John Greenfield – Page 8

Pavement to the people: an update on CDOT’s new public space initiatives

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The People Spot at Little Black Pearl art center in Bronzeville. Photo courtesy of CDOT.

[This piece also appeared in Checkerboard City, John’s weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Thursdays.]

Local pundits like ex-Sun-Times columnist Mark Konkol and the Tribune’s John McCarron and John Kass have trashed the city’s new protected bike lanes as a waste of space on the streets. But Chicagoans tend to overlook the massive amount of room on the public way given over to moving and parking private automobiles.

A new Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) initiative called Make Way for People is dreaming up more imaginative uses of the city’s asphalt and concrete, creating new public spaces that are energizing business strips. In partnership with local community leaders, the program is taking parking spots, roadways, alleys and under-used plazas and transforming them into People Spots, People Streets, People Alleys and People Plazas, respectively, lively neighborhood hangouts.

“It’s not a top-down program where we come in and say, ‘We think you need a People Spot or a People Street,’” says Janet Attarian, head of the department’s Streetscape and Sustainable Design section. “Instead we say, ‘We want to help you build community and culture and place and, look, we just created a whole set of tools that wasn’t available before.’”

Continue reading Pavement to the people: an update on CDOT’s new public space initiatives

What do Hyde Parkers really think of the 55th Street protected bike lanes?

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[This piece originally ran on the website of the Green Lane Project, an initiative that is promoting protected and buffered bike lanes nationwide, sponsored by the national advocacy group Bikes Belong. The term “green lanes” refers to protected and buffered lanes and other innovative bikeways.]

Bike planners and advocates get excited when green lanes appear on city streets, but how do regular folks feel about them? To get a better idea, I pedaled to 55th Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park community, where the city recently built new protected bicycle lanes.

A square-mile of land on the city’s South Side, surrounded by parkland to the west and south and Lake Michigan to the east, Hyde Park is famous as the home of the University of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry and the Obamas. A dense, ethnically diverse college neighborhood, it naturally boasts a high bike mode share.

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Ride into the safety zone: new traffic calming and ped safety treatments

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Englewood resident Denise King tries out the new refuge island at 63rd and Claremont.

[This piece also appeared in Checkerboard City, John’s weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Thursdays.]

Running late as usual, I hop on my bicycle and sprint south from Logan Square, fortunately with a sweet tailwind at my back. I’m heading to the ribbon cutting for new Children’s Safety Zone traffic-calming and pedestrian-safety treatments at Claremont Academy Elementary School, 2300 West 64th Street in West Englewood.

The city has 1,500 of these safety zones, designated areas within one-eighth mile of schools and parks. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) is planning to install additional infrastructure at dangerous intersections within these sectors to discourage speeding and make crossing easier. Currently there are about 3,000 pedestrian crashes a year in the city, with about 800 involving kids (full data below). And in this era of rising obesity rates, the goal is also to encourage more children to walk to school and to play at their local park.

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What’s up with all those K streets west of Pulaski?

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Photo by Jeff Zoline.

[This piece originally ran in Time Out Chicago magazine.]

Q: How did K-Town come to be? That stretch of the West Side with all the north-south streets whose names start with the letter K has always fascinated me.

A: The K streets extend for a mile west of Pulaski Road: Karlov, Kedvale, Keeler, Kildare, Kenneth, Kilbourn. The mile after that, the streets begin with the letter L (Lavergne, Lawler)—though you’d have trouble finding people repping L-Town as their ’hood. The mile after that? M streets. The alphabetical pattern continues through P.

In the Tribune in 1913, the superintendent of Chicago’s Bureau of Maps, John D. Riley, explained his department’s new proposal for renaming north-south streets: “Under this scheme a certain letter would be assigned for each mile beginning with ‘A’ for the first mile west of the Indiana state line.” Thus, roads 11 miles west of the Hoosier border start with K, the 11th letter of the alphabet.

Abby Kindelsperger responded to the Time Out article:
“Actually, as a teacher at Long & Chicago, I have to disagree that ‘you’d have trouble finding people repping L-Town as their ‘hood.’ My students who live in the surrounding L-streets certainly consider their neighborhood to be L-Town, and never use the city’s label of Austin. I suppose in a community that doesn’t feel much love from the city, renaming is a form of power.”

At the time, north-south streets west of Pulaski were numbered according to their distance from State Street, so the switch from digits to words was done to differentiate them from their numbered east-west counterparts on the South Side (two 42nd Streets might be confusing). The City Council rejected the proposal regarding roads east of Pulaski, which by then already had proper names like State Street and Michigan Avenue, since renaming them all would have been a major pain in the neck.

Can Indy rock? Exploring Indianapolis, the Midwest’s next bike mecca

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Eric McAfee and Kevin Kastner on the Indianapolis Cultural Trail.

[This piece also appeared in Checkerboard City, John’s weekly transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets in print on Thursdays.]

If I had to sum up Indianapolis in one word, it would be “Underrated.” With a population of 829,718, the Hoosier State capital is the second-largest Midwest city (although it’s only the ninth largest metro area in the region.) Despite its size it’s known as “Naptown” and “India-No-Place” due to its reputation as a bland, suburban-style metropolis with few attractions besides the Colts, the Pacers and the Indy 500. I’m told that in the 1980s you couldn’t even buy a sandwich downtown after 6pm and the massive streets, lined with dozens of garages and oceans of parking lots, were so deserted you could safely walk down the middle of them.

But two weekends ago when I took Megbus there to meet up with my buddy Jake, in town for a conference, I discovered a surprisingly hip city with some fascinating architectural features and plenty of fun stuff to do. And while there’s little public transportation to speak of, and the city’s dominant image is a racecar, I was shocked to find a level of bike-friendliness that gives Chicago a run for its money.

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Grid Shots: Chicago Critical Mass 15th Anniversary Ride

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The Great Chicago Bike Holdup. Photo by Mike Travis.

Last night was the 20th Anniversary of the worldwide Critical Mass movement, which began in San Francisco, and the 15th anniversary of Chicago’s monthly rides. It’s probably safe to say our local celebration drew over 2,000 participants. They marked the occasion with The Great Chicago Bike Holdup, raising their rides over their heads for a group portrait in front of the Picasso. The route dipped down to Roosevelt, went west to Ogden and Randolph, then up to Webster, and back south via Magnificent Mile, ending at a secret 10,000 square-foot private lot in River West with a bonfire and dance party. As someone who’s been doing the Daley Plaza rides since 1997, I enjoyed seeing many of the early participants show up for the anniversary ride, some visiting from out of town. Several of my friends met their mates through the Mass and some of the kids from these unions are now old enough that they pedaled solo in last night’s ride.

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