Recent Streetsblog NYC posts about Chicago

Chicago Loses NYC’s Congestion Pricing Money

By Ben Fried | | 3 Comments
Will Chicago get a second chance at federal funds for better bus service? Photo: celikins/Flickr Looks like New York legislators aren’t the only ones willing to pass up big money for transportation improvements if it means putting a fair price on private auto use. Back in April, the feds withdrew a $354 million grant to […]

Chicago Outsources Parking Reform to Morgan Stanley

By John Kaehny | | 19 Comments
The Chicago City Council has approved by a vote of 40-5 a deal to privatize the city’s 36,000 metered parking spots for the next 75 years, trading meter revenues for an upfront payment of $1.15 billion. Under the agreement with Morgan Stanley Infrastructure, meter rates will rise substantially and some meters will operate overnight and […]

Streetfilms: Chicago’s Sunday Parkways

By Ben Fried | | No Comments
Streetfilms contributor Nicholas Whitaker files this report from Chicago, which put on a pair of major car-free events last month called Sunday Parkways. Recently Streetfilms has also covered car-free events in New York, Portland and San Francisco, and like the Summer Streets video, this one features a guest turn from Gil Peñalosa, one of the […]

Using Twitter to Catch a Train

By Sarah Goodyear | | 3 Comments
The people over at CTA Tattler ("seen and heard on the Chicago Transit Authority"), as part of their tireless efforts to monitor the movements of the Chicago Transit Authority, have turned to the microblogging tool Twitter and created a Twitter feed with the user name ctatweet. It’s a way for people using the city’s transit […]

Congestion Costs Chicago $7.3 Billion Per Year

By Ben Fried | | 4 Comments
You know a city is getting serious about tackling traffic when a new report comes out measuring how much gridlock costs the region. In New York, it was the 2006 release of Growth or Gridlock, which pegged the annual price of traffic at $13 billion, that set off a public debate about congestion pricing that […]

Chicago-Style Parking Plan Could Raise $5 Billion Plus for NYC

By John Kaehny | | 34 Comments
According to a senior municipal bond analyst at a leading Wall Street firm, New York City could raise between five and six billion dollars immediately if it privatized its parking meters as Chicago is doing. Whether privatization is the right way to unlock New York City's parking riches is debatable. What's not in question is that curbside parking in New York and most U.S. cities is grossly underpriced and could potentially be a crucial source of revenue for much needed transportation improvements.
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