Category: Transportation

Where does this road diet rule come from?

April 17, 2013 / / 14 Comments

55th Street road diet from summer 2012. This is the best road diet photo I’ve got. Traffic counts here indicate 15,700 cars daily (based on a single day of measurement in 2006).

“Roadways with Average Daily Traffic (ADT) of 20,000 or less may be good candidates for a road diet and should be evaluated for feasibility”, via FHWA. The documents – here’s the second one – I’ve found so far on FHWA’s website don’t explain the research behind this assumption. How should a road be evaluated for feasibility? The second one bases review of a street on crash type, severity, and rate.

View 4600 W Foster Avenue in a larger map. Alderman Laurino is correct in her description of how many lanes are here. The road is only striped for 1 lane in each direction.

This concerns me because CDOT seems to have adopted this as a policy. They are using it as a reason to not consider a road diet on Foster Avenue. However, though, Foster Avenue between Pulaski Road and the Edens Expressway has only “1 and a half lanes” in each direction, according to local Alderman Marge Laurino of the 39th Ward (see John Greenfield’s interview below, which is an expanded version of one published on Grid Chicago in two parts).

Interview

Greenfield: Where in your ward would you like to see speed cameras installed?

Laurino: Well right now I don’t know that we have locations that would fit some of the criteria that we’re looking at. Currently I think the ones that they’re putting in are going to be where there have been pedestrian fatalities and I don’t know that I have anything that fits that really strict criteria but I would… Just a suggestion, Foster Avenue in front of Gompers Park. I mean it’s often times an area where cars really speed because for whatever reason, where there are no homes and that and it’s just wide-open parkland people just seem to hit the accelerator. I don’t know why that it but it appears to be the case.

JG: Is that a long stretch with no stoplights?

ML: From Pulaski to Cicero it’s a long stretch and it’s not one lane. I want to call it one-and-a-half lanes. There really shouldn’t be two lanes of traffic going in one direction but they seem to squeeze that in. So anyway that might be a potential place for a camera. We’re also looking at something called a road diet, where we just, through paint markings and paint striping, make the street narrower. That would be on Foster Avenue, let’s say between central Park and Cicero.

JG: Is there any talk of putting in bike lanes there to take up the extra space?

ML: No, for whatever reason it doesn’t fit their criteria.

What people will say when Ventra comes out

March 20, 2013 / / 20 Comments

Ventra is not a replacement for the Chicago Card and Chicago Card Plus. It’s a single card that replaces the following fare media*:

  • Transit Card (pay per ride)
  • 1-day pass
  • 3-day pass
  • 7-day pass
  • 30-day pass
  • 30-day reduced fare pass for seniors 65+ and customers with disabilities
  • U-Pass
  • Chicago Card (pay per ride, linked to personal credit/debit card)
  • Chicago Card Plus (pay per ride or 30-day pass, linked to personal credit/debit card)
  • Military Service Pass
  • There might be another pass type I’m forgetting

When people see how simple this really is, and how not inconvenient Ventra makes it for them and for CTA to administer, they will be shocked. You’ll hear things like:

“I can use my credit or debit card now to pay for passes at every vending machine?”

Previously, only certain stations had the correct vending machine. O’Hare airport is notorious for having three vending machines, none of which do the same thing but that do have overlapping functions.

“I can buy a 1-day or multi-pass at all 145 train stations, and not just at Walgreens or CVS, who tend to sell out? And with a credit or debit card?”

Yep. Isn’t that convenient?

“So you’re saying that when school is out and my U-Pass doesn’t get me unlimited free rides until the next semester, I can just hit up one of these 2,000+ retail locations and throw $20 – cash or credit, no difference – on there, or add a 3-day pass because I’m running around for internship interviews?”

Yes, that’s what I’m saying.

“Boarding this bus is way faster now that everyone has a contactless card. And this only took $5 at the vending machine, a 2 minute phone call after which I got that $5 back?”

You can even register online with your smartphone.

* Paper 1-day passes will be available. A single-ride paper ticket will be available.

SFO airport showed me some cool planes

March 18, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I flew on Virgin American to Portland, Oregon, last year and had to stop in San Francisco on my return journey to Chicago. The layover was over 2 hours long, and I spent that time relaxed in the new Terminal 2. The terminal has great window coverage of the airfield.

I saw for the first time an Airbus A380, the largest of the so-called jumbo jets (is that phrase even used anymore?). It was flown by Lufthansa (see photo).a

I also saw a lot of Boeing 747s from different airlines, including United, OneWorld, Star Alliance, British Airways, and Cathay Pacific. I may have seen a Chinese airline.

I also saw President Barack Obama land in Air Force One. I recognized the plane from far away, as it was coming in for landing, but I wasn’t completely sure until it touched down. My camera was probably hanging around my neck; I was too dumbstruck to do anything about it. After it landed and I was positive that Boeing 747 was flown by the United States Government, I walked around the terminal until I could see it.

The plane had been parked far away from a terminal, near a hanger and two C-17 military cargo planes.

American airports should have viewing platforms. Not just plane spotters like to photograph them. Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS) airport has a viewing platform and there was over 50 people up there, including lots of families.

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