Category: Urban Planning

Bicycling for college students

September 2, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I write this article to all college students who choose to bike to class this semester (and any future semester). This post is a bit Chicago-centric, but can be applied universally.

Introduction

If you haven’t yet chosen to bike to campus, don’t read this – I’ve got another article in the works for you. Essentially, I gained my advice and education from information I found in multiple documents published by the Chicago Bicycle Program. But you can read my post in less than 10 minutes. I give my friends the same spiel, and now I’ve finally published it for everyone’s benefit.

My credentials: I’ve been commuting safely and effectively to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus for four years, attending undergraduate and graduate class. I’ve been bicycling all around Chicago (I can prove it with these maps) for the same period.

I divide my advice into three sections: Safety, Getting There, and The Right Equipment. You should have a copy of the Chicago Bike Map at your side (download as PDF; tambien disponible en espanol; request one to be mailed).

Safety
Safety is a combination of skills, following the rules of the road, and being alert.

You gain safe cycling skills by practicing safe cycling at all times on all roads upon which you cycle.
You most likely learned the rules of the road in high school driver’s education.

Bicyclists must follow the same traffic regulations as motorists (including stopping at yellow and red traffic lights). Additionally, you should practice several additional behaviors (found in the Sharing The Road section of the Bike Map):

  • Never ride against traffic. Bike Snob NYC calls this “bike salmoning.” No other road user expects vehicles to travel in the wrong direction, making this one of the most risky maneuvers.
  • Don’t ride on the sidewalk. You’re disrupting pedestrian traffic and it’s illegal.
  • Know about the door zone: the 4-feet invisible space on both sides of every vehicle that represents the width of a door swinging into a bicyclist’s path. Watch for recently parked cars and cars with people inside.
  • Lastly, ride in a straight, predictable line, and not weaving between parked cars in the parking lane. Passing motorists and bicyclists can safely travel past you because they know where you’re going.

Staying alert will help you avoid collisions and prevent you from getting boxed in by CTA buses. Part of being aware is being able to hear: Don’t use headphones while bicycling (this too is illegal).

Wanna see these tips in action? Watch the CDOT/Chicago Police video on traffic enforcement for bicyclist safety.

Getting There
You can journey safely by determining the best way to get to your destination. Mark your origin (home) and destination (school) on the bike map and then follow the bike lanes, marked shared lanes, and recommended routes to the end. Practice your trip with a friend during the day.

Indoor, sheltered bike parking at the recently reopened Damen Brown Line station.

Also consider making a multi-modal trip using transit. All CTA stations in Chicago have bike parking, and most Metra stations have bike parking. A bus will carry your bike for you at any time, and you can take your bike on the L outside of rush hours.

*More information on bikeway facilities in Chicago below.


The Blue Island bike lane on my way to class from Pilsen.

Try your hardest to never let a motorist scare you off the road with their hurtful and pointless words (or honking). You have the right to bike on the street. If you get into a verbal altercation with a motorist, TAKE A BREAK. Your adrenaline and heart rate will have increased, and emotions may decide your next move. Pull over and breathe. You need to stay in control of you, your bike, and your trip. If the motorist is operating their vehicle that’s a danger to you or other street users, pull over and immediately call 911 to report reckless driving.

Additionally, college campuses often have a lot of buses (either public transit or shuttles). Let the bus driver “do their thing” and don’t try to compete for space with the bus. Wait or signal and pass safely in the adjacent lane.

The Active Transportation Alliance, the Chicago bike advocate, has a crash support hotline: 312-869-HELP (4357).

The Right Equipment
To bike somewhere safely, you need the right equipment:
LIGHTS and a LOCK. Right now, throw away your cable lock. It’s completely useless unless part of a locking scheme that includes a high-quality u-lock.

Buy the most expensive, new u-lock you can afford. You spent a lot of money on your bike, so you should spend a little money on the device that will keep your bike yours! Once you buy, learn how to use it by following these depictions.

