Help create a new vision for Clark Street along Lincoln Park

by Michelle Stenzel

Do you walk, bike or drive on Clark Street between North Avenue and Armitage? If so, you may have noticed a need to make the street safer for everyone on it. Well, now you have a chance to speak up: We're very excited to announce that Bike Walk Lincoln Park will be co-hosting a community workshop on how to improve this very stretch of Clark Street! 

Crossing Clark Street at Menomonee is a stressful experience. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

Together with Alderman Michele Smith and Active Transportation Alliance, we invite you to participate in the event on August 20. Led by Brenna Conway of ATA, we'll walk along the street to observe, discuss, and brainstorm ideas that can then be shaped into initial recommendations.  -->

Think spring! Three upcoming bike events

by Michelle Stenzel

Sure, it snowed six inches yesterday, but it’s March, so spring can’t be far away, and that means more time riding our bikes!  There are a few local upcoming bike-related events that you should know about.

Early January on the Lake Michigan shoreline. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

Chicago Bike Swap

The Chicago Bike Swap will be held on Saturday, March 9 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm on the UIC campus. Although you can indeed go there to try to sell your ride or look for a new one, there’s a lot more to this event than swapping bikes.

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Our suggested bike share station locations!

by Michelle Stenzel

Map showing the initial bike share rollout area in yellow,
and the planned second phase, in the pink border.

Bike Walk Lincoln Park supporters and friends met recently to discuss recommended bike share station locations within the 43rd ward. Please see our prior post on the basics of Chicago's planned bike share system here. 

We used a map taken from the current suggested locations on the Chicago Bike Program's website seeking community input, and worked through each area of the ward, discussing reasons why a specific place would justify a station location. Chicago Department of Transportation staff have said they would like to have the stations every half mile quarter mile apart at the most, so we made sure there were no gaps in our suggested network.

We produced a map (link to view the PDF map is here), a list and a letter. The map is below, and you can see the letter we sent to Alderman Michele Smith and CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein here.

We had two journalists join us at the meeting to discuss bike share locations, and you can see the DNA Info Chicago article here, and Medill student journalist Sonali Basak's video coverage here.

More crosswalk signs installed!

by Michelle Stenzel

Why yes, we are excited about these signs. This month marks the two-year anniversary that it's been state law that drivers must STOP for pedestrians in crosswalks, not just swerve around them. These signs are helping to finally educate drivers, and make life easier for people walking!

In-street "Stop for Pedestrians" signs are appearing all over Lincoln Park. (Photo: BikeWalkLincolnPark)

In addition to the first in-street stop for pedestrian sign that we reported about in this post, we've now spotted five more locations.

More after the jump -->

Upcoming Events: Family Bike Ride, Green Week, and More

Hello Bike Walk Lincoln Park members, supporters, friends!

Please mark your calendars and plan to join us for a few upcoming local events, including our next Bike Walk Lincoln Park meeting on July 10th.

Is this the future of bicycling in Chicago? Protected lane on Kinzie Street at Wells. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park) 

PANEL DISCUSSION  “Chicago Cycling: What’s Next? “ – JUNE 21

The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum will be hosting a free event this Thursday evening, with a number of panelists discussing the future of cycling in the city, including Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein.  Doors open at 5:30 pm and the discussion begins at 6:00 pm.  Afterward, you can mingle with panelists and view the ongoing Nature Museum exhibit "Bikes! The Green Revolution!" until 9:00 pm. More details at this PDF.

Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 to be revealed tomorrow!

by Michelle Stenzel

Now that we've all survived NATO or enjoyed our NATOcations, it's time to re-engage with the process of building a better bicycling network! The long-awaited Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 draft will be released to the public TOMORROW, Tuesday, May 22, starting at 4:00 pm in the Copernicus Center. Come by any time between 4:00 pm and 8:00 pm to see the maps, provide your comments, ask questions, and get excited about the safer network that will be shaping up over the next several years!

The draft maps will likely be posted on the Chicago Bike Program's Streets for Cycling 2020 page, which you can find linked here. (Please note that the maps currently loaded onto the page as of this posting on the morning of May 21 are NOT the maps of the draft plan.)

Come view the draft Streets for Cycling 2020 plan on May 22!

by Michelle Stenzel

This is it, Folks, the big reveal! 

This past winter, the Chicago Department of Transportation Streets for Cycling 2020 team asked the citizens for our input about where we'd like to see safer conditions for bicycling, and we gave it to them. 

Citizens at the North Side Community Area Group of the Streets for Cycling 2020 Plan discussing "Upgraded Bikeways" in February 2012. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

Many of you took part in the process, showing up at meetings, taking online surveys, or e-mailing your comments, suggestions and feedback. The CDOT team took that input from the north side and from all over the city, and came up with their draft plan, which will be revealed at a series of four community meetings starting on May 22! 

Fullerton Parkway access to the lake front is third-highest in the city

by Michelle Stenzel

You've heard our thoughts on the Fullerton Parkway bridge project on this prior post. We have had many conversations with people on- and off-line on the topic, and in the end, we're not fully convinced that the final result will be a net gain for people walking and riding bicycles to the Lake Front Trail; however, we're going to take the positive steps of working within the confines of the project to try to make the design as pleasant as possible for users who are choosing active transportation to traverse the area. (Join us at our next Bike Walk Lincoln Park meeting on 4/16 to contribute ideas, details below.)

