What's this doing in the bike lane?
Share your pics, videos, streets, stories of what you find in the bike lane of the non-bike variety that has an impact on your ride and/or your safety. I've decided to keep it a little more open ended - cars, snow, buses, garbage, cabs, etc. If they shouldn't be in the bike lane, go ahead and add it to this thread. Please be safe if you are taking pics or video! :-)
My hope is that we can collectively build some evidence of what we see when riding in the city with the overall hope of better enforcement of "bikes only" and improving maintenance.
Update: More Hashtags to Capture Vehicles in the Bike Lane
With popular hashtags:
#BikeLaneShaming
#LaneSpreading (Chicago Bike Selling)
#ClearTheWay (ActiveTrans), there are many options to capture violations.
We think you should use ALL of them AND post your photos on The Chainlink. ;-)
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Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Argonne69 on
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Well, today I have a little bit of good news to report. This afternoon I attended the Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council meeting at city hall. The room was packed. The meeting started with the chairperson asking everyone in the room to introduce themselves. I introduced myself as Mark, a member of Bike Lane Uprising. At the end of the meeting they opened the floor to questions/comments, and I was the first to get my hand up. I spent 5 or more minutes going on about the lack of enforcement regarding vehicles in the bike lanes. I mentioned that I had documented close to 500 incidents in just over a year, and that I had submitted close to 400 to the 311 system since they added the code back in April. I mentioned that Bike Lane Uprising had collected over 800 reports since September. I asked people to check out this thread on thechainlink.org to see 150+ pages of reports.
After I had finished, there was a bit of a chuckle, and the chairperson said that the person I need to talk to was sitting right next to me. The person turned out to be William Kenan, the Deputy Director of the Department of Finance. They're the city department primarily responsible for writing tickets for vehicles parked in the bike lanes.
After the meeting Mr. Kenan and I exchanged contact information, and he said he would be in touch. I said that I would ask Bike Lane Uprising to send him our the data collected up to this point. He asked if I could give him an immediate list of hotspots, and I told him 225 N Franklin, 125 S Franklin, the 1800 block of west Polk, and the 1800 block of west Roosevelt. That should hopefully get them started.
He mentioned that the 311 system is not real-time, but I said that we didn't need real-time data to see that there were several serious hotspots that could be easily targeted.
After we spoke, several people in the audience came up to me and thanked me for raising the issue, and wondered how they could more easily report vehicles. Apparently they weren't aware of the 311 system code. I also directed them to the Bike Lane Uprising website.
Hopefully we'll see a little progress in the next few months. I'm planning to attend the next meeting in June. It would be worthwhile to see if BLU can get on the agenda for the meeting, and give a short presentation.
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