Making strides: the Chicago Pedestrian Plan

By John Greenfield

[This piece also appears in Newcity.]

This June evening is too pretty for the subway, so I bicycle south to the Pink Line’s California station to meet up with the Active Transportation Alliance’s Tony Giron. He’s leading a march across the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Little Village to Farragut High School for the first of seven public inputhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif meetings on the Chicago Pedestrian Plan.

Similar to the Bike 2015 Plan, this Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) document will be a roadmap for making the city a safer and easier place to walk. The goal is to reduce pedestrian injuries by half and fatalities by one hundred percent. “Chicago is a great city for walking,” says Giron. “But along with park paths and tree-lined streets, we still have roads that are difficult to cross, dangerous intersections and places that are inaccessible to people walking.”

Fellow green transportation journalist Steven Vance (stevencanplan.com) and I recently launched Grid Chicago, a new blog about walking, biking and transit in Chicago and beyond. Read the rest of this story at gridchicago.com.

Gabe Klein meets Chicago's bicycle community

CDOT bike coordinator Ben Gomberg, CDOT commissioner Gabe Kline, CDOT deputy commissioner Luann Hamilton

By John Greenfield

Today’s Bike to Work Week rally in Daley Plaza was inspiring, a far cry from last year’s lackluster event, thanks to big plans for bicycling from new mayorRahm Emanuel and forward-thinking transportation commissioner Gabe Klein.

In 2010 Chicago’s efforts to become a world-class bike town had stagnated. The city had installed over 100 miles of bike lanes and over 10,000 parking racks, achieved bike access on transit and educated multitudes about safe cycling, but we seemed to be resting on our laurels. Meanwhile other U.S. cities were pioneering car-separated bike lanes, automated bike sharing systems, on-street parking corrals, traffic-calmed “bike boulevard” streets, car-free “ciclovia” events and more.

This week fellow green transportation journalist Steven Vance (stevencanplan.com) and I launched Grid Chicago, a new sustainable transportation blog. Read the rest of this story at gridchicago.com.

Stalled on the Bloomingdale Line

Sixteen months after choosing a firm to design the Bloomingdale Trail, the city still hasn't awarded the contract

by John Greenfield

[This article also runs in the Chicago Reader, www.chicagoreader.com.]

On a weekday morning in October, in gorgeous Indian summer weather, I rode my bicycle on top of the Bloomingdale line, the dormant railroad right-of-way that runs 2.7 miles across the northwest side from Logan Square and Humboldt Park to Wicker Park and Bucktown. I hauled my cruiser up the elevated rail line's embankment, accessing it from the south side of the parking lot of the McCormick Tribune YMCA, at 1834 N. Lawndale, near the western end of the line. Heading east, trying not to think about all the broken glass under my tires, I came to one of the new signs posted at another easy access point at Albany Avenue. In English and Spanish it read:

DANGER
PRIVATE PROPERTY
NO TRESPASSING
VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED


Since 2004 the City of Chicago has been planning to convert the line, currently owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, into a multiuse trail and "linear park," similar in concept to Manhattan's wildly popular High Line, which opened in June 2009. The Chicago Department of Transportation has secured $3.1 million in state and federal funds to pay for the preliminary design and engineering of the Bloomingdale Trail, and in July 2009 the city announced its choice of Arup, a London-based multinational firm, to do this work, which is expected to take 18 months.

At that time, CDOT spokesman Brian Steele told me that his department hoped to officially award the contract to Arup by the end of the year. "Once the contract is awarded, the contractor can start work right away," he said.

But more than sixteen months have elapsed since then, and the contract still hasn't been approved.

In summer 2009, for a Reader story, I spoke with Bucktown residents whose houses abut the line; they complained that trespassing on the tracks had soared since the city and advocacy groups began publicizing the trail conversion concept. This illegal traffic included daytime use by bicyclists, joggers, and dog walkers, but the line was also attracting squatters and vandals at night. Neighbors said their buildings had been tagged with graffiti, rocks had been thrown through their windows, and that there had been several break-ins.

