Writing about cities
I’m two for two on writing letters and getting the results I intended to see.
First, there was getting the bike rack at Dominick’s in Bridgeport.
Then there was getting parking spaces removed so a pinch point in the Halsted Street bike lane at 15th Street was less “pinchy.”
Now I’m trying to get the United States Postal Service to stop parking and driving in bike lanes, especially the Kinzie Street protected bike lane.
I mailed out letters to six recipients on Wednesday.
Twice in the past seven days I’ve encountered an unsecured sucker pole.
A sucker pole next to a highly-secure bike rack provided by the City of Chicago’s Bicycle Program. The adjacent placement of the two fixtures is an unfortunate side effect of construction crews who didn’t receive guidance on bike rack placement.
What’s a sucker pole? Any sign pole that’s not embedded in concrete or securely fastened to the ground in another fashion. A simple hex nut on a bolt fastens the pole to the base.
So last Saturday I encountered my latest one in front of India House (59 W Grand), just hours after Alexis Finch of Thought You Knew pinup calendar fame mentioned a specific sucker pole at the Green Eye (2403 W Homer) – I could completely remove the pole from its base.
Alexis reported that when she visits that bar, she removes the pole from its base and lays it on the sidewalk to prevent others from locking their bikes there.
I want you to spread the word about sucker poles while at the same time requesting a bike rack for that spot. I invite designers to remake this crappy poster I created and thankfully never printed.
Remake this “beware of sucker poles” poster into something cool and I’ll pay to print a few copies for you to keep and give to friends or bike shops.
Photo by my friend and UIC alum, Joshua Koonce.
I asked him about the photo’s title, “Urbanity fails again.” He replied:
I just thought it up on the fly, but you do see a lot of just these really little urban failures. Like, decayed bike lanes, weeds, potholes, gaps, sidewalk plates missing, leaky viaducts, “minor urban disasters” so to speak.
I feature Josh’s photos often on Steven Can Plan and now Grid. I also created a Flickr group for Grid where you can showcase your photos about sustainable transportation in Chicagoland.
If I had a car, or lived closer to O’Hare, I would spend more time taking photographs of airplanes. As it stands, it costs a lot of time and money, for transit, for me to get out to places that have good viewing of the planes. I find these places (“the suburbs”) uncomfortable to bike in.
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Boeing 747-406M, registration PH-BFS. Find more photos of this specific aircraft on Airliners.net. It’s really cool that there’s a huge community of people who take photographs of airplanes around the world.
What was going through this driver’s head (do they have a brain?) when, as soon as the light turned green, they peeled away from the stop bar, turning the wrong way down a one-way street?
Were there not enough indicators that this is a one-way street against their direction? There were arrows, a “no left turn” sign, a stop bar the full width of the street, a DO NOT ENTER sign, and a “one way” sign.
Or is the driver entitled to do whatever they want?