Category: Beyond Chicago

Circumnavigating lower Lake Michigan by Metra, bike, ferry and bus

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Sunset near Muskegon, MI.

[This piece also ran in Newcity magazine.]

One reason I’m glad I’ve cycled coast-to-coast a couple of times is that I feel like I’ve got nothing to prove when it comes to bike touring. As long as I’ve got my bicycle with me and get a few miles of pedaling in, it doesn’t matter what other non-car transportation modes I use – it’s a bike trip. Or at least a trip worth taking.

Case in point is a circuit of lower Lake Michigan I took a few years ago. While I covered a lot of ground with my bicycle in tow, I didn’t actually ride much more than a hundred miles. But this actually enhanced the experience.

Instead of my usual death-march mileage, the relaxed pace left me time to take walks in the woods and hang out on the beach before hitting the road to the next destination. Of course, a well-disciplined cycle tourist would leave early and get the day’s pedaling done before sightseeing. Maybe next time I’ll do it this way.

This excursion was inspired by a Time Out Chicago issue about Lake Michigan getaways and a yen to escape the big city and catch some sunsets over water. I was also curious to try the high-speed ferry from Milwaukee to Muskegon, MI. I’d already ridden the entire perimeter of the lake in stages before so this jaunt was about R & R rather than breaking new ground.

Continue reading Circumnavigating lower Lake Michigan by Metra, bike, ferry and bus

Report lists top transit suburbs with a cloudy definition of transit and suburb

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Photo of La Grange Metra station by Tristan Garrett. 

Ed. note: Ted Rosenbaum is originally from Evanston and has a master’s in transportation engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He currently works on public transportation in the San Francisco Bay area, and is on Twitter @RedTosenbaum. His opinions are his own, independent of his employer. -Steven

On Wednesday, July 25, DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development published their report on The 20 “Top Transit Suburbs” of Metropolitan Chicago—An Index Approach. It’s a good thing they put “Top Transit Suburbs” in quotes, because this report has a tenuous link to that phrase at best. Although the abstract says the study aims to evaluate “the region’s suburbs on the basis of their attractiveness to those with lifestyles oriented toward the use of public transportation,” they focus exclusively on Metra access & amenities. Metra is an important part of Chicagoland’s transportation network, and the region’s greatest hope for reducing the car dependence of downtown workers who don’t live all that close to the city. But drawing a straight line from Metra station aesthetics and auto-accessibility to public transportation-oriented lifestyles? That’s a stretch.

Download the full report (.pdf). Continue reading Report lists top transit suburbs with a cloudy definition of transit and suburb

Grid Bits: CTA bus job fair, pay with smartphone on Metra, new federal transit safety regulations

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A Metra train crosses Canal Street in downtown Chicago. Photo by David Wilson. 

There are 6 articles in this transit-focused edition of Grid Bits, a sporadically occurring category of posts that summarize and link to recent articles in other news media. At the end you’ll find two Grid Chicago-authored commentaries. The first attempting to explain the logistical reasons why CTA’s Blue and Red Lines, the busiest, don’t have 5000-series cars; the second recommending a possible weekend-only pilot project to allow bicycles on South Shore trains.

In the federal transportation bill that was signed into law in early July, a provision was included that requires the Federal Transit Administration to work with state departments of transportation to develop safety regulations for transit providers across the country (including the Chicago Transit Authority, Metra, and Pace). No such regulation currently exists, as it does for intercity bus travel, air travel, and highways, among other modes. Transit agencies, understanding consequences of poor emergency responses, have been self-regulating. It remains to be seen if such regulation will be an improvement over past self-regulation. The Chicago Tribune reports: Continue reading Grid Bits: CTA bus job fair, pay with smartphone on Metra, new federal transit safety regulations

How does wayfinding on the CTA compare to BART?

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Plentiful signage at this CTA station makes it easy to figure out which station you’re at and where you need to catch your train. Photo by Mickey B. All other images courtesy of the author.

This guest post was contributed by Rachel Hyman, a senior at the University of Chicago who studies geography. A resident of Hyde Park, she’s made it her mission to see every corner of Chicago, by bike if possible. In her free time, she edits the literary blog Banango Lit.

Almost all of my experience with urban public transit has been in Chicago, so I was excited to come out to San Francisco for a summer internship and scope out their system. to get to work I take BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), essentially a subway that runs within San Francisco and in the East Bay. In Chicago, I live in Hyde Park, which doesn’t have great access to the ‘L’, so it’s nice to live closer to a train station here. Just last week, though, I had an experience which soured me a bit on BART.

Continue reading How does wayfinding on the CTA compare to BART?

Grid Shots: Crossing

Today’s theme is “crossing” and it was very easy to find photos for this one. I first look for photos by searching for the theme in the Flickr group. A variety of photos showing different kinds of crossings appeared.

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Cycling across the wide Western Avenue on Milwaukee Avenue. This photo wasn’t labeled with “crossing” but it was recently uploaded so I saw it in the group page first. Photo by Clint. 

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Crossing guards in Blue Island. Photo by Jane Healy. 

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A railroad crossing sign in the Wilmette Purple Line parking lot. The public isn’t allowed to cross the here (only CTA workers), and for the most part the tracks are guarded by the concrete wall. Photo by Michelle Reitman.

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A Metra Rock Island train crosses other railroad tracks at a 90-degree angle at the 16th Street tower. Photo by Eric Pancer. 

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This CTA bus stretches across the entire intersection. Photo by Señor Codo. 

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Ducks and their offspring will cross here, in Wheaton, Illinois. Photo by Clark Maxwell. 

When do cyclists crash?

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Chart 1. The chart above shows the hourly activity of aggregated reported crashes in Illinois in 2010. It shows the hour of the day, that, throughout the year, saw the most injuries and fatalities. 

This post is fourth in a series on crash data sponsored by Jim Freeman, a Chicago lawyer specializing in pedestrian and bicycle crashes. Read the other posts in this series.

The League of Illinois Bicyclists (LIB) recently posted a link on its Facebook page to an event in August called “Designing for Bicycle Safety”, hosted by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). A person commented,

We can design for bike safety until we are blue in the face, but unless bicyclists come to their senses and buy lights and reflective clothing for riding after dark – there will continue to be needless rider deaths and incapacitating injuries. I believe this needs to be top priority in rider awareness education.

Safer infrastructure should be the top priority in all things bicycling, and when it comes to reducing crashes at night, we agree that encouraging cyclists to use lights at night is important (Get Lit!). I wanted to know just how many crashes occur at each hour of the day. As is usual when it comes to bike crash data crunching, it takes longer than I originally thought or planned to get the full answer. In essence, though, the majority of crashes and injuries occur during “evening rush hour” while the majority of fatalities, while very small, occurred at night.

Update July 27, 2012: New, interactive charts show the same data in different ways.  Continue reading When do cyclists crash?