Category: Chicago

Talking about a pedestrian street for Peoria Street on Vocalo

March 1, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Click on the rendering to enlarge and learn about the main features. 

Ryan Lakes and I took our Peoria Street pedestrian street proposal to the masses by speaking to Molly Adams and Brian Babylon on Tuesday morning’s Morning AMp show on Vocalo, FM89.5

Listen (or download) to the 15 minute interview on SoundCloud. 

What is the Peoria Street pedestrian street?

We propose creating a gateway connection between the University of Illinois at Chicago’s east campus and the West Loop neighborhood over the Peoria Street bridge by nearly eliminating car traffic, completely eliminating parking, removing curbs, and adding amenities to make this a place to go to instead of through.

The Peoria Street bridge over I-290/Eisenhower expressway, between Van Buren and Harrison Streets, was closed to car traffic in 1965 when a new entrance for the CTA station opened. This entrance of the UIC-Halsted Blue Line station is by far the most used access point to the busy station, as it’s the closest to campus buildings. In fact, according to a CTA letter to IDOT, “weekday passenger volumes at this station entrance exceed 11 of the other 12 total station passenger volumes at the other stops on the Forest Park Blue Line branch”.

The UIC Campus Master Plan of 2010 calls for creating a gateway at this place, and the Illinois Department of Transportation is proposing to rebuild this bridge as part of its Circle Interchange project. The bridge should rebuilt to accommodate a pedestrian street. However, rebuilding isn’t necessary and our proposal can be implemented in situ.

Ryan Lakes with Vocalo producer and cohost Molly Adams at the Vocalo studio in the WBEZ studio. 

Updated March 20 to bring the chronology of events up-to-date. 

How many miles of roads are in your ward?

February 27, 2013 / / 10 Comments

Screenshot 1: Showing how some streets are not being counted. There should be a yellow section of road between the two existing yellow road sections. 

A friend recently asked me how many blocks of road are in his ward. He wanted to know so that he could measure how many blocks of streets would have an older style of street lighting after X number of blocks receive the new style of street lighting. For this project, I used two datasets from Chicago’s open data portal: street center lines and wards. The output data is not very accurate as there may be some overlap and some uncounted street segments; this is likely due to a shortcoming in my process. I will show you how to find the number of blocks per ward using QGIS (download Quantum GIS, a free program for all OSes).

Here’s how I did it

  1. Load in the two datasets. Wards and street center lines (zipped shapefiles). They are projected in EPSG:3435.
  2. Exclude several road classifications in the street center lines by querying only for "CLASS" > '1' AND "CLASS" < '5'. The data dictionary for the road classifications is at the end. We don’t want the river, sidewalks, expressways, and any ramps to be included in the blocks per ward analysis.
  3. Intersect. In QGIS, select Vector>Geoprocessing Tools>Intersect. The input vector layer is “Transportation” (the name of the street center lines dataset) and the intersect layer is “Wards”. Save the resulting shapefile as “streets intersect wards”. Click OK. This will take a while.
  4. Add the “streets intersect wards” shapefile to the table of contents.
  5. You’ll notice some of the issues with the resulting shapefile: missing street segments (see screenshot 1). What should QGIS do if a street is a ward boundary?
  6. Obtain street length information, part 1. Remove all the columns in the “streets intersect wards” shapefile that have something to do with geometry. These are now outdated and will confuse you when you add a geometry column generated by QGIS.
  7. Obtain street length information, part 2. With the “streets intersect wards” shapefile selected in the table of contents, select Vector>Geometry Tools>Export/Add geometry columns. Select “streets intersect wards” shapefile as your input layer, leave CRS as “Layer CRS” and save as new shapefile “streets intersect wards geom”.
  8. Add the “streets intersect wards geom” shapefile to the table of contents.
  9. You will see a new column at the end of the attribute table called LENGTH. Since the data is projected in EPSG:3435 (Illinois StatePlane NAD83 East Feet), the unit is feet.
  10. Simply export “streets intersect wards geom” to a CSV file and open the CSV file in a spreadsheet application. From there you can group the data by Ward number and add the street lengths together. (I thought it would be faster to do this in a database so I imported it into a localhost MySQL database and ran a simple query, SELECT wardNum, sum(`chistreets_classes234`.`LENGTH`) as sum FROM chistreets_classes234 WHERE ward > 0 group by wardNum. I then exported this to a spreadsheet to convert feet to miles.)

Because of the errors described in step 5, you shouldn’t use this analysis for any application where accuracy is important. There are road lengths missing in the output dataset (table with street lengths summed by ward) and I cannot tell if the inaccuracy is equally distributed.

[table id=7 /]

Wards 19 (south side) and 41 (Norwood Park, including O’Hare airport) have the highest portion of street length in the city.

Screenshot 2: Ward 41 is seen. 

Street data dictionary

Column is “CLASS”. The value is a string. This dataset lacks alleys. Adapted from the City’s data dictionary.

1. Expressway

2. Arterials (1 mile grid, no diagonals)

3. Collectors (includes diagonals)

4. Other streets (side streets, neighborhood streets)

5. Named alleys (mostly downtown, like Couch Place and Garland Place)

7. Tiered (lower level streets, including LaSalle, Michigan, Columbus, and Wacker)

9. Ramps (goes along with expressway)

E. Extent (not sure how to describe these; includes riverwalk and lake walk segments, and Navy Pier, also includes some streets, like Mies van der Rohe Way)

RIV. River

S. Sidewalk

99. Unclassified

I need a visualization tip for showing pedestrian and auto traffic in downtown Chicago

January 30, 2013 / / 34 Comments

Madison Street over the Chicago River. Pedestrian traffic is very high, and very constrained, near the Metra stations.

