Category: Change

Sayonara to Grid Chicago, hello Streetsblog Chicago

January 23, 2013 / / 0 Comments

John and I met at Taqueria La Zacatecana in May 2011 to discuss combining forces. 

In case you don’t follow my “big” blog, Grid Chicago, you must know that we’ve moved. My blogging partner John Greenfield and I work for OpenPlans and launched Streetsblog Chicago on Tuesday, January 22, 2013.

Here’s the Grid Chicago origin story that I wrote to signal the change:

Back in 2010, I started corresponding with Streetsblog’s Ben Fried about getting a version of the site started in Chicago. Streetsblog was my favorite transportation blog and I viewed it as the gold standard in local, grassroots transportation news writing. I wasn’t alone. Getting a Streetsblog up and running in Chicago had been an elusive goal for many people involved in the local sustainable transportation and planning scene.

On a visit to New York that year, I met Ben at the OpenPlans office in Lower Manhattan. We spoke about how Streetsblog NYC started in 2006 and how they launched each subsequent city. What I took away was that in order to produce a site like Streetsblog, you need the funding to hire people who can devote a lot of time to it. I left New York excited about all theprogressive transportation changes taking place there, but thinking that I probably wouldn’t be starting a Streetsblog in Chicago.

I’d had my personal blog, Steven Can Plan, since 2007, and that’s where I expressed my perspectives on cities and transportation, but I wanted to publish more frequently and reach a wider audience. I needed a partner. Fast forward to spring 2011. I was speaking to my friend Kevin Monahan about my desire to create a more popular blog to discuss transportation issues in Chicago, with a bent on advocating for more and better walking, biking, and transit infrastructure.

Kevin told me to get in touch with John Greenfield, an acquaintance of mine who, like me, had previously worked on bike parking projects at the Chicago Department of Transportation (he left a bit before I started there). At the time John was writing a sustainable transportation blog called Vote With Your Feet, and he was also interested in creating a more ambitious website.

I contacted John in May to propose a partnership. We met at Taqueria La Zacatecana in Avondale and for an hour, munching on burritos, we hashed out our goals for this website we both wanted to build. While we knew we’d be spending a lot of time on the site and would need to earn money from it, that wasn’t as important as launching quickly. What made the timing so crucial was that Mayor Emanuel had released a groundbreaking transition plan with several bold goals to improve bicycling. We had to be there to cover it. We launched Grid Chicago in June 2011, and we quickly gained a loyal readership and a roster of talented guest contributors.

By early 2012, we started considering the possibility: What if Grid Chicago could somehow morph into Streetsblog Chicago? We already had a large readership along with good ad support from local businesses. By launching Grid Chicago we’d proven there was a demand for in-depth transportation news and analysis from two guys who’ve been walking, biking, and taking transit in the Windy City for years.

Last winter Ben started contacting people about funding the new site. In March he came to Chicago and presented at the Metropolitan Planning Council, talking about how Streetsblog makes an impact with its reporting. The momentum started to build in a serious way. Thanks to funding commitments from The Chicago Community Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation, not to mention the hard work of many people – especially Peter Skosey of theMetropolitan Planning Council and Randy Neufeld of the SRAM Cycling Fund – Streetsblog is finally coming to Chicago.

With the launch of Streetsblog Chicago, Grid Chicago will stop publishing new content, but the site will remain online as an archive. We’re looking forward to providing you with more frequent, wide-ranging coverage of the local movement for effective transit and safer streets. And by joining the Streetsblog family, our readers are going to get plugged in to transportation policy stories of national significance, and more people around the country are going to be following Chicago’s progress on walking, biking, and transit issues than ever before.

We’d like to thank Ben, Peter, Randy and all the other folks in Chicago and New York who have made this moment possible. And we want to thank you, our readers, for giving us a reason to schlep around the city attending public meetings and stay up into the wee hours banging out the next day’s posts. We’re jazzed about finally getting Streetsblog Chicago off the ground, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Steven Can Plan isn’t changing. I’ll still be blogging here on the same irregular schedule. 

Tell it, Sue Baker! Car crashes are not accidents

October 29, 2012 / / 0 Comments

“It was an accident!”, said the driver. Photo by Katherine Hodges. 

