Tag: analysis

a collage of 7 photos on 7 occasions where food scrap waste dropped off at a collection site in the City of Chicago

I’ve been composting using the city’s food scrap dropoff program for two years now

January 18, 2026 / / 0 Comments

Data summary:

  • 13 total dropoffs
  • Timespan: October 18, 2023 to December 26, 2025 (about 26 months)
  • Total volume: 13 × 101 oz = 1,313 ounces (about 10.3 gallons)
  • Average frequency: roughly once every 2 months

Last month I made the thirteenth trip to a City of Chicago food scrap dropoff site at 1758 S Clark St. After two years I think it’s a good moment to count how long and how often I’ve been dropping off scraps for composting. I started collecting food waste soon after I learned the city was starting the program, and I dropped off the first collection on October 16, 2023. This means I’ve been hauling my trusty 101-ounce IKEA HÅLLBAR plastic bin to this spot for just over two years now.

That food waste decomposing in landfills causes a significant amount of methane release into the air and that methane traps more heat than CO2. Although there is still a lot more CO2 than methane released I thought that I can do a little more, and the site being over a mile away means I’m forced to go for a short bike ride even if I don’t otherwise feel like it.

What do the numbers say

  • Over 26 months, I’ve diverted about 1,313 ounces of food scraps from the landfill—that’s about 10.3 gallons of mostly banana peels, coffee grounds, and eggshells (I am using the volume of the bin rather than weights I’ve measured)
  • On average, I make the trip roughly every two months, though the intervals have varied quite a bit.
  • Looking back at my photo timestamps, I notice some interesting patterns. In 2024, there was a long gap between my July dropoff and my December one—over four months.
  • But 2025 has been different. I’ve made six trips this year alone, with intervals as short as 34 days between visits.

The Clark Street dropoff isn’t particularly close to my apartment, and I’ll admit that’s been a barrier. On days when I don’t feel like making the trip, that container sits in my fridge a little longer, and gets full to a point where I divert food waste to the trash. Curbside pickup would change everything—but until that happens, I’m still glad the city offers the dropoff sites.

Fun with stats: Building permits by street name and number edition

September 17, 2017 / / 0 Comments

John Hancock Center

The John Hancock Center. Photo by Kevin Dickert.

 

On which street are the most building permits issued?

Michigan Avenue!

But where on Michigan Avenue are the most building permits issued?

Take a guess!

First, can you answer: Are most building permits issued to North Michigan Avenue (between Madison Street, 0 north/south, and Oak Street, 1000 north), or South Michigan Avenue (between Madison Street, 0 north/south, and um, somewhere south of 130th Street, 13000 south)?

Here’s the answer…

Even though South Michigan Avenue is at least 13x longer than North Michigan Avenue, South Michigan Avenue has 39 percent fewer building permits!

From 2006 to yesterday (Saturday), there were 7,828 building permits issued to projects on North Michigan Avenue and 4,714 building permits issued on South Michigan Avenue.

The most common address on North Michigan Avenue to receive building permits was 875 N Michigan Avenue. It’s also the most common address to receive building permits on all Chicago streets.

What’s there? The John Hancock Center (tower)!

The average building address number on North Michigan Avenue is 540.6. That means that building permits on North Michigan Avenue concentrate around Grand Avenue, which is near the city’s biggest Marriott hotel, and is where the Under Armor flagship store is.

The next most common street – after South Michigan Avenue – is North Clark Street, which extends from Madison Street (0 north/south) to the northern edge of the city at Howard Street, which is 7600 north, about 7.6 times longer than North Michigan Avenue.

S. Clark Street Signs

Businesses in the 400 block of South Clark Street, as of when the photo was taken in November 2008. I believe the hotel is still there. This is the busiest block of South Clark Street, for building permits. Photo by Bruce Laker.

South Clark Street doesn’t register in the top 10 or even the top 100. It comes it at number 162, with 772 building permits. This is surprising to me because South Clark Street runs from Madison Street (0 north/south) in downtown and goes to 2200 south, and has a lot of downtown office buildings.

South LaSalle Street (3,613 building permits), South Wabash Avenue (2,916), and South Dearborn (1,611) are all in the top 50. The data could be wrong somehow.

Oh, how Chicago land use is controlled by spot zoning

May 23, 2016 / / 3 Comments

If you only had a zoning map to try and understand how the different blocks in the City of Chicago relate to their neighborhoods and the city at large, you might have the idea that the city has no neighborhoods, but is actually a collection of tiny, randomly dispersed zones of differing land uses.

And then when you walked those areas you’d find that the zones, which attempt to prescribe a land use, at least nominally, don’t have anything to do with the restaurant, housing, and commercial building mix of uses actually present.

No plan would have been devised to create a map like this.

Over the last five years, and surely over the last 14, the City of Chicago has been divided (really, split) into an increasing number of distinct zoning districts.

The city’s zoning map is updated after each monthly city council meeting, to reflect the numerous changes that the 50 alders have approved individually. (Their collective approval occurs unanimously in an omnibus bill.)

Every few months I ask the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) for the latest zoning map, in the form of a shapefile (a kind of file that holds geographic information that can be analyzed by many computer programs). While Chicago has one of the country’s best open data offerings, some datasets, like zoning, don’t get updated in the catalog.

There are two ways I can analyze and present the data about the quantity of zoning districts. Both, however, show that the number of distinct zoning districts has increased. This means that the city is divided even more finely than it was just six months ago.

Analysis 1: Period snapshots

I have the zoning shapefile for five periods, snapshots of the city’s zoning map at that time. From August 2012 to now, May 2016, the number of discrete zoning districts (the sum of all B3-5, RS-1, DX-7, etc. zoning classes) has increased 7.8 percent.

Period Zoning districts change

August 2012

11,278

 –

September 2014

11,677

3.42%

June 2015

11,918

2.02%

November 2015

12,015

0.81%

May 2016

12,162

1.21%

I collect the period snapshots to show the history of zoning at a specific address or building in Chicago, which is listed on Chicago Cityscape. For example, the zoning for the site of the new mixed-use development in Bucktown that includes a reconstructed Aldi has changed four times in four years.

aldi zoning history

Analysis 2: Creation date

The zoning shapefiles also have the date at which a zoning district was split or combined to create a new district, either with a different zoning class (RT-4, C1-1, etc.) or a different shape.

With the most recent zoning shapefile I can tell how many new zoning districts were split or combined and a record representing it was added to the list. The records start in 2002, and by the end of the year 7,717 records were created.

The following year, only 14 records were added, and in 2004, only 6. The Chicago City Council adopted a rewritten zoning code in 2004, and I guess that the zoning map was modified prior to adoption. After 2004, the number of new zoning districts picks up:

year zoning districts added by splitting/combining cumulative change

2002

7717

7717

 –

2003

14

7731

0.18%

2004

6

7737

0.08%

2005

267

8004

3.45%

2006

497

8501

6.21%

2007

561

9062

6.60%

2008

592

9654

6.53%

2009

304

9958

3.15%

2010

245

10203

2.46%

2011

271

10474

2.66%

2012

277

10751

2.64%

2013

299

11050

2.78%

2014

397

11447

3.59%

2015

367

11814

3.21%

2016

173

11987

1.46%
none listed

175

12,162

 –

It seems there’s a light relationship between the recession that started in 2008 and the number of zoning changes made. There are more made annually before the recession than after it. It actually seems to track with building permits (sorry, no chart handy).

“My” new bike racks have appeared at CTA and Metra stations

April 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I received some exciting news last week in the form of a photo a friend posted to Twitter. He took it at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Loyola Red Line station and it features a double deck bike rack from Dero.

Photo by Erik Swedlund.

Erik didn’t know this, but that bike rack was installed there because of a project I worked on at the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) in 2009. The working title was something like “bike parking RTA ICE grant”. That means an Innovation, Coordination, and Enhancement grant from the Regional Transportation Authority. It was also known as round 2 of transit bike parking. You might know round 1 as the project that put hard-to-use double deck bike racks at four CTA stations: Midway Orange (well used), Sox-35th Red (mostly well used), Damen Blue (not used), and Jefferson Park Blue (mostly well used) – all opened in 2008. Round 1 was paid for by CMAQ funding CDOT received in 2003.

The scope of my involvement was limited to finding stations “at which sheltered, high-capacity bike parking will be used most effectively”. Looking back, that should probably have said, “will be most used”. What does “used most effectively” even mean? The scope did not include deciding what the bike parking area would look like, or how many spaces there would be. That was up to an engineer who was managing the overall grant and project – I just recommended stations.

Summary of my methodology

I developed my own method (after researching the method for round 1 selections, and other methods) to select several train stations geographically distributed around the city where bike parking would be most used. I developed a spreadsheet and inputted the station attributes my method required. The formula then ranked the stations. The outcome I wanted was essentially a number that represented the likelihood of people cycling to that station. I tweaked the formula many times based on what rankings it came up with and whether or not the top ranked stations fit expectations I came up with for a station that would have a lot of people cycling there (access mode data didn’t exist at all for CTA stations, and was old for most Metra stations).

For example, if my formula ranked Pulaski Orange very high, did that station fit the expectations of a station that attracted a lot of CTA passengers to arrive by bicycle?

