Writing about cities
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The second post in “Readers Ask,” from a planning student in Chicago.
I want to recommend bioswales for my Complete Streets project area which consists of a part of Grand in Chicago, Illinois  There are a lot of surface parking lots over there, and a big shopping mall which is built on a weird arrangement of slopes (Brickyard). Since I know nothing about bioswales, I’m wondering what you could tell me about how I could go about recommending this. I have no idea what the rainwater runoff issue is over there, but I could only imagine that there would be one, with all the surface parking and weird slopage.
Bioswales are just one of many solutions to water runoff and stormwater collection. Another option is using permeable pavers in the parking lot. The real experts on this are Janet Attarian and David Leopold at CDOT. As a project manager at the Streetscape and Sustainable Design Program, he’s dealt with and implemented bioswales, permeable parking lots, and pollution fighting bike lanes – the works. There’s a parking lot, designed by CDOT, built with a bioswale AND permeable pavement on Desplaines between Polk and Taylor in Chicago (photo below)/
Parking lot has permeable pavement and a bioswale. The site is monitored by CDOT to see how it performs in the winter. Photo by Bryce.
EVERY parking lot has runoff – every parking lot should do a better job managing it. By not better managing our stormwater, we all pay the costs, be it through flood insurance, recovering from floods, or having to build bigger pumps and sewers.
Permeable pavement at Benito Juarez High School in Chicago, Illinois.
Perhaps you shouldn’t recommend a bioswale, but a parking lot that “captures 80% of its runoff” or something through a “variety of methods.”
Bioswale in Portland, Oregon, as part of a green street transformation.
The EPA lists additional Best Management Practices. The Cities of  Seattle and Portland are experts in this. Portland was even able to get parts of its bikeway built by rolling them into the Department of Environment’s Green Streets program, their efforts to reduce stormwater runoff and thus reduce the costs they pass on to their customers that pay for sewer service (like, everyone). I recommend this blog article about Portland’s sustainable design, written by a fellow planning student.