Steven can plan

Say hello to Chicago’s newest planner. ME!

Instead of walking at my school’s graduation ceremony on May 7, 2010, I was busy at work making sure bike parking in Chicago is equitably distributed, visiting the Pacific Northwest, and generally having fun.

Me having fun riding a Volae recumbent bicycle at the Rapid Transit Cycleshop grand opening in University Village at UIC’s South Campus.

Did I say something about bike parking equity? Oh, yeah, I’ve only blogged about it here a couple of times before and it comprised my entire master’s project (which thankfully was approved and deemed “satisfactory” by my wonderful adviser, Vonu). You can read the entire project on my website. I wrote my project in a wiki called DokuWiki – it’s a text-based, lightweight application that encourages writing and doesn’t stand in the way of a creative masterpiece (like Microsoft Word does).

It’s a huge project (there are over 35 webpages that come out to 139 printed pages). I realize that most people won’t read it, but in the course of preparing for a short presentation I recently gave to some staff members at Active Transportation Alliance, I created a short summary to aid me.

Read my project, Bike Parking Equity, or the summary.

A photo of my cheaply printed project. I printed to PDF each and every webpage in the project and then combined them all, using the Mac’s built-in functionality and Preview application.

The assignment: Attached is a press clip from the Chicago Sun-Times on November 5, 2009, with the headline, “Bus driver strike over layoffs an ‘option’.” Also attached is an arbitrators ruling establishing the provisions of the current contract. Do you think the CTA unions should strike over the issue of layoffs? List and explain your reasons.

The class: Transportation Management

I think it is too early to form an opinion on the situation with the facts given. The newspaper article states that the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) has not yet communicated to the bus operator union what concessions it wants from the members.

However, I have developed a preliminary opinion based on the arbitration agreement and the contract between employer and employee.

The CTA has an obligation to honor its contract and the binding arbitration agreement (AA). The contract and AA stipulates that the CTA provide specific raises in specific years to all employees in the two unions (Amalgamated Transit Union Locals 241 and 208). I believe that for the CTA to continue honoring the terms of this contract, that is, to continue providing raises to the bus operators, then the CTA must reduce its workforce (along with other “balance modification” measures like cutting service and raising fares).

I am not often supporting of unions and I have never been a member of one, I believe the bus operators union will do itself a disservice by striking. It signals to City and State representatives they’re unwilling to continue negotiations with the CTA or a mediator, and that they cannot accept that the CTA, while working hard to increase organization and operational efficiencies, will be unable to pay the salaries of so many “extra” employees because there will be less buses and routes to operate. I shouldn’t have to mention the ill will the CTA’s customers might develop towards the bus operators and the transit agency.

The union must also follow the procedures in their contract that, according to the newspaper article, requires them to submit to binding arbitration. Additionally, this may also harm the union and its members by requiring them to accept a less-than-desirable situation about their jobs.

I found that the Chicago Civic Federation, a non-partisan organization of citizens concerned about the city’s financial well-being, supports the CTA’s plan to reduce service and raise fares, as announced in the CTA’s fiscal year 2010 budget (press release). The Civic Federation calls the cuts and increases a fair approach that balances responsibility on management, union staff, and customers.

I agree with their position that all parties “must make sacrifices.”

In these trying budgetary times, all parties, to garner the most effective support, must ensure they reference only facts so as not to deceive or confuse the public. Facts will also allow the parties to communicate effectively and keep the public’s suspicion at bay. I wrote in the fourth assignment that the CTA should launch a marketing campaign (in order to improve their public image) that seeks to inform the public with simple facts about the agency, the breadth and cost of services it provides, but most importantly describes how it receives funding from Illinois residents through sales and real estate taxes, but also through grants. Additionally, they would discuss the efforts they’ve undertaken in the past few years to increase efficiency in all aspects of the agency.

Lastly, I would like to suggest that the unions spend an equal amount of time, effort and money on persuading elected officials to work on a plan that fixes our regional transit issues and keeps bus operators employed. Transit can be an economic and community development tool when looked at in the context of total transportation management that recognizes the economic detriment of traffic congestion, dangerous streets, pollution, and carbon emissions.

The Chicago Transit Authority should convert the U-Pass program from using magnetic stripe fare media to an RFID, or proximity, card.

Several times on weekdays on the University of Illinois at Chicago campus, a crowd of up to thirty students waits for the 8/Halsted bus after a class period ends. A very high percentage of the students will use a U-Pass to pay for the bus fare. All U-Pass users have to dip their cards. According to the Transportation Research Board’s Transit Capacity and Service Manual, each passenger with a dip card will take 4.2 seconds to pay their fare whilst users paying with contactless cards will take 3.0 seconds each to pay their fares.

Converting the U-Pass student fare program to use the same contactless fare collection as the Chicago Card and Chicago Card Plus will improve the Chicago Transit Authority’s quality of service on all bus routes, especially those routes used heavily by program participants.

