Tag Archives: Chicago

On state roads in Chicago, IDOT wants to properly collect evidence about bike lanes

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Chicago may be interested in building 100 miles of bike lanes but the state of Illinois wants to slow down the process on state roads in the city in order to collect more data:

But in many of the selected locations, sections of the roadways fall under state jurisdiction. The Illinois Department of Transportation won’t allow protected bicycle lanes to go on state-designated routes until it is satisfied they are safe, officials said.

IDOT will collect at least three years’ worth of traffic accident data and then make a determination based on the analysis, officials said, adding that the existing information is inadequate because protected bike lanes are new here…

Claffey said IDOT has safety concerns that include the visibility of cyclists at intersections and operational issues like maintenance and snow-removal around protected bike lanes. Approving protected bike lanes for Chicago would open the floodgates to allowing all other local governments in the state to do the same, he said.

“We are also concerned about losing traffic lanes,” Claffey said, noting that protected bike lanes require more space than traditional bike lanes.

In Illinois, it seems safe to ask if there is something else going on behind the scenes. But, if IDOT is claiming in part that they need more data about safety, isn’t this typically a persuasive argument when it comes to roads?

Chicago traffic bad and, perhaps worse, unpredictable

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Having heavy traffic is bad enough but Chicago also has unpredictable traffic, according to a new report.

Residents of the Chicago area are accommodating that increasing uncertainty by setting aside more time each day — just in case — for the commute, new research shows.

For the most important trips, such as going to work, medical appointments, the airport or making a 5:30 p.m. pickup at the child care center to avoid late fees, drivers in northeastern Illinois and northwest Indiana should count on allotting four times as much time as it would take to travel in free-flowing traffic, according to the “Urban Mobility Report” to be released Tuesday by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute. The analysis is based on 2011 data, which are the most recent available.

It is the first time that travel reliability was measured in the 30-year history of the annual report. The researchers created a Planning Time Index geared toward helping commuters reach their destinations on time in more than 95 percent of the trips. A second index, requiring less padding of travel time, would get an employee to work on time four out of five days a week…

The Chicago region ranked No. 7 among very large urban areas and 13th among 498 U.S. cities on a scale of the most unreliable highway travel times. The Washington area was the worst. A driver using the freeway system in the nation’s capital and surrounding suburbs should budget almost three hours to complete a high-priority trip that would take only 30 minutes in light traffic, the study said.

This sounds like an interesting new way to measure traffic. The absolute amount of time spent in traffic is interesting in itself but this study gives us a sort of confidence interval for time spent in traffic. This suggests that traffic is not just an issue of getting stuck but it is the threat of getting stuck that would affect a lot of behavior. Just the threat could lead to a lot more lost time and productivity.

It would also be interesting to look at how often the average driver gives themselves this time cushion. Could traffic be improved if people planned to take more time to get to their destination?

Repeat argument: Washington D.C. is the real second city in the United States

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Aaron Renn argues that Washington D.C., and not Los Angeles or Chicago, is the real “second city” in the United States:

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. Since 2001, Washington has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate of its peer group. Over the course of the entire decade, it ranked second in job growth, trailing only Houston. That wasn’t just because of the federal agencies and gigantic contractors of Washington stereotype. The region has also been a hotbed of entrepreneurship—much of it, to be sure, dependent on federal dollars. During the 2000s, it had 385 firms named to the Inc. 500 lists of fastest-growing companies in America, according to Kauffman Foundation research—by far the most of any metro area. From 2000 through 2011, according to rankings developed by Praxis Strategy Group, Washington’s low-profile but powerful tech sector had the country’s second-highest job growth, after Seattle’s. The region is also one of America’s top life-sciences centers.

Then there’s economic output. During the 2000s, per-capita GDP grew faster in Washington than in any of its peer regions except the Bay Area. Today, Washington’s per-capita GDP is the country’s second-highest—again, after the Bay Area. Unlike Washington, however, the Bay Area hemorrhaged jobs over the course of the decade. Related to Washington’s impressive output is its astonishing median household income, the highest of any metro area with more than 1 million people. A remarkable seven of the ten highest-income counties in America are in metro Washington. And during the 2000s, per-capita income rose in Washington faster than in any of its peer metros.

