Category: Roads

Talking transportation with former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist

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John Norquist – photo courtesy of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Whenever I visit Milwaukee I’m impressed by some of the more progressive aspects of its urban planning, like the many well-preserved old buildings, bike-and-ped-friendly bridges, the Milwaukee Public Market and the vibrant riverfront. Much of the credit goes to John Norquist, who served as mayor from 1988 to 2004, when he left to take his currrent post as president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). Continue reading Talking transportation with former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist

Western Illinois Death March

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Roadside Halloween display in Colchester, IL

On Halloween weekend I took a train-bike-train excursion to western Illinois and northeast Missouri and, fittingly, death was a recurring theme on this fun little trip. My childhood pal Greg recently took a gig teaching political science at Western Illinois University in Macomb, IL. Judy, another old friend from the Bicycle Federation of Wisconsin, moved to Kirksville, MO, last summer to study osteopathic medicine. Since both towns are near Amtrak lines, I decided to link the two visits with a grueling 120-mile day of bicycling. Here’s a map of my bike route.

Friday morning I caught the Carl Sandburg line from Chicago’s Union Station. Like most Amtrak lines that run entirely within Illinois, it allows “roll-on” bicycle service for an additional fee, so I’m able to hoist my unboxed bicycle onboard and simply lean it against the wall of the train car. It’s a relaxing 3.5-hour cruise southwest across the prairie to Macomb, where Greg meets me at the combined train and bus station for this quaint college town of 19,748. In high school we played in a psychedelic rockabilly band called the Glorious Disciples of Freedom, so we greet each other with the band’s secret handshake, grasping each other’s bicep and saying in unison, “Disciples of Freedom.”

Continue reading Western Illinois Death March

Mannequins remind drivers and pedestrians to travel safely

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32 ghostly-white figures line the north side of Wacker between Wabash and Clark, but they’re not Halloween decorations. These mannequins, male and female, wear black t-shirts reading “One of 32 pedestrians killed last year in Chicago.” On the back the shirts read “It’s up to you. Be Alert. Be Safe. We’re all pedestrians.” These dummies are part of the city’s new shock-and-awe campaign to raise awareness of pedestrian safety issues and reduce crashes. The Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) is spearheading the initiative with the help of the Chicago Police Department, funded by a grant of almost $550,000 from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Continue reading Mannequins remind drivers and pedestrians to travel safely

Grid Bits: UP-North construction to restart, taxi drivers and street safety, new CTA Loop station

John and I are still gathering information for our Open Streets article, which will be co-written and published Tuesday. Also on Tuesday is another public meeting about the Bloomingdale Trail, where the designers and consultants will showcase the results of this past weekend’s open house and charrettes (I went on Saturday). I will publish an article about the Tuesday presentation on Thursday, October 6. There are five stories in this edition of Grid Bits.

Streets

(1) Taxi drivers

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Click on the photo to read the photographer’s caption. I found this by searching on Flickr for “stupid taxi chicago” in order to find people’s opinions. Photo by Nick Normal. 

The Chicago Tribune reported on September 23, 2011, that many of the tickets Chicago police give to taxi drivers are dismissed in court. When a taxi driver receives commits three moving violations in one year, they risk having their chauffeur’s license not renewed. Continue reading Grid Bits: UP-North construction to restart, taxi drivers and street safety, new CTA Loop station

They’re not accidents, and we don’t have robotic cars

Updated October 5, 2011, to add a reference to a new article that fails to mention that the car involved in a crash had a driver. 

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The headline for this crash might read: “Taxi wanted to avoid Lake Shore Drive congestion by taking the Lakefront Trail, makes wrong turn”. Photo by Andrew Ciscel. 

Language and word choice is powerful. It influences you to interpret a story in a specific way – or another. Monday’s headline on the Chicago Sun-Times website reads, “Police seek vehicle in fatal Uptown hit-and-run” and I thought, “Aren’t the police also interested in the driver of that vehicle?”*

And I read the first paragraph:

Police have released surveillance photos of a car that plowed into a woman crossing the street in Uptown early Saturday, then reportedly backed up and struck her again before fleeing the scene. The pedestrian died eight hours later.

“Oh, the police are looking for a car that drives itself. Of course!” I exclaimed to myself. “I guess one of Google’s experimental cars has come to Chicago”. But I was wrong as in the fifth paragraph, the unnamed author of this article described the crash: Continue reading They’re not accidents, and we don’t have robotic cars

Uninsured drivers and other tales

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Yesterday I posted this statement about automobile crashes on my Facebook wall:

‎36.9% of all automobile crashes (including the ones involving pedestrians and bicyclists) in 2010 were labeled “hit and run” by IDOT.

I pulled this information from the crash data I’ll be analyzing and visualizing with three other people.

The first comment I received asked if that number was related to the number of uninsured motorists in Chicago. I found a report published by the Insurance Research Council (IRC; funded by property casualty insurance companies) that estimated, for 2009, 15% of drivers in Illinois do not have insurance. The estimates were “based on the ratio of uninsured motorist insurance claim frequency to bodily injury claim frequency.” I don’t know if this is a good, or the best measurement technique, but it’s one way that we can compare annual data. It seems this method will not include crashes where neither driver has insurance (driver or medical), or when no claim is made against the uninsured driver.

Then today I was at MicroCenter in Logan Square shopping for a computer hard drive. Someone else was standing next to me looking at some of the same products. He got a phone call. It went something like this. (Note: I did not hear anything the caller said – I’m making it up based on his responses.)

  • Caller: What are you doing?
  • Man: Shopping for hard drives.
  • Caller: How’d you get there?
  • Man: I’m borrowing this person’s car.
  • Caller: Let’s go somewhere.
  • Man: No, I don’t care, I’m not taking you on a joy ride. I haven’t had a license for three years. If I get pulled over, I’m going to jail.

What the heck does one do in this situation? Do you call the police and report that a driving crime is about to happen?

Simply because he has no license doesn’t make him a bad driver, but his tone and his message to the caller indicated, to me, that his license to drive was taken from him. But that was a little deterrent. He calculated his risk and concluded it was low enough to borrow someone’s car and drive to the store to buy a hard drive, but that driving any further (taking the caller on a joy ride) was too risky. There’s probably some correlation that the longer distance one drives, or the more time one drives, the more likely they will be pulled over. But for there to be that correlation, police officers would have to be 1) randomly distributed across the region where this person is driving, and 2) paying attention to driver infractions.

As long as the man avoids making errors and ensures the borrowed car meets legal requirements to drive (lights, registration, etc…), then he will avoid being pulled over. Since the IRC estimates that 15% of drivers in Illinois have no insurance, it may be prudent for the police to randomly pull over a certain percentage of drivers each year simply to check for valid insurance. When there’s a crash with an uninsured driver, that infraction of driving without insurance is just as important to public safety as the action that caused the crash. Not every insured driver carries uninsured motorist insurance to protect themselves, monetarily, from this situation.

I searched Flickr for “uninsured driver” and this was one of the photos that appeared. The driver of the white car hit the dark car in the foreground. The photo was posted by one of the people in the dark car and says that the driver of the white car did not have driving insurance. Photo by vikisuzan in Kent, Washington.