Tag: map

Gaps

April 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A map that focuses on striped bikeways in downtown Chicago.

When you look at your bikeways more abstractly, like in the graphic above, do you see deficiencies or gaps in the network? Anything glaring or odd?

It’s a simple exercise: Open up QGIS and load in the relevant geographic data for your city. For Chicago, I added the city boundary, hydrography and parks (for locational reference), and bike lanes and marked-shared lanes*. Symbolize the bikeways to stand out in a bright color. I had the Chicago Transit Authority stations overlaid, but I removed them because it minimized the “black hole of bikeways” I want to show.

What do you see?

Bigger impact map

This exercise can have more impact if it was visualized differently. You have to be familiar with downtown Chicago and the Loop to fully understand why it’s important to notice what’s missing. It’s an extremely office and job dense neighborhood. It also has one of the highest densities of students in the country; the number of people residing downtown continues to grow. If I had good data on how many workers and students there were per building, I could indicate that on the map to show just how many people are potentially affected by the lack of bicycle infrastructure that leads them to their jobs (or class) in the morning, and home in the evening. I don’t know how to account for all of the bicycling that goes through downtown just for events, like at Millennium and Grant Parks, the Cultural Center, and other theaters and venues.

*If you cannot find GIS data for your city, please let me know and I will try to help you find it. It should be available for your city as a matter of course.

You asked for it, you got it – Chicago bike count data

February 25, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Note: This post doesn’t have any analysis of the data or report, nor do I make any observations. I think it’s more significant to hear the ideas you have about what you see in the map or read in the data.

A lot of people wanted the Chicago bike crash and injury data overlaid with bike counts data.

In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school. This is dissimilar from Census data which asks respondents to indicate how they go to work.

Well, good news for you! CDOT today released the bike counts report from data collected in 2009 (just in time). There has been overwhelming response about the bike crash map I published – this shows how rabid the public is for information on their environments (just yesterday someone told me that they switched bike routes based on the crash frequency they noticed on their original route).

The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes.

Get the data

A photo of the EcoCounter counting machine in action on Milwaukee Avenue (this was taken during testing phase, where CDOT compared automatic and manual counts to determine the machine’s accuracy).

How to use this map:

  1. Find a blue dot (count location) in an area you’re interested in.
  2. Zoom into that blue dot.
  3. Click on the blue dot to get the number of bikes counted there.
  4. Then observe the number of purple dots (crashes) near that count location.

What do you see that’s interesting?

What else is coming?

Now let’s hope the Active Transportation Alliance and the Chicago Park District release their Lakefront Trail counts from summer 2010. CDOT may have conducted bicycle counts in 2010 as well – I hope we don’t have to wait as long for that data.

I hope to have a tutorial on how to use GeoCommons coming soon. You should bug me about it if I don’t post it within one week.

Photos of Chicago bike commuters by Joshua Koonce.

Bike crash map in the press

February 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Thank you to the Bay Citizen, Gapers Block, and the Chicago Bicycle Advocate (lawyer Brendan Kevenides). They’ve all written about the bike crash map I produced using Google Fusion Tables. And WGN 720 AM interviewed me and aired it in April 2011.

View the map now. The map needs to be updated with injury severity, a field I mistakenly removed before uploading the data.

The Bay Citizen started this by creating their own map of bike crashes for San Francisco, albeit with more information. I had helped some UIC students obtain the data from the Illinois Department of Transportation for their GIS project and have a copy of it myself. I quickly edited it using uDig and threw it up online in an instant map created by Fusion Tables.

A guy rides his bicycle on the “hipster highway” (aka Milwaukee Avenue), the street with the most crashes, but also has the most people biking (in mode share and pure quantity).

Why did I make the map?

I made this project for two reasons: One is to continue practicing my GIS skills and to learn new software and new web applications. The second reason was to put the data out there. There’s a growing trend for governments to open up their databases, and your readers have probably seen DataSF.org’s App Showcase. But in Chicago, we’re not seeing this trend. Instead of data, we get a list of FOIA requests, or instead of searchable City Council meeting minutes, we get PDFs that link to other PDFs that you must first select from drop down boxes. But both of these are improvements from before.

I would love to help anyone else passionate about bicycling in Chicago to find ways to use this data or project to address problems. I think bicycling in Chicago is good for many people, but we can make it better and for more people.

Read the full interview.

3D experimentation to improve pedestrian environment

October 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

3D experimentation to improve pedestrian environment from Steven Vance on Vimeo.

The movies aren’t the only place where you’ll see in 3D! Go check out Clark and Deming (about 2540 N Clark Street) in the Lincoln Park neighborhood to see a special pedestrian safety marking on the pavement. They were installed on October 18, 2010.

Designed to increase nighttime visibility

Who’s involved?

  • Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT)
  • National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA)
  • Western Michigan University (WMU)

All three entities are involved in the installation of these optical illusion zig-zag markings.

Between and including years 2005 and 2009, there were at least 2 reports of injuries to people walking and at least 9 reports of collisions involving people riding bikes*. With that data in mind, I’m not sure why this location was selected for a pavement marking whose aim is to improve pedestrian safety. The data do indicate that this intersection has a lot of bicycle-related collisions, much more than I’m seeing for other intersections.

Clark and Deming

Curiously, there are no automobile traffic counts for miles in either direction on Clark Street so one cannot compare the number of collisions at the Clark and Deming intersection with other intersections in town. Out of over 1,200 count locations, Clark Street in Lincoln Park was skipped.

Not really stopping for pedestrians

*Data from the Illinois Department of Transportation Safety Data Mart (which was taken down in 2015 or 2016)

Igniting the discussion on equity

February 20, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I want to have more conversations about transportation equity

My master’s project is all about it. You might have read me talking about it a little here two weeks ago. A then I shot off a post with some key quotes I’m using about the topic in my project.

The purpose of the map is to show the difference in distribution between 2008 and 2009.

This post, though, is all about the graphic above. A lengthy conversation has begun in the comments on the Flickr page. I want more people to get talking about why 2008 might look the way it does, and why 2009 looks the way it does. Perhaps you need a little background on 2009: I made sure to visit the most underserved Wards you see in 2008 and ensure they receive new bike racks in 2009.

A big question is why people in those areas aren’t asking for bike racks. Does no one there ride a bike to the store? Or maybe they do but don’t know how to request a bike rack or know the purpose of one? Maybe they got a bike stolen and need some tips on proper locking.

Those are all questions I want my project to answer – and I’m working hard 20 hours per week to answer them! But I want more questions. I want ideas that point me to look in new directions. If you don’t like my response, tell me.

Bike parking is almost always mentioned in nationwide bike plans as a necessary way to complete the urban bicycling network. Mia Birk, “famous” bicycle planner, and principal at Alta Planning and Design in Portland, Oregon, says that bike parking is part of “the tool kit for successful 
bicycle infrastructure in cities.” Another Portland entity is aware of equity: BikePortland.org.

What’s going on here? Photo by Eric Rogers.