Contactless fare collection technology (also known as Radio Frequency Identification, RFID, or proximity cards) gives customers additional options to pay and manage their transit fares. It keeps prepaid fares secure against theft and loss. The customer can easily switch payment methods – between a credit/debit card online and debit card/cash at vending locations – and fare types – pay-per-use or 30-day unlimited use. What is most important is how contactless fare collection speeds boarding onto buses and passing through turnstiles at rail stations. This aspect of the technology most discernibly improves the CTA’s quality of service. Taking into consideration all these benefits, contactless cards provide the greatest passenger convenience for fare payment.

Quality of service is the customer’s perception or assessment of performance. The first percept would be the increased boarding speed at key bus stops. The improvements, visible to the boarding passengers and which positively affect the route, cascade from there: increased boarding speed reduces dwell time, which can help keep buses operating on their posted schedule and shrink the rate of bus bunching. The performance gains are measurable – there would be a half-minute decrease in dwell time at UIC bus stops, amongst other gains.

Contactless fare cards are more durable than the U-Pass, which is surprisingly less durable than the CTA’s paper Transit Cards. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the U-Pass card material is more prone to cracking and tearing than the Transit Card material. Currently, UIC students who require a replacement card must pay a $35 fee – an exorbitant amount that does little to deter the anger or frustration of those students who use their cards daily.

A secondary benefit in convenience for the student, the participating colleges, and the CTA, is that producing the U-Pass as a contactless farecard could be permanent: students would keep the same fare media through their entire tenure at the school. Each and every semester, the schools and CTA would spend less labor hours for temporary U-Pass farecard printing and distribution. Alternatively, the U-Pass program could be applied to the existing Chicago Card and Chicago Card Plus system, similar to how London Oyster cardholders can add 7-day, monthly and annual passes, giving transit passengers more options than 30-day unlimited use or pay-per-use. During the semester and the U-Pass activity period, no fare would be deducted from the student’s contactless farecard. When the semester is over or the U-Pass activity period is complete, the contactless farecard would automatically switch to the user-defined fare choice and payment plan.

Converting existing fare programs to work like the CTA’s Chicago Card and Chicago Card Plus would be a prudent and appropriate step for the CTA to take to improve the quality of service for U-Pass eligible students and the bus system alike.

The assignment:  Find two plans written on a common theme from cities with similar attributes and compare them. The purpose is to start reading plan documents produced by firms, agencies, and organizations around the country. Furthermore, the comparison should include a critique of each plan. For this assignment, I compared the bike “master” plans for Seattle and Portland. The cities have a similar population, and are geographically close.

The class: Making Plans, Making Plans Studio. This class has a lecture and a lab. The assignments are due in the lecture session, which have little to do with the single assignment for the lab. In the lab, students write an actual plan. I took this class in Spring 2009 and each of the four labs independently write an economic development plan for Blue Island, Illinois.

Portland and Seattle are very closely located cities and have a population difference of only 20,000. Portland is recognized as the bicycling capital of the country, but Seattle desperately wants to compete. I reviewed each of their bicycle master plans, but Portland’s is in need of an update. Seattle released their bicycle plan in 2007.

• Portland’s current bike plan (adopted in 1996) (download as PDF). See end of post for update.
• Seattle’s bike plan (adopted in 2007) (download as PDF).

Organization and Design

Portland is definitely known around the country and world as the United States’ premier bicycling city. The leading hobby magazine, Bicycling, identified Portland as such back in 1995 (according to their Bicycle Master Plan). As such, I was expecting their plan to be near perfect. I found that its organization was haphazard and difficult to follow.

Portland installed its first bike boxes in 2008 in response to deaths caused by right-turning trucks.

For example, the plan is 159 pages long but does not use paragraph or section identifiers (i.e. Objective 1.2) or page headers or footers that can tell the reader where they are in relation to the other sections of the plan. The only understandable section identifiers are in the table of contents and the objectives labels. The objectives labels are taken straight from Portland’s comprehensive plan and all come from the same section of that plan (section 6). Eventually you may find that the Portland bicycle plan does have a chapter for each subsection of section 6 in the city’s comprehensive plan. Unfortunately the label is written once at the beginning of the section and is blurred into a black and white photo.

The Seattle plan smartly follows the Chicago example of heavy sectioning and sub-sectioning. This method makes it easy to reference, locate and describe an exact strategy in the plan. In this way, each strategy, or action item as Portland calls them, has a distinct identifier. By following the Chicago example, plans can also more easily internally cross-reference. The one cross-reference in the Portland plan tells me to find Section IV B3. Section IV is only labeled at the beginning of that section, so a reader first has to find that page. Then within Section IV, “B3″ is nowhere to be found. There’s no way to infer what B3 could mean. It could mean “benchmark” but Section IV has no benchmarks for the strategies described. Cross-referencing in the Seattle plan is helpful: the links usually take the form of, “For more information, see Chapter 4.” Sometimes the Seattle tells visitors to go online.

