Tag: photo essay

Urbanity fails again

Photo by my friend and UIC alum, Joshua Koonce.

I asked him about the photo’s title, “Urbanity fails again.” He replied:

I just thought it up on the fly, but you do see a lot of just these really little urban failures. Like, decayed bike lanes, weeds, potholes, gaps, sidewalk plates missing, leaky viaducts, “minor urban disasters” so to speak.

I feature Josh’s photos often on Steven Can Plan and now Grid. I also created a Flickr group for Grid where you can showcase your photos about sustainable transportation in Chicagoland.

Flying

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.

The bollards are in – ’nuff said

Update June 15, 2011: The Chicago Bicycle Program has uploaded 22 photos and videos today. Here’s a video of workers painting the bike box at southbound Milwaukee. Also, I’ve been wrong about a bike-friendly bridge treatment on Kinzie – I don’t have evidence to support this assertion. We’ll see what happens.

Protected bike lane? Yep.

It should be 100x more clear now that cars are not allowed here. But I’m sure we’ll still seem some goof in the bike lane at least once in the next few days.

Crews installed the base, getting ready to install the pole.

And the bridge has bollards as well! No more double-driving on the bridge. Now it’s time for the new bike lane bridge deck!

Brandon Souba took the photos. Thank you so much.

Bike to work week now, but what about next week?

Groupon mentioned on its blog that 126 employees rode to their Chicago office Monday.

Since the city has a goal of having 5% of trips under 5 miles by bicycle*, how do we ensure those same 126 employees ride their bike next week? Or tomorrow even!

With more of this:

A protected bike lane on Kinzie Street. These have been shown to reduce the number of crashes as well as slow down car traffic.

And some of this:

A family riding their bikes on Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, New York City. This bikeway is unique because it has both directions and is protected from traffic by parked cars. Photo by Elizabeth Press.

We’ll also need some left turn bays for bicyclists:

This will help cyclists make safer left turns across intersections. As seen in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Then we’ll see this:

Happy people riding together in our neighborhoods. With lights at night, for sure.

Oh, we’ll probably need additional bike parking, like this station at Amsterdam Zuid station (think Chicago’s Union Station or New York City’s Penn Station):

Free, underground, double-decker bike parking.

*We’re probably somewhere between 0.5% and 1.5% (of trips under 5 miles by bike). No data’s actually available on this; not for the baseline year of 2006 and most likely will not be available for the goal year, 2015.