Category: People

I am not your representative

May 3, 2012 / / 0 Comments

This guy showed up. Why didn’t you?

I’ve struggled inviting friends and peers to the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 public meetings and open houses. A couple of said something along the lines of “I don’t need to go if you’re going”.

That’s not my job.

My job is to tell you what happened. But you have to show up. You have to increase the numbers of people who are demanding changed streets. I am one person, with a blog. When I put my name on the sign-in sheet, or leave a comment, I am only signing my own name, not the names of my blog’s readers, or my friends and neighbors.

There are 4 more meetings. The draft network will be presented there. This is basically your last chance to affect what the final plan will say. What kinds of things will it say? It will make recommendations as to which type of bikeways will go where. Want a protected bike lane and road diet on Chicago Avenue, because there’s so much retail and services you want to visit, but people are driving too fast? Yeah, go to the meeting and make sure it’s on there.

These people showed up. Were you there? Photos are from the Sulzer Library event on February 1, 2012. 

My new favorite traffic crash impact analogy, as heard at a meeting about a road diet

April 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

At Wednesday night’s community meeting at the University of Chicago Alumni House (5555 S Woodlawn) in Hyde Park about a proposed road diet and installation of protected bike lanes on 55th Street, a resident spoke up and asked about possible negative bus and bicycle interactions in the shared space bus stops.

In the proposed street reconfiguration plan, bus stops remain at the curb. The protected bike lane is curbside as well. Where they overlap, an unprotected bike lane “occurs” around the space created for the bus stop.

He likened the interaction to this (which is paraphrased): “It doesn’t matter if a rock falls on a melon, or if a melon falls on a rock, the melon still cracks open”.

This city now runs on bikes and bees

April 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bicycling in Chicago is as much about having cheap transportation* as a thing to build new and maintain existing social relationships. And sometimes everything can come together in such an awesome way that you build a freakin’ business on the back of a bicycle.

I also posted about this on Grid Chicago.

Such is the case with many of my friends, including Jana Kinsman and Brandon Gobel. Jana created Bike-A-Bike and got several thousands of “startup” dollars via her Kickstarter. Brandon uses his sweet Bullitt to deliver odds and ends around town. And on April 3, 2012 (and other days), Brandon got to help Jana deliver beehives. They were empty that day but they went out on Wednesday, April 18, 2012, with real, live bees in his Bullitt’s aluminum box.

Here’s a 22 photo slideshow of the April 3 trip. Brandon sent me a bunch of photos from the April 18 trip and I’ll add those to the slideshow soon. Just come back in a day and they will be on this page, and on my Flickr.

You’ll find the bees buzzing in East Garfield Park and at The “Awesome” Plant (er, just The Plant) in Back of the Yards.

* I’ve seen a lot of polls ask, “Why do you bike?” and they always have answers I don’t care about. Like, “for fun”, or “for the environment”. Yeah, right. The most significant motivator for why people do anything is how much it costs them. Bicycling is cheap, nearly free. The bus is downright expensive compared to it, and driving a car everywhere (like 60 miles round trip to work) is personal economic suicide.

BikeLock app based on dataset I opened up

April 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bike parking at Daley Plaza, downtown Chicago. 

It’s really cool to see work you did “go places”. A friend of mine who works at Groupon just linked me to an iOS app called BikeLock that finds bike racks near you on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. It’s based on bike rack location data in the City of Chicago’s Data Portal. (The data on there is old, while the data in the public API I built is real time.)

Download it from the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The developer is Mike Jahn, another Groupon staffer. You can get the same information for free, though, on my mostly mobile-friendly Can I bring my bike on Metra? web app, and a website I made for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT).

A screenshot of the Can I bring my bike on Metra? bike rack finder website. 

That data comes straight from the Bike Parking Web Application I started developing in 2008 soon after I started working in the Chicago Bicycle Program. It was good that my supervisor had the same perspectives I did about open and transparent data and work. But it didn’t start like that; here’s the full story:

My first job at the Bicycle Parking Program was to deal with abandoned bikes, get them off the street. I was taught the existing method of keeping track of my work, but I used my programming skills (in PHP, MySQL, and with the Google Maps API) to develop a web application that tracked it faster and mapped out the abandoned bikes I had to visit and tag with a notice. I was using this for a few days or few weeks and then show my boss. His reaction was something like, “Great! Now make one for bike racks!”

Why? Well, let’s take this quote from Judy Baar Topinka, Illinois comptroller, speaking Tuesday about her office’s new website, The Ledger, which lists the state’s unpaid bills among other financial data.

“The object of the exercise is to make everything that we know of in the comptroller’s office public. If we know it, you’ll know it.” WBEZ

I made one for bike racks. I created two environments, one for private administration at the office (“Bike Parking Web Application”) and one for the public (“public interface”). A later feature I added to the public interface was the Advanced Search. This allows you to filter by Ward, Community Area, and Status. You can then choose your sorting method. A map will appear above the results. You can download the results as either an XLS file, and XLS file that’s designed to be imported in GIS programs (like QGIS), or a KML file.

I’m aware of just one other app that uses this data set: MassUp.us. I don’t know if MassUp uses the real-time API that my Metra bike rack finder uses.

The first raised crosswalk I’ve seen in Illinois

March 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The raised crosswalk, a view looking northeast, from the sidewalk. 

Forest Park was a client of mine in 2012 via my work for Active Transportation Alliance; they’re a technical consultant for cities that had grants from the Communities Putting Prevention to Work program. I visited the village with one of their staffers to identify great locations for bike racks (that also included advice on their existing rack inventory, and suggestions for exactly which models to buy).

We would drive around town and then stop and walk a lot. One place where we did a lot of walking was in their downtown, on Madison Street (the same Madison Street as in Chicago). I was pleasantly surprised that their signage reflected the “stop for pedestrians in crosswalk” law, replacing the now-irrelevant “yield for pedestrians in crosswalk” signs. And to top it off, they had talking and lighted signals at some of the crosswalks. I do not support any widespread installation of these: I think they help move our culture in a direction that perpetuates the low respect we have for pedestrians. I believe there are other ways to enforce driver compliance that do not require this kind of equipment.

Forest Park has installed one of those ways: it’s a raised crosswalk (also known as a speed table). It looks like a speed hump, but is much wider, has a flat top, and carries a marked crosswalk (see my article on Grid Chicago “What is an unmarked crosswalk?“). It causes drivers to slow down and has an added – subjective – benefit of intimating that the driver is entering a “protected space”, one for people on foot and that it should be respected. They bring the roadway up to the pedestrian’s level instead of dipping the sidewalk down to the driver’s level.

I don’t know of one in Chicago, but three guys are working to get several installed in a Logan Square traffic circle redesign.

Note: If you are interested in knowing exactly which models of bike racks to buy, learn more at Simple Bike Parking, or contact me directly. I may charge a fee.

The raised crosswalk as seen from a car moving westbound.