5440 or Fight

I'm sure someone has used the title already, but I haven't seen it yet myself.

That's 5440 Sheridan and it should really be 5440 and fight.

At the moment I would abstain on voting on this. I don't know enough and I support the notion of local say on projects like this. I know we in the northwest quadrant of the ward have suffered votes by folks in the rest of the ward that voted against us when they should have abstained.

So let me point you to this blog where the blogger does a great job telling you who's for it and who's against it, but doesn't quite explain the cons as well as they should, since they appear to be against it.

The blog is Edgewater Chicago Surreal.

Vote YES for B1-2 for Broadway - At least the west side.

Edgewater has a history of making mistakes that end up costing us.

The first was letting Lake Shore Drive end up here and after it ended here not doing everything in our power to see that it got extended past Edgewater.

The next was allowing the insanely high high-rises along the lake, and then when we got them not insisting that each and everyone provide a public beach.

The next were the four-plus ones along the Kenmore-Winthrop corridor.

You get the picture right. So the latest mistake being proposed by some is allowing 6 stories on Broadway's west side.

Enough already. Vote yes in the March 21 primary for the 4 story limit referendum.

I can understand that developers can make more money with denser taller buildings. But what we really need and want is diversity. Edgewater Glen and Lakewood Balmoral neighborhoods are unique urban environments and they need the protections that a 4 story buffer zone would provide.

Consider it Environmental Protection.

See me over at SoapBlox/Chicago

I'll try to be posting Edgewater stuff here. But for the moment my efforts are over at SoapBlox/Chicago.

New vendor for voting technology selected.

See Dan Johnson-Weinberger's DJWInfo here

It's Sequoia. See Here their announcement.

Dan says it's good in that it allows Irish-Style ranked balloting for the top two spots. I see if it does more. Stay tuned

Meta-Blogging

Meta-Blogging is blogging about blogging.

99.99% of bloggers are at the mercy of their host when it comes to the design of their blog. Living in that 0.01% is pacified over at jScoop. He (odds are but one often doesn't know when it comes to blogging. He's mentioned a girfriend [could be a Lesbian, of course] and I've seen references to Paul in some of his coding or somewhere).

Lets start that sentence over. He is literally creating his own blog software. Why, you may ask. Ahah, you have just entered the Meta-blog zone.

My biggest grip about Blogger.com, the host of this blog, is that one cannot comment on comments. Nested commenting. If a commenter makes an outrageous statement and is followed by 5 more commenters who are quite sane, you have to make a reference to that offending comment in your comment. But worse so may everybody else in addition who may want to comment on your comment to the comment.

You get the idea.

There is one more major issue in the blog world. It won't happen here at my blog because nobody cares, but it's trolls. Trolls are commenters who are extremely uncivil. The more popular your blog the more they are attracted. Eventually they can drive away the civil commenters who made your blog popular in the first place.

Scoop the software of the so-popular DailyKos (That's my diary page over there) has resolved both of those issues. Comments can have nested comments and comments can be rated. Good ratings can generate "Trusted User" which further give one the power to tag Trolls. If enough Trusted users tag a troll comment it disappears. Trolls hate it when they can't get the attention they crave.

Could jScoop be in my future. We'll see. There are more Meta-Blog issues that come into play. We'll save that discussion for another installment of Meta-Blogging.

Empty storefronts owned by the CTA

At several CTA stops in the Edgewater Neighborhood we have empty storefronts. Often these storefronts have been empty for years. Recently at a Edgewater Glen Association meeting it was suggested that it is red-tape that is holding up our having a better neighborhood and more income for the CTA.

I have just left a comment on Carole Brown's blog to that effect. Carol Brown is a CTA official who has started here own blog.

Carole Brown's Blog is here.

Anyone care to comment?

Rogers Park Montessori Begins New School Construction

Well, it's real when they move heavy equiptment and start pounding stakes with ribbons on them into the ground. This is real groundbreaking as opposed to the official "Ground Breaking" ceremonies.

Wouldn't it be nice if the RPMSschool website would keep it's community updated with pictures. Even cooler would be if they added the architect's plans. And most cool would be a blog-like comments area. As we say in the blog-world: IMHO.

I was going to upload a picture here but I think I would have to pay Blogger to do that. So here's a link to a picture. The happy woman in the picture is RPMS's senior pre-school teacher with 30+ years.

Picture of Rogers Park Montessori School new site at 1800 W Balmoral

Why is LSD 45mph on the Southside but 40mph on the Northside?

It's just bureaucratic indolence but still. For a number of years now we Northsiders have been putting up with the swing speed limits: 40mph Nov through March; 45 April through October.

Do you remember why? Because the salt would be bad for the new planting in the new spiffy medium. Well, lookie now. The southside LSD has a new spiffy medium, with new spiffy plantings. But did it get the 40mph treatment? Appears not.

We have a legitimate complaint here folks.

Voting Machinery Alert

Deadly Earnst has some new information about new voting machinery in the works for Chicago.

What do we want?

1. Paper trails (duh!)
2. Accuracy
3. Capable of Condorcet compliant Instant Runoff Voting.
4. Open source code owned by the city.

The last will likely be the hardest to get. (BTW what does David Orr have to say about the topic. Anyone, anyone, Ferris?)

Time to extend the Lakefront Bike Path is Now.