Pedestrians head east over the Fullerton Parkway bridge on a Sunday afternoon in March 2012, the day before demolition and removal of the sidewalk was scheduled to begin.  (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

But today's post is to point out why this little segment of Fullerton is so important. You already know from our prior post on the subject that there is NO public transportation service on Fullerton within a mile of the Lake Front Trail, because that ends at Halsted. So, to access the trail, many people walk or ride bicycles across the bridge to the LFT. It always feels crowded, but we never knew there were statistics on the usage rates. Until now.

Aldermanic menu walks in the 43rd ward!

By Michelle Stenzel

Alderman Michele Smith is hosting "walkabouts" open to all residents of the 43rd ward. During the walks, she and her staff will be taking suggestions for ways to allocate our ward's annual $1.2 million in menu funds. The menu funds are provided so that an alderman can pay for infrastructure improvements for things like street resurfacing or sidewalk replacement. Ald. Smith says these walks will help in developing the submission to the city for this year's funds as well as inform a multi-year plan for future improvements. See the details on Alderman Smith's newsletter here.

Pedestrian countdown timers like this one at Clark and Armitage help people decide if there's enough time to cross.
(Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

We're very excited because many of the menu items are upgrades that we could sorely use to help make our neighborhood even better for walking and riding bicycles. 

For example, if a resident or block of residents feels that car drivers speed down their street, they could request that a speed hump (formerly known as speed bump) be installed, for $3,700. 

Bike lanes: Shared, conventional, buffered and protected

by Michelle Stenzel

We're going to be discussing potential locations of bike lanes in the next few weeks to help gather community opinions about where people would like to see major bike lane improvements on Chicago's north side. The CDOT Streets for Cycling 2020 project team is asking each Community Advisory Group (open to all, e-mail me at Michelle at KairiesStenzel dot com to join the North Side Community Advisory Group) to identify which streets we would like them to consider for upgrades in bicycling infrastructure.

The types of lanes that are considered "upgrades" are nicely laid out in the NACTO Urban Bikeway Design Guide, but since viewing that involves paging through lots of data, I'm making it easy for you by highlighting some basics. All images below are taken from the NACTO guide.

Plan & Ride recap, and Streets for Cycling 2020 kicks off!

It was an enthusiastic crowd at the first Bike Walk Lincoln Park "Plan and Ride" session. Thanks for hosting us, CityGrounds Coffee Bar! (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park) 

PLAN AND RIDE RECAP

In spite of chilly air and an early start time, we had a great turn out for the Bike Boulevards Plan and Ride event this morning. There was a big range of bicycling skill sets, from very confident cyclists who have ridden in Chicago for decades, to people who rarely ride at all but would like to more often if they were provided safer facilities.

Sign up for Bikeways 101

Do you want to learn how cities across the country are making their streets safer for bicycling? Join us in attending a mini-seminar on the topic on Saturday, October 15 at 10:00 am at Jak's Tap in the west Loop (full details in the RSVP link below). Speakers from Portland, San Francisco and New York will share their insights. This seminar is presented jointly by the Active Transportation Alliance, Chicago's Department of Transportation and NACTO. 

That last group's full name is "National Association of City Transportation Officials", which sounds boring, but they have a great program called Cities for Cycling and have published an inspiring online document called Urban Bikeway Design Guide. Check it out to view all the different configurations that are available to cities to put in safe bike lanes. We don't have many in Chicago yet, but they have been used in Europe and elsewhere in North America with great success. In the next years and months, as Chicago puts in 100 miles of protected lanes for bicyclists, we'll probably need to make use of many of the options described in the design guide.

Maybe something like this protected lane in Budapest could work on narrow streets like Armitage?
(Photo from David Baker + Partners Architects)

The meeting is free and open to the public, but you must RSVP and you can do so on the Active Transportation Alliance website at this link. We hope to see you there!

Bike Walk Lincoln Park meeting on October 4th

Join Bike Walk Lincoln Park to help keep our neighborhood's streets safe and beautiful for pedestrians and bicyclists.

We're holding an open meeting on Tuesday, October 4th for the community, and welcome everyone to attend.

Bike Walk Lincoln Park is a community group that was formed in June 2011, in conjunction with the Active Transportation Alliance as well as Alderman Michele Smith's office, to work on issues of interest to anyone who walks or bikes in the 43rd ward. We'll focus on safety for all users of the street, because that's paramount to making our streets and sidewalks pleasant for everyone.

We already have a list of projects we'd like to tackle, but we want to hear your ideas, and we want to work with you to make them all become a reality.

WHEN:  Tuesday, October 4th, 2011 at 7:00 pm

WHERE:  Lincoln Park Library Community Room -- 1150 W. Fullerton -- Fullerton and Racine

Please RSVP to let us know to expect you, or just come at the last minute. E-mail Michelle Stenzel at bikewalklincolnpark@gmail.com to RSVP.

If you can't make it to the meeting but would like to get involved, e-mail us to get on the mailing list or to share your suggestions. We look forward to meeting you!

* Addendum on October 5, 2011: A summary of the meeting can be found here.