Because of Hurricane Sandy, the New York Times paywall is down so I’m reading every article I can, starting with “Safety Lessons from the Morgue“:

As she explains it, “To say that a car crash is an accident is to say it’s a matter of chance, a surprise, but car crashes happen all the time, and the injuries that people sustain in those crashes are usually predictable and preventable.”

Another car crash-related excerpt from the article about Sue Baker, injury prevention researcher extraordinaire:

In one of her recent projects, Baker looked at another aspect of highway deaths. The study, which Baker prepared with David Swedler, a doctoral candidate, examined more than 14,000 fatal crashes involving teenage drivers. They found that male drivers were almost twice as likely as female drivers to have had high levels of alcohol in their blood and were also more likely to have been speeding and driving recklessly. Significantly, 38 percent of 15-year-old drivers, both male and female, were found to have been speeding, but by age 19, female speeders dropped to 22 percent, while male speeders remained steady at 38 percent.

Those differences, Baker says, suggest that boys and girls should not automatically receive the same driver training — and that boys should perhaps receive their license at an older age than girls. “Males might scream foul,” Baker acknowledges, “but let them.”

Yes, let them. It’s too easy to get a driver’s license in this country.  I love her style:

In 1979, at a Department of Transportation public hearing about the dangers faced by truck drivers, Baker angrily explained, “Isn’t it time we did some crash testing with trucks and dummies, rather than with drivers themselves?” Later, according to Baker, the trucking industry hired a researcher to try to discredit her driver-safety studies. Unable to uncover problems with her work, he eventually gave up and called to tell her about his assignment. [emphasis added]

Not everything is perfect with injury prevention studies, though.

In the mid-1970s, [Sam] Peltzman did research on highway fatalities that suggested that mandatory safety features like seat belts and padded dashboards actually encouraged people to drive less cautiously.

Tom Vanderbilt talked about that in “Traffic“, which is basically my favorite transportation book, even mentioning Mr. Peltzman. Flip to page 181 to read it. Vanderbilt lists all of the different labels for that behavior:

  • the Peltzman effect
  • risk homeostasis
  • risk compensation
  • offset hypothesis

He summarizes: “What they are saying, to crudely lump all of them together, is that we change our behavior in response to perceived risk, without even being aware that we are doing so”. But Sue has a response:

Baker acknowledges that there may be some individuals in cars with anti-lock brakes, for example, who may not apply the brakes as soon as they did with the old brakes. But she insists there is no evidence that better brakes or air bags have encouraged recklessness — that they have in fact saved many thousands of lives. “What concerns me,” she says, “is that these spurious arguments are used by companies to bolster their opposition to beneficial safety regulation.

I think it’s safe to say now that she’s a personal hero of mine. But way, there’s just one more thing!

As she talked about what still needed to be done, her voice was tinged with anger: “Buildings need to be designed so it’s not so easy to fall down stairs. All new homes should have sprinklers. Traffic lights should be timed for pedestrians, not to move as many cars as possible through an intersection.

Yep. Exactly what we don’t do. We make ’em wait. And wait. Without even telling people the traffic signal’s even acknowledged their presence.

More

Links between pedestrian safety and crime

October 25, 2012 / / 4 Comments

Chicago Pedestrian Plan

Safety item 20: Analyze the relationship between pedestrian safety and crime (download the plan)

The 2011 Chicago Pedestrian Crash Analysis identified a strong correlation between community areas with high numbers of pedestrian crashes and community areas with high crime rates. Correlation does not indicate causation and further study is necessary to understand this relationship and the potential broader benefits of pedestrian safety improvements. [From page 62 in the 2012 Chicago Pedestrian Plan.]

ACTIONS

Short Term

  • Identify and obtain funding for this study.
  • Identify a location for safety improvements and obtain data for the “before” conditions.

Mid Term

  • Design and implement pedestrian safety improvements.
  • Develop a pedestrian safety enforcement plan for the area for the duration of the project.
  • Analyze the effects on pedestrian safety and crime.

MILESTONES

  1. Initiate this study by 2013 and complete by 2015.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS). 2011. [I don’t fully see the connection, but this reference was linked to a page on NYC Department of Transportation’s website.]