Chicago law requires a headlight, and a rear reflector or taillight. Forget the rear reflector – it’s close to worthless. You want road users to see your presence. So get two blinkies: a white light for the front, and a red light for the rear (with a rear light, you’ll be honoring the law). These two accessories will make you visible. Bike shops shouldn’t let you leave until you buy these or prove you already own a set.

If you want be really visible, you can get cold cathode fluorescent lights for your bike. I built this setup as a fun, DIY project.

More equipment you may want:

  • Fenders. Keep your feet and pants dry.
  • Water bottle cage. Being outside and active dehydrates your body.
  • Rear rack or front basket. Shuck your backpack into a basket to keep sweat off your back and reduce back pain.


I built a pannier from a kitty litter bucket. My Nishiki Prestige parked at the UIC Richard J. Daley library.

Please comment on this blog, add me on Facebook or email me with questions.

*The bike map’s road designations are based on actual field observations completed several years ago by City and Active Transportation Alliance staff. Bike lanes, indicated by two white stripes, a bicycle symbol, and an arrow, are for the exclusive use of bicyclists. Marked shared lanes, shown with a bicycle symbol and two chevrons, tell motorists and bicyclists that this is a shared lane and motorists should expect a higher number of bicyclists than most streets. (All lanes in Chicago are shared lanes and bicyclists ALWAYS have the right to use the entire lane when the bicyclist feels they cannot safely share the lane with a motorist, or when changing lanes.)

What a new bike lane looks like (this is Clinton Street at the railroad crossing between Kinzie and Fulton).

Biking to the Chicago Olympics in 2016

March 18, 2009 / / 0 Comments

What does the Chicago Olympic Committee’s bid book say about bicycling as part of the Olympic transportation system? A system that has to move 15,000 Games workforce, 30,000 athletes and their coaches and support staff, as well as 1.5 million everyday “background” users like you and me commuting? This:

“Travel by bicycles, always welcome in Chicago, will be used practically to augment the plan through the use of bicycle valet service near rail stations.”

The end.

This one line was found under section 15.10, “Public-Transport Network.” It’s public transport-related because the bike valet will be at CTA and Metra stations near the venues. Many of those stations are up to 1.6 miles away, according to the plan. These bicyclists will be expected to ride from hotel or home to the rail station nearest the Olympic venue, park, then board a shuttle bus. 

The worst part of the statement within the bid book is that they felt compelled enough to insert the snide comment that bicycles are “always welcome in Chicago” as if readers may have been confused that Chicago would, in some way, disallow their use during the Olympic Games. Or, perhaps, historically, Chicago didn’t welcome bicycles. With this, I feel the bid book authors have never actually seen bicyclists in Chicago and had to learn this through secondhand communication – this is belittling and dismissive to bicyclists around the world.

The Olympic plan should use bicycling as a mode and opportunity to solve the complicated, expensive, and potentially messy transport issue. Bicyclists should be allowed to ride straight to the gate, which is where they would find bike valet service. And volunteers and staff can ride between gates, venues, and operations centers on bicycles. Instead, Olympic games workers will be driving singly in small SUVs or on Segways just like our public transport and police do now.

A final note on the use of shuttle buses: My concern is where these buses will come from, and what the CTA or other agency will do with them post-Games. According to section 15.11, “Fleet and Rolling Stock,” the Chicago Olympic games “will have access to the Federal Borrowed Bus Program.” What is the FBBP? The internet doesn’t know! A web search reveals one result: an entry on the CTA Tattler blog. No agency in this country has buses they can lend. A table in the bid book following this section, Table 15.11, has a column for transit fleet and rolling stock, and it’s conflicting or confusing. One column indicating the number of vehicles in possession now by various agencies, the next, a number to which these inventories will expand, and the third, the number of additional vehicles on hand for the Games. All rows in the third column indicate that NO additional vehicles will be needed for the Olympic Games – all agencies will have the necessary fleet vehicles to provide transport for the Olympic Games.

I don’t get it.

