Tag: video

Living in a smart city

May 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

What does living in a smart city look like?

It might look like this.

When a city can gather data on every aspect of it’s citizens activities, what should we do with it? What products, services and environments should we develop?

Many private and public sector organisations are rushing us towards a future state where every cup of coffee, cell phone, taxi, bus, street and building will be self-aware and communicating with us and each other. Rather than asking when is this future coming, I’d like to ask what will we do once it’s here.

That’s the description of a class taught by George Aye at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I visited the class twice to hear and watch their presentation on minimizing disruptions caused by traffic crashes at a specific intersection, but whose new system elements can be transferred to other intersections in the city. When I came back the second time, the students had figured out a way to animate the intersection using a projector and mirror (which you see at the end of the video).

A static shot of the animation on the 3D paperboard and mixed material model.

The intersection in question is “The Crotch”, or the center of Wicker Park, at Milwaukee-North-Damen. The goal was to imagine how smart processes, policies, and technologies can be used to minimize the disruption of crashes at this intersection and others like it. The first phase of the students’ plan is about preventing crashes and the second phase is about speeding up the investigation. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read the class blog, which documents, through narrative, photos and video, the students’ progress.

Some of their proposal for Milwaukee Avenue in this area included:

  • Barring private automobiles at certain times to give more room to more efficient modes, like buses and bicycles
  • During the ban period, allow taxis and possibly car-sharing cars
  • At all times of the day, deliveries (like beer) would be scheduled in advanced to better use existing and consolidated loading zones; when trucks use loading zones, they aren’t blocking traffic
  • Implement a Barnes dance (pedestrian scramble) at The Crotch to accommodate existing pedestrian crossing behaviors and speed up crossing times of what are now two-leg crossings (like walking north or south on west side of Damen Avenue, which requires a crossing distance of about 180 feet on two segments while the crosswalk signal cycle may not let you do consecutively; a direct crossing is only 72 feet)

View the full Living in a smart city photoset

My television interview about dooring data

April 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Last week you heard me on WGN 720 AM talk about bicycling in Chicago and my bike crash map.

This week you’ll get to see me talk about bike crash and dooring data on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight program. It comes after a rule change announced on Sunday: the Illinois Department of Transportation will begin collecting crash reports for doorings. Previously, these were “unreportable.”

WTTW reporter Ash-har Quraishi came over to my house Thursday to ask me about what kind of information the crash data I obtained from IDOT includes and excludes.

Just how many taxi vs. bicycle crashes are there? A Google Refine story

April 26, 2011 / / 0 Comments

On this Chicagoist story about how IDOT will now collect data on doorings (instead of ignoring that crash type as they preferred), I opened the story photo entitled “Cabbie takes down another” by Moe Martinez. His photo caption reads, “you see it alot … thankfully this guy seemed to be relatively ok … coherent and what not.”

I wanted to know just how often “we” see taxi drivers crashing with people riding bicycles. You can’t filter by vehicle type in either mine or Derek’s bike crash maps, but you can via the Fusion Table.

I decided to get the answer via Google Refine and make a screencast to show you just how quick and powerful a tool it is.

It’s dead simple:

  1. Load a CSV of the data into Google Refine.
  2. Click on the VEH1_SPECL column’s down arrow, then Facet>Text Facet.
  3. In the facet box, sorted alphabetically, find “TAXI/FORE HIRE.”
  4. The number of rows that apply is listed: 353.
  5. Divide 353 by the total number of rows, 4931, multiply by 100, and you get your percentage.

Taxi drivers are involved in just 7.2% of bicycle crashes in Chicago in 2007-2009.

The majority of crashes, at 66%, involve people driving “PERSONAL” vehicles. And 80% of those crashes are with a passenger vehicle that’s not a van, minivan, SUV, truck, or bus (so probably a sedan or coupe). Let’s look at more data.

How many taxis are there and how many personal vehicles are there? Are taxicabs involved in a disproportionately higher number of crashes?