Alderman Scott Waguespack of the 32nd Ward held a closed-door meeting that July about the crime issue with reps from other affected wards, Canadian Pacific, the 14th District police, CDOT, and trail advocacy groups. Later that month most of the same entities showed up for a public meeting with about 60 residents who demanded that the line be secured. Shortly afterward the city fenced off vacant lots by the line at Kimball and at Milwaukee and Leavitt. Canadian Pacific promised to install the no-trespassing signs and agreed to let residents install fences and shrubs along the right-of-way to protect their homes—though it didn't offer to pay for them.

A path up the embankment at Milwaukee and Leavitt used to be one of the most convenient access points. But on my recent ride I encountered new iron fencing here on the south side of the tracks.


It's still possible to climb around the east side of these bars, over a rickety guardrail, albeit with the risk of a 15-foot fall to the street below if the railing were to break loose. At the line's eastern end, at Ashland and the Kennedy Expressway, chain-link fencing has been installed on the north, east, and south sides of the right-of-way—but door-size holes have been cut in all three sides. It's fairly easy to scramble up to the line here from the sidewalk on the east side of Ashland.

The area under the expressway seems to be a combination shooting gallery and art gallery, littered with needles, bottles, and food containers, and lined with an impressive array of colorful graffiti.


There are images of R2D2 and a walrus in a fedora, plus messages like "R.I.P. King of Pop" and "Squatrs show some respect! — our spot." Next to a Magic Marker sketch of a 40-ouncer and a spilled beer can someone has written "Smoke crack all the time, rain or shine."


Canadian Pacific is eager to get rid of the property, which has become a liability that brings in no income—it has offered to sell it to the city for a dollar. But the city doesn't want to take responsibility for the line yet: CDOT's Steele says the right-of-way probably won't change hands until after the preliminary design work is done and the city has a better sense of the condition of the embankment and its 37 overpasses, so it can more accurately estimate the cost of building the trail. Most of the concerned parties agree the right-of-way will continue to be a haven for illegal activities until then.

Which will be when? Steele says his department completed its negotiations with Arup in March, after which the contract was sent to the city's Department of Procurement Services. Since then procurement has been gathering and reviewing supporting paperwork from the contractor. Shannon Andrews, spokeswoman for Procurement, says the contract "is in the final stages of being awarded."

Steele says it's not unusual for the finalizing of the contract to be taking this long, given its complexity and the fact that Arup hasn't worked with the city before, which meant more time was needed to prepare the paperwork. Asked about his earlier forecast that the contract would be awarded by the end of last year, Steele says, "Like all estimates, it was just that—an estimate."

Other city contracts seem to also be moving slowly these days, says John LaPlante, director of traffic engineering at T.Y. Lin, a firm that has worked on other Chicago multiuse path projects. LaPlante says several of his company's recent city contracts have taken as long as a year to process.

Progress has been made on the conversion in the meantime. In June the Park District approved a $450,000 grant to the Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, to coordinate the Bloomingdale Trail Civic Engagement and Stewardship Project, which will help raise public funding and private donations for the trail project and coordinate community participation over the next two years. The Trust for Public Land now estimates the trail will cost $60 million.

And the development of parks at future access points is under way. "We think of the trail as both the line and the access points, so from our perspective things are moving forward," says Ben Helphand, board president of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, which has been advocating for the project since 2003.

After the Trust for Public Land helped arrange for the $1.2 million purchase of four parcels of land for access points, in 2008 the city razed buildings at Leavitt and Milwaukee and at Albany. That fall a park opened between Albany and Whipple as a simple, sodded green space. This month the Park District began construction on a $500,000 project to relandscape it and install playground equipment, public art, benches, and lighting. The work should be done by summer 2011. In September the Logan Square Neighborhood Association unveiled a colorful new mural on the retaining wall on the other side of the embankment from the park, featuring a map of the Bloomingdale with images of people walking, running, and biking on the line.