Sometimes change comes all at once in a big project. Other times it's small steps. The big project answer to Edgewater's traffic problems is the extension of LakeShore drive north. But there are small step improvements that could be done in the short term at anytime.

I will discuss those traffic solutuions at a later date but for the moment let me say that one of those solutions involves pedestrian underpasses along Sheridan road between Hollywood and Devon. The most natural points for those underpasses are at Berger Park at Granville and Thorndale Beach and Parks at Thorndale.

It's especially a natural now that Thorndale has a park on both sides of Sheridan. Which brings me to my real topic of discussion, bike path extension and not the big project, the in the lake version.

Now while the lake is down and the connection between Thorndale beach and Ardmore beach (sorry, I don't go for naming beaches after people) is wide is the time to move some rocks a build a paved extension of the Bike path to Thorndale.

There's another reason. Remember when they had Sheridan torn up for sewer work. Well they changed Thorndale to be both directions between Broadway and Sheridan and they eliminated parking east of Winthrop. That is now the point where the bike path should be leaving the lake to move to Kenmore and Winthrop, not narrow one way Ardmore.

Add the underpass with room for bikes and viola' we have make a significant, even if not the big project, improvement, for both bikers and pedestrians.

Local politics.

Here

Over at DailyKos I castigate myself for not doing enough on the local political scene.

I really don't care for this blogger software and if I were serious I would make a much greater effort at getting somthing else set up. I suggested to Mr Lawrence (sorry his first name eludes me at the moment) over at ECC that they host a scoop site.

The other place that needs a scoop site is the Schakowsky/Osterman/Smith/(Ronen?)/Volini storefront complex south of Bryn Marw on Broadway.

Well we can dream. And some of us can get off our butts. Starting right here I guess.

Here's a local Edgewater neighbor with a blog, who also hangs out at DailyKos:
http://maslovsrag.blogspot.com/

We, Edgewater Citizens, Are Due Reparations!

Why do we, Edgewater, more specifically north Edgewater, have to suffer expressway volumes of traffic, daily, through the heart and lungs of our community? I contend that there is neither any reasonable nor legitimate answer to that question.

Some fifty years ago the "larger community" forced on Edgewater, a quiet neighborhood lakeside community, the butt end of Lake Shore Drive's eight lanes of automobile traffic. They commandeered the quiet residential streets of Ridge and Sheridan. They stripped all parking at all times from those streets. They forced those streets to submit to unnatural acts of lane alternation: three lanes with the rush hour and one against.

Now that history is but a repressed memory. Yet the reality of reverse commuting subjects us to comparable horrors. Every morning and evening we are trapped between constant multi-lane traffic. We venture out only if we must.

But even after the twice-daily onslaughts have receded, its effects poison our community. Exposed streets naked of parking and exhausted of traffic give reign to speeders and weavers.

Fifty years of such abusive servitude have wearied and ruined the face and vitality of the community.

Stately lakefront mansions have been cast aside to be replaced by downtown-style high-rises because no well-to-do cultured person who could afford to live otherwise would live in such noise and clamor. A vibrant urban university has been torn from its supporting community, isolated and split asunder by four lanes of pedestrian-intimidating cars. Beautiful six-flats and courtly apartment blocks have been turned over first to slumlords who milk them, then care less of them, until they have become hovels and worse, then have torn them down to be replaced by plain at best and ugly at worst, automobile friendly four-plus-ones. All manner of businesses deprived of their life-blood of pedestrian customers have moved out to be replaced by gas stations, auto dealers, auto repair, muffler repair and body shops glad to locate in the middle of a virtual, de-facto automobile expressway.

By struggling mightily against those anti-urban forces we have been able over the last twenty-five years to regain some of our lost dignity. Organizations like the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce and the Edgewater Community Council have fought to keep storefronts occupied and slumlords in court. Our representatives in the Chicago City Council, Volini, Osterman, and Smith likewise have fought often lonely rear-guard battles against the ravages of our expressway reality.

But! But, as long as we ourselves continue to believe in the supremacy of the automobile, as long as we internalize the mores of the car mythology, as long as we think that because we ourselves own and use cars we must give up any right to oppose their domination of our lives; for as long as we hold those ideas, we shall never be able to confront and defeat the automobile's subjugation of our community.

The "modern" myths we must fight include:

1. It is a community's duty, just as it is a person's duty, to yield its own self-interest to the larger community's greater interest.
2. Streets, especially arterial streets, must be designed to handle rush hour traffic.
3. The goal is to move as much traffic as fast as practical.
4. The city must adapt to the "modern" reality of the automobile.
5. Driving our car is a right.

Driving a car is, of course, a privilege licensed by the larger community. We have a right to walk in the right-of-way but must earn the privilege of driving on the right-of-way.

The automobile must adapt to the traditional reality of the city. The traditional reality of the city is walking, busing and "el"ing. The traditional reality of the city is that it takes time to get across-town.

The sub-urban goal is more and faster but the urban goal is closer and denser. Closer and denser befit slower.

We have the el and the commuter railroads built especially for rush hour. Perverting our streets for rush hour perverts our community. There is no rush hour right.

If the larger community deems that an expressway must go here then they have an obligation to build one. I have no doubt that fifty years ago we were told that we were being subjected to a temporary situation; before long Lake Shore Drive would go all the way to Evanston.

OK. We have done our duty. We have waited long enough. It's time to "take back our streets."

Living in an Expressway

That's what ruined Edgewater and that is still our biggest struggle. More on this later.