I’m co-leading a Power Broker book club at Mouse Arts & Letters in Bridgeport on Saturday 4/18 — we’re only reading a couple chapters focused on municipal finance, so no need to commit to reading the whole book in order to join us for discussion mouseartsandletters.org/events/munic...

#chiLFT mostly clear on this beautiful (fake) spring day, though still technically closed between Ohio St Beach and the curve. The upper level sidewalk is almost entirely clear if you can get your bike up the steps, however, and walking the icy patch around the curve isn’t bad if you don’t mind mud

As a knowledge worker I find it unsettling how explicit the current crop of LLM tools are in their attempt to get me to internalize the logic of management. Like personally I do not want to review PRs and tell other people what to do all day, that’s why I’m a programmer and not a middle manager

The suburb of Harvey has 6 alders serving ~20k residents. For comparison, Chicago has 50 alders serving ~2.7m residents, so Harvey has ~16x more alders than Chicago by population. If Chicago had Harvey’s ratio of alders to residents we would have 810 alders www.cityofharveyil.gov/city-council/

Does anyone have a copy of the Friends of the Parks’ complete “Last 4 Miles” plan from 2009? The only direct link I can find is in this 2022 WTTW story, but the link is broken and it wasn’t archived properly by any archive services I’m familiar with because it’s a PDF news.wttw.com/2022/06/20/c...

Is there a cloud service I can use to upload and stream music files that I own without subscribing to the company’s library of licensed music? Plex seems to be the stock answer to this question but I don’t want to deal with any physical hardware and that seems to be a requirement for a Plex server

Walking on Western after a snowstorm, a drama in three acts

I don’t know much about int’l law but it still seems like it would be a good idea for a future Democratic admin to start cooperating with the ICC if and when the coalition ever takes power again. Not only is it morally correct on the merits, but it‘s the only way I can imagine we’ll see justice

Yes I'm vibecoding (putting on a vinyl record and lighting some candles)

[Bumping into Wallace Shawn on the street] “Hey aren’t you the guy who plays Wallace Shawn in My Dinner With Andre”

UP-N ➡️ BNSF ➡️ Salt Creek Trail ➡️ BNSF ➡️ Potsticker House ➡️ UP-N $7 with a Metra Saturday/Sunday Day Pass (dinner sold separately)

That iconic blast of heat as you turn the corner onto Ardmore at the northern terminus of the Lakefront Trail

I wonder what the revenue / politics would have looked like if Bring Chicago Home had only applied to single family homes, condos, and apartments with a price per unit >$1m. It probably would have left a ton of revenue on the table, but maybe clearer winners + losers would have helped the messaging

Two normal elderly women in line behind me at the coffee shop chatting about car-free streets in Paris, Doug Ford ripping out bike lanes in Toronto, and how they’d bike more if more lanes were protected. Not totally correct on the details but solid on values. A small reminder that we’re winning

Is there any reason to believe adding noise barriers to expressway median L stations wouldn’t be extremely cheap, especially in proportion to the benefit to South/West side riders?

I hadn’t biked to Logan Square in a while before tonight (probably at least a year) and I was pleasantly surprised to find that you can now get there from Edgewater basically entirely on greenways, protected lanes, and off-street trails

My compromise position on cars is that they should be safe, legal, and rare

We’re gonna save transit, folks

God bless whoever put up this pro-upzoning poster in Edgewater, please put up more

Pilsen rooftops

The moment the rally started marching north on Dearborn, as seen from the County building

A tale of two cities, Chicago bike edition: On the left is CDOT's map of bike infrastructure on the North Side, and on the right is the South Side. Even without the legend, you can tell that these are two different worlds, with I-55 acting as a border between them

Montreal Critical Mass

You can tell a lot about municipal priorities in Chicago and Montreal by comparing the two cities’ “Green Alley” programs. Chicago’s program funds better types of concrete pavement (left), while a program with the same name funds people-first green spaces in Montreal (right)

“Cold and windy” was not what I was asking for here

Sorry to the Sun-Times newsletter editors who have to deal with it, but the typo in this morning’s edition did get a laugh from me

Today feels like a good day to reflect on the extent to which Jesus was a non-citizen who was detained and tortured