Tag: O’Hare

To slow down drivers, we must speak up to our own drivers

November 20, 2016 / / 0 Comments
Backseat view of drive to Oak Park

We have a lot of power from the backseat to influence our drivers to drive better. We only have to speak up.  Photo: John Bracken

I’ve had a lot of experience with a major “transportation network company” this weekend. TNCs are also known as e-hail car services, and, inaccurately, “ride share”, because a car arrives at your location after pressing a button on an app.

I rode in one four times from Friday to Sunday because my visiting friend had a broken bone and couldn’t ride a bike – that was our original plan. Instead we had a multi-modal weekend and relied on walking, public transportation, another friend’s personal vehicle, and the TNC to go out.

These experiences reminded me that advocates for safe streets and better active transportation service and infrastructure – including myself – must directly battle entrenched norms about the “plight of the driver”.

In our final ride, on our way to the airport to drop off my friend, the TNC driver asked about the timing of our trip, if we were in a rush so the driver could know if they needed to drive a certain way.

I said that we were not, that we had budgeted plenty of time, and that Google Maps showed green lines on the local streets and highway between where we had dinner in Ukrainian Village and O’Hare airport.

As he was driving the car northbound on Western Avenue toward the Fullerton Avenue on-ramp to the Kennedy, my friend asked him about the app he was using that was speaking the turn-by-turn directions, and how it knew what the road conditions were.

The app uses the Waze service, which collects data from transportation departments, other drivers, and databases of upcoming road closures. The driver said he liked that it warned him of the locations of red light and speed cameras, too.

“I’ve gotten four speed camera tickets in the last year”, he said, “and they were all $100 each.”

I have written about Chicago’s speed cameras several times in Streetsblog Chicago, and I thought the cost was different so I asked, “Isn’t it lower for the first time?” Nope, he said.

When I looked it up at home I remembered why I was mistaken: The fine is $100 if you are traveling 11 miles per hour or more over the speed limit. The fine is $35 for traveling six to 10 miles per hour or more over the speed limit, but the cameras aren’t enforcing this range currently.

That was the end of our conversation, but I should have kept on.

The conversation we should have had would have questioned his driving behavior. I should have asked, “Why are you driving so far so often?” and “Why aren’t you slowing down? Don’t you know that speeding is dangerous to you, your passengers, and other people outside the car?”

I was spineless and didn’t challenge how he was contributing to unsafe streets in the city. My silence was tacit agreement that four $100 speeding tickets – for driving 41+ in a 30, or 31+ in a 20 in a school zone if a child was present – was a personal burden and not a necessary enforcement tool to try and reduce the number of injuries and deaths in car crashes in Chicago.

Later, on the Kennedy Expressway, he was traveling a bit over 70 miles per hour, or more than 25 miles per hour greater than the speed limit. Again I said nothing.

Another of the TNC drivers this weekend was likely high on marijuana. I shouldn’t have accepted any of these situations.

Which places in Chicago get the most building permits?

December 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments
View from the CTA green roof

The Merchandise Mart in the Near North Side community area ranks second place in locations receiving the most building permits.

Ed. note: I changed the title of this blog post because one interpretation of the original, “Where are the most building permits issued in Chicago?”, has the answer “City Hall”, the location of the issuer. My bad. 

Without regard to type or construction cost, the most building permits in the City of Chicago are issued at 11601 W Touhy Ave.

Where is that? It depends on which geocoder you use.

Two buildings at 11601 W Touhy Ave from Google Street View. The City of Chicago has issued thousands of building permits to this address, but the work is actually distributed across the O'Hare airport grounds. Google Maps and the Cook County parcel map places these buildings in Des Plaines.

Two buildings at 11601 W Touhy Ave from Google Street View. The City of Chicago has issued thousands of building permits to this address, but the work is actually distributed across the O’Hare airport grounds. Google Maps and the Cook County parcel map places these buildings in Des Plaines.

Google Maps puts it on this building that’s on a street called “Upper Express Drive” and in the city of Des Plaines, Illinois. But the City of Chicago wouldn’t issue building permits in another city.

Our own geocoder converts the geographic coordinates given in the city’s building permits database for these permits to the address “399 E Touhy Ave, Des Plaines, IL”. The Cook County parcel for the same location has the address “385 E Touhy Ave, Des Plaines, IL”.

Now where is this building?

It’s at O’Hare airport, and it’s one of a handful of addresses* the city’s buildings departments uses to denote permits issued to work at O’Hare. Since 2006 to Saturday, December 12, 2015, there’ve been 2,403 building permits issued here. The permits’ work descriptions indicate that a lot of the work occurs elsewhere on the airport grounds.

13 buildings have had more than 400 permits issued since 2006 to yesterday.

address community area count
11601 W Touhy Ave O’Hare

2403
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz Near North Side

802
141 W Jackson Blvd Loop

538
233 S Wacker Dr Loop

518
2301 S Lake Shore Dr Near South Side

516
30 S Wacker Dr Loop

510
5700 S Cicero Ave Garfield Ridge

495
500 W Madison St Near West Side

482
227 W Monroe St Loop

422
55 E Monroe St Loop

421
875 N Michigan Ave Near North Side

408
151 E Wacker Dr Loop

407
350 N Orleans St Near North Side

401

A pattern emerges: 10 of these 13 buildings are in the Central Business District and the other three are O’Hare airport, McCormick Place (2301 S Lake Shore Drive), and Midway airport (5700 S Cicero Ave).

