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See the Houten “Fietstransferium”, and other bikes and transit commentary

September 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Video by Mark Wagenbuur, aka markenlei on YouTube. See his original blog post about it.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that “Fietstransferium” means “bike transfer building”. It’s a structure underneath the train tracks at the Houten (in the Netherlands) main railway station (it has a secondary station on the same line a little bit south of the main one). You roll in directly from a car-free street in the center of a town, park your bike, and walk up to the platforms. Also available in the Fietstransferium are bike rentals (likely OV-fiets) and bike repair. It wasn’t open when I visited Houten in January 2011.

From the video (and from other sources) 60% of NS passengers arrive by bike. Good connections between bikes and trains helps maintain that access rate, but probably also helps increase it. Bike connections to major train stations in Chicago is woeful, even at the stations that are new enough to support a good connection. Let’s call Houten’s bike to train connection quality “roll in, walk 100 feet, service”: you roll into the bike parking area, and walk upstairs to your train (there’s even a ticket machine in the bike parking area). This differs from “roll on service” as that means you roll your bike into the train.

Chicago

The LaSalle Street Metra Station got an upgrade in bike connections this year when the “intermodal center” adjacent to it on Congress Parkway and Financial Place was added. It came with bike parking, an elevator, and a staircase with bike ramp. The station has other access points, which are very well hidden. Unguarded.

Well-placed bike parking
The LaSalle Street intermodal center. 

Northwestern (Ogilvie) Station lacks indoor and guarded bike parking, and any that’s available is far away from the tracks. The sheltered bike parking is very undesirable, dark, and dirty; I don’t recommend parking on Washington Street. Nor do I recommend parking on any of the sidewalks surrounding the station block.

Union Station is similar to Northwestern Station: all bike parking is unguarded and far from the tracks. Millennium Station. Same problems.

The nexus of bikes and transit is something I enjoy planning, and talking and writing about. Read my past articles on the subject. I’ve created the biggest and best collection of bikes and transit photos in the eponymous Flickr group. It’s an important part of the Chicago Bike Map app. You can load train stations on the map, search for them, and get information about when and how to board a train or bus with your bike. Coming soon is information on accessible stations (which have wide gate turnstiles making for self-service bike entry) and stations that aren’t accessible but have the same wide gate turnstiles (called TWA, or turnstile wheelchair accessible).

Additionally, none of these stations are accessible by good bike lanes. Only Union Station and Northwestern Station have adjacent bike lanes, and then only ones that are north-south (Clinton and Canal). As the Chicago Department of Transportation noted in its multiple presentations about the upcoming installation of the Union Station bus intermodal station, biking on Canal Street is not good and the bike lane will probably be reconfigured during the Central Loop BRT project. To summarize, the connection quality that Chicago’s downtown train stations provide is “confusing service”: where does one park? will the bike be safe? how does one get to the platform now?

Getting to Union Station

Biking on Canal Street outside Union Station. It has multiple entrances and access routes but which one is best?  Another photo from biking on Canal Street.

Near Northwestern Station, the Washington Street bike lane ends abruptly three blocks away at Desplaines Street. The Madison Street bike lane doesn’t reach Northwestern Station, nor would it be effective with its current design, as it would constantly be occupied by things that aren’t bicycles.

Speeding zone

Biking on Washington Street, a very wide fast street, whose bike lane ends very soon (in the middle ground) where then you find yourself competing for space with buses and right-turning cars. As soon as one is “competing” on a street, the street fails to provide good space for either mode. 

Harrison Street just south of the LaSalle Street Station is usually a good street to bike on, but it lacks the kind of bikeway infrastructure that attracts new people to transportation bicycling, and more trips to be made. (I’ve lately been thinking of ways to synthesize the argument about why protected and European-style bikeway infrastructure is necessary, so here goes: Bicycle usage will not increase without them.)

San Francisco

Bikes on Bart Pilot Aug. 3, 2012

Photo of a man walking with his bicycle in a BART station by San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. 