Besides the park between Albany and Whipple, there will eventually be seven other Bloomingdale access points: at the McCormick Tribune Y; between Kimball and Spaulding; at Mozart; at Maplewood; at Milwaukee and Leavitt; at Churchill Field Park, on Damen; and at Walsh Park, on Ashland.

The new iron fencing at Milwaukee and Leavitt is a reminder that some neighbors are still worried about security. This year Don Perini, owner of metal fabricator and erector Perini Ironworks, installed the bars at his own expense as well as the chain-link fences at Ashland, which he says were cut two days later. Perini, who lives next to the line in Bucktown, says he's had two of his window screens broken. "There are vagrants walking up there and people throwing things and lighting bonfires," he says. He'd like to see the line patrolled more often, but says the situation is better than it was last year: "The alderman [Waguespack] is doing a good job of monitoring it and getting the word out that it's private property."

Kerri Stojack, special assistant to Waguespack, credits the new fencing with reducing crime on the line. She says the ward office got about ten complaints last year about vandalism along the trail and has gotten fewer than five so far this year.

With the weather still unseasonably warm, I took another spin down the Bloomingdale at twilight earlier this month. Just west of California, on the middle of the rail bed, someone had set up a living room scene: ragged armchair, straight-back wooden chair, bookcase, and VCR atop a cabinet, all on an area rug.


Further east, near Marshfield—above Walsh Park—I came across a couple of tents sheltered by a tarp tied to trees. Two long-haired bearded men were leaving the tents. They said they'd been hanging out on the line for years. "A lot of people know we're here and we don't cause no trouble," the taller man said.

Why is the Red Grand stop rehab taking so long?

By John Greenfield

[This piece also runs in Time Out Chicago magazine, www.timeoutchicago.com.]

Q: It seems like the CTA Red Line’s Grand station reconstruction is taking forever. What’s the holdup?

A: While the on-train announcement for this stop used to cheerfully declare, “This is Grand,” things have has not been so rosy for this rehab, coordinated by the Chicago Department of Transportation.

Work started in early 2008 and was supposed to be finished last year, but CDOT has pushed the target back to late 2011, says spokesman Brian Steele. At just under four years, that would be about twice as long as the recent rehab of the Red Line’s Jackson station, and about the same duration as the reconstruction of the Red Line’s Chicago stop, but Steele says those were much simpler jobs. “The Grand/State project is the most complex and challenging station reconstruction project the department has tackled in the last decade,” he explains.


The location, directly below the Grand/State intersection and flanked on all sides by the foundations of buildings like the Rock Bottom Brewery, complicated matters, and there have been unforeseen hassles. Old blueprints for the site didn’t show the location of some utility lines, last year striking construction workers delayed the project about a month, and several times during the last two winters, work has slowed or stopped because of harsh weather.


On the bright side, Steele says the job is still within budget and the station will feature a much bigger mezzanine; more turnstiles, escalators and elevators; a large indoor bicycle rack; and a bike ramp to make it easy to roll your ride from the street to the station.

Why Chicago is falling behind other bike towns

CDOT Commissioner Bobby Ware speaks at the Bike to Work rally

By John Greenfield

[This piece also runs in this week's Newcity, www.newcity.com.]

Don’t get me wrong – Chicago’s already a terrific place to ride a bicycle. It’s flat, with a bike-friendly street grid and a scenic, 18.5-mile Lakefront Trail. Since the early ‘90s, the City of Chicago has spent $100 million to push pedaling, striping over 110 miles of bike lanes, installing more than 12,000 bike parking racks, and educating tens of thousands people about safe cycling via Mayor Daley’s Bicycling Ambassadors. Cyclists have access to buses and trains, we’ve got a fancy bike station in Millennium Park, and the list goes on.


But when Newcity asked me, a former Active Transportation Alliance staffer and consultant to the Chicago Department of Transportation’s (CDOT) Bicycle Program, for my take on the current state of bike culture in Chicago, one word sprang to mind: stagnant.

