By Diana Lind for Next City.
Page 66 of 171
I need a visualization tip for showing pedestrian and auto traffic in downtown Chicago
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
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.
Sayonara to Grid Chicago, hello Streetsblog Chicago
John and I met at Taqueria La Zacatecana in May 2011 to discuss combining forces.
In case you don’t follow my “big” blog, Grid Chicago, you must know that we’ve moved. My blogging partner John Greenfield and I work for OpenPlans and launched Streetsblog Chicago on Tuesday, January 22, 2013.
Here’s the Grid Chicago origin story that I wrote to signal the change:
Back in 2010, I started corresponding with Streetsblog’s Ben Fried about getting a version of the site started in Chicago. Streetsblog was my favorite transportation blog and I viewed it as the gold standard in local, grassroots transportation news writing. I wasn’t alone. Getting a Streetsblog up and running in Chicago had been an elusive goal for many people involved in the local sustainable transportation and planning scene.
On a visit to New York that year, I met Ben at the OpenPlans office in Lower Manhattan. We spoke about how Streetsblog NYC started in 2006 and how they launched each subsequent city. What I took away was that in order to produce a site like Streetsblog, you need the funding to hire people who can devote a lot of time to it. I left New York excited about all theprogressive transportation changes taking place there, but thinking that I probably wouldn’t be starting a Streetsblog in Chicago.
I’d had my personal blog, Steven Can Plan, since 2007, and that’s where I expressed my perspectives on cities and transportation, but I wanted to publish more frequently and reach a wider audience. I needed a partner. Fast forward to spring 2011. I was speaking to my friend Kevin Monahan about my desire to create a more popular blog to discuss transportation issues in Chicago, with a bent on advocating for more and better walking, biking, and transit infrastructure.
Kevin told me to get in touch with John Greenfield, an acquaintance of mine who, like me, had previously worked on bike parking projects at the Chicago Department of Transportation (he left a bit before I started there). At the time John was writing a sustainable transportation blog called Vote With Your Feet, and he was also interested in creating a more ambitious website.
I contacted John in May to propose a partnership. We met at Taqueria La Zacatecana in Avondale and for an hour, munching on burritos, we hashed out our goals for this website we both wanted to build. While we knew we’d be spending a lot of time on the site and would need to earn money from it, that wasn’t as important as launching quickly. What made the timing so crucial was that Mayor Emanuel had released a groundbreaking transition plan with several bold goals to improve bicycling. We had to be there to cover it. We launched Grid Chicago in June 2011, and we quickly gained a loyal readership and a roster of talented guest contributors.
By early 2012, we started considering the possibility: What if Grid Chicago could somehow morph into Streetsblog Chicago? We already had a large readership along with good ad support from local businesses. By launching Grid Chicago we’d proven there was a demand for in-depth transportation news and analysis from two guys who’ve been walking, biking, and taking transit in the Windy City for years.
Last winter Ben started contacting people about funding the new site. In March he came to Chicago and presented at the Metropolitan Planning Council, talking about how Streetsblog makes an impact with its reporting. The momentum started to build in a serious way. Thanks to funding commitments from The Chicago Community Trust and the Rockefeller Foundation, not to mention the hard work of many people – especially Peter Skosey of theMetropolitan Planning Council and Randy Neufeld of the SRAM Cycling Fund – Streetsblog is finally coming to Chicago.
With the launch of Streetsblog Chicago, Grid Chicago will stop publishing new content, but the site will remain online as an archive. We’re looking forward to providing you with more frequent, wide-ranging coverage of the local movement for effective transit and safer streets. And by joining the Streetsblog family, our readers are going to get plugged in to transportation policy stories of national significance, and more people around the country are going to be following Chicago’s progress on walking, biking, and transit issues than ever before.
We’d like to thank Ben, Peter, Randy and all the other folks in Chicago and New York who have made this moment possible. And we want to thank you, our readers, for giving us a reason to schlep around the city attending public meetings and stay up into the wee hours banging out the next day’s posts. We’re jazzed about finally getting Streetsblog Chicago off the ground, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Steven Can Plan isn’t changing. I’ll still be blogging here on the same irregular schedule.
TV shows can’t fool me with their inaccurate train portrayals
I have an idea. I have a TV show that takes place in New York City. I need to film a scene on the subway. So I use the closest subway… Los Angeles Metro.
Oh, and I’ll place “NYC Subway” signs on the walls (replete with graffiti).
No one will see the red stripes all over the place indicating this is the Red Line.
When you live in those cities, or you’re just enough of a railfan to see the difference, it becomes annoying and makes you despise the TV show you like.
On this particular show, they show footage actually taken in New York City to show the subway entrance. Some stock footage I guess.
That show was “Don’t Trust the B**** in Apt. 23“. The other filmed product that got it all wrong was “The Bourne Legacy”. It partially takes place in some bastardization of Chicago. In this movie, which stars Jeremy Renner instead of Matt Damon, the director depicted the Chicago ‘L’ while showing footage of a New York City elevated train. How could one tell? Nowhere in Chicago are there two parallel tracks, with one above the other. Nor are the elevated tracks that high above the street, nor do they use curved elevated columns. This happens about 50 minutes in. Immediately before this fake scene is shown, you’ll see aerial footage of the real Chicago ‘L’. This lasts for 4 seconds.
Real Chicago ‘L’.
Stand-in Chicago ‘L’.
I don’t want to call this “disingenuous” (but I think it is) and TV show producers aren’t required to film exactly where they portray; these “stand ins” are probably for budgetary reasons. I don’t think it harms a city’s brand or image. I just get annoyed: the show becomes less believable. Maybe I know too much about cities.
Film crews get tax breaks in lots of cities and states in the United States and Canada. If I were the city’s film office manager, or the city’s lobbyist or brand manager, I’d want it to be portrayed accurately.