The first location that’s outside the Central Business District and not one of the city’s airport or its convention center is at 1060 W Addison St – better known as Wrigley Field – in the Lake View community area with 321 building permits issued. It ranks #30. If you keep running down the list, the next most frequently issued location is 7601 S Cicero Ave – that’s the Ford City Mall and I think the city’s only sprawl-style indoor mall. It ranks #39 because it pulls monthly electric maintenance permits.

The Merchandise Mart’s position at #2 is notable because the majority of its permits are for small amounts of work: there is a lot of electrical rewiring done because of the frequent shows and exhibitions in the interior design materials “mall”.

The Mart sees other activity, though, including multi-million renovations for technology companies like Motorola Mobility and Braintree. The Mart also received a permit this year for a new $3 million staircase construction, part of its building-wide renovation project.

Rendering of new main (south) lobby staircase at the Merchandise Mart

This rendering shows a new grand staircase that will be built in the Merchandise Mart’s south lobby jutting from the side of the lobby that’s between the doors on the Chicago River side, and the reception desk and central elevator bank. A building permit issued this fall puts the construction cost at $3 million.

If you want to know more about building trends in Chicago, send me a message through the Chicago Cityscape website and I can put together a custom report for you.

* Other addresses I’ve noticed are:

  • 10000 N Bessie Coleman Dr
  • 10000 W Ohare St
  • 11600 W Touhy Ave
  • 11555 W Touhy Ave

Of these only the two Touhy Ave addresses are logical: O’Hare Street isn’t a real road, and 10000 N Bessie Coleman Dr is much further north than the northernmost point in Chicago.

Flying

July 7, 2011 / / 0 Comments

If I had a car, or lived closer to O’Hare, I would spend more time taking photographs of airplanes. As it stands, it costs a lot of time and money, for transit, for me to get out to places that have good viewing of the planes. I find these places (“the suburbs”) uncomfortable to bike in.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Boeing 747-406M, registration PH-BFS. Find more photos of this specific aircraft on Airliners.net. It’s really cool that there’s a huge community of people who take photographs of airplanes around the world.

Draft letter to my Alderman about the TSA

November 18, 2010 / / 0 Comments

To my readers: I am concerned about transportation security in the United States. I am concerned that it grossly oversteps boundaries erected by my rights as a citizen. I am concerned about the effectiveness of security theater. I want to travel without my naked body being viewed, or my clothed body being touched, by strangers at the airport.* I want my elected politicians to do something. The first is to consider our options.

Below is a draft letter to my most local elected official, the 11th Ward Alderman of Chicago. I’ll send this to him to his office at 3659 S Halsted Street after Thanksgiving week.

Do you have ideas for making it better? My opinion is at the end.

Dear Alderman Balcer,

I understand that airports in the United States can elect to remove the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and provide their passenger screening services.

You have probably heard that is widespread confusion, anger, and disgust at how some people passing through America’s airports are being treated. Many object to having strangers view them naked, and others are reporting feeling groped by strangers – all in the name of preventing terrorism. The federal Government Accountability Office reported that it could not confirm if the current “Advanced Imaging Technology” (AIT) machines (either backscatter x-ray or millimeter wave) would have detected the explosive material someone attempted to use around Christmas 2009.

I haven’t yet decided if I will include this photo of a sleeping TSA officer at Chicago’s Midway (MDW) airport in 2007. Photo by Erin Nekervis.

As the City of Chicago owns O’Hare and Midway Airports, the City Council has power and authority over their operations.

I urge you and your colleagues to investigate the effectiveness of the TSA’s AIT machines, their protection or lack of protection of Chicagoans’ privacy, the level of training each TSA worker receives, and the possibility of using different passenger screening techniques in the Chicago Airport System, without the aid of the TSA.

I have enclosed an article by the Toronto Star from December 30, 2009, that briefly explains how security works at airports in Israel, a country under daily threats of bombing, and real bombing, without the use of expensive and unexplained machinery.

Steven Vance
11th Ward Resident

*I really want some high-speed rail.

Addendum, 11/19/10: After reading how an airline pilot refused to have his body groped or viewed naked, and describing his experience with the TSA on a message board, I wanted to post the pilot’s comments (via Gizmodo):

Roberts’s reply: “If your perspective prevails [that Roberts’s actions had no effect in changing TSA policy] – and I’m afraid it may – we may all live to find ourselves wishing we had fought in earlier days, when we still had a fighting chance.”

This reminds me of the “If you’ve got nothing to hide, then why are you against it?” position. At the rate the TSA is removing rights protecting Americans from unreasonable searches (Fourth Amendment), I eventually won’t have anything to hide because I won’t be allowed to have anything – no water bottles, no 7 inches long bike tools, no shaving cream. This government, and many other governments, conducts intensive surveillance and collects godawful amounts of data. The government is not always benign, will share the data, and does a poor job of securing the data. I am not doing anything illegal, but that does not mean I want to share all of my activities with the government or the police.

Read more TSA horror stories, in this roundup from the UK-based Daily Mail.