Writing about cities
What is Open Streets?
It’s when a street is closed to cars and transformed into a safe place for fun and recreation. Read more on Grid Chicago.
Filmed by Steven Vance while sitting on the cargo deck of a Larry vs. Harry Bullitt, John Player Spezial. Cycling by Brandon Gobel, Bullitt owner.
Filmed with a handheld Sony DSC-HX5V. Edited with Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.
Common bike-car crash locations in West Town. The bottom blue circle identifies Ogden/Milwaukee, where there is a yellow trap for northbound, left-turning motorists (from Milwaukee to Ogden) that makes them run into southbound bicyclists who have a green light.
My contribution to a discussion on The Chainlink, Are protected bike lanes going in the right places?
Kelvin, Milwaukee/Ogden/Chicago is the intersection along Milwaukee Avenue with the highest number of bicycle crashes. I created this table and map to show them, using data from 2007-2009.
The blue rings on the map are called, in GIS parlance, “buffers” and are circles used to select things (in this case, bike crashes) within a certain distance of the circle center. In this map I used 50 feet radius buffers (100 feet diameter). While this distance encompasses the intersection from center to all four curbs, it doesn’t encompass the crashes that happened just outside the buffer that were still most likely influenced by the intersection (like drivers’ turning movements).
I am working on a project with three friends to create a better map and “crash browser”. I mentioned it in the last story on Grid Chicago in this post. For this project, we are using 200 feet radius (400 feet diameter) buffers to ensure we encompass the entire intersection and the area in which it still has an effect. This also grabs the bike lane “pinch points”, places where a bike lane doesn’t start until 100-200 feet beyond the intersection.
I am also concerned with the strategy and approach CDOT is using to choose locations. It’s not transparent; at MBAC, CDOT said they were choosing locations “without controversy and that could be implemented quickly”.
Read more about Kinzie Street, Chicago’s first protected bike lane, and my other thoughts on protected bike lanes.
Updated September 30, 2011: The ordinance never got on the Committee on Health and Environmental Protection’s agenda for September. So my fingers are crossed for the October meeting.
Clean power advocates march in Pilsen on Saturday, September 24, 2011. Photo by Ryan Williams.
Instead of voting on the Clean Power Ordinance on September 8, 2011, the Committee on Committees, Ethics and Rules “re-referred” it to the Committee on Health and Environmental Protection. This is a companion post to Rollin’ beyond coal, on Grid Chicago.
What the Clean Power Ordinance is
It sets emissions standards for coal-powered plants in Chicago. It applies modern standards about air pollution, as they apply to coal and natural gas power plants, to any coal-powered plant in Chicago.
The Chicago Clean Power Coalition has a summary of the ordinance.
Why this is needed
Residents of Pilsen, Little Village, Bridgeport and other communities (pollution has no boundary) have suffered for decades from the release of carbon dioxide, mercury, lead, hydrochloric acid and other chemicals into the air. Read the Toxics Release Inventory for the Fisk Generating Station.
A large portion of the population is 18 and younger; this portion is growing. Pollution has a greater negative effect on young people.
The Fisk and Crawford power plants, owned by Midwest Generation, a subsidiary of Edison International, were grandfathered in to the Clean Air Act of 1970. That means the standards imposed by that legislation don’t apply.
The ordinance’s “Whereas” clause lists six studies that define the effects of certain levels of particulate matter (better known as soot) on human disease, mortality, and life expectancy. A 2002 Harvard study (PDF) that found the power plants combined caused 41 premature deaths per year.
What else
It appears that Alderman JoAnn Thompson, 16th Ward, is no longer a co-sponsor. The Chicago Clean Power Coalition lists her as a co-sponsor as of August 12, 2011, but on the ordinance document (ordinance number O2011-6489) published on the City Clerk’s website, her name is missing.
Midwest Generation, or one of its sister companies, Edison Mission Energy, is known to have lobbied the City Council, the Mayor’s Office, and the Department of Environment in 2010. “Midwest Generation officials said the ordinance is not needed because they already have started to comply with federal standards that will significantly cut pollution at their plants” (Chicago Tribune). The company also claims that a shutdown of the plant will harm electricity supply in Chicago. On that:
Chicago doesn’t actually need the electricity from the plants, though if the plants go offline before ongoing upgrades to local transmission infrastructure are completed it could cause instability on the grid including possible blackouts, according to a spokesman for the utility ComEd. (Midwest Energy News)
Alderman Solis (25th Ward) joined Alderman Joe Moore (49th Ward) during the election time this year as a lead sponsor, to help save his seat on the council in a fight with Cuahetemoc “Témoc” Morfin.
What’s next
Since the Committee on Committees, Ethics and Rules (CCER) “re-referred” it to the Committee on Health and Environmental Protection (CHEP), the members of CHEP, 18 of which are also on CCER, must discuss the ordinance. Oddly, CHEP did not place on its agenda for their Tuesday, September 27, 2011, meeting a consideration of the ordinance. After discussion, the committee can recommend that the full council vote on it. If the council passes it, Mayor Emanuel can sign or veto it.
In July, Mayor Emanuel talked about his support for the ordinance but didn’t go so far as to endorse it.
It is now possible to upload a shapefile (and its companion files SHX, PRJ, and DBF) to Google Fusion Tables (GFT).
Before we go any further, keep in mind that the application that does this will only process 100,000 rows. Additionally, GFT only gives each user 200 MB of storage (and they don’t tell you your current status, that I can see).
Sample Data
If you’re looking to give this a try and see results quickly, try some sample data from the City of Chicago data portal:
Notes
I had trouble many times while using Shape to Fusion in that after I chose the file to upload and clicked Upload, I had to grant access to the web application again and start over (choose the file and click Upload a second time).
Centroid Geometry – This creates a column with the geographic coordinates of the centroid in a polygon. It lists it in the original projection system. So if your projection is in feet, the value will be in feet. This is a function that can easily be performed in free and open source QGIS, where you can also reproject files to get latitude and longitude values (in WGS84 project, EPSG 4326). The centroid value is surrounded in the field by KML syntax “<Point><coordinates>X,Y</coordinates></Point>”.
Simplified Geometry – A geometry column is automatically created by the web application (or GFT, I’m not sure). This function will create a simpler version of that geometry, with fewer lines and vertices. It also creates columns to list the vertices count for the simple and regular geometry columns.
A lot of people ask me how many people are out there bicycling.
“Not a lot”, I tell them.
And I explain why: the primary source of data is the American Community Survey, which is a questionnaire that asks people questions about how they got to work in a specific week. (More details on how it does this below.) We don’t have data, except in rare “Household Travel Surveys”, about trips by bike to school, shopping, and social activities.
It’s comparable across the country – you can get this data for any city.
Here’s how: