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Last minute vote on bicycle data visualization project

November 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The United States Department of Transportation is holding a data visualization competition and Chicago bike crash locations are one of the topics.

From Michael Carney:

I started this project because, basically, I thought it would be interesting to make a map of bike crash locations around Chicago and present it to my GIS class at UIC. Sebastian Lew and I collaborated for several months and it evolved into something more. Using ArcGIS, we were able to symbolize streets by level of overall crash intensity, calculate crashes per mile on streets, perform hot spot analysis to identify areas with high numbers of crashes, compare ridership levels with crash levels, examine temporal trends in crash activity, and perhaps most importantly, assess the effectiveness (at least at a basic level) of current bicycle infrastructure. At the very least I hope our project can help you plan a safe route to work, at the most I hope it can be used by policymakers and planners when considering how and where to expand Chicago’s bike infrastructure.

Vote today only. View the project.

Should Cook County become a state?

November 23, 2011 / / 0 Comments

“A state Republican legislator has introduced a bill to the Illinois General Assembly to separate the Chicago’s county from the state–effectively making the midwestern city the 51st state in the union” via Yahoo! News.

I’m just thinking aloud here:

  • We could fix our own transit funding issues. We wouldn’t have to compete with transit funding for downstate agencies (at the state level, competition at the federal level would still exist).
  • We’d be a very small state, 5.3 million.
  • Metra would be tough to deal with, unless it came under CTA control first! Har har.
  • I think this could make the State of Chicago a larger economic powerhouse without the meddling of so many different legislators.

What else would be different if Chicago (and Cook county) was its own state?

“These liberal policies are an insult to the traditional values of downstate families,” Mitchell told the Decatur Tribune. “When I talk to constituents, one of the biggest things I hear is ‘Chicago should be its own state . . . .Our voters’ voices were drowned out by Chicago.”

That’s kind of funny. Like Chicagoans are a bunch of abortion-having, dolphin-saving, vegan, bisexual couples.

What SOAR said at the CTA budget hearing

November 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

A view of the Dominick’s and AMC River East movie theater in Streeterville at Columbus Drive and Illinois Street, by Ian Freimuth.

Gail Spreen spoke at the November 7, 2011, Chicago Transit Authority budget hearing on behalf of SOAR (Streeterville Organization of Active Residents). Here’s a summary of her speech:

We don’t have a CTA station, so we rely on buses. We appreciate transit trackers that makes them more predictable to use. There’s significant growth potential in the neighborhood because we have much undeveloped land. We ask that our service be continued and hopefully expanded in the future. The medical institutions are growing and are active users of transit. The encouragement and possible requirement for using transit may come into play. We appreciate the good communication between CTA and SOAR. Our goal is to make Streeterville the greenest neighborhood in the city. You can read the full text on their site (but the PDF’s not accessible).

From Wikipedia: Streeterville is a neighborhood in the Near North Side community area bounded by the river on the south, the Magnificent Mile portion of Michigan Avenue on the west, and Lake Michigan on the north and east, according to most source. The majority of the land in this neighborhood is reclaimed sandbar.

Too much talking, not enough documenting

November 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I took this photo for several reasons: to show a sidewalk reconstruction project that forces people to walk in the street; to show that people bicycling will advance from where I took this photo to the location across Grand Avenue to get a “head start” on cycling across Halsted Street to Milwaukee Avenue. 

Or doing.

I talk to a lot of people about cycling in Chicago and they’ve good stories to share. Stories about positive experiences they’ve had, about negative experiences, or of problems they’ve seen others encounter. I always encourage people to do something about this experience. My advice almost always involves them documenting it in some way; things like reporting a bike crash to the police, even afterwards, or taking a photo of a major pothole. I might suggest they write down their thoughts to share privately with close friends. Or it might be as simple as calling 311 to report an abandoned bike.*

There are lots of things that we want to change. Keeping track of what they are can help focus energy on making that change happen. (That’s why I carry my camera with me at all times outside my home.) One way I’ve started to document and share is by writing about the good and “needs improvement” parts of Chicago transportation on my new blog, Grid Chicago.

If you cycle in Chicago, I implore you to attend the Streets for Cycling planning meetings – the first one is December 10th – so you can express your concerns and desires. There are one hundred other ways to be involved in supporting a change in Chicago, and I might be able to link you one you’re interested in.

Note: The CTA has started several online efforts to collect feedback from and communicate with customers, but they’ve always collected feedback through their email address, feedback@transitchicago.com, where they always respond. These new efforts are Facebook, Budget Ideas, and Twitter.

Let’s do this for bike crashes: I guess I’ll start a bike crash documentation project right now (January 5, 2012). Write up a report and share me a link, or leave a comment on one of these pages:

Another person bicycles across Grand Avenue to get that head start. 

*These are all things I do, but I encourage everyone to think creatively and do what interests them.