Category: Places and Spaces

Where I went in 2009 through 2011

March 24, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I think my trip to San Francisco this past weekend for visiting friends and Transportation Camp West winds up over a year of domestic and international travel. This post links you to all the recap entries and Flickr photo galleries for the awesome cities I traveled to, rode the train in, and biked through.

2009

September

December

Approximate 2009 travel distance: 3,792 miles*

2010

April

August

September

November

December

Approximate 2010 travel distance: 17,515 miles (does not include intercity train trips)*

2011

January

March

May

August

September

Approximate 2011 travel distance: 8,271 miles (does not include intercity train trips and one car trip)*

*Travel distances exclude biking, walking, and trips on transit.

Milwaukee Avenue versus Elston Avenue

March 9, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I moved to Avondale (north of Logan Square) in the final weekend of January 2011. I didn’t want to abandon Bridgeport but I didn’t want to find a new roommate and a great opportunity opened up. I miss Bridgeport.

So now my daily riding to friends’ houses, bars, clubs, UIC, or the library, happens most often on Milwaukee Avenue. Both are diagonal streets but I live 1.6 kilometers from Milwaukee Avenue and 350 meters from Elston Avenue. To be more efficient, I should more often ride on Elston Avenue.

So why do I prefer Milwaukee Avenue? In response to a thread on The Chainlink, “Milwaukee v. Elston,” I posted a photo essay with each photo documenting and describing problems that collectively are unique to Elston Avenue. The series starts with a photo of the Ashland/Elston/Armitage intersection and moves northbound through the Elston Avenue Strip Mall Zoo* ending at Diversey and Western Avenues.

Riding through this intersection is like being a gazelle in a savannah with hungry lions. At least for 340 feet. There are so many opportunities to get hit by a car, especially going northbound right before reaching Ashland Avenue (not pictured).

View the rest of the photos in “Why I don’t like riding on Elston.”

*Strip malls are terrible urban design. They’re inhospitable to everyone, even those who drive. At some point every visitor will be walking through a parking lot to get to the front door, risking life and limb, breathing fumes, and walking through leaked automobile oil.

Afterword: The Chicago bike crash map shows few crashes on Elston Avenue relative to Milwaukee Avenue. But the number of people cycling on Elston Avenue is unknown – we cannot make a comparison.

Weighting people’s experiences in route choice

March 6, 2011 / / 0 Comments

An iPhone app is not a substitute for a paper map*, good signage on your bikeway network, or someone just telling you, “Turn right on Church, right on Chambers, left on Reade” to get to the bike shop where you left your water bottle.

At the bike shop I asked about how to get to the Williamsburg bridge so I could go “home” to Brooklyn. After looking at the map, he said, “Oh, take Grand.” -He then told me how to get to Grand.

The Williamsburg bridge. I took this one even though the Manhattan bridge was probably closer to my “home” because I hadn’t yet ridden on it!

I did. It worked. It was excellent. I even passed by the Doughnut Plant (which I had forgotten about visiting).

Doughnut Plant makes really tasty donuts. I wouldn’t get them too often, though, because each one costs $3.

Not only did I receive a “tried and true” route suggestion, I got it faster than any automated route devising device would have generated one.

Each month I’m asked by people how to get somewhere in Chicago. We have so many resources these days but we often still rely on the spoken interaction to get us to our destination.

*I’ve read or heard people suggest that “someone should make” an app that puts the bike map on their smartphone. I don’t think this app would be very useful or easy to use. But a paper map is both – and almost always free.

You asked for it, you got it – Chicago bike count data

February 25, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Note: This post doesn’t have any analysis of the data or report, nor do I make any observations. I think it’s more significant to hear the ideas you have about what you see in the map or read in the data.

A lot of people wanted the Chicago bike crash and injury data overlaid with bike counts data.

In 2009, Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) placed automatic bike counting equipment at many locations around the city. It uses pneumatic tubes to count the number of bicyclists (excludes cars) at that point in the street – it counts ALL trips, and cannot distinguish between people going to work or going to school. This is dissimilar from Census data which asks respondents to indicate how they go to work.

Well, good news for you! CDOT today released the bike counts report from data collected in 2009 (just in time). There has been overwhelming response about the bike crash map I published – this shows how rabid the public is for information on their environments (just yesterday someone told me that they switched bike routes based on the crash frequency they noticed on their original route).

The size of the blue dot indicates the bicycle mode share for that count location. Mode share calculated by adding bikes and cars and dividing by bikes.

Get the data

A photo of the EcoCounter counting machine in action on Milwaukee Avenue (this was taken during testing phase, where CDOT compared automatic and manual counts to determine the machine’s accuracy).

How to use this map:

  1. Find a blue dot (count location) in an area you’re interested in.
  2. Zoom into that blue dot.
  3. Click on the blue dot to get the number of bikes counted there.
  4. Then observe the number of purple dots (crashes) near that count location.

What do you see that’s interesting?

What else is coming?

Now let’s hope the Active Transportation Alliance and the Chicago Park District release their Lakefront Trail counts from summer 2010. CDOT may have conducted bicycle counts in 2010 as well – I hope we don’t have to wait as long for that data.

I hope to have a tutorial on how to use GeoCommons coming soon. You should bug me about it if I don’t post it within one week.

Photos of Chicago bike commuters by Joshua Koonce.

Photos from Milan, Italy

February 20, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I was in Milan on two separate days. The first for an hour while I waited for my train to Como after arriving from Rome. The second I spent eight hours there, walking around the castle, park, neighborhoods, and the Duomo. View the entire photo set.

Milano Centrale, the main train station, northeast of Piazza Duomo (I guess you would call this the “old center”). Grandi Stazioni is a company charged with “upgrading, valorizing and managing Italy’s 13 largest railway stations.”

On some of the pedestrian bridges in Parco Sempione, couples attach locks to signify their love. You may have zoom in on the photo to see the locks attached to mermaid’s “staff.” Here’s a closer view.

I brought my camera into the museum, Pinacoteca di Brera. This worker was busy restoring artwork.

In many places in Milan, the trams had segregated right-of-way. I think it looks beautiful when trains run over and through separated, landscaped corridors. See a smaller tram (one car) outside the Milano Centrale train station.

If the roof is open, go up! You get some nice views of the Piazza below, as well as the always-there crowds and the Galleria. You can also get a closer view of the cathedral buttresses.

Coming from Chicago, I don’t have access to protected or separated bike lanes. And I was surprised to see them in Milan! But I shouldn’t have been surprised, because most cities in Europe have them.