Category: Chicago

The United States uses way too much text for regulatory traffic signs

September 19, 2012 / / 21 Comments

Look at these two signs in Berlin (right outside the American embassy). They’re universal across the European Union – and probably in adjacent non-EU countries. The upper one means “yield” and the lower one with the white arrow means “compulsory right turn”. In the United States, there are several signs that mean the same thing. The simplest one we have comes in two forms: symbol and text. That makes two different signs, but there’s a third one. It’s also a text sign but has extra words!

American symbol sign (actually a symbol with text): The sign has an arrow pointing in an upward curve toward the right and the word “only”. Photo by Joseph Dennis. 

Yet there is no need to mix a symbol and a word, as both parts of the message (“right turn” and “only maneuver you can make here”) can be communicated with symbols. In the EU, the right turn sign has two states, both depicted by symbols: off and on. Off meaning you cannot turn right there and is depicted with an arrow pointing right, on a white background, circumscribed with a red circle. The “on” version means you must turn right there and is depicted with an arrow pointing right, on a blue background. (It would be pointless to have a sign saying you can turn right somewhere.)

The next sign is the text-only version of the “right turn only” sign.

American text sign: The sign says “right turn only”. Photo by Michael Jantzen. 

And then there’s the most ridiculous one, “right lane must turn right”. In many places, Chicago included, bikes and buses are excepted.

A group of people protest the stupidity of this sign design. I mean, a bunch of Tea Partiers protest our socialist road system. Or something. Photo by Susan Adams. 

All of the signs depicted above mean the same thing! Why have we developed four unique ways to communicate a single meaning?

While I’m on the subject of right turns, here’re two signs in San Francisco, on Market Street at Octavia Boulevard. Octavia is the end of the Central Freeway, so people driving here are in the mindset of fast highway driving. Cars cannot be turned right here and bicyclists are warned to look out for people making illegal right turns. In other words, “Beware car drivers who break the law”.

Photo of “right turn prohibited” symbol sign and “[bikes] watch for prohibited right turns” text sign by Adam Fritzler. 

How to split a bike lane in two and copy features with QGIS

July 13, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A screenshot of the splash image seen on users with iPad retina displays in landscape mode. 

To make the Chicago Offline Bike Map, I need bikeways data. I got this from the City of Chicago’s data portal, in GIS shapefile format. It has a good attribute table listing the name of the street the bikeway is on and the bikeway’s class (see below). After several bike lanes had been installed, I asked the City’s data portal operators for an updated shapefile. I got it a month later and found that it wasn’t up-to-date. I probably could have received a shapefile with the current bikeway installations marked, but I didn’t have time to wait: every day delayed was one more day I couldn’t promote my app; I make 70 cents per sale.

Since the bikeway lines were already there, I could simply reclassify the sections that had been changed to an upgraded form of bikeway (for example, Wabash Avenue went from a door zone-style bike lane to a buffered bike lane in 2011). I tried to do this but ran into trouble when the line segment was longer than the bikeway segment that needed to be reclassified (for example, Elston Avenue has varying classifications from Milwaukee Avenue to North Avenue that didn’t match the line segments for that street). I had to divide the bikeway into shorter segments and reclassify them individually.

Enter the Split Features tool. QGIS is short on documentation and I had trouble using this feature. I eventually found the trick after a search that took more time than I expected. Here’s how to cut a line:

  1. Select the line using one of the selection tools. I prefer the default one, Select Features, where you have to click on the feature one-by-one. (It’s not required that you select the line, but doing so will ensure you only cut the selected line. If you don’t select the line, you can cut many lines in one go.)
  2. Toggle editing on the layer that contains the line you want to cut.
  3. Click Edit>Split Features to activate that tool, or find its icon in one the toolbars (which may or may not be shown).
  4. Click once near where you want to split the line.
  5. Move the cursor across the line you want to split, in the desired split location.
  6. When the red line indicating your split is where you desire, press the right-click mouse button.

Your line segment has now been split. A new entry has been added to the attribute table. There are now two entries with duplicate attributes representing that together make up the original line segment, before you split it.

This screenshot shows a red line across a road. The red line indicates where the road will be split. Press the right-click mouse button to tell QGIS to “split now”.

After splitting, open the attribute table to see that you now have two features with identical attributes. 

Copying features in QGIS

A second issue I had when creating new bikeways data was when a bikeway didn’t exist and I couldn’t reclassify it. This was the case on Franklin Boulevard: no bikeway had ever been installed there. I solved this problem by copying the relevant street segments from the Transportation (roads) shapefile and pasted them into the bikeways shapefile. New entries were created in the attribute table but with blank attributes. It was simple to fill in the street name, class, and extents.

