Tag: land use

Letter to the editor: Illinois cities shouldn’t have the ability to impose parking mandates

My letter to the editor was published as guest commentary in The Daily Line

State Rep. Kam Buckner’s bill to stop cities from mandating specific numbers of off-street car parking at homes and businesses in transit-served areas should be celebrated. These mandates increase the cost of housing, take up land that could be used for just about anything else (like, more housing), and, because of how they facilitate more driving and require building more curb cuts than is truly necessary, make it harder to walk, bike, or ride the bus to run errands.

A massive parking garage at the new Malcolm X College on the Near West Side of Chicago.

I rent my home and I like the idea that there are only enough car parking spaces in the building for people who really need to have a car close by and are willing to pay for it. This means that the cost of providing parking for everyone in the building is not added onto my rent. 

Currently, every municipality in Illinois with a zoning code has a different idea of how many car parking spaces are required at bars, restaurants, townhouses, bowling alleys, and cemeteries. City planners don’t have the training or expertise to project the demand for parking. In other words, they don’t know more than home builders and businesses do about how many parking spaces each project needs.

In the place of mandates, cities should let home builders and businesses choose how much parking they believe they need to serve their tenants, employees, and customers.

By prioritizing car ownership and usage, parking mandates perpetuate reliance on fossil fuels and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, removing such requirements can incentivize the use of public transportation, cycling, and walking, consequently reducing traffic congestion and air pollution in our cities.

Without parking mandates near transit service, cities will be freer to allocate land in ways that support sustainable transportation, including making room for more housing to be located near transit and in walking distance to essential shops and services.

I look forward to debating the specifics of Buckner’s bill and getting it passed this year. 

-Steven Vance, Chicago, urban planner

[P.S. Buckner has another bill, HB4795, to prevent Illinois’s eight largest cities from having residential zoning districts that disallow multiple units.]

Netherlands, day 1 (day 10 of the trip)

I arrived to Rotterdam via ferry over the English Channel from Harwich, England, on Wednesday evening (day 9). This part of the travelogue is about day 10. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 10

