Tag: crash data

Complete Streets policy? What Complete Streets policy?

Disappearing sidewalk on Fullerton Parkway over the Lincoln Park Lagoon

This sidewalk will be eliminated to make room for a new right-turn lane onto southbound Lake Shore Drive. Photos and captions by Bike Walk Lincoln Park.

Michelle Stenzel, a co-leader of the Bike Walk Lincoln Park neighborhood advocacy group, hits the nail on the head with her analysis of a construction project to rebuild the Fullerton Parkway bridge over the Lincoln Park Lagoon. The project, from the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), widens the street from four lanes to five, reroutes pedestrians on the south side sidewalk over a long path to cross the lagoon, and doesn’t install bikeways to and from the Lakefront Trail. It also replaces a crumbling bridge and improves upon the existing bridge design. The project will begin construction on Monday, March 19, 2012.

What’re the shortcomings? She outlines three problems on the Bike Walk Lincoln Park after attending a presentation Wednesday night. They are:

1. Elimination of the sidewalk on the south side of the bridge Continue reading Complete Streets policy? What Complete Streets policy?

Does Chicago want to be a bike friendly city or what? (video)

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A depiction of what wouldn’t have happened. Photo by flickrknufflo. 

Share the road? What a terrible idea.

The Netherlands is the safest place to travel, on any mode, because they’ve a road design philosophy called “sustainable safety”. One of the principles is to homogenize modes by mass, speed, and direction:

Large differences in speed and mass of different road users in the same space must be eliminated as much as possible. Where speed differences cannot be eliminated types of traffic must be separated. [Read about the four other principles.]

In Chicago and most places in the United States, the philosophy is “share the road” and “good luck”. Continue reading Does Chicago want to be a bike friendly city or what? (video)

Making cities safer for cyclists and pedestrians: Today’s NYT’s “Room for Debate”

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Photo shows Kinzie Street less than two months after opening a protected bike lane here. This represented a new design direction for Chicago’s streets. I explored this direction more in my article for Architect’s Newspaper. 

“It Starts With Better Design”. I agree.

I said this in Safer roadway designs: How Danes make right turns and When you build for youngest, you build for everyone. Today’s “Room for Debate” on the New York Times website features four experts talking about how to make cities safer for cyclists and pedestrians. Each of the four have a different response to the introduction’s strategy for reducing fatalities, which is that New York City should take a “broken windows” theory approach to cracking down on traffic violations. Much credit is given to this theory and the police’s approach to petty crimes in the 1980s and 1990s in reducing crime overall, citywide (read more about this). Continue reading Making cities safer for cyclists and pedestrians: Today’s NYT’s “Room for Debate”

What speed camera legislation means for Chicago (updated)

See all of our speed camera coverage. 

Governor Quinn signed legislation, public act SB965, on Monday morning to allow any municipality in Illinois with greater than 1 million inhabitants to construct and operate an “automated speed enforcement system”. There’s already a lot of misinformation and I intend to correct the record. I also present information gathered from multiple research studies on the impacts of speed cameras.

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A car crash on North Avenue at Kedzie Avenue, in the new safety zone around Humboldt Park. There’s not a red light camera here but there could be a speed camera in the near future. From 2005-2010, there have been 22 injuries to pedestrians and pedalcyclists at this intersection, inflicted in automobile crashes.

The law is an amendment to the red light camera law. It is not the first time speed cameras have been allowed in Illinois. In 2004, Illinois passed the Automated Traffic Control Systems in Highway Construction or Maintenance Zones Act (view it), enabling speed cameras to be used in work zones on highways. The Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the Illinois State Police (ISP) quickly deployed mobile speed camera vans – I discuss the study of this pilot project in the section, “Do they really make a difference?”. Continue reading What speed camera legislation means for Chicago (updated)

Streets for Cycling concerns: What about Logan and Western?

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LOOK!

You ask, I answer. Or, really, the Chicago Crash Browser (super beta draft version) and automobile collision data from the Illinois Department of Transportation answers. James Baum asked on The Chainlink:

From an engineering point of view I am very interested in how they plan on “fixing” the mess that is the Logan Blvd underpass. I feel that this area definitely fits under the “do the easy stuff first and the hard stuff last”  category on the hard side. The intersection is dangerous enough for motor vehicles and I’d like to see some crash statistics for autos there.

I agree that cycling through here is a problem; it seems that getting through here regardless of mode is a problem, though. The Moving Design group of design activists, of which I took part, created a large visual to raise awareness (“LOOK!”), using stencils, hair spray, and a fire extinguisher.  Here are all the pedestrian and “pedalcyclist” crashes. Notice how few pedestrian crashes there are within 250 feet of the center where Logan Boulevard and Western Avenue meet. That might be because few people actually walk here, avoiding it like the plague our streets are: Continue reading Streets for Cycling concerns: What about Logan and Western?

Safer roadway designs: How Danes make right turns

I went to Copenhagen, Denmark, in January 2011, and I was there for about 48 hours. I met Mikael of Copenhagenize, who lent me his Velorbis bike. I biked as much as possible, at all hours of the day, and I encountered a lot of the cycling infrastructure that makes it easy to bike and encourages the hundreds of thousands of trips by bike a day – even in winter!

This photo essay shows one of the ways you can design an intersection to facilitate safe right turns and through-maneuevers, for both people driving and cycling, as seen in Copenhagen. I’m posting this to show an alternative to the centered bike lane design common in Chicago that leads to many unsafe merge maneuvers that I mentioned yesterday in A tale of five bridges (first photo).

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The driver of the white taxi on the left yielded to bicyclists going straight before making a right turn from the left lane to the right lane and enter the Kennedy Expressway ramp. Not everyone yields.  Continue reading Safer roadway designs: How Danes make right turns