CDOT responds to open letter about police enforcement; still waiting for replies from mayor, police

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Citations issued for blocking the bike lane vary from year to year. This FedEx truck blocks the Kinzie Street protected bike lane, the city’s first. 

In the open letter that Anne Alt and I wrote and mailed in early April to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, transportation commissioner Gabe Klein (CDOT), and police superintendent Garry McCarthy, we only received a reply from Klein. We don’t expect a response from the Mayor’s Office or the Chicago Police Department.

The letter has been pasted below.

The response from CDOT pointed out an inaccuracy in our letter’s data about the number of citations issued to motorists for parking in marked bikeways (bike lanes and marked shared lanes). The data, from the Department of Administrative Hearings, substantially undercounted the number of citations issued. The issue with this data is that it came from the wrong source and the numbers from that department likely represented contested citations.

Since receiving this letter, Grid Chicago has obtained new data, from the Department of Finance (known to most as the Department of Revenue). The number of citations issued for violating Municipal Code of Chicago 9-40-060, are as follows (rates in parentheses): Continue reading CDOT responds to open letter about police enforcement; still waiting for replies from mayor, police

Postal service making a mockery of Kinzie protected bike lane

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Photo by Seth Anderson.

This is an embarrassment. This protected bike lane was developed to provide people bicycling to and from downtown a safe passage, in which no vehicle should ever enter. The physical separation is apparently of no concern to postal workers, who don’t believe that the public will mind them putting cyclists in danger by forcing them to unnecessarily merge in and out of moving vehicular traffic. Continue reading Postal service making a mockery of Kinzie protected bike lane