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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
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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
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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.
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You could make a digital, online version of this map that residents created at the Bloomingdale Trail charrette.
We constantly use maps on Grid Chicago, displaying photos of them, or embedding and linking to them. Here’re all the articles with embedded maps. I’ve even gotten John to make a map for the stealth routes! This is a tutorial on how to create your own map. Continue reading How to create your own online map: Google My Maps
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Grab your phone right now and send the message “CTATRAIN THOR” to 41411. Or send “ctatrain logs” to the same number. Wait a moment.
Clever, right? Continue reading CTA launches train tracker with text messaging
A reader on our Facebook page suggested we feature the 35th Street pedestrian bridge, over the Illinois Central railroad tracks and connected to a second bridge over Lake Shore Drive, in this week’s Grid Shots*. Here’re several other interesting and, in some cases, dilapidated pedestrian bridges over Lake Shore Drive. All photos are by Eric Rogers, who contributes many of his great photos to our Flickr group.
3500 S Lake Shore Drive
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The 35th Street pedestrian bridge is particularly uninviting; it links the neighborhood at 35th and Cottage Grove to the Lakefront Trail. It should have been replaced by now. Continue reading Grid Shots: The variety of pedestrian bridges over Lake Shore Drive