Chicagoans shared much information at the Streets for Cycling Plan open house on Saturday

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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.

Continue reading Chicagoans shared much information at the Streets for Cycling Plan open house on Saturday

Everybody is planning: a report from Saturday’s bikeways open house

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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