Category: Design

Last week’s South Side Streets for Cycling meeting

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Peter Taylor points out a route on the Southeast Side

Last Wednesday I put my bicycle on the Red Line, rode down to 95th Street and pedaled over to the Woodson Library, 9525 S. Halsted in Longwood Manor, for the second of three public meetings for the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020. Read Steven’s recap of the previous week’s session at the Garfield Park Conservatory here.

The last meeting of the series takes place this evening from 6-8 pm at the Sulzer Library, 4455 N. Lincoln Lincoln Square. If you can’t make it, there are also webinars you can attend online on Friday and Monday from noon to 1 pm.

Continue reading Last week’s South Side Streets for Cycling meeting

Good news in the update about the Damen-Elston-Fullerton intersection design

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A close zoom on the newly created west intersections from the plan drawing. Renderings are courtesy of CDOT. 

Update April 10, 2013: Construction will begin in fall 2014 after the acquisition of several parcels, covered in an ordinance introduced to city council on April 10, 2013. 

Update January 25, 2012: Based on some comments, and on some emails from readers, neither the original and revised designs are very good. One reader said that the project designers are applying a set of standards to a problem instead of applying a solution. Part of the problem at this intersection is the traffic coming from a highway where the ramps are spaced too closely together, but is not within the project limits. I will be looking into these and other questions, like, How much will this project cost (including property acquisition)? and Who will pay for it?

The much despised Damen-Elston-Fullerton intersection is being redesigned by the Chicago Department of Transportation. They hosted an open house in April 2011 at the Bucktown Wicker Park library which I wrote about extensively on Steven Can Plan. I and others who attended were not satisfied with how the new design affected people who will bike through here. I published my comments in my article, left a brief comment with the stenographer at the open house, and emailed the project manager my extended comments. I asked Steven Can Plan readers to do the same. A few of them did!

CDOT received 41 comments, and is responding to all of them; 20 included comments about bike lanes and 3 people requested protected bike lanes.

What’s changing? Continue reading Good news in the update about the Damen-Elston-Fullerton intersection design

Are Chicago’s pedestrian safety campaign posters too depressing?

This could be your grandson

Editor’s note: Michelle Stenzel is a co-leader of the North Side planning district in the Streets for Cycling 2020 Plan and co-chair of Bike Walk Lincoln Park, a committee to make walking and cycling safe in that neighborhood. All photos feature ads in the campaign and were taken by Stenzel. -Steven

The posters began popping up in the Loop last year in October, around the same time the mannequins appeared on Wacker Drive. Most of them have pictures of pedestrians who were seriously injured or killed in a crash. Not real victims, of course, actors presumably, but the photographs are graphic. The people are lying unconscious in hospital beds, with neck braces, head bandages, facial lacerations, and IV tubes. One poster shows a crash occurring from a viewpoint within the car, with the driver’s head hitting the steering wheel and the victim’s body bouncing off the shattered windshield. Another shows a dead man, still sprawled on the street where he was killed. Continue reading Are Chicago’s pedestrian safety campaign posters too depressing?

Safer roadway designs: How Danes make right turns

I went to Copenhagen, Denmark, in January 2011, and I was there for about 48 hours. I met Mikael of Copenhagenize, who lent me his Velorbis bike. I biked as much as possible, at all hours of the day, and I encountered a lot of the cycling infrastructure that makes it easy to bike and encourages the hundreds of thousands of trips by bike a day – even in winter!

This photo essay shows one of the ways you can design an intersection to facilitate safe right turns and through-maneuevers, for both people driving and cycling, as seen in Copenhagen. I’m posting this to show an alternative to the centered bike lane design common in Chicago that leads to many unsafe merge maneuvers that I mentioned yesterday in A tale of five bridges (first photo).

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The driver of the white taxi on the left yielded to bicyclists going straight before making a right turn from the left lane to the right lane and enter the Kennedy Expressway ramp. Not everyone yields.  Continue reading Safer roadway designs: How Danes make right turns

Talking transportation with 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waguespack

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[This piece also runs on the Chicago web publication Gapers Block.]

As part of an ongoing project to interview all 50 of Chicago’s aldermen about sustainable transportation issues in their districts, I recently caught up with Scott Waguespack at the 32nd Ward service office, 2657 N. Clybourn. His ward includes parts of Ukrainian Village, Wicker Park, Bucktown, Goose Island, Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Roscoe Village.

In 2007 Waguespack defeated Richard M. Daley-backed incumbent Ted Matlak and soon gained a reputation as an independent voice in City Council. Most famously, he was the leading critic of Daley’s push to privatize the city’s parking meters, a move that the former mayor would eventually admit, “we totally screwed up.” Continue reading Talking transportation with 32nd Ward Alderman Scott Waguespack

How did progressive transportation czar Gabe Klein get that way?

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[This article also runs in Newcity magazine. All photos by Steven.]

“Gabe Klein has always viewed his work as a canvas to create a contribution, and is inspired by ventures that give something back to the community, versus strictly producing profit. This is why he only works on projects that invoke his passion.”
– From “Gabe Klein’s TreE-House,” gabeklein.com

“True love knows no bargains. It is one-way traffic; giving, giving, giving.”
– Swami Satchidananda, Klein’s childhood guru

When forward-thinking Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Commissioner Gabe Klein reported for work on May 16 as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new administration, it marked a sea change in the city’s priorities. After spending most of the 20th Century trying to make it easier to drive, City Hall was switching its focus to promoting healthier modes: walking, biking and transit.

Continue reading How did progressive transportation czar Gabe Klein get that way?