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I Love Riding In the City

December 1, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The magazine Urban Vélo features cool people in every issue who filled out this form. I don’t want to miss any opportunity to become famous in print! Here are my answers to the form:

Your Name

Steven Vance

Location

Chicago, IL

Occupation

Blogger.

Where do you live and what’s it like riding in your city?

I live in Bridgeport, a cool neighborhood a couple miles south of the Loop. I love riding in the city, but preferably at night when fewer people are driving. Weekends are annoying because the traffic changes – shopping is the name of the game and it makes for a different transportation environment. I want the city to construct protected bike lanes.

What was your favorite city to ride in, and why?

Portland, Oregon. Because there were so many other people riding. Riding a bike to get around was the normal thing to do – I didn’t get honked at or told to ride on the sidewalk. The grocery store I visited had their bike parking with 10 feet of the entrance. I was riding with a crowd of other bike people biking at 1 AM on a weekday.

(Dang it, now I’m wondering if New York City was my favorite city to ride in. NYCDOT has been throwing down bike lanes left and right in all boroughs for 4 years straight now. But I think Portland wins out because of its calm.)

Why do you love riding in the city?

It’s a lot easier than riding in the suburbs.

Or just say whatever you want about riding in the city… Poetry anyone?

If you need a ride, I’ll give you a seat on the back of my Yuba Mundo. No charge.

I submitted this photo with my application.

As far as bicycle magazines I know about go, they can be compared to conditions of the city like so:

  • Suburbs – Bicycling Magazine – boring, bland, the same every month. Thumbs down.
  • Urban – Momentum Magazine – diversity, families, becoming a more popular and convenient place to live. Thumbs up.
  • Hyperlocal – Urban Vélo – getting down to the nitty gritty, who lives here? who lives there? who does what? Thumbs up.

November snow

November 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

November snow photo by the Washington State Department of Transportation (WsDOT).

I rode this train, the Amtrak Cascades, from Portland to Seattle, but in April 2010. I would love to go back and ride it again, through the snow this time. It looks so beautiful.

I commend the Washington State Department of Transportation for its good presence on social media and social networking websites. I’m tracking where other DOTs are online.

I want to make a crash reporting tool

November 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

UPDATE 12-01-10: Thank you to Richard Masoner for posting this on Cyclelicious. I have started collecting everyone’s great ideas and responses in this development document.

Hot off the heels of making my “Can I bring my bike on Metra right now?” web application, I am ready to start on the next great tool*.

I want to create a bicycle crash reporting tool for Chicago (but release the source code for any city’s residents to adopt) along the lines of B-SMaRT for Portlanders and the Boston Cyclist’s Union crash map based on 911 calls.

I’d rather not reinvent the wheel (but I’m very capable of building a new web application based in PHP and MySQL) so I’ve been trying to get in contact with Joe Broach, the creator of B-SMaRT, to get my hands on that source code.

Not exactly the type of crash I’ll be looking for. Photo by Jason Reed.

I want the Chicago Crash Collector (please think of a better name) to have both citizen-reported data, and data from police reports. I just sent in my FOIA request for police data to the Chicago Police Department, but I’m not holding my breath for that.

What are you thankful for about your city?

November 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Aaron asks on Urbanophile, “What are you thankful for about your city?” His own answer was

I won’t pick just one city, but I’m thankful that across America, no matter how thriving or struggling the city, it always seem there are people passionately making it a better place. From Austin and Chicago to Detroit and Braddock and Buffalo, there’s a passionate generation of urbanist out there fighting the fight for their city. I shudder to think where we’d be without them. This gives me hope that more places that we think that are struggling are going to ultimately make a turnaround.

My answer

This is not really about my city, Chicago, but about all cities of a similar density: I appreciate that it does not take 25 minutes of driving to get to a store (of any type) or my friend’s house. In 25 minutes, I can ride my bike to 15 full-service grocery stores and 10 friends’ houses. And I can do it safely because the roads are narrow which helps keep traffic speeds are low.

The nearest Dominick’s finally installed a bike rack after having been without one since its opening over a decade ago and its renovation two years ago.

This is in contrast to where I spent Thanksgiving, in Mesa, Arizona. The road that connects my family’s house to the bank I needed to visit is 90 feet wide, having a speed limit of 45 MPH but a design limit of at least 60 MPH.

The grandest canyon

November 28, 2010 / / 0 Comments

One of the informational boards at Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona say that while the Grand Canyon may not be the deepest, widest, or longest canyon in the world, many people consider it the grandest.

In this photo of my dad and sister, it’s almost 20 miles from here, at the south rim west of Yavapai Point, to the north rim (in the direction I shot the photo, slightly northwest).

This is Grand. And America’s Best Idea.