Both the Seattle and Portland bicycle plans have great initiatives to improve bicycling, but Seattle’s document surely makes their future work much easier to find!

Bicyclists are the first customers off the ferries in Seattle. On an average day, over 50,000 trips are taken by ferry.

Content

Both the Seattle and Portland bicycle plans provides a lot of extraneous but relevant information, including tips on safe cycling, traffic laws, maps, facility design guides, and crash data. This makes for a long plan but provides governmental and transit agencies the information they need to make decisions available in a central place. The plan document can also act as a self-promotional tool: information contained within the plan is identical to the information that the plan makers want to educate people. For example, within the Portland plan, safe cycling guidelines are included. The necessity of its inclusion in the plan document is debatable, but it doesn’t distract from the plan’s reason for existence.

Portland also includes in its plan a streets and bikeways design guide. This is a separate document that explains to traffic engineers and roadway constructors and planners how to design and build streets, including signage, that make it safer for bicyclists to ride upon.

Both plans have very similar strategies, but because of Seattle’s more recently developed plan, it includes recently accepted innovative traffic calming techniques as well as new bikeway designs (like bicycle-only left turn lanes).

The Portland plan’s age might become a disadvantage to the city and its bicyclists if uninformed agencies are strictly following its guidelines. The Portland Bureau of Transportation, in which sits the Bicycle Program, has fortunately not stuck to strategies listed. PBOT has installed several bikeways and bike parking facilities that are not mentioned in the plan, namely colored bike boxes between pedestrian crosswalks and motorist stop bars, as well as on street bike parking.

UPDATE: Portland closed on November 8, 2009, the public comment period for the 2009 Bike Master Plan Update. Read the draft plan.

The assignment: You are on a team working with the City of Chicago on increasing the City’s tree canopy from just under 15% to 25%. What would you recommend? Please bear in mind that most city staff feel that they have covered most city owned land and that to reach the goal they will have to get private landowners to plant the trees. How can we get them to do this? What types of parcels present opportunities?

The class: Sustainable Development Techniques

How the class works: The professors invite working professionals to speak to the class each week. After the lecture from these guests, a short discussion ensues. The guests design the homework questions. The following week, the class discusses their responses with each other and the professors.

I’ve identified four parcel types that present opportunities to increase the City of Chicago’s tree canopy from 15% to 25%.

1. Existing surface parking lots, both private and public
2. New surface and multi-level parking lots, both private and public
3. Schools, both public and private
4. Condemn private lots

1. The team will inventory private and public surface parking lots. Using demand survey data, the team will identify specific lots and direct them to reduce the number of spaces by half the difference between demand and availability. The team will select the spaces where trees will be planted at no cost to the parking lot owner. Alternatively, the parking lot owners can choose to purchase and install secure, sheltered bicycle parking on the spaces where trees would have been planted. Owners must install this facility at their own expense but may charge for its use.

The owners choose between a no cost option that potentially reduces their income, or a cost option that potentially reduces their income. Both options would potentially reduce carbon or carbon emissions associated with the parking lot.
2. The team will recommend zoning code changes that reduce the number of required auto parking spaces for new parking lots, increase the number of bicycle parking spaces, and improve the zoning code’s accommodations to alternative fuel, hybrid and shared car spaces. The code will require that builders plant trees in the space that would have been built as auto parking. The code will specify best tree planting practices so the builders plant trees in places on the parcel where it will live.

Parking lots will become useful to a larger number of users, and reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

3. Many schools have land paved with asphalt, acting either as a playground or parking lot for staff. Under a district (or diocese) and City-wide plan to reduce carbon emissions and improve the health of staff, schools will install sheltered bicycle parking on a small portion of the asphalt, and then remove a large area of asphalt. They’ll replace the removed asphalt with grass and trees. Principals will make up the first group of staff to adopt alternative commute methods (which can include carpool, vanpool, transit, walking or bicycling), starting with at least two days per week.

Students will receive a kid-friendlier playground. School staff will reduce their carbon emissions. Schools will help reduce their contribution to the urban heat island effect. New trees will reduce carbon in the atmosphere.

4. Lastly, the City will condemn private lots and convert these to urban forests. The team will first identify residential areas, and then commercial areas. Communities identified by the team to receive urban forests can choose to have and operate a farm or garden instead. The City will provide relocation assistance to all residents of a blighted or energy inefficient building who decide to move to a denser part of the city. The City would then condemn the lot and building, aggregating it into the forest. A variation of this plan includes strategic placement of the trees: The trees can be planted in such a way on the parcel’s perimeter that would permit a new parcel owner to build a new, energy efficient home on the lot.

I feel unclear about the consequences of this strategy. Will the new urban forests raise, lower, or leave alone property values? Will property owners appreciate a rise in property values? Will they feel their neighborhood has improved? How will the forests affect crime and other neighborhood activities?