About 781,023 people drive to work, either alone or with someone else, in Chicago (data from 2005-2009 5-year American Community Survey). 1,063,047 households have 1,218,594+ vehicles available in Chicago. Let’s assume the 7,000 taxicabs in Chicago are not counted as a “vehicle available.”* That’s 1,225,594 “personal” vehicles. If all were on the road at the same time, only 0.57% of them would be taxicabs. But they’re not on the road at the same time. So let’s take that number of people who drive to work and add 7,000 vehicles to it. So of those 788,023 “vehicles” now on the road, just 0.88% of them are taxicabs.

So it does seem that taxicabs are involved in a disproportionate number of crashes when compared to their presence on the streets. However, taxicabs are most likely driven more more miles and for more time than personal vehicles thus making their exposure to people bicycling greater than drivers of other vehicles. (A majority of “personal” trips are very short.)

New data coming soon

I can’t wait to get the 2010 crash data. Here’s why: In 2007, students in a taxi driver training course at Harold Washington College received some education about sharing the road with bicyclists:

A pilot “Share The Road” education module was launched at the taxi training school at Harold Washington College. It includes a 25-30 minute lecture, with discussion. After the pilot, the class will be required for all people training to drive taxis in Chicago. In the future, bicycle questions will be included on the exams required to become taxi drivers. June 2007 MBAC meeting minutes (PDF).

The number of crashes between taxi drivers and people riding bikes jumped from 2007 to 2008, but declined heavily between 2008 and 2009. More data will show us a clearer trend that may lend insight into the impact of the “Share The Road” education module.

*Notes

The question (PDF) on the American Community Survey asks, “How many automobiles, vans, and trucks of one-ton capacity or less are kept at home for use by members of this household?” This may or may not include taxicabs stored at home.

I don’t know how many taxicabs there are in Chicago, but the Chicago Sun-Times reported there are approximately 7,000.

Don’t vote for this guy

December 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Will the next Chicago mayor be the same kind of urban planner like Richard M. Daley was? Will they build new parks and libraries at the same time they sell off infrastructure at a fraction of its value or abuse Tax Increment Financing funds?

I attended the UIC mayoral candidate forum on Wednesday to find this out. There was some talk about creating an open and transparent government (Patricia Watkins), with budgets that a 5th grader could read and spending denoted for each Ward or Community Area (I really like these ideas).

One candidate, Fredrick White, wants to support the building of a water bottling plant that would bottle water with “CHICAGO” on the label and have it sold in local stores and restaurants in order to create jobs (I don’t like this idea at all).

Fredrick K. White is probably telling the audience to visit his website.

I liked Miguel del Valle’s responses to the question about paying for higher education and ensuring the University of Illinois is funded. He recommended better integrating the community colleges and supporting the 3+1 program, where the final year of a bachelor’s program is completed at a university.

At least two candidates want to create technology parks, one even saying he wants Chicago to become the Silicon Valley of the Midwest. Another said Chicago can become the hotbed for nanotechnology development (William Walls).

Whatever was said, it wasn’t said by Fenton Patterson. I can’t recall anything he said. When responding to questions, he swaggered to the front of the stage, pulled his jacket back, stooped his head down, mumbled something that didn’t answer any question that was asked. His demeanor looked like that of a detective on [insert name of cop TV show here] ready to grill a perpetrator.

This forum was the first step in weeding out bad candidates like Fenton Patterson.

More of my work on the Chicago elections:

Buffered bike lanes make bicycling easy

November 6, 2010 / / 0 Comments

UPDATE: With the post you’re reading and this post, I want to show you what a bicycle lane can do! Also clarified definition of buffered and protected bike lanes in second paragraph.

All of this talk about protected bike lanes made me want to watch some videos! Here’s a clip of my friend and I riding on our first ever buffered bike lanes. As seen on Stark Street in downtown Portland, Oregon.

The next video is about Sands Street (over 1 year old now) in New York City that I’ve been raving about for a couple weeks and months now, since riding on it in late August 2010. One half is protected by a concrete wall, and the other half is semi-protected by having raised pavement and a buffer. A bike lane with only a spatial buffer is not considered protected (like in the first video, above).

People riding their bikes westbound (right side of bike lane) on Sands Street toward either the Manhattan Bridge (turn left, south), or Dumbo Brooklyn and the waterfront (turn right, north).