Chicago bikeways GIS description

Bikeway classes (TYPE in the dataset) in the City of Chicago data portal are:

  1. Existing bike lane
  2. Existing marked shared lane
  3. Proposed on-street bikeway
  4. Recommended bike route
  5. Existing trail
  6. Proposed off-street trail
  7. Access path (to existing trail)
  8. Existing cycle track (also known as protected bike lane)
  9. Existing buffered bike lane

It remains to be seen if the City will identify the “enhanced marked shared lane” on Wells Street between Wacker Drive and Van Buren street differently than “existing marked shared lane” in the data.

I found the Milwaukee Avenue peloton this morning

July 12, 2012 / / 0 Comments

You can spot at least 10 people bicycling southbound on Milwaukee Avenue through Bucktown. 

I work from home and don’t commute downtown like I believe a majority of cycle commuters do. I was bicycling towards the Wicker Park-Bucktown Chamber of Commerce office for an 8:30 AM meeting of the Special Service Area’s transportation committee. We talked about bike racks, street furniture, and the progress of Open Streets. We partnered with Active Transportation Alliance to put that on, September 16, a Sunday and the week after Open Streets on State Street.

Pride Parade 2012: Easier on transportation system over last year

June 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bodhi Spiritual Center says, “You are fabulous”. 

After last year’s near-meltown of transportation surrounding post-parade trips, parade organizers, aldermen, and the city redesigns the parade route, to make it longer and eliminate the hard to access “internal triangle” between Halsted and Broadway (with a vertex at Grace/Halsted/Broadway). The meltdown was that thousands of people tried to board at the CTA Belmont Station. The station stopped allowing new passengers 5 times to ease overcrowding. I can’t recall if trains had to skip the station because they were full.

The new design allowed for better access from more CTA train stations, more bus routes, and allowed for more even spectator dispersal along the route (with 6 pedestrian crossings operated by many police officers). The CTA, which is usually very good at communicating service changes, made a webpage dedicated to the Pride Parade and even designed their own map. That and their social media communication stressed the other stations paradeogers should use: Wilson, Sheridan, Addison, and Fullerton. That was in addition to the other bus routes that now had closer access to the changed route.

I wrote about the 2011 transportation experience on Grid Chicago in which I suggested shutting down private vehicle traffic on more streets and further away from the parade route, allowing only buses and bicyclists. I couldn’t tell if that happened this year. Last year I entered the parade “shed” on Belmont and then Addison. All east-west streets it seemed were closed to traffic from Clark Street to Halsted Street (which is a good thing). Clark Street was closed this year for a couple of blocks south of Diversey Avenue (also a good thing).

Chicago Fire Department miniature trucks. 

I didn’t notice these last year, but the fire department utilized ATV-like trucks to transport sick spectators. I didn’t see any Chicago police officers riding ATVs, but I may have read the department abandoned those because of their increased danger on crowds and the officer driving it.

I think the route changes were effective in making for a better (and safer) parade experience. Organizers and the City’s OEMC estimated attendance at 850,000, just 50,000 over last year. Because of the changes and the great weather (it was very breezy), I expected a higher increase. Some people who attended last year may have been turned off by the unease of the crowded viewing experience.

The Chicago Fire Department has one of the least useful Twitter feeds, but sometimes it’s hilarious

June 21, 2012 / / 0 Comments

20 minutes ago, when the Twitter outage probably corrected itself, the Chicago Fire Department’s Office of News Affair tweeted three photos, without comment. I’ve posted them in reverse order.

Tweet 3

The third photo (above) shows a BMW X5 SUV on top of a Jaguar sedan and Mercedes E320 sedan in a multi-level parking garage. The parking garage appears to be a split-level, and it seems the BMW SUV was moved forward from an upper level to the tops of these cars, which you can see in the second photo (below).

Tweet 2

Tweet 1

The photos appear to have been taken with a cellphone, using the flash. The license plates are obscured by their reflection of the flash. The car broke through the cables leading me to ask two questions: What is the level of tension on the cables? How fast did the car travel?

The @CFDMedia account is often cryptic. The Chicago Sun-Times provided more information an hour later:

A 74-year-old man driving a 2012 BMW X5 crashed through cable barriers separating two levels of a Loop parking garage Thursday — and his SUV came to a stop atop a 2005 Jaguar and a 2003 Mercedes-Benz parked on the level beneath him, police said.

Police cited the 74-year-old with driving too fast for conditions.

Updated 16:18 to add a report from the Chicago Sun-Times.