Finally, Washington’s population is the best-educated in America. Almost half of all adults in the Washington region have college degrees, the highest proportion of any metro area with more than 1 million people. The same is true of graduate degrees: almost 23 percent of Washingtonians hold them…

But what solidifies Washington’s emerging status as America’s new Second City isn’t its economic performance or its emerging global-city profile. Both of those are secondary effects of the real change in Washington: the increasingly intrusive control of the federal government over American life.

Washington has changed in recent decades and Renn highlights some of these shifts. Three things strike me about his analysis:

1. Washington still lags compared to Los Angeles and Chicago in being a world city. According to the 2012 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index, New York is #1, Los Angeles #6, Chicago #7, Washington #10, and Boston is the next American city at #15.

GlobalCitiesIndex2012ATKearney

This may not be a huge gap but L.A. and Chicago particularly have edges in business activity, human capital, and cultural experience while Washington has the clear edge in political engagement.

2. The choice to build a new capital in the United States back in the late 1700s is still having far-reaching implications today. Imagine New York City as both #1 global city and center of US government. While Renn argues the federal government in Washington is helping propel it up the rankings of cities, I wonder how government centers will fare in the future versus business and trade centers like New York, L.A., and Chicago (which aren’t even the state capitals). We might then benefit from a cross-national comparison with other countries that have similar set-ups.

3. Renn has made this argument before. I wrote a post titled “Washington D.C., not Chicago or LA, the real “second city” of the United States?” back on April 7, 2012 based on Renn’s piece on newgeography.com titled “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” So Renn is making this argument…is anyone else?

h/t Instapundit

Considering how to better connect Chicago’s “Cultural Mile”

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Chicago Tribune arts critic Chris Jones suggests Chicago’s “cultural mile” is not connected well:

Like many such districts, congressional and otherwise, the Chicago Cultural Mile is an inherently artificial entity — Chicago self-evidently has many a cultural mile — designed to promote specific business and nonprofit interests and, of course, designed not to impinge on the jurisdiction of others. The reason for the weird turns is to link such big lakefront museums as the Field Museum of Natural History in the “mile” along with such Michigan Avenue anchors as the Art Institute, the Spertus center and Millennium Park. John W. McCarter Jr., the former president of the Field, joined the board of the nonprofit Chicago Cultural Mile Association last week along with Frank P. Novel of Metropolitan Capital Bank & Trust. The association, a hitherto snoozey but apparently growing nonprofit, also announced the hiring of its first full-time executive director, Sharene Shariatzadeh.

Let’s stipulate that the weird trajectory of the Chicago Cultural Mile is indicative of a problem in cultural Chicago, which McCarter knows as well as anyone: the continued lack of a graceful, logical curve (be it path, rail or road) to get visitors from Michigan Avenue to the steps of the Field Museum and the Adler Planetarium in a way that does not confound the visitors. Some variation of a graceful curve — as distinct from a counter-intuitive, traffic-dodging series of right-angled turns on streets with a surfeit of concrete — is needed. There are many reasons for the current financial duress at the Field, but one under-acknowledged factor is the renovation of Soldier Field, which made the museum seem more of its own island, far more distant, far harder to reach, if only in people’s heads.

But that’s not a reason for the Cultural Mile to leave Michigan Avenue.

Motor Row, its natural destination, sits right next to the McCormick Place convention center, a crucial economic generator that was built without an obvious emotional link to its city — a disdain for urban context that extracts a heavy price. Fixing up Motor Row is the best way to change that. As the Tribune reported last fall, things are already happening: The Seattle-based food-circus hybrid known as Teatro ZinZanni is eyeing the ‘hood for its long-anticipated Chicago branch. The band Cheap Trick is planning a venue and museum. There is talk of hotels and restaurants. A nearby stop on the Green Line is coming.

Jones is suggesting there are three major issues at stake here:

1. The first issue is that there is not a coherent physical connection between these spaces. They exist in proximity to each other but there is not public space that would encourage visitors to travel between them. This is an urban planning issue.

2. The second issue is marketing and selling this stretch as a coherent grouping. Even without a good layout, how many visitors to Chicago know this grouping exists? While the northern end of Michigan Avenue, north of the Chicago River, is well known and visited, this area could use more promotion.

