Category: Cities

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.

TV shows can’t fool me with their inaccurate train portrayals

January 14, 2013 / / 14 Comments

I have an idea. I have a TV show that takes place in New York City. I need to film a scene on the subway. So I use the closest subway… Los Angeles Metro.

Oh, and I’ll place “NYC Subway” signs on the walls (replete with graffiti).

No one will see the red stripes all over the place indicating this is the Red Line.

When you live in those cities, or you’re just enough of a railfan to see the difference, it becomes annoying and makes you despise the TV show you like.

On this particular show, they show footage actually taken in New York City to show the subway entrance. Some stock footage I guess.

That show was “Don’t Trust the B**** in Apt. 23“. The other filmed product that got it all wrong was “The Bourne Legacy”. It partially takes place in some bastardization of Chicago. In this movie, which stars Jeremy Renner instead of Matt Damon, the director depicted the Chicago ‘L’ while showing footage of a New York City elevated train. How could one tell? Nowhere in Chicago are there two parallel tracks, with one above the other. Nor are the elevated tracks that high above the street, nor do they use curved elevated columns. This happens about 50 minutes in. Immediately before this fake scene is shown, you’ll see aerial footage of the real Chicago ‘L’. This lasts for 4 seconds.

Real Chicago ‘L’.

Stand-in Chicago ‘L’. 

I don’t want to call this “disingenuous” (but I think it is) and TV show producers aren’t required to film exactly where they portray; these “stand ins” are probably for budgetary reasons. I don’t think it harms a city’s brand or image. I just get annoyed: the show becomes less believable. Maybe I know too much about cities.

Film crews get tax breaks in lots of cities and states in the United States and Canada. If I were the city’s film office manager, or the city’s lobbyist or brand manager, I’d want it to be portrayed accurately.