Pedestrian Crash Analysis

The summary report didn’t contain the word “crime”. The technical report contained 2 mentions, with an additional chart. They are quoted in the ordered list below. Download the summary report.

  1. In an examination of various factors including crime, income, race, language spoken, and Walk Score®, the strongest correlation found was between pedestrian crashes and crime
  2. Finally, crime statistics were compared to pedestrian crashes to determine if a correlation could be identified, using data from the Chicago Police Department (CPD) annual reports for 2005 through 2009. The annual reports include incidences of crime by Chicago Community Area (CCA). The statistics for the years 2005 through 2009 were averaged and compared to the aver- age number of fatal and serious injury pedestrian crashes over the same time period in each CCA. Of these factors, crime was the only variable that correlated to pedestrian crashes. Figure 1 shows the correlation between crime and pedestrian crashes was very high. However, there may be many variables responsible for this correlation.
  3. Figure 1: Crime vs. Fatal and Serious Injury Pedestrian Crashes by Chicago Community Area

Figure 1.

I have a few criticisms of this analysis: it lacks raw data; the data tables included in the technical report are of limited length, listing only the “top” items of any metric; the summary report lists many silly factoids; the maps are low resolution and of a limited scale – their design could be modified to improve their usefulness in communicating the crash frequencies of the marked locations. The analysis is reliable.

The technical report includes the state’s guide on how police officers are trained to fill out a crash report form. It also includes relevant crash reporting laws in Illinois. Download the technical report.

Special post for S.M.

The new term for #robotcar journalism is COWARDD

October 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

#robotcar: A journalistic writing style that anthropomorphizes automobiles or hides the fact that a human was operating an automobile involved in a crash.

The new term:
COWARDD, or (C)hoosing (O)bscuring (W)ords (A)bsolves (R)esponsibility of (D)eadly (D)riving.

Thank you to Gary Kavanagh for devising it.

For examples of #robotcar, see these articles on Grid Chicago.

The seventh day wasn’t a day for rest, it was a day to sell bicycles

July 1, 2012 / / 0 Comments

You won’t find this chopper bike at any shop. Photo by Seth Anderson. 

A friend of mine works in a local bike shop (read: not a chain store, not a department store) so I get to hear stories about the kinds of bikes people bring in for repair, and when he sells someone a brand new, or new used bike. It’s cool to hear about people getting on bikes again, or replacing their own in decent condition with a new one that runs smoother and perhaps a little faster.

I sent my friend this text message today:

And on Day Seven, God created the local bike shop and said, “Get thine brothers and sisters on bicycles”.

I later added that it wasn’t God who created “Mart bikes” (the bikes sold at Target, Walmart, and other department stores with names like Magna and Roadmaster). Satan created these hunks of junk. Their main attraction is their $89 price with 1 penny shipping. But to make a bike that cheap, every corner has been cut. It will rust faster, break down faster, become disabled faster. Unfortunately, this is not intuitive or well-known to potential buyers of these machines.

And as my bike shop friend tells me, they usually cannot be fixed. They use proprietary parts, or will cost so much to fix, the person could get a used bike from the shop!

Other shortcomings of “Mart bikes”: no one is at the store to help find one the right size, or fit the brake levers, seat post height, or saddle angle to your body. Bikes are misassembled. My friend told me that a customer came in with a brand new “Mart bike” and asked the shop to make sure it was assembled correctly.

If you’re in Logan Square, I know some great bike shops: The Bike Lane (2130 N Milwaukee) and Boulevard Bikes (2535 N Kedzie).

N.B. I’d prefer that department stores don’t sell bicycles. I’ve thought of a few ways to change situation and ensure people ride quality bicycles that they enjoy. Riding a bicycle that later breaks down discourages some riders from correcting the issue, thus stopping them from riding a bike again. One of those ways is to hire a local bike shop to staff the bike department in the store on weekends (and sales would only occur on weekends). The staff would find the right bike for the buyer, and fit the bike to the buyer. Another idea is to ban certain kinds of stores from selling bicycles unless they meet certain requirements, like bikes were assembled by a certified bike mechanic.