3. A third concern is that this cultural mile could be still expanded to include interesting existing places. As Jones notes, McCormick Place doesn’t really interact with the nearby area even as it attracts thousands of visitors so a nearby site that would attract visitors could be very lucrative and useful.

As someone who has visited this stretch numerous times, I would add another caveat. To get from Michigan Avenue to the museum campus (Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, and Adler Planetarium), the most direct route is to cut southeast from the corner of Michigan Avenue and Randolph Street through Millennium Park and Grant Park and over to Lake Michigan. This route takes advantage of one of Chicago’s great features: its parks along the lake. However, cutting through the park, getting away from the traffic, and enjoying the nature and different energy of the parks means that I miss out on what is going on along Michigan Avenue. If the city wants more people to follow Michigan Avenue south, does this necessarily mean diverting people away from the parks?

Remembering MLK in Chicago

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The story of the time Martin Luther King, Jr. spent in Chicago in 1966 is not well-known. While many think of King as leading a successful Civil Rights Movement that culminated in the “I Have A Dream” speech in 1963 and then the passing of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, his efforts in his last years faced more opposition. In Chicago, he unsuccessfully fought for an end to residential segregation. Read two longer posts about King’s time in Chicago:

–MLK in Chicago – Jan 17, 2011

–More on MLK in Chicago in 1966 – Aug 7, 2011

The Chicago Tribune has this short summary of what King faced in Chicago:

On this muggy Friday afternoon, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped out of the car that had ferried him to Marquette Park on Chicago’s Southwest Side to lead a march of about 700 people. The civil-rights leader and his supporters were in the white ethnic enclave to protest housing segregation. Thousands of jeering, taunting whites had gathered. The mood was ominous. One placard read: “King would look good with a knife in his back.”

As King marched, someone hurled a stone. It struck King on the head. Stunned, he fell to one knee. He stayed on the ground for several seconds. As he rose, aides and bodyguards surrounded him to protect him from the rocks, bottles and firecrackers that rained down on the demonstrators. King was one of 30 people who were injured; the disturbance resulted in 40 arrests. He later explained why he put himself at risk: “I have to do this–to expose myself–to bring this hate into the open.” He had done that before, but Chicago was different. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today,” he said.

Not Chicago’s best day or season.

Could a new Chicago casino be a cultural hub?

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Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones argues that the inevitable Chicago casino should be more of a cultural hub than a gaming paradise:

Instead, it should be viewed as a major new cultural hub, which happens to have a little gambling going on alongside its many other attractions.

And that won’t happen unless Chicago’s creative professionals — its architects, entertainment executives, chefs, artists, actors, music promoters, cultural officials — hold their noses and overcome, as did the former street performers of the Cirque du Soleil more than two decades ago, whatever qualms they may have about becoming involved with gambling, which will arrive with or without them. They must grab hold of this civic debate right now, before the chance is lost for good.

The main energy of a Chicago casino should have everything to do with experiencing architecture, watching spectacular shows, eating at world-class restaurants, interacting with thrilling technological art and the like, and as little as possible to do with gambling. When winners are few, the core activity, experience elsewhere has shown, is more frequently depressive than ecstatic. The casinos’ commercials showing constant excitement at the slots are, as anyone who has spent time in a casino late at night will attest, illusions.

The only thing the actual gambling would bring to the table is the revenue that will make other great things possible in what could be an intensely creative building, one of the few big-ticket cultural developments that actually could pay for itself and get built in a barely recovering economy, rather than languishing as a costly, unfunded dream.

This is an intriguing idea – and one that might be too aspirational. The conversation about casinos in Illinois has been primarily about money as state and local governments are in desperate need of cash. My primary question to Jones would be whether there are actual models to follow here – are there urban casinos, outside of Las Vegas, that meet the goals he suggests or would Chicago be doing a whole new thing here? What would it take to have both a profitable casino as well as one that could be a cultural center? Where would such a cultural casino be located that could build upon existing tourist flows while also attracting new crowds that would be drawn to a casino? Historically, casinos tend not to have the best reputation as they attract certain kinds of crowds so building a world-class casino and cultural hub would be a big coup if done well in Chicago.

