Category: Street Design

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. 

Current madness of the week: investigating car crashes

February 10, 2013 / / 4 Comments

Gravity should have prevented this car crash, as would not placing buildings near roadways. But we’ve figured out how to defy gravity. Photo by Katherine Hodges.

“Police closed the street to investigate”.

What a waste of time. The investigation will conclude the same way as any other, with one or more of the following contributing factors: exceeding the speed limit, alcohol, a deficiency in someone’s driving skills or knowledge, or some defect in the road (I’m excluding poor road design as it could almost always be better, designed in such a way to reduce the occurrence of poor quality driving).

The story: a person driving an SUV side swipes another SUV. The driver loses control and then hits the center concrete barrier. The SUV flips over and the driver dies. (Yes, this is in relation to an incident on I-294 in Glenview this weekend.)

We already know how to fix all of these issues.

I need a visualization tip for showing pedestrian and auto traffic in downtown Chicago

January 30, 2013 / / 34 Comments

Madison Street over the Chicago River. Pedestrian traffic is very high, and very constrained, near the Metra stations.

Here’s the goal:

Show that pedestrians don’t get sufficient space or time to have a high quality pedestrian experience given that they comprise the largest mode share on streets in the Loop. The trips are highly delayed at traffic signals, pedestrian space is encroached upon because of automobile turning movements, and the sidewalks aren’t wide enough for two-way or even one-way traffic at certain times of the day. It’s possible to build our way out of pedestrian traffic…

Here’s an example data set:

On October 3, 2006, for all of the 24 hours, at 410 W Madison Street, there were 17,100 automobiles counted.

On some day in summer 2007, for 10 hours, at 350 W Madison Street, there were 43,987 pedestrians counted.

The two locations are practically the same as the bridge here prevents more pedestrians or automobiles from “slipping in”.

It’s possible to download the data sets from CDOT’s Traffic Tracker so you can see the whole city on your own map, but you’ll have to do some digging in the source code to find them.

Destination streets are rarely the best places to bike

January 29, 2013 / / 22 Comments

This family took to riding on the sidewalk of Division Street instead of in the bike lane. They’re riding the stylish workhorse WorkCycles Fr8. Once I saw them riding the blue one, I had to get a different color. 

My friend Calvin Brown, a circumstantial urban planner, is always giving me Jane Jacobs-style observations about how citizens use their cities.

“Destination streets are the ones I avoid biking on because there’s so much car traffic there. Traffic must be balanced between streets that are good for biking and ones that aren’t currently good.”

In other words, because it’s a destination street (a place where there are a lot of retail outlets, venues, points of interest) it induces a lot of car traffic. Lots of car traffic discourages people from riding bikes, and makes it difficult for those who already are.

To me, a great example of this is Division Street. There’s a bike lane there from Ashland to California Avenues, and has tons (tons!) of restaurants and some night clubs. Yet that causes a lot of taxi traffic, people driving their own cars, looking for parking, jutting into the bike lane to see why traffic is going slow or backed up (um, because there are ton of cars!), and valet and delivery drivers blocking the bike lane.

It’s exactly this traffic, though, that keeps these places vibrant, desirable, and healthy (from an economic standpoint). The solution for bicycling is easy: swap the car parking with the bike lane so that bicycling isn’t affected by a majority of the aforementioned traffic maneuvers.

Calvin’s “destination streets” examples were Grand Avenue and Chicago Avenue. Neither has bike lanes, and both have 2 travel lanes in each direction. Grand has destinations from Racine Avenue to Ashland Avenue and Chicago has destinations from Ada Street to Western Avenue. I’d wager that if you narrowed those roadways by installing a protected bike lane you’d get slower traffic and higher business receipts.

Chicago Avenue at Hoyne Avenue is a particularly stupid part of Chicago Avenue: The Chicago Department of Transportation installed a pedestrian refuge island here. After several years and at least 4 replaced signs due to collisions of automobiles with it, the design hasn’t been modified. The island in and of itself did not change the speed of those who drive here, as the roadway’s width remained static.

Is there a member of the ITE who will stand up against bad road designs?

October 1, 2012 / / 25 Comments

Sharing the road is one place to start. Why should one on a two-wheeled, muscle-powered device pedal along side a garbage truck with blind spots? Wait, why does an automobile even have blind spots? This enormous right-turn lane is one example of “dangerous by design”. 

Update October 5, 2012: For a great example on why I cannot – and why you should not – support bad road designs is this story of a fatal bike crash on a major biking “commuterway” in Chicago. We must stop building narrow bike lanes to the left of parked cars and we can be done with this type of crash for good.

The infrastructure as we have it in Chicago and many other American cities cannot support any increases in bicycling. The operation and design of our infrastructure creates a finite limit for the number of people who will bicycle on it. I’m not talking about how many people can use it, but how many people want to use it.

We’ve seen infinitesimal growth in the bicycle’s mode share for commuting to work, so small that the growth might not actually be growth at all because all the reported increases are within the range of error (the Census Bureau being the collector and distributor of the data). Our infrastructure is not safe, and that is what inhibits an increase in bicycling riders and trips that the City of Chicago, its mayor, its council, its officially adopted plans, and its people, desire. Until our roads are made safe, the cycle growth will remain minuscule or non-existent. The only other significant factor in promoting cycling is high gasoline prices, but even as they remain high, the cycle growth (or spike, seen in 2008) hasn’t returned.

It’s a small group of people who are designing and maintaining our roads. And they are the first group of people we listen to when we say we want safe roads. Instead of the people who’ve actually built safe roads.

The ITE is the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and, like many organizations, has a code of ethics. In their Canons of Ethics document (.pdf), there are at least two sections that require members to stand against bad road designs.

Section 1: The member will have due regard for the safety, health and welfare of the public in the performance of professional duties.

Section 11: The member will guard against conditions that are dangerous or threatening to life, limb, or property on work for which the member is responsible, or, if not responsible, will promptly call such conditions to the attention of those who are responsible.

A study in Portland, Oregon, found that 60% of residents wanted to bike, but had concerns about safety.

These residents are curious about bicycling. They are hearing messages from a wide variety of sources about how easy it is to ride a bicycle in Portland, about how bicycling is booming in the city, about “bicycle culture” in Portland, about Portland being a “bicycle-friendly” city, and about the need for people to lead more active lives. They like riding a bicycle, remembering back to their youths, or to the ride they took last summer on the Springwater, or in the BridgePedal, or at Sun River, and they would like to ride more. But, they are afraid to ride. They don’t like the cars speeding down their streets. They get nervous thinking about what would happen to them on a bicycle when a driver runs a red light, or guns their cars around them, or passes too closely and too fast.

American roads are dangerous by design. It’s time to fire the people who design them that way.

Year after year, roads in Chicago are ripped up, repaved, and restriped in exactly the same way that existed before. Miles of missed opportunities for safer roads. This essay says nothing of the lack of police enforcement of traffic rules, for which there is little empirical evidence. The essay may be updated from time to time, but I won’t be noting each change.

An example of a better design: the buses and bikes don’t mix, and automobiles turning left cannot be passed by through-automobiles. Bicyclists are safer.