Year: 2012

First of three Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 meetings is Wednesday

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Streets should be made safe for everyone. 

Come to the first meeting for the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 at Garfield Park Conservatory, 300 N Central Park Avenue, on Wednesday, January 18, at 6 PM (see it on Google Calendar).

I asked the plan leaders Mark de la Vergne of Sam Schwartz Engineering and Mike Amsden of the Chicago Department of Transportation what people can expect here, and how it will be different from the December 1, 2011, open house. Amsden replied:

The three public meetings will provide interested citizens an opportunity to learn more about the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020. The meetings will begin with a half-hour presentation describing the project steps, timeline and outcomes, as well as educational information on the different types of bikeways being considered for the 2020 bicycle network. After the presentation, there will be a brief Q & A session followed by a mapping activity similar to what was done at the Open House. Those in attendance will be able to share with CDOT what they like about bicycling in their neighborhoods and most importantly – what they’d like to see improved.

Continue reading First of three Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 meetings is Wednesday

An update on the Chicago Velo Campus at the Illinois Cycling Association awards

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Emanuele Bianchi

Although I try to keep track of everything that’s going on in Chicago’s burgeoning bicycle scene, racing is one facet that I’m not so familiar with, but I’m definitely interested in learning more. For example, I’m not sure I had ever heard of the Illinois Cycling Association (ICA) before I attended their 4th annual awards ceremony on Saturday, having read about the event on the Chainlink.

The ICA is a federation of local bike clubs and promoters that are registered with USA Cycling, which promotes racing on a national level. The association’s goal is to raise the level of competitive cycling in Illinois, a state not yet known as a bike racing Mecca due to its mostly pancake-flat topography. This may change in the future if ICA member Emanuele Bianchi achieves his dream of building the world’s best indoor velodrome, the $40 million Chicago Velo Campus, on the city’s Southeast Side. I interviewed Bianchi about the project last fall.

Continue reading An update on the Chicago Velo Campus at the Illinois Cycling Association awards

Grid Shots: Water taxi edition

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A Chicago Water Taxi travels south on the Chicago River from Ping Tom Park in Chinatown, just south of 18th Street, towards downtown. Photo by Eric Pancer. 

Are water taxis part of sustainable transportation?

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) helped Chicago Water Taxi (Wendella) get a Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grant to buy a new boat in 2000. It’s easy to understand their efforts to reduce congestion on the road if people who normally drive the route of a water taxi now take the boat. And same for the air quality if the emissions of its engine, measured in person-miles, is better than that of an automobile. But what about its influence on water quality? The Environmental Protection Agency describes all the ways in which boating pollutes water. An article in the Active Transportation Alliance’s Mode Shift newsletter explained water taxi transportation as another local transit option. Continue reading Grid Shots: Water taxi edition

Photos of Chicago plowing sidewalks and the Kinzie Street bike lane

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Plowing the LaSalle Street bridge sidewalk. 

The Chicago Department of Transportation posted several photos to its Facebook page showing crews working at 5 AM Friday morning using a SW-4S tracked vehicle to clear snow from the Kinzie Street bike lane, and the sidewalk on the LaSalle Street bridge. Continue reading Photos of Chicago plowing sidewalks and the Kinzie Street bike lane

Checking out other cities’ plow trackers

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A screenshot of the Naperville snow removal status map. It doesn’t track plows live. 

After a reader tipped me to a McHenry County plow tracking website, I looked for other examples and found a couple that are leading Chicago’s. Continue reading Checking out other cities’ plow trackers

Plow Tracker not ready for prime time

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Thursday was the first time the City of Chicago turned on Plow Tracker, a website that shows the location of every snow plow in the “Snow Command” I reported on last week.

The web application could use some improvement. When I loaded the website at 11:50 AM, the map never loaded – searching for “plow tracker” on Twitter brought up a flurry of messages about the website, leading me to presume that the server was overloaded. The remaining page elements took over 60 seconds to load. On a second load I saw the map appeared as did 183 iterations of the funky snow plow icon.

Continue reading Plow Tracker not ready for prime time