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Photo of Amtrak and Metra trains at Union Station by Eric Pancer.
Read the event review for this meeting.
Come to the Great Hall at Union Station on Thursday, December 15, 2011, from 4 to 7 PM, for a presentation and open house on the Union Station Master Plan. The Great Hall is in the original Union Station building, at 210 S Canal Street – the meeting will be in the southwest corner. Continue reading Union Station master plan public meeting is Thursday
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Transportation commissioner Gabe Klein gives a thumbs up to stricter taxicab regulations. This photo was taken on a bike ride with John Greenfield for this article. Okay, he actually wasn’t giving a thumbs up to that, but I can only imagine that he would.
There are six stories in this edition of Grid Bits.
Safety
(1) Taxis
In October, we linked you to the Chicago Tribune’s coverage on unsafe taxi drivers and how it’s sometimes hard to revoke or suspend their driver’s or chauffeur’s licenses. Monday, Mayor Emanuel and Alderman Beale announced proposed changes to the taxi ordinance to deal with this and other issues: Continue reading Grid Bits: Taxi reforms, bike sharing update, crash analyses
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A bike counter is a nice way of saying, “Hey, the city values you for riding your bike”. It’s currently 1°C at 9:21 AM on January 10, 2011, in Copenhagen, Denmark. So far today, 2,142 people have biked past this counter (only in this direction, westbound). 43,504 have biked past in 2011 (again, westbound) and it’s only the 10th day of the year.
Marisa Paulson at The Northwest Passage* writes about last week’s public meeting for Park 567 at Milwaukee Avenue and Leavitt Avenue in Wicker Park. “Park 567” is a proposed access point for the Bloomingdale Trail. I really like what one of the project organizers said in response to respecting the history of Milwaukee Avenue (I guess very recent history).
Continue reading Let’s get a bike counter in Chicago
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[This article also runs in Newcity magazine. All photos by Steven.]
“Gabe Klein has always viewed his work as a canvas to create a contribution, and is inspired by ventures that give something back to the community, versus strictly producing profit. This is why he only works on projects that invoke his passion.”
– From “Gabe Klein’s TreE-House,” gabeklein.com
“True love knows no bargains. It is one-way traffic; giving, giving, giving.”
– Swami Satchidananda, Klein’s childhood guru
When forward-thinking Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) Commissioner Gabe Klein reported for work on May 16 as part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s new administration, it marked a sea change in the city’s priorities. After spending most of the 20th Century trying to make it easier to drive, City Hall was switching its focus to promoting healthier modes: walking, biking and transit.
Continue reading How did progressive transportation czar Gabe Klein get that way?
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This post is a little different than all of our past event reviews: here we display a bunch of photos and beneath them captions from Anne Alt, who volunteered as a map docent and conversed with many visitors. At any time, you can just browse our respective photo galleries: Steven’s photos or John’s photos. Visitors added a few thousand data points on maps for nine planning districts; we’ll talk about some of them.
As Calvin explained in Monday morning’s post, the event was partly about sharing knowledge. Mike Amsden at the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) explains the next steps for this project:
We were extremely excited to see the level of turnout at our first meeting. Now we will start to go through all of this feedback and incorporate it into our existing conditions analysis. We will be working on this analysis through January and February as we continue the initial public outreach phase of the project. All of this feedback will be used to help us develop the eventual network.
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Ed. note: This post was written by guest contributor Calvin Brown. -Steven
If you were too busy to come downtown for the Streets for Cycling Open House yesterday at 23 E Madison Street, you missed a great opportunity to share your own ideas for the development and rethinking of Chicago’s precious street space.
Here’s what made the open house an important event: The city bicycle staff were at the event with open ears, and the event took place in the dead center of the Loop making it as convenient as possible for all Chicagoans to attend. Giant maps on the walls covered every section of the city and were open to revision and graffiti. The maps quickly filled up with ideas for future bikeways and changes to existing problems. Continue reading Everybody is planning: a report from Saturday’s bikeways open house