Times article today, Matthew Tobias, the Chicago Police Department’s deputy chief of Area 3 patrol, reported on the number of citations that the department has issued to drivers in violation of the cellphone ban: “from 2,577 administrative violations in 2008 to 10,920 in 2009 and 19,701 last year” (known as “citations issued” in the table below).

I looked at the crash data to see how many crashes were coded as having been caused by “Distraction – operating an electronic communication device (cell phone, texting, etc)”.

Out of 274,488 recorded crashes in 2008, 2009, and 2010, there were 331 crashes which had a Cause 1 or Cause 2 of “Distraction – operating an electronic communication device (cell phone, texting, etc)”. The table below compares the rates of crashes to the rates of citations issued and the number of crashes that the police noted were caused by cellphone distraction. It also shows the number of these “cellphone distraction” crashes that involved bicyclists and pedestrians.

Year Citations issued Automobile crashes Cellphone distraction crashes % of cellphone distraction crashes Involved with bicyclists? Involved with pedestrians? National VMT (billions)*
2008 2577 111,701 91 0.081 3 10 2973.47
2009 10920 81,982 130 0.159 1 7 2979.39
2010 19701 80,805 110 0.136 6 8 2999.97

Maybe this data shows that the increased enforcement is causing fewer crashes?
However data for cyclists’ involvement in crashes and their cellphone use WON’T BE recorded unless there’s a rule change as the cause is only recorded for the vehicle involved in the crash, and bicycles are devices, not vehicles.

None involved fatalities.

*Yep, that’s 2 thousand billion. Read it like this, 2 trillion 973 billion and 470 million. VMT data from Bureau of Transportation Statistics.