Art on the street includes street art, but the reverse isn’t true.
[flickr]photo:6909321018[/flickr]
Oak Park Arts District cross walk. Photo by I BIKE UIC / April Yvonne.
[flickr]photo:6903842264[/flickr]
Bloomingdale Trail mural by Jeff Zoline. The quantity of art will only be increasing in the next few years as the viaduct undergoes a transformation to become a trail and linear park. Continue reading Grid Shots: Art on the street edition
[flickr]photo:6880697670[/flickr]
Alyson Fletcher counts cyclists on 18th Street.
The need for knowing how many people are cycling in Chicago should be obvious: to plan a good bikeway network that considers where people are already cycling; and to track the progress of the Bike 2015 Plan and other related plans. There are multiple needs to count cyclists in Chicago, for civic planning, academic research, and business promotion. On Tuesday morning and afternoon last week, volunteers at several downtown Chicago intersections were armed with pencil and paper to count people cycling (towards downtown in the morning, away from in the afternoon).
The City’s bike count program is now getting into a groove of consistent and periodic tabulating after a time of sporadic counts in different locations (mostly for single facility analysis). A good bike count program is permanent, counting people at the same times on a regular basis at the same location. The new program, which started in 2011, will count cyclists at the same places in downtown Chicago, at the same time each month. Not only can the City use this information to plan a network (and hopefully more bikeways in the Loop), but it can be used to track the impact of bikeways and cyclists on ridership and traffic, respectively. Continue reading Bike counts are important to businesses and in evaluating our progress
[flickr]photo:6978565457[/flickr]
Rahm Emanuel at yesterday’s press conference
Monday morning when Steven read the awesome news on the Sun-Times website (apparently the Mayor’s Office offered them the scoop on this) that the city has raised the last $9 million needed to start construction on the Bloomingdale Trail, his first reaction was annoyance. You can find more details about the exciting plans for the trail in most of the other local news outlets, so if you don’t mind today I’ll focus on this somewhat nitpicky issue.
Why was Steven irritated? Because of what he heard at last Thursday’s community meeting at Yates Elementary in Humboldt Park, where citizens were invited to provide input on the preliminary design ideas for the 2.7-mile trail and “linear park.”
Continue reading Clearing up some confusion about the Bloomingdale Trail fundraising process
[flickr]photo:6819937030[/flickr]
Meet Maggie Martinez. She was the final commenter at last night’s final public meeting for the development of the Bloomingdale Trail framework plan*. And what a final comment she made. If I had known it was going to be a rousing call to action for supporting youth in arts and cycling, and the benefits of the project for the Humboldt Park and nearby communities, I would have filmed it. Instead you get this (pretty good) photo, the audio of her speech, and a transcript.
[vimeo]38206021[/vimeo]
I put the audio of Maggie speaking to a basic slideshow of photos from the meeting. Watch it on Vimeo. Continue reading Rallying the community around the Bloomingdale Trail, a project for open space, art, and active transportation
[flickr]photo:6216477110[/flickr]
Photo from the October charrette.
The results of all the two previous public meetings for the Bloomingdale Trail, a three-day charrette in October and a meeting in December, will be presented Thursday in the “framework plan”. What is the framework plan? The Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail website, now operated by the Trust for Public Land, has a handy FAQ (pdf):
A framework plan is a document that sets the overall vision for a project without necessarily making specific design decisions. When a project is particularly large or complex, as is the case with the Bloomingdale Trail and Park, framework plans are an essential first stage in the design process. The basic principles established in the Bloomingdale Framework Plan can then be taken and used to drive the specific design decisions that will be made in the next phases of the project.
For example, the Bloomingdale Framework Plan will suggest ways to maximize the use of the limited space available on the top of the Bloomingdale Trail and Park, detail the basic layout of the Bloomingdale’s pathway, and create general guidelines for incorporating the arts on the Bloomingdale Trail and Park.
Continue reading Important Bloomingdale Trail meeting about framework plan is Thursday
According to the new Grid Shots schedule, today’s topic is “viaducts”.
[flickr]photo:6801580158[/flickr]
The first photo shows someone cycling on Jackson Boulevard just east of Canal Street. Did you know it’s a viaduct? It spans the Metra and Amtrak tracks below. Photo by Allan Marshall. Continue reading Grid Shots: Viaducts