Chicago ‘L’ hangman game

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Michael Jantzen, a Washington, D.C. programmer and photographer whose photos I’ve published here, sent me a link to his Chicago ‘L’ hangman game he created after Transportation Camp there last weekend. (I went to Transportation Camp in San Francisco in March 2011.) The game features the Chicago Transit Authority’s 143 rail stations.

Play it now!

Some are going to be really easy, like “87TH” in the screenshot above. I guess I should have refreshed the page and taken a screenshot of a more difficult station!

How do you get insurance information from a car that presumably drove itself?

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An actual robotic car. Cars driven by robotic software may actually be safer for our roads than cars driven by people because they never stop paying attention. Photo by j-fi. 

You may have read about 10 days ago that actor Gene Hackman was involved in a collision with an automobile while cycling in Florida. And if you read about this on CNN’s website, you may be under the impression that he was hit by a robot car. Twice in the article there is a mention of a car hitting Hackman and but a driver of that automobile is mentioned 0 times. The robot car strikes again!

I want news media to write stronger, more accurate descriptions of the situation. I want articles about robot cars to only be about cars that are driven without a human operator (an article by Tom  Vanderbilt, also the author of Traffic). When you discover it, tell the author and their editor that you want better information. I am republishing, in full, Travis Wittwer’s essay titled “#robotcar”: Continue reading How do you get insurance information from a car that presumably drove itself?

A Bloomingdale Line pub crawl by snowshoes and skis

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(Please pardon the primitive quality of these photos, taken with a borrowed camera-phone.)

As I’ve written before, I have a two-pronged strategy for enjoying Chicago winters. One aspect is indoor coziness and/or winter denial: Fireplaces, tiki bars, Jacuzzis, endless cups of Sleepytime tea, the Lincoln Park Conservatory and the 9th floor winter garden at the Washington Library. The other is getting plenty of outside time through bike commuting, long walks in the snow, ice skating, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing.

Last Friday night in the midst of a blizzard that dropped six or eight inches on Chicago, some old Critical Mass buddies and I had a night of car-free fun that combined both approaches. It also involved another key to winter happiness: choosing the right travel mode for the weather.

Continue reading A Bloomingdale Line pub crawl by snowshoes and skis

Grid Shots: Cycling snow commute

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“A bicyclist hauling it in Edgewater, in the midst of the snowstorm. On Broadway just north of Granville.” Photo by Joseph Dennis. 

I was home during the snow storm on Friday and I read people’s commute experiences on various social networks. Here are some photos to celebrate the successful and less successful rides on the bicycle. Continue reading Grid Shots: Cycling snow commute

Recaps from Wednesday’s Streets for Cycling Plan meeting at Garfield Park

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Both John and I attended the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 meeting at the Garfield Park Conservatory on Wednesday. The project leaders (Mike Amsden from the Chicago Department of Transportation, and Mark de la Vergne from Sam Schwartz Engineering, pictured) announced 4.3 new miles of protected bike lanes for the west side boulevard system to be installed this year in the main lanes to slow traffic in the Lawndale and East Garfield Park neighborhoods. Continue reading Recaps from Wednesday’s Streets for Cycling Plan meeting at Garfield Park

New plow tracker-style website hits the web in time for today’s snow storm

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Snow plows already rumbling in West Loop. Photo taken this morning by Seth Anderson.

The City of Chicago’s Plow Tracker, debuting for last week’s snow storm, has some competition from Derek Eder and Forest Gregg, a programmer and a University of Chicago graduate student, respectively. Gregg is also the author of SVO: Powering your vehicle with straight vegetable oil.

Gregg found the data feeds that were powering Plow Tracker and worked with Eder to build a site that shows where snow plows have been, intimating which streets may have been plowed. Visit ClearStreets to see if a plow has traversed your street. The site is from a new organization called Open City. Continue reading New plow tracker-style website hits the web in time for today’s snow storm