On some levels things are going great. Since changing its name from the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, Active Trans has been doing yeoman’s work building a coalition of biking, walking and transit interests. This has helped double the organization’s budget and staff size, increasing its clout to promote healthy, environmentally-friendly travel.

We now have four community bike centers spread from Woodlawn to Rogers Park, most teaching bike handling and mechanical skills to inner-city youth and selling refurbished rides to residents for cheap, green transportation. Three of these co-ops have expanded to larger digs in the last year or so.

Students and staff at Blackstone Bicycle Works in Woodlawn

There are now three Euro-style bicycle shops selling stylish, practical city bikes and cargo cycles, plus a gaggle of other new stores serving the ever-expanding ranks of daily commuters. After all, CDOT says bike traffic has quadrupled on Milwaukee Avenue over the last six years.

The Chainlink, a social networking site for Chicago cyclists, has ballooned to almost 4,000 members in just two years. There are now a multitude of two-wheeled subcultures in this city, some of which I’ve probably never even heard of. Why, only yesterday I heard the term “Tarck-ing” (fixed-gear, freestyle trick riding) for the first time.

But lately CDOT and other City agencies have been spinning their wheels when it comes to making bicycling safer, more convenient and fun through innovative bike facilities and programming. To paraphrase Daniel Burnham, they’ve been making little plans that have no magic to stir cyclists’ blood.

I’m not the only one who thinks so. Executive Director Rob Sadowsky recently resigned from Active Trans to take the reigns of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance in bike-crazy Portland, OR. Since Active Trans gets much of its funding from consulting contracts with CDOT, the nonprofit tends to be muted in its criticism of City Hall. Freed from this constraint. Sadowsky fired a parting shot in a recent Sun Times interview:

"Chicago was leading the way for a long while in cycling," Sadowsky said. "Things have been happening in other cities, like Minneapolis and New York, that really made strides we're not even coming close to. Part of that is a strong presence from the Department of Transportation's commissioner level and strong backing from the mayor. We're kind of lacking that in the city right now."

This current leadership vacuum was apparent at this year’s lackluster Bike to Work Rally. Mayor Daley, who usually shows up to give an enthusiastic if somewhat cryptic speech at the annual rally, was conspicuous by his absence.

Mayor Daley at a previous Bike to Work Day rally

CDOT Commissioner Bobby Ware, subbing for the mayor, seemed to know little about his agency’s bike projects. He spoke with his nose in his notes, referred to the City’s Bike 2015 Plan blueprint for cycling as the “2010 Plan,” and mangled the name of a Bicycle Program staffer who accepted an award on behalf of the program.

In fairness, Ware’s only been on the job for a month. But the fact that CDOT has had five commissioners in six years, for reasons known only to Mayor Daley, has slowed the pace of bicycle planning. Each new commish has to be brought up to speed on cycling issues, and this wastes precious time.

Another speed bump to better bike facilities and events has been the City’s reluctance to put some skin in the game. Daley, rumored to be a cyclist himself, is often cited as the U.S. mayor who is most outspoken in support of biking. And as a powerful politician, his lip service is in fact crucial for motivating bureaucrats to support bicycle projects.

But like our under-funded transit system, bicycling gets almost no money from the City budget. Virtually all of the cash CDOT spends on bike initiatives comes from federal and state funds, often through federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality grants which come from a tax on gasoline.

This stinginess makes it harder to pull off bold schemes like the “ciclovia,” an event that shuts down several miles of streets to cars, creating safe places to bike, walk and socialize. Active Trans first proposed bringing this Latin American concept to Chicago in the early 2000s, well before other U.S. cities were talking about it. But City Hall’s insistence on a heavy police presence and reluctance to foot the bill delayed the program for years while Active Trans struggled to raise the necessary funds.