Here’s the goal:

Show that pedestrians don’t get sufficient space or time to have a high quality pedestrian experience given that they comprise the largest mode share on streets in the Loop. The trips are highly delayed at traffic signals, pedestrian space is encroached upon because of automobile turning movements, and the sidewalks aren’t wide enough for two-way or even one-way traffic at certain times of the day. It’s possible to build our way out of pedestrian traffic…

Here’s an example data set:

On October 3, 2006, for all of the 24 hours, at 410 W Madison Street, there were 17,100 automobiles counted.

On some day in summer 2007, for 10 hours, at 350 W Madison Street, there were 43,987 pedestrians counted.

The two locations are practically the same as the bridge here prevents more pedestrians or automobiles from “slipping in”.

It’s possible to download the data sets from CDOT’s Traffic Tracker so you can see the whole city on your own map, but you’ll have to do some digging in the source code to find them.

Destination streets are rarely the best places to bike

January 29, 2013 / / 22 Comments

This family took to riding on the sidewalk of Division Street instead of in the bike lane. They’re riding the stylish workhorse WorkCycles Fr8. Once I saw them riding the blue one, I had to get a different color. 

My friend Calvin Brown, a circumstantial urban planner, is always giving me Jane Jacobs-style observations about how citizens use their cities.

“Destination streets are the ones I avoid biking on because there’s so much car traffic there. Traffic must be balanced between streets that are good for biking and ones that aren’t currently good.”

In other words, because it’s a destination street (a place where there are a lot of retail outlets, venues, points of interest) it induces a lot of car traffic. Lots of car traffic discourages people from riding bikes, and makes it difficult for those who already are.

To me, a great example of this is Division Street. There’s a bike lane there from Ashland to California Avenues, and has tons (tons!) of restaurants and some night clubs. Yet that causes a lot of taxi traffic, people driving their own cars, looking for parking, jutting into the bike lane to see why traffic is going slow or backed up (um, because there are ton of cars!), and valet and delivery drivers blocking the bike lane.

It’s exactly this traffic, though, that keeps these places vibrant, desirable, and healthy (from an economic standpoint). The solution for bicycling is easy: swap the car parking with the bike lane so that bicycling isn’t affected by a majority of the aforementioned traffic maneuvers.

Calvin’s “destination streets” examples were Grand Avenue and Chicago Avenue. Neither has bike lanes, and both have 2 travel lanes in each direction. Grand has destinations from Racine Avenue to Ashland Avenue and Chicago has destinations from Ada Street to Western Avenue. I’d wager that if you narrowed those roadways by installing a protected bike lane you’d get slower traffic and higher business receipts.

Chicago Avenue at Hoyne Avenue is a particularly stupid part of Chicago Avenue: The Chicago Department of Transportation installed a pedestrian refuge island here. After several years and at least 4 replaced signs due to collisions of automobiles with it, the design hasn’t been modified. The island in and of itself did not change the speed of those who drive here, as the roadway’s width remained static.

I wish I wrote a blog about food trucks sometimes: Chicago has made it really difficult for expansion

January 6, 2013 / / 0 Comments

The Flirty Cupcakes food truck. Photo by Andrew Huff. 

Most of my time (because it’s actually my job) is to blog about transportation. This blog is about cities, and cities are about food trucks, so I guess it’s fine. I neither own a food truck, nor patronize them, but I’m fascinated by the process of how city administrations are handling them, whether through some kind of indifference or making regulations that seem only to make running a food truck more difficult than it should be.

At a “mobile food summit” at the University of Chicago in the spring of 2012, I learned from the sponsor Institute for Justice that they were suing cities for passing unconstitutional laws that regulated business not for health and public safety, their duty, but to protect the economic well-being of other businesses. Based on that knowledge, Chicago did this with the food truck ordinance from July 2012.

The Chicago Tribune reports today, in summary form, the current status of this regulation (here’s the full article):

No city licenses for food trucks

The city hasn’t licensed a single food truck for onboard cooking since the practice was approved in July. Some food truck operators say they’re scared off by the extensive red tape they foresee in the application process. Of the 109 entrepreneurs who have applied for Mobile Food Preparer licenses, none has met the city’s requirements.

I looked this up to know more and I found short commentary on Reason magazine’s blog:

The City of the Big Shoulders is hungry. And 109 entreprising folks want to help feed it. Too bad they’re not allowed to.

For example, the Tribune interviewed proprietors, one of whom said, “While most of its provisions are similar to those in other major cities, [Gabriel] Wiesen said, Chicago’s code includes rules on ventilation and gas line equipment that “are meetable but extremely cumbersome and can raise the price of outfitting a truck by $10,000 to $20,000.”

The bit about the regulation possibly being unconstitutional is that the food trucks with this license (which allows them to cook on the truck) must have a GPS device recording their position during retail hours and cannot operate within 200 feet of a brick-and-mortar restaurant (except in designated mobile food truck loading zones, for a maximum of two hours). Restricting where and when a food preparation business can operate is the tricky part: the city doesn’t regulate this for brick-and-mortar restaurants (except for zoning, which is much more lax and is intended to keep incompatible land uses away from each other).