After coming up with a “top 30” of geographically diverse CTA and Metra stations, my boss and I rented an I-GO car to visit 15 of them to record measurements of physically available space, take photographs, and discuss things like how people might access the station with their bicycles (it wasn’t always clear, and many stations turned out to have sufficient bike parking for the amount of people who cycled there).

To make this project respect geography, and to do it as simply as possible, I divided the stations into north and south categories, separated by Madison Street. Stations in the south category were compared only with fellow south stations. I don’t know if this was an appropriate to consider geographic equity, but I had limited time and resources to develop a method and complete this project. In other words, I did the best I could and I think I did a pretty good job. Hopefully time will tell and I can learn from successes and mistakes with this project. That it’s actually being constructed makes me very happy.

Considering the stations

Lots of u-racks at the 55th-56th-57th Metra station in Hyde Park. Photo by Eric Rogers. 

I recommended that bike racks for the 55th-56th-57th Street station be installed at 57th Street because it has more space than the other entrances. Here’s what else I said about the space:

North side of 57th St, east of station house

This space is very large like Space C, but it’s extremely grungy and dank. The restaurant in the station house is currently storing its garbage bins here. The space receives natural light all day because of a gap in the viaduct. There’s an attendant at this station house on weekdays from 6 AM to 2:30 PM, but this person has NO view of the space. 57th St is one-way east of Lake Park Ave, and two-way west of Lake Park Ave.

Sheltered, except for gap in the viaduct roof.

I’m happy to report that the situation has been improved over the description in my “station profile”: the sidewalk concrete was replaced, and the walls and pylons were cleaned and painted white. The restaurant’s garbage bins were moved east in the open air (not under the viaduct). Another change was at Loyola Red Line station: I recommended they be installed in one of two outdoor locations but the bike racks were installed inside the station house.

The other tier 1 locations in my recommendation were Western Orange Line and 95th Red Line (both CTA). Howard Red Line was a tier 2 station (and is built), along with Ravenswood Metra and Logan Square Blue Line. I found out later that the Howard Red Line station also received some double deck racks. Ravenswood station is being completely replaced soon so I understand why that didn’t get any new bike parking as part of this project. I don’t know why Logan Square Blue Line didn’t receive any, if Howard did. It might be that there wasn’t enough money in the $375,000 grant, or that someone has other plans for the CTA station.

A sixth station was part of the project, but not part of my recommendations. The Clybourn Metra station (2001 N Ashland, serving both the UP-North and UP-Northwest lines) was already in planning and design phases and was included in the RTA ICE grant round 2 project to complete the funding arrangement. The bike parking area at Clybourn was to be paid for by Chicago TIF funds; combining the TIF funds with the RTA ICE grant would provide the local match the RTA ICE grant needed (requiring a local match is typical).

See more photos and information on Grid Chicago.

Figuring out how many CMAQ projects are for roads

March 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Simplified, the purpose of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) grant is to fund projects that reduce congestion and improve air quality. This usually means bicycle, pedestrian, and transit facilities and vehicles. But it also means road projects. Like intersection widening, new signals, changes to signal programming, and “signal interconnect” (timing the signals to cooperate with each other to have some free flowing traffic). It can also mean making grade separations at railroad tracks to eliminate backups when trains cross. However, not everything is infrastructure: there’s also marketing, encouragement, analysis, bike sharing, and education.

In a conversation I was having last night with some transportation advocate friends, one joked that most of CMAQ funds road projects. I agreed (probably because the irony of reducing congestion by making higher capacity roads was funny to me), and we moved on to other topics. I set out verify the actual distribution share for the six-county region in Northeastern Illinois.

I spent almost an hour converting the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s CMAQ 2012-2016 projects list from PDF to Excel and then quickly identified every project as being “road” or “not road”. I tallied the amount of proposed CMAQ funding for the projects to get the answer: road projects take up 25.7% of CMAQ funding.

But I can’t stop there! Now that I have CMAP’s data in a spreadsheet, I can get the average of Daily VOC eliminated for road and non-road projects, as well as the estimated cost per VOC kilogram eliminated.

On average, non-road projects have a lower cost per VOC kilogram eliminated ($4,109.37 versus $9,472.90). And non-road projects on average eliminate 19.7 times more kilograms of VOC daily (5.918 kg versus 0.301 kg for road projects).

There are some disclaimers! These are all estimates and not every project has received funding. Also, projects are not selected solely on cost per kilogram of VOC eliminated, or daily VOC eliminated. I’d also like to see estimates on the number of people affected by each project.

You can check my math by downloading my modified projects list (XLS).