Grid Extras – Page 8 – Grid Chicago

Weekend open thread: Speed cameras, yea or nay?

Watch this video of a small experiment conducted by Volkswagen in Sweden where people who sped funded a lottery that those who didn’t speed were automatically entered into.

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Watch The Speed Camera Lottery on YouTube.

Will speed cameras successfully reduce speeding and injuries in Chicago? Would you support such a speed camera lottery? Do you ever think the speed camera lottery would “die”, meaning that people would stop speeding and the lottery would no longer have revenue? Continue reading Weekend open thread: Speed cameras, yea or nay?

How to create your own online map: BatchGeocode for spreadsheets

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Maps can be digital, too! The Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 process disappointingly hasn’t included online map crowdsourcing as a strategy to gather input from residents and to easily collect data digitally so that it could be more quickly collated, analyzed, and shared. Photo by Serge Lubomudrov.

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. This is the second of four tutorials on how to create your own online maps.

We use maps as a communication tool and a way to enhance our articles. I’m going to give you some basic knowledge to create your own map using online tools so that you can identify issues and solutions where you live, which you can easily share afterwards. I’ll describe four simple ways to create a map. Before that, though, I’ll describe how to choose one. Since there are four tutorials, I’m going to break them up into four articles (vote in the comments for the next tutorial I should write).

Continue reading How to create your own online map: BatchGeocode for spreadsheets

Weekend open thread: What videos did you watch this week?

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NYC Ave. by Shawn Brown

Last weekend’s open thread asked you to post a link to an article you read. This weekend I want you to post a link to a video about some kind of sustainable transportation that you watched. I’ll go first. Here’s a vigorous and dramatic view of New York City streets, traffic, and buildings, from a very low-to-the-ground point of view, shot all from cameras mounted on bicycles. I really like the first minute, where the camera is (in what seems like slow motion, but isn’t) wrapping around objects and people.

Introducing the Bike 2015 Plan Tracker

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One of the strategies in the Bike 2015 Plan is to “establish 2 north-south bikeways and 4 east-west bikeways to and within the Loop by 2010” (see strategy details). No bikeways were built until the Madison Street westbound bikeway in 2011. Photo by Joseph Dennis.

I was frustrated after a short bicycle ride on Lincoln Avenue Saturday night to the Heritage Bicycles party. A long stretch of the bike lane in the 43rd Ward received brand new striping and bicycle symbols last year but there were many “features” on the ride I didn’t appreciate: taxi drivers blocking the bike lane and making sudden u-turns, valets putting traffic cones in the bike lane, a pinch point under the ‘L’ viaduct at Lincoln and Wrightwood (created by the too-long parking lane), a long crack in the pavement where I wanted to ride to avoid the door zone, odd bike lane designs*, and lots of potholes. Dottie wrote about this sorry bike route in August.

Continue reading Introducing the Bike 2015 Plan Tracker

Weekend open thread: What stories did you read this past week?

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We’re following Bike Portland’s lead with this post. Leave a comment with a link to a story about sustainable transportation you read this week. That’s all!

Photo of a Chicago Transit Authority train by Clark Maxwell.