Remembering the cable car era in Chicago

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A new book highlights the cable-car era in Chicago around the turn of the 19th century:

Chicago historian and transportation author Greg Borzo has chronicled that forgotten era, which lasted not quite 25 years (1882 to 1906), in his new book, “Chicago Cable Cars,” published by The History Press.

These horseless street railway cars were pulled by the quiet, invisible force of continuously moving underground cables that crisscrossed the city, starting on the South and West sides and Loop district and leading to a nationwide cable-car boom in almost 30 cities, according to Borzo…

His research revealed that the cable-car experience, which debuted Jan. 28, 1882 on State Street, from Madison to 21st streets, became “a rich part of the very fabric of everyday life” in Chicago and led to people from different ethnic and economic classes rubbing shoulders, if only for the duration of a ride…

Borzo, who has written three other books about Chicago, said he took on his latest project because history books about the city either confused cable cars with trolleys or skipped over cable cars in describing the timeline from horsecars to electric trolley cars.

He said he hopes the book will foster a wider recognition of Chicago’s cable-car history, perhaps in the form of a monument, a plaque or, better yet, construction of a short cable-car line.

I knew Chicago had electric street cars but was not aware there was a thriving cable car system as well. Find a preview of Borzo’s findings at Forgotten Chicago. The site includes these two interesting pieces of information:

1. Here is the track mileage comparison between Chicago and San Francisco:

During Chicago’s cable car era (1882 to 1906), three companies provided more than one billion rides using an estimated 3,000 cars. Chicago ended up with the second most miles: 41.2 double-track miles compared with a peak of 52.8 double-track miles in San Francisco. And to operate its systems, Chicago’s cable car companies built 13 powerhouses and countless car barns, office buildings, waiting rooms, repair shops, car building shops and other structures. With a mile of single track costing about $150,000, Chicago’s huge investment in cable car track, infrastructure and equipment added up to $25 million ($600 million in current dollars).

2. A map of the cable car system in the Loop in 1894:

For a city looking for new revenues and already having a decent tourist base, I could imagine some people might want to look at a short cable car line that would sell nostalgia like it does in San Francisco. How about a short line from Michigan Avenue to Navy Pier? Not quite an authentic route but it would connect two important tourist spots and replace the buses made to look like trolleys. Perhaps they could even create a little hill to ride over…

Comparing New York locations “Then and Now”

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Photographer Evan Joseph has co-authored a book that compares New York City locations Then and Now.

The book, an update to an earlier edition, pairs old photos of New York City with current photos of the same location. While photos in the previous edition didn’t always match exactly the heights and camera angles of the originals, in this edition, Joseph went through a painstaking process of matching the angle of each old photo. He did so by loading each historical image onto his iPad, he explained to us last week, going to each street photographed, and looking around until he could lock down the location of at least one building in the old photo. “Then I would keep doing it…keep moving around and around until I could get that building into the same location.”

While Joseph had no desire to use 100-year-old photography equipment to replicate the old photos—and is, in fact, known in the photography community for carrying around a lot of modern equipment—he found that he did miss one aspect of “then” photography. “What I quickly figured out was that the elevated subway lines that ran all over New York…were amazing photographic vantage points that no longer exist. So many of them were taken from 25 feet off the ground,” he says. “That is just an amazing place to shoot a building. It gets you above the traffic, it gets you above people, but not so high up that it’s a rooftop view. It renders the target…in a very natural and flattering perspective.” Joseph was left to replicate that perspective as best he could with a monopod, “really like a window-washer’s stick that I attached a photo mount too. Then I rigged up some remote triggers so I could fire the camera from holding a stick 10 feet about my head.” (Joseph also used his connections to developers and real estate brokers to get some of his shots from within other buildings.)

The book also gave Joseph the opportunity to do a little aerial photography, with a helicopter shoot of lower Manhattan. The goal was to replicate a photo that was probably taken from an airplane c. 1935—the result is the then-now pairing above.

Aside from that photo of lower Manhattan, downtown is underrepresented in the book, Joseph says, because most of the century-old photos of New York were taken by commercial architectural photographers, and there wasn’t much call for them to take photos of residential buildings. Instead, the photos of residential areas are snapshots, incorporating streets more than buildings. Still, Joseph thinks there may be material there for a future edition of the book, and we look forward to it.