Suburbia wayfinding

February 25, 2009 / / 0 Comments

An unfortunate part of living in the suburbs and only ever traveling to major points of interests in the region by auto is that you never actually learn how to navigate the region, or the areas surrounding those points of interests. What you do you learn is the location’s position to the nearest highway. The result is that you don’t know where anything is, just how to get there from one origin.

The same holds true for large cities, like Chicago, when it comes to traveling to new places – you learn how to travel to your destination, but you don’t know your destination. You won’t know what’s in between here and there, and you won’t see the changes and history that brought social groups from here to there, spatially and chronologically. 

A method to encourage visitors – this doesn’t mean tourists – to know their destination, and spread out “their feelers” to get a real understanding of a neighborhood’s substance is by pointing out significant spaces and places. This technique is popularly known as wayfinding. It can be quite simple, like adding signs that show the direction and distance to a well-defined community or major park, or it can be complex by involving residents and asking what are the important points of interest that they would like to promote.

Wayfinding signage is only one way to correct the original statement in this article: that the motor vehicle hides local values and decreases our knowledge of the space in between and around our origin and destination. We travel too fast, and we take bypassing highways. 

There are other approaches cities can take to help people slow down and experience more interesting places.

  1. Make it accessible. This doesn’t mean complying with Americans with Disabilities Act. It means increasing the options on how people can get there, or informing them of their options. This could mean identifying nearby roads suitable for bicycling, or promoting existing transit service nearby, but also making sure that locals and visitors don’t compete for auto parking space.
  2. Market the place. Use traditional marketing and advertising to tell people why they should spend a little more time exploring and getting to know the place. Perhaps your community has a bistro bustling during lunch, and a few blocks away is a farmer’s market where business has plateaued because only the locals are buying. Some low-cost graphics and a good relationship with the restaurant now has 5% of its customers venturing out to the market. 

I wrote a paper on the residential and economic dynamics between two adjacent neighborhoods in Chicago’s Lower West Side, University Village and Pilsen. University Village is a neighborhood created from scratch – designed to be “perfect” you could say. It houses a few thousand university students who come and go on different daily and weekly schedules, as well as permanent homeowners population. Sprinkle in some restaurants, local and national retail firms, and essential services like dry cleaning and hair salons along two major and intersecting bus routes and you have a “perfect” neighborhood.

University Village, because of its newness and designed quality, lacks character, history, and can seem a bit sterile. That’s where Pilsen can support the new neighborhood; Pilsen is over 100 years old, has seen major demographic, spatial, and physical changes, and heavily influenced by its majority Mexican population that it more than makes up for what University Village lacks. The problem is that neither neighborhood knows about the other aside from a bus, bike, or car ride through. There’s also a railroad viaduct separating the two. These barriers can be overcome, and each neighborhood can require the services of the other. Students usually need cheap food – you can get that in Pilsen. And long-time residents want new retail choices – University Village can provide that.

Read the entire paper, titled Economic and residential dynamics between University Village and Pilsen.

GIS and mapping tools

February 9, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Some of the work I do for school and my job requires that I make maps. I’ve never taken a class on how to make maps or analyze data sets featured in maps (what GIS does), so I learn as I go.

There’s no one around me I can call upon when I have questions that need immediate answers. Well, there’s me! Because of this, I must quickly find a solution or workaround myself.

Today I had to import a list of Chicago Transit Authority and Metra rail stations into ArcGIS so I could plot them on a map that also showed Chicago’s boundary and our bikeways. I could do this in Google Earth, but then I would have less control over the printed map I wanted to make, or the image output. ArcGIS has a built-in geocoder and I learned how to use it six months ago, but a skill not practiced is lost – and I forgot how to do it.

That’s okay – what follows is how I overcame this barrier:

Because I know how to use PHP to instantly create Keyhole Markup Language (KML) files (the format which Google Earth and Maps speaks fluently). Then, with this user-contributed KML to SHP plugin for ArcGIS, I was able to convert my KML files to Shapefiles and display them on my map. Unfortunately, my custom “fancy” icons were lost in the translation. Supposedly this alternate user-contributed script does the same thing.