Chicago's "Open Streets" ciclovia

The ciclovia finally debuted in 2008 as “Sunday Parkways” with events on two different 3.5-mile courses on Sundays in the fall. In 2009 it was consolidated to one 7-mile summer Saturday event, called “Open Streets.” After these modest successes the program fizzled out due to the difficulty of funding it - there will be no major events in Chicago in 2010. Meanwhile, city-funded ciclovias have flourished in other cities. New York is staging three this year, Portland, OR, is staging five, and San Francisco is staging nine.

San Francisco's "Sunday Streets" ciclovia

Chicago used to be the poster child for big-city bike improvements. A few years ago, New York’s Transportation Alternatives advocacy group liked to use the Second City’s successes to shame the then-sluggish New York DOT into action. But things changed in 2007 when New York got a dynamic, bike-friendly new transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan. In recent years Chicago has fallen behind New York and many other cities in several aspects of promoting cycling.

Chicago has installed more bike racks than any other U.S. city. But last year the City began uprooting most of Chicago's parking meters to make way for pay-and-display units, eliminating tens of thousands of de facto bike parking spots. Meanwhile, CDOT has not installed any new bike racks for months and will not be doing so anytime soon, due to installation contract delays.

Bikes crowded on racks and poles in Logan Square after meter removal

On-street bike parking, where a single car parking space is filled with racks to accommodate a dozen cycles, reducing sidewalk clutter and advertising the space efficiency of bikes, is beginning to be commonplace in Portland, OR, and San Francisco. Although Andersonville’s Cheetah Gym, with the blessing of the local chamber of commerce, asked for on-street racks several years ago, CDOT passed on this opportunity, citing concerns about safety. Chicago still hasn’t tried on-street bike parking.

On-street bike parking in Portland, OR

Millennium Park’s $3 million, state-of-the-art bike station opened to fanfare in 2004, but the facility is too far east to be of much use to most Loop commuters. The Bike 2015 Plan calls for building a second bike station in the West Loop, near Union Station and the Ogilvie Center, so that Metra commuters could pick up bikes to pedal to their offices. Although space was available to build the station in Metra’s new French Market, next to the Ogilvie Center, CDOT missed the boat on this opportunity as well.

Millennium Park's bike station

Separated bikeways, where cyclists are protected from cars by a curb or other physical barrier, are widespread in Europe and are becoming more common in U.S. cities. New York’s separated bike lane on 9th Avenue, for example, has been a hugely popular experiment, but Chicago has yet to try this idea.

Separated bike lane on 9th Avenue in New York City

Automated bike rental has been commonplace in Europe for years. Paris’ Velib system, with 20,000 bikes at rental kiosks all over town, is credited with doubling the mode share for cycling. Chicago has been talking about this idea for years and in 2007 Mayor Daley rode a Velib bike in Paris. But Washington D.C. beat us to the punch two years ago, Denver now has 500 automated rental bikes, and Minneapolis will be getting 1,000 this summer. Chicago is finally piloting a bike-share program this July, but once again we’re thinking small, with only 100 bikes in six Loop locations.

Denver's B-Cycle automated bike rental kiosks

But perhaps the most frustrating example of Chicago being the first to come up with a good idea for cycling but the last to implement it is the Bloomingdale Trail. As early as 1997 planners proposed turning the little-used Bloomingdale elevated rail line on the Near-Northwest Side into a multi-use path, in 1997, and the Chicago Plan Commission committed to the idea in 2004.

Although the rugged, now-abandoned rail bed is already getting plenty of illegal use from cyclists, joggers and squatters, the City seems to be dragging its heels on renovating the structure and opening it to the public. It’s unlikely to open until the end of this decade. Meanwhile, New York’s elegant High Line “vertical park,” a similar project that wasn’t officially proposed until 1999, debuted last year to huge acclaim – it’s already had millions of visitors.

Chicago's Bloomingdale Line

New York City's High Line

As a follower, not a leader, in all these different categories, it’s no wonder Chicago dropped in Bicycling magazine’s ranking of the best large U.S. cities for biking, from first place in 2001, to tenth place in 2010. It’s not that things are bad here, it’s just that more exciting stuff is happening more quickly elsewhere.