Thursday, May 11, 2023 – 289 photos takenfind more on Flickr

  • I woke up to have breakfast with my friends, who I was staying with. They were going to their offices in Amsterdam, but rather than travel with them I decided to get ready a bit slower and meet them in the evening for dinner.
  • I left their house at around 10 AM and started cycling, on the OV-fiets shared bicycle, owned by NS, the Dutch national railway company, that I picked up the day before. My destination was Rotterdam Centraal station so I could return the bike and hop on an Intercity Direct high-speed train to Amsterdam (the train runs high-speed between Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Schiphol airport). But I was distracted by the planes landing at the Rotterdam-The Hague (RTM) airport, which is five minutes from my friends’ house.
  • At this point I realized I didn’t really need to be anywhere soon, so I kept cycling. My friend D. had already pointed out a place to spot trains on the “HSL” (high-speed line) so I headed there, which is about 10 minutes north of their house, in between Rotterdam and a suburb called Rodenrijs. Dutch land use is quite compact. The built-up area ends with a hard line and then there’s either agricultural land or nature preserves. The area between their neighborhood and this suburb had a bit of both. From this location I spotted Thalys, Eurostar, and NS’s Intercity Direct trains in both directions.
  • Having enough of this I cycled back to the house to recharge my phone (I had already used half of the battery recording so many photos and videos in two hours). Only then did I cycle 18 minutes to the station and board the next ICD train. ICDs depart every 15 minutes, so I didn’t bother to target a timed departure. I also like to get an “American cookie” at Kiosk, a $5 cold cuts sandwich, and drinkable yogurt.
  • On the train I spotted my trainspotting spot (view it on a map).
  • At Schiphol airport station I changed trains to a Sprinter to Amsterdam Zuid (south) station, where I changed to the Amsterdam Metro so I could disembark at Jan Van Galenstraat station. Why? That’s the nearest station to where the bike I own lives. (It lives at another friend’s flat, who lend it to their visiting friends occasionally.)
  • Schiphol airport is a notable station: it has six platforms and trains to everywhere in the country, plus Thalys trains to Brussels and Paris stop here. My friend will sometimes take the train from Rotterdam, disembark here, and bike the rest of the way to his Amsterdam office to ensure he gets enough cycling in that day.
  • I unlocked my bike (which my friend had set out for me the day before) and rode it northeast towards the city center. My destination was the Allard Pierson Museum because I wanted to see their “Maps Unfolded” exhibit. The exhibit displayed maps created by Dutch people and over the last 400 years, showing the Netherlands, places colonized by the Dutch, and maps of the world made by Dutchies.
  • As usual, I missed a turn or two but serendipitously encountered a recent major streetscape change (basically a project that converted asphalt and space for cars to space for people and more landscaping – read about the changes at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal on Bicycle Dutch).
  • The upper floors of the Allard Pierson Museum gave me great views of the Rokin canal, the shops that front it, the cyclists that ride it, the tourists and Amsterdammers that lunch on the water’s edge, and the tour boats that slowly motor along.
  • After the museum I checked out the new underwater bike parking garage. Read that again. The Dutch have built an underwater. bike. parking. garage. Watch this 1-minute time lapse video that shows how it was built. A canal area in front of Amsterdam Centraal station was dammed and emptied of water. The garage was built, with a watertight roof and vertical circulation and the water was replaced.
  • This bike parking garage has 7,000 spaces, on double decker racks that use pistons to assist bicyclists in lifting the upper racks up and down. Again, Mark W. has demonstrated this over and over again on his blog. Each of the numbered aisles indicates about how many spaces are free.
  • The garage replaces two other garages on the south side of the station, and is part of a long-term project to “clean up” the areas around the station. (The project includes enlarging waiting areas for the tram platforms, reducing lanes for cars, preventing vehicles that aren’t taxis and mobility transit from getting close to the station entrance, and decluttering bikes.)
  • Everyone who uses the garage must check in their bike using their OV-chipkaart (public transport smart card) or a contactless bank card or smartphone wallet. This way the garage automatically tracks that everyone who leaves with a bicycle was also tracked as entering with a bicycle (although the system doesn’t check that it’s the same bicycle).
  • The bike parking garage has a direct entrance to the Metro station and the train station (where one can board trains to anywhere in the country, as well as to Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and I think Czechia).
  • The next new thing to see is the IJboulevard, an extension of land into the former bay called the IJ on the north of Amsterdam Centraal. (I really don’t know what to call it now, the Wikipedia article calls it a “body of water”.) The IJboulevard is a kind of linear plaza that’s as long as the train station shed, a new public space. It wasn’t hot when I was traveling, but I’ve recently seen complaints on Dutch Twitter that it’s oppressive without landscaping.
  • Also on the north side of the train station is the bus station, which is on level two (or level one if you’re European). It’s been there for many years, but it’s impressive due to its operations and the architecture.
  • The ferries are also on the north side of the train station. This station is truly a multimodal hub. It’s one of the most fascinating and bustling places to be in the city. There are two ferry routes here for pedestrians and bicyclists to the north side of the IJ, and another ferry route a quarter mile to the east. All the ferry routes are free and operate 24/7 because there are no bridges or tunnels for pedestrians or bicyclists (even if there were they would be sorely inconvenient because of their length and depth or height). Since 2018 there has been Metro service to the north side of the IJ; this allows bicycles but there’s a fare and doesn’t operate 24/7.
  • Ferries are designed to walk and roll on and go back and forth; they don’t need to turn around. They leave on a schedule – pay attention to the countdown screens at each dock – but must yield to boat traffic already in the IJ, which I got to watch.
  • It was time to move on, towards the restaurant where I would be meeting my Rotterdam friends. I biked to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s main park. Vondelpark is surrounded mostly by housing so it connects to side streets, but it’s crossed by a main street and buttressed at the south end by a main street separates it from Rijksmuseum and Museumplein.
  • Because of how it’s connected to so many side streets, and a couple main streets, Vondelpark makes a greater “intersection” for through-routes. But it’s also a wonderful place to cycle for people watching, recreation, or to cycle in circles, like I did. Using my new handlebar phone mount I recorded some video and captured this awesome scene of three bicyclists riding side by side by side all turning at the same time!
11-second video of what appears to be some very fluid and coordinated cycling in Vondelpark.
  • We ate dinner at a vegan burger restaurant called Vegan Junk Food Bar that dyed their buns hot pink as a fun gimmick (some of the food was good and some of it was mediocre) and afterward had beers at Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Brewery of the IJ).
  • From the brewery we walked about half an hour to Amsterdam Centraal station and boarded the next Intercity Direct train back to Rotterdam Centraal, and took the Rotterdam Metro back home – this time with my personal bicycle so I could have it for the next five days in Rotterdam, and a special ride around Texel island (in a future blog post).

At least 2.5 percent of the land area in Chicago is covered in parking lots and garages

Here’s how I know that at least 2.5 percent of the land area in Chicago is covered in parking lots and garages, as of February 5, 2017.

That’s a lot of polluted water runoff.

I grabbed the land area of 227.3 from the Wikipedia page.

I grabbed all the parking lots from OpenStreetMap via Metro Extracts, which is going to be the most complete map of parking lots and garages.

Volunteer mappers, including me, drew these by tracing satellite imagery.

With the parking lots data in GIS, I can count their area in square feet, which comes out to 160,075,942.42. Convert that to square miles and you get 5.74.

5.74/227.3*100 = 2.5 percent

The last snapshot of parking lot data I have is from February 2016, when only 3.39 square miles of parking lots have been drawn.

There are still many more parking lots to be drawn!

They didn’t pave paradise, but they still put up a parking lot

The building

The building. Image: Cook County Assessor

Two light industrial building were purchased and demolished in order to build more car parking for WMS Gaming in the Avondale community area. Congratulations on the success of WMS Gaming that they are hiring more people, but this kind of development is transit “dis-oriented”.

Nearly an entire block face of California from Melrose to Roscoe will have a surface parking lot. Across the street to the west, and across the street to the south is entirely residential.

