Bike boxes, curb bump outs and more planned for Lincoln and Halsted near Children's Memorial site

by Michelle Stenzel

The final plans for the Children's Memorial site have been released and approved by the city's Chicago Plan Commission. All documents are available for viewing via links provided on Alderman Michele Smith's website. I've reviewed them and will highlight some of the positive changes that are planned for biking and walking.

BIKEWAYS

The documents include plans for continuous bike lanes on Halsted and Lincoln along the project site. Below is a document included in the plans, over which I've added green highlighting to make the lanes more visible. 

McCaffrey Interests' Planned Development exhibit, with my green highlighting added.

A few things to note: 

How many people in Lincoln Park bike to work? Take transit? Live car-free?

by Michelle Stenzel

The 2010 Census produced a lot of data that has been made public, but it's often not very useful to ordinary citizens until someone overlays the numbers onto a map, and makes it easy for people to see the data come to life. We're fortunate that Shaun Jacobsen of Transitized has recently done just that, with the census data on how Chicagoans commute to work.

You can access the citywide map at this link directly, and read Shaun's blog entry here. 

Screen shot of the Chicago Commute Mode Map by Shaun Jacobsen of Transitized.com

When you first open the map, it shows what the dominant mode of transportation is for each census tract, whether it's drive alone, carpool, transit, walk, bike, or telecommute. The blue tracts mean that transit is the dominant mode (not necessarily the majority, just the mode with the highest percent) of commuting for those residents, while red is drive alone, and purple is walking. You can hover over any of the tracts to get detailed data on that tract. You can also choose different layers to view by clicking on the icon on the upper left that looks like a stack of papers.  (More -->)

Opportunity is knocking: Follow up thoughts on the Children's Memorial redesign

by Michelle Stenzel

I attended the latest community meeting on the Children’s Memorial Hospital redevelopment site last week. More than 500 people came to hear the presentation by architect Joe Antunovich of Antunovich and Associates laying out the newest plan. 

There was a very big turnout of people at the Children's Memorial Redevelopment community meeting on January 14, 2013. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

Although there were some concerns expressed about the heights of the proposed buildings, most community members spoke in support of the plan. You can read more coverage about the meeting and further opinions on the plan on DNA Info Chicago, Streetsblog Chicago, and Transitized.

We provided our opinions on the new plan last week based on the presentation posted online. Today we're adding just a few further thoughts that have materialized through the community meeting. (More -->)

Our thoughts on the new Children's Memorial site plan

by Michelle Stenzel

A new proposed plan has been released for redevelopment of the Children's Memorial Hospital site, and we recently reviewed the proposal to evaluate its design in terms of walking, biking, transit and public spaces. It's a large site with many facets to the plan, and you should review the PDF of the presentation, which you can download from Ald. Michele Smith's web page, or attend the community presentation on Tuesday evening (January 14, 6:30 PM at DePaul Student Center). 

View of the new Children's Memorial proposal toward the southeast, with Lincoln Avenue on the right.
(All images in the post are from McCaffrey Interests presentation PDF unless otherwise noted)

The design of all the new buildings looks very nice! The external design of the new buildings is bright, airy, clean and modern. The plans call for preservation of historic buildings worth preserving, and lots of retail right where it's needed. (More -->)

Looking back and looking forward

by Michelle Stenzel

Kidical Mass family bike rides began in Lincoln Park in 2013. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

It’s been a busy year for us at Bike Walk Lincoln Park! Before we ring in the new year, here’s a partial list of what we accomplished in 2013:

Led four “intersection evaluations”, in which we documented what’s working well and what’s not for people walking, biking, and using transit, and then submitted our recommendations to Alderman Smith for future improvements. This year we tackled the following intersections:

• Clark and Fullerton
• Halsted and Armitage
• Halsted and Wrightwood
• North and Sedgwick

Co-hosted a community workshop to brainstorm ideas for improving Clark Street from North to Armitage to make it better for people on foot, on bike and on transit.  More -->

Using Walk Score's travel time maps

by Michelle Stenzel

You've probably heard about Walk Score, a website that aims to provide information to help people determine how walkable a neighborhood is while making decisions about where to live. While the Walk Score website used to only provide measures of walkability, in the last few years, Transit and Bike scores have been added as well.

As you may imagine, Lincoln Park as a whole neighborhood does well on all these measures. The zip code of 60614 currently merits a Walk Score of 83, Bike Score of 84, and Transit Score of 79, which is a strong showing. For comparison, Chicago as a whole receives a Walk Score of 75, Bike Score of 62, and Transit Score of 65. One can quibble about the methodology being limited. For example, the only factor that is considered for walkability is the number of amenities within close walking distance, while disregarding other hard-to-quantify factors like how pleasant, safe, direct and inviting the routes are. 

However, today I simply wanted to share an interesting feature that I saw on the Walk Score website. They have added interactive Travel Time maps that you can use to see how far you can get in a certain time period walking, biking or taking transit. You set the time period for anything from 10 minutes to 60 minutes, then choose the mode of travel. Voila! The map shows you how far you can go.

I found it fun to experiment to see how far I can bike in various time periods. Here's the map of how far you can get by bike in 10 minutes, from the east side of Oz Park:

(Please note that the window for the map on the website is not resizable, so parts of the edges of all these maps are cut annoyingly cut off.) 

Newest Lincoln Park Divvy stations!

by Michelle Stenzel

Chicago now has 300 Divvy bike share stations up and running, with 3,000 Divvy bikes available for use. Lincoln Park has been part of the system since its roll out at the end of June 2013. It took a little while to install the first 300 stations, but they were in by end of October.

Here's what the map of Lincoln Park Divvy stations looks like currently:

Map of the location of Divvy stations in Lincoln Park, per the Divvy website.

We're pretty well covered! Depending on how you define Lincoln Park, there are about 38 stations in this neighborhood. I took pictures over the last few weeks of some of the newest stations for today's post.