Active Trans will be hiring a new director soon, and it will be interesting to see if this person will can light a fire under CDOT and other departments to make some of the above projects happen sooner than later. But again, Active Trans can only push so hard, because the advocacy group depends on the City for consulting dollars.

Unlike in liberal, temperate West-Coast cities where bicycling has long been popular and politicians have responded to demands from the public for better bike facilities, cycling in Chicago has traditionally been a “top-down” affair. Under Daley, the City has installed paths, lanes and racks in an effort to coax people out of their cars.

But now that Chicago cycling has gained momentum while CDOT’s bike initiatives have lost steam, it’s time for a “bottom-up” approach. Citizens need to start pressuring City Hall to put the metal to the pedal.

It’s worked before. After seriously injuring herself when she wiped out on one of Chicago’s dangerous metal-grate bridges, in 2002 Kathy Schubert launched a letter-writing campaign demanding that the bridges be made safer for cyclists. The campaign infuriated then-CDOT Commissioner Miguel d’Escoto, but after receiving dozens of postcards, he ordered the Bicycle Program to start working on the problem. Eventually metal plates were installed on bridges at Wells and Cortland.

The Bike 2015 Plan, released in 2006, calls for the establishment of ten miles of “bike boulevards,” traffic-calmed, residential streets where cycling is encouraged because cars are forced to slow down, common in Portland, OR, Berkeley, CA, and other cities. Last fall Sarah Kaplan grew frustrated that little action had been taken on this proposal. She formed the grassroots group Bike Boulevards Now! to lobby the city to get moving on the idea. CDOT Bicycle Program Coordinator Ben Gomberg now says he’s hoping to establish Chicago’s first bike boulevard by 2011.

Bike boulevard in Berkeley, CA

If you want Chicago to remain a first-class bicycling town, contact your alderman, CDOT, or the Mayor’s Office to demand that the City starts implementing big plans for biking - now. Tell them you want immediate action on exciting projects like separated bikeways, on-street bike racks, a new bike station, a large-scale bike-share program, City-funded ciclovias and the Bloomingdale Trail. Or, better yet, form your own grassroots, recruit members via the Chainlink, and start organizing for change. It’s time to put the rubber on the road.

Chicago's dumbest intersection?

By John Greenfield

[This also runs in Time Out Chicago, www.timeoutchicago.com]

At Randolph and Michigan, why is it such a hassle to walk from the Chicago Cultural Center to Millennium Park?

Nowadays you have to cross the street three times to get there - north across Randolph, east across Michigan and south across Randolph again. But you used to be able to walk there directly in a marked crosswalk. The white lines are still faintly visible and many jaywalkers still follow this direct route, say Traffic Management Authority aides.

The City removed the crosswalk, along with another crossing at Washington, in August 2004, a month after the park opened, says Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Brian Steele. At the time Mayor Daley was thinking about moving into the Heritage at Millennium Park condos, just west of the cultural center.

Steele says the area was flooded with visitors to the new park and traffic engineers studying the intersections observed many conflicts between turning motor vehicles and pedestrians. “It was creating a lot of safety concerns,” he says.

After a crew ground out the thermoplastic lines, many peds continued to use the same crossings, says Steele. Workers fenced off the curbs with bollards and chains and added signs: “NO CROSSING – PLEASE USE OTHER SIDE.” The fencing cost taxpayers $51,000, according to CDOT records.


Asked whether the City considered the inconvenience to walkers when it removed the crosswalks, Steele says, “Point A to point B is not always the safest route. In return for the extra activity, pedestrians are in a much safer situation.”

Rob Sadowsky, executive director of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, which also advocates on walking issues, isn’t convinced. “The answer that we’ve heard from City is this was done to protect pedestrians, but the overwhelming message is this was done to ensure the flow of car traffic,” he says. “Michigan Avenue shouldn’t be a high-speed corridor; it should be an opportunity to stroll and explore.”