The Chicago Department of Planning and Development staff wrote in their report to the Chicago Plan Commission that the project “Promotes economically beneficial development patterns that are compatible with the character of existing neighborhoods (per 17-8-0103) as evidenced by the compatibility of off-street parking within the broader industrial park character of the surrounding area.”

The Plan Commission had to approve the demolition of these buildings and the additional parking lots because they were not allowed in Industrial Planned Development 1151.

The change was neither an economically productive use of the land, nor is it “compatible with the character” of half of the surrounding area.

This might be economically productive for WMS Gaming, so more of its workers can drive. But there are more ways to get around than driving.

WMS Gaming is near the 52-California bus route. It’s also two blocks from the 77-Belmont bus route and 152-Addison bus route. WMS Gaming can operate a shuttle to CTA or Metra stations.

Turning what was – and still could be – productive space has now been turned into entirely productive

Exploring Pace’s locations for mysterious Arterial Rapid Transit bus stations on Milwaukee Avenue

intersection of Touchy and Milwaukee in Niles

This is the semi-urban scene at Touhy and Milwaukee Avenue. The police station is ahead on the right. The water fountain (described below) is behind the bus on the left. There are multi-unit buildings to the left and across the street on the right. Image: Google Streetview

Update, Jan 21, 2015: Pace unveiled their plan for ART and their request to Congress to make the ART plan a project of regional significance to attract more funding.

Pace, the suburban bus operator in Chicagoland, is constructed an Arterial Rapid Transit bus route on Milwaukee Avenue from the Jefferson Park Transit Center in Chicago – a busy intermodal station where Metra and CTA buses and trains stop – to Golf Mill Mall in Niles. Both of these are major transfer hubs.

I’ve never looked into ART bus systems before but it seems to resemble what many call BRT Lite. Pace has minimal information on its website. Daniel Hertz, notable bus transit supporter, pointed me to an RFP [PDF, 10 MB] that describes the location and scope of Pace’s first (of many) ART corridors.

The RFP describes this project as one of 24 corridors outlined in its Vision 2020 document “to provide a regional network of premium transit services”. It appears that premium is relative and that bus riders will have a more comfortable and easier-to-find bus station at which to wait – bus travel time will not change.

I’ll try to paint you a picture of the built environment going north to south at the eight intermediate stops.

Dempster Street, Niles

Milwaukee has six general purpose lanes here and Dempster has six, four of which go under Milwaukee; buildings are set back far from the curb and land uses are low-density and optimized for arriving in a car

Main Street, Niles

Milwaukee has four general purpose lanes and one wide parking lane here; Main is a two-lane street; there is some residential on both streets

Oakton Street, Niles

Milwaukee and Oakton both have four general purpose lanes

Harlem Avenue, Niles

this intersection has decades-old buildings that have limited parking up front and smaller setbacks; there’s a Dunkin Donuts here with a drive-through between the building and the sidewalk (that’s novel but awful)

Touhy Avenue, Niles

This intersection may be the most urban, despite its immense size. Touhy has six lanes here meaning pedestrians must cross 100 feet of pavement in a faded, stamped-asphalt crosswalk; there’s a massive police station building on one corner, a large multi-unit building on another, a strip mall that actually has entrances onto a  sidewalk plaza instead of just in the parking lot behind it (the Subway and Starbucks here even have sidewalk cafés), and a fountain rounding out the junction – I recommend demolishing the fountain in favor of selling the land to a developer who can build more of the multi-unit buildings like the ones behind the fountain while also getting rid of the pointless cul-de-sac

Highland Avenue, Chicago

This is one block south of Devon Avenue, in Norwood Park. There’s a conventional bike lane here but the Chicago Department of Transportation has noted that there just enough cars that reducing the number of general purpose lanes from four to two – part of a road diet that would add buffered or protected bike lanes – but many residents don’t support the project so the alderman has decided against supporting it.

The land use and design is a blend of what came before it and what’s typical in Chicago: old buildings up against the sidewalk, closer-built single-family homes, some multi-unit buildings.

Austin Avenue, Chicago

Like Highland but now seeing fewer surface parking lots.

Central Avenue, Chicago

Like the rest of the junctions we’re still in motordom; four of the six “first in line” motorists seen in Google Streetview are blocking the crosswalk while waiting for the light to turn green.

About the stations

Pace has established a $6 million budget for the station construction. The station platforms will span 40 to 110 feet, a raised platform that’s 12 inches tall, a new shelter, real-time bus tracker*, a common vertical marker, a single bike rack to hold two bicycles, and associated roadway, curb, and drainage improvements.

It’s unfortunate to learn that the RFP mentions that shelters in Chicago may have to be the insufficiently designed kind JCDecaux operates for the city as part of a very long advertising contract.

Pace ART station design

Pace shows a rendering mocking up a typical station design. I’m concerned the handrail at the rear of the bus will preclude using longer buses in the future, but that would be the least of Pace’s worries.

* It appears that Pace will be using NextBus‘s real-time arrival information services (page A-6 of 14); they’re a company founded in 1996 and now owned by Cubic, which operates Ventra.