I’ve always been fascinated by this concept. Once buildings disappear, people tend to forget about them and, of course, new generations have difficulty picturing what was there before. What was once a common streetscape known to thousands (or potentially millions in big cities) simply disappears. Skylines can change quickly as well.

Photography projects like these can also help residents and others get a quick view of urban change. While certain changes get a lot of attention (like the Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago), smaller changes frequently take place and may not be noticed until a whole series of changes occur.

A few years ago, I remember seeing an aerial black and white photograph of Lake Shore Drive crossing the Chicago River. In this photo, Lake Shore Drive still had its famous S-curve (see here) and there weren’t many big buildings in the immediate area. This area has been transformed quite a bit throughout Chicago’s history: it was once a railroad and dock area along the Chicago River that in recent years has become a center for condominiums (like the Aqua building which attracted attention after opening in 2010) and office buildings after Lake Shore Drive being moved closer to the lake. I spent a lot of this with this photo and thinking how much had changed in just several decades.

 

Argument: cities could find more revenue by taxing people who commute in

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Michael Pagano details the tax revenue issues facing American big cities and proposes a solution: tax commuters for the city services they use.

Over the past several decades, municipal tax systems have changed in many ways to try and capture the revenues needed to support essential services. But most cities continue to base their tax systems on dated notions of how local economies work and what drives income growth and wealth. Cities must be given the ability to develop tax and revenue systems that match the unique characteristics of their local economies, and that allow them to diversify revenues in ways that protect them from fiscal crises.How might that request be accommodated? Tax structures should be created that link cities to their underlying engines of growth or to income and wealth, similar in design to what the property tax attempted to accomplish two centuries ago. In Ohio for example, cities tax earnings at the place of employment and the place of residence. By taxing at the place of employment, users of city services (that is, employees who physically work at a site) contribute to the resource base for service provision.

Imagine if users of city-government services actually were required to pay for the full cost of those services? Imagine household decisions on where to live that is based on their paying the full cost of services. Imagine the decision calculus by individuals who would be responsible for paying their fair share. It could be revolutionary.

I wonder if changing the tax structure in this way would only serve to push more organizations and firms to the suburbs. Take the example of Chicago cited by Pagano. In the last few years, several companies, like Motorola, have announced they are moving workers back into the city. Would changing the tax structure make them reconsider?

Mapping Chicago by taking a photo at every major intersection

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Planner Neil Freeman found an interesting way to map Chicago: take a photo of every major intersection. A post on Atlantic Cities describes the map:

Freeman’s first project, called “Chicago mile by mile,” created an unconventional city map of the city based on 212 photos of strategic “mile” intersections. It was inspired by Chicago’s unique grid system, in which every eight blocks measures a full mile, and the city’s corresponding address system, which advances (for the most part) in increments of 800. If you begin at the zero-points of Madison and State streets and go west a mile, for example, you’ll reach the corner of Halsted Street at 800 W Madison Street.

“This arbitrary address system ends up defining what it means to live in Chicago,” he says. “These arbitrary systems that end up underlying our built environment of our daily life are really intriguing to me.”

On the webpage with the map, here is how Freeman describes the map:

 

Chicago mile by mile

Neil Freeman, 2002
213 color photographs
114 x 104 inches

These photographs maps Chicago’s uncomprimising street grid into 212 4″x6″ snapshots. The photographs document every intersection of mile streets, major roads on section lines. The entire city is traversed by this network of arterials. Photographs were taken in January 2002.

It would take a while to look at the thumbnails of all the photographs. However, I think doing so might start to reveal patterns. In other words, are the major intersection on the North Side more alike or different from major intersections on the South Side? Are there patterns across all intersections? I suspect there may be as these major intersections would tend to attract certain kinds of functions and organizations.

Extending this project in three possible ways could also add a lot of information. One way to expand this would be to start filling in more of the intersections between these major ones. A second way would be to track these intersections over time. If Freeman took all of these photographs again in 2012, how much would have changed? A third way would be to collect data on how people experience and visual these intersections and compare this to the photographs. How exactly do residents and visitors perceive these intersections?