Other tools I used to get my map created:

  • BatchGeocode.com – This site is indispensable for turning a list of addresses (with names, descriptions, and URLs) into the same list but with latitude and longitude coordinates! It will even create a KML file for you.
  • KML Generator (PHP class) – This class allows you to quickly and easily create KML files from any array and array source of coordinates. I store the transit stations in a database and run a query on the database and loop through them to generate the points in a KML file.

I’d like to thank James Fee’s GIS Blog for the links to the ArcGIS scripts/plugins I used in my project. To everyone else who must confront software, technology and mapping roadblocks, there’s almost always a solution for you.

Read about how I got around QGIS’s lack of geocoding.

Bike shops’ social responsibility

February 5, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Bike shops have a responsibility to teach their customers safe cycling.

This is because the bike shop salesperson has the customer’s attention, and it’s when the customer will be most receptive to tips, advice, and training. The bike shop salesperson, in many cases, will be the first and last person the customer talks to about biking. Lastly, it’s because the bike shop is a community center with a wealth of knowledge and experience – all of which should be shared.

The customer’s family is probably not a good resource and websites and friends can only teach them so much. But a bike shop salesperson has two advantages over other friends, family, and the internet: the customer’s time and trust.

Each bike shop should take it upon themselves to teach each new customer how to ride safely and legally on the street, the local laws regarding its operating and accessories (buy some lights, please!), etiquette for multi-use paths (like Chicago’s Lakefront Trail), and proper locking techniques.

  1. All bikers will, at some point, have to ride on the street in mixed traffic.
  2. It’s unreasonable to expect cyclists to know the laws applicable to cycling when they’ve had very little experience cycling and when there are no widespread institutions that teach cycling.
  3. Multi-use paths are fountains of rage and dangerous commingling. 
  4. The cyclist will be in a situation that requires them to secure their bicycle.

No matter how adamant the customer is that they won’t be riding in the street, they will. The sidewalk is illegal territory in so many communities, and isn’t safe for the cyclist themselves or the pedestrians they might run over. On sidewalks or on multi-use paths, they will have to cross streets with automobile traffic. It’s a little different than being a pedestrian and crossing these streets because you are operating relatively heavy equipment and you move at a different speed. Eventually, this cyclist will graduate from scaredy-cat to coffeehouse comfortable, biking to a café down the street. Talking one on one about these things, using diagrams from a brochure will influence the new cyclist that safe cycling matters – for themselves and those with whom they’ll interact. Then show them how to read a map.

Bicycle laws are not handed to 16-year olds in high school (actually, they most likely are, but who reads that?). That might have been 10 years ago, and they won’t remember that a front headlight but only a rear reflector are required for post-dusk riding. Or that red lights are for all street users (and really dangerous to disobey). Don’t forget that some bicyclists were taught to ride against traffic, facing cars down on the wrong side of the street.

Those customers who might be telling the shop salesperson that they won’t be riding in the street probably think they’re only going to ride on the multi-use path. These customers need trail etiquette stressed to them. They need to know when it’s safe to pass, what to say to those they’ll pass, the right speed to travel, and when to stop or slow down. The trail is not a speeding zone; rollerbladers, children, strollermoms, teams in training, walkers, and in some places even horses and their riders, will all be groups with whom the cyclist must interact and take care of – this mix is fun to watch and be around, but path users must pay attention to each other. 

Real locking techniques may be one of the most useful things you can teach any cyclist. They won’t be cyclists if they can’t keep their bike! The City of Chicago offers a guide on theft prevention and proper locking, two unique but related concepts. You shouldn’t do one without the other, because they enhance the overall “theft-proof-ness” of a bike. The salesperson can spend five minutes demonstrating to the customer cross-locking, and then having the customer practice. They can also quiz the customer on appropriate locking locations. What structures are secure and which ones aren’t? Why or why not?

Preface this lesson to the customer that “in 20 minutes, you can become a bicycling expert!” The bike shop-customer bond will strengthen and you’ll have proved to them your service is necessary and appreciable. Because you took the time to show a customer how much you care about them, their new bike, and the sport or utility of bicycling, they’ll spread the word and come back.