blog.zolk.com - A Blog by Kevin Zolkiewicz

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BRT is Coming to Chicago! (Well, kind of...)

CDOT held a planning open house at the Chicago Architecture Foundation last night that focused on design options for the upcoming Central Loop BRT project. Myself along with about 100 other interested parties attended the event, which included presentations by CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein and Deputy Commissioner Luann Hamilton. Follow the headline link for my full report at ChicagoBus.org.

I’m optimistic about the city’s BRT plans, but I’m still waiting to see Chicago develop what could become a “gold standard” for BRT in the United States. The Jeffrey Boulevard BRT, slated to open later this year, hardly even qualifies with BRT with rush hour-only bus lanes and souped up bus shelters. The Central Loop BRT is more promising, but isn’t traditional BRT in the sense that it serves only portions of multiple routes and will likely not include pre-paid boarding.

What I can only hope will be true BRT (serving an entire line with bus-only lanes, stations, and pre-paid boarding) will someday come to fruition along Ashland or Western. That project is still in the early planning stages.

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Andersonville's Decaying Crosswalks

A-Ville Daily reports on a reader’s complaint regarding the increasingly “shabby looking crosswalks” in Andersonville. As I describe in my comment on the post, these “brick” crosswalks are done using painted stamped asphalt that doesn’t age very well. Newer installations use longer lasting dyed concrete. In any case, I’ve long been concerned about the lack of visibility of the crosswalks, some of which haven’t even had the faded crosswalk lines repainted in several years. This is not just aesthetics, but also a public safety issue. In the future, I’d rather the City not bother with these stamped imprints and instead use their new standard of highly visible continental-style crosswalks, seen on the recently repaved Foster Avenue and Michigan Avenue downtown.

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Kickstarter Project to Fund City's First Parklet in Andersonville

eco-Andersonville, an initiative of the Andersonville Development Corporation, has launched a Kickstarter project to build Chicago’s first parklet. The goal of the project is to raise $5,600 to help fund creation of the parklet. The Andersonville Development Corporation plans to fund the rest of the project cost, estimated between $10,000 to $14,000 for the first year.

Parklets are small urban parks that typically replace two or three on-street parking spots with landscaping, seating, and bike parking. Streetsfilm has a video showcasing some of the parklets in San Francisco. Those parklets have resulted in a 37% increase in pedestrian activity on weekday evenings, according to a presentation by the Chicago Department of Transportation.

The parklet project coincides with other plans to install on-street bike corrals in Andersonville. After a frustrating experience trying to park my bike in Andersonville last week, I asked eco-Andersonville via Twitter for an update on that project. I’m told that a spot at Foster and Clark is “almost solid” and they’re looking into an additional location for the northern end of Andersonville.

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Video Tour of WMATA's New Railcars

Washington Metro’s GM Richard Sarles shows off the agency’s newest railcars, scheduled for delivery starting next year. One of the features is a snazzy electronic display that shows upcoming stops, similar to what’s on board New York’s newest cars. Really makes you wonder why CTA went with the 1980s version of that sign.

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Chicago Awards Bike Share Contract to Alta Bicycle Share

A couple months later than expected, but the City has finally awarded a contract for the upcoming bike sharing system. Alta, the same company responsible for bike sharing programs in several cities including DC, Minneapolis, Toronto, and soon New York, will run the yet-to-be-named bike sharing system in Chicago. The system will offer 3,000 bikes at 300 stations this year, with additional expansion planned. The Department of Transportation originally hoped to get the system up and running in June, but that timeframe is now questionable given the delay in awarding a contract.

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CDOT Proposing Road Diets, Protected & Buffered Lanes on Near South Side

Grid Chicago’s John Greenfield reports on a recent 4th Ward community meeting held this week to discuss road diets and new bike lanes that CDOT is planning to move forward with on the Near South Side. John put together a handy Google Map.

It’s perhaps one of the best installation plans thus far. A protected bike lane would be installed on King Drive from 26th all the way to 51st, with a buffered lane on Ellsworth continuing further south into Washington Park. Protected and buffered lanes would connect Washington Park to the lakefront via 55th. Further north, a buffered lane on 31st would connect Bridgeport to the lakefront. I like this plan because it connects multiple communities together with safe bicycling facilities and provides lakefront access thanks to the planned east-west lanes.

It’s starting to look like the South Side will benefit the most from the planned installation of 100 miles of protected bike lanes. The density of the North Side will make protected lane installation very tricky. Streets for Cycling 2020’s map of potential North Side protected lanes identified only a few miles of streets that could easily accommodate the lanes. It’s for that reason that I wonder if the North Side might benefit more from a solid network of neighborhood greenways rather than a disjointed protected lane network that randomly appears and disappears.