BART in the San Francisco Bay Area tested in August policy of having no bike blackout periods on Fridays. That meant people could bring their bikes on the trains at all times on Fridays in August, and not just outside rush periods. Showing their high level of attention planning and policy, the agency evaluated the program with a proper survey. There’s a meeting tomorrow with the BART Bicycle Task Force; Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority should have such a group!

Stolen Bike Registry data: Which train stations have the most bike theft?

September 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

If you can help it, don’t park your bike on the sidewalk under the tracks at the Clybourn Metra Station. Too many opportunities for theft here. 

The Stolen Bike Registry is a website created by Chicagoans for people to notify the community that their bike has been stolen. I make no claims to the accuracy or completeness (or anything) about this list or the dataset from which it was created. Because of less than optimal data collection practices, and a diversity of website users, the location information is difficult to comb through and present. I’ve used Google Refine to clean up some of the location data so that I can pick out the theft locations that represent CTA or Metra stations.

This is a list of the most reported bike theft locations that are CTA or Metra stations, from about June 13, 2006, to April 2, 2011, representing 1,740 bike theft reports*. It’s not known how many bike thefts were reported to the police because they don’t know.

CTA (13 stations)

Logan Square Blue Line CTA 8
Rockwell Brown Line CTA 5
Addison Brown Line CTA 2
Fullerton Red/Brown Line CTA 2
Paulina Brown Line CTA 2
Western & Milwaukee (Blue Line) CTA 2
Western Brown Line CTA 2
Addison Blue Line CTA 1
Chicago Brown Line CTA 1
Damen Blue Line CTA 1
Ashland Orange Line CTA  1
Cumberland Blue Line CTA 1
Wellington Brown Line CTA 1

The new bike racks at Clybourn Metra station are in a more visible spot. Maybe there’s even a security camera pointed at them some of the time. 

Metra (24 stations)

Clybourn Metra 19
Ravenswood Metra 18
Edgebrook Metra 4
Evanston Main Street Metra 2
Forest Glen Metra 2
Healy Metra 2
Lake Cook Metra 2
Ogilvie Metra 2
57th Street Metra 1
College Avenue Metra Train Station 1
Corner of Maple & Church in downtown Evanston, near Metra 1
Glenview Metra Station 1
Harlem Metra Station Berwyn, IL 1
Irving Park Metra Stop 1
Jefferson Park Metra 1
LaSalle Street Metra 1
Mayfair Metra 1
Metra Station at Davis Street, Evanston 1
Morton Grove Metra Station 1
Prairie Crossing Metra Station 1
Rogers Park Metra 1
Union Station Metra 1
Western Metra Station 1
Wilmette Metra 1

* Reports come from around the world. 10 dates have been excluded because their dates were anomalous, empty, or not possible.

Updated September 30 to correct a Metra station and combine it with another.

Beautiful renderings of what Bloomingdale Trail will look like in a decade

September 28, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The easiest place to get on the Bloomingdale Trail now will remain the easiest place. This access point will have three entry points, two of them are ramps. 

I say a decade because that’s how long it will take for all the plants and landscaping on the Bloomingdale Trail elevated park to look like how it appears in these fancy renderings by Michael Van Walkenburg & Associates.

Western Trailhead at Ridgeway Avenue pops up 10 feet above the trail level, over 20 feet above ground level. 

See all the photos from the meeting last Monday. Read my high praise for the project and the planning process on Grid Chicago.

Just bought some new books (bikes and urban planning stuff)

September 27, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Two books: Buckminster Fuller’s Critical Path (haven’t finished) and Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic (finished).

While I hurry and finish up this 900 page CIA spy novel (The Company by Robert Littell) that I bought for $1 in Richmond, VA, I bought a couple more books. I still have to finish Straphanger, too!

I ordered Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the Story of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (book link) by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch that I found on the blog Human Transit. I also ordered City Cycling by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler; this book won’t be available until October 19th. I applied for the Ph.D. program at the urban planning college at Rutgers University where both men teach. I was not accepted. Boo, hoo. But Pucher and Buehler are the foremost researchers on bicycling around the world (they mostly research bicycling in English-speaking countries and compare them to places in Europe).

Some more books that I want to read eventually:

1. Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike by Grant Peterson.

I flipped through this book at the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum book store after viewing the Bikes! The Green Revolution exhibit on its last day. One of the features in the book was why you shouldn’t ride in a straight and predictable line in urban traffic (as the Chicago Bike Map and other resources articulate). Instead you should be controllably unpredictable, to demonstrate to drivers that you’re a little wobbly and they should give you more space. There’s also guidance on choosing and maintaining a bicycle. I’d like to know what Peterson has to say about that. This reminds me, I had a short discussion with a friend (who hasn’t biked in years) who’s reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There’s a lot in there that’s not instructions on fixing a motorbike that I’d like to peruse.

2. Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists Are Changing American Cities by Jeff Mapes.

I probably won’t read this book; I feel it’s one of those books that will be full of everything I already know. Or it will be preaching to the choir. Or it will help me feel great about myself and my choices and inspire me to do something right this moment but I won’t because I’m busy with other stuff. And then I’ll tell everyone else to read it. But really, I just want others to read it and others to see how I (think) I am changing (one) American city (which involves me pedaling a bicycle and constantly living to tell about it). It’s really hard to change cities alone or with just a small group of people. We need more people who are willing to get involved. Bring your own ideas, act on your own ideas, or come borrow mine (or some of the ideas in the myriad sustainable transportation groups and communities I’m involved in).

When I’m not reading, I’m making the Chicago Bike Map app. Please buy it. Support a starving college student. Oh, wait, that was never really my style. But I do want an iPad…

What books are you reading?

I updated some formatting of this post. It’s ugly to have all these links to books with long titles. 

The United States uses way too much text for regulatory traffic signs

September 19, 2012 / / 21 Comments

Look at these two signs in Berlin (right outside the American embassy). They’re universal across the European Union – and probably in adjacent non-EU countries. The upper one means “yield” and the lower one with the white arrow means “compulsory right turn”. In the United States, there are several signs that mean the same thing. The simplest one we have comes in two forms: symbol and text. That makes two different signs, but there’s a third one. It’s also a text sign but has extra words!

American symbol sign (actually a symbol with text): The sign has an arrow pointing in an upward curve toward the right and the word “only”. Photo by Joseph Dennis. 

Yet there is no need to mix a symbol and a word, as both parts of the message (“right turn” and “only maneuver you can make here”) can be communicated with symbols. In the EU, the right turn sign has two states, both depicted by symbols: off and on. Off meaning you cannot turn right there and is depicted with an arrow pointing right, on a white background, circumscribed with a red circle. The “on” version means you must turn right there and is depicted with an arrow pointing right, on a blue background. (It would be pointless to have a sign saying you can turn right somewhere.)

The next sign is the text-only version of the “right turn only” sign.

American text sign: The sign says “right turn only”. Photo by Michael Jantzen. 

And then there’s the most ridiculous one, “right lane must turn right”. In many places, Chicago included, bikes and buses are excepted.

A group of people protest the stupidity of this sign design. I mean, a bunch of Tea Partiers protest our socialist road system. Or something. Photo by Susan Adams. 

All of the signs depicted above mean the same thing! Why have we developed four unique ways to communicate a single meaning?

While I’m on the subject of right turns, here’re two signs in San Francisco, on Market Street at Octavia Boulevard. Octavia is the end of the Central Freeway, so people driving here are in the mindset of fast highway driving. Cars cannot be turned right here and bicyclists are warned to look out for people making illegal right turns. In other words, “Beware car drivers who break the law”.

Photo of “right turn prohibited” symbol sign and “[bikes] watch for prohibited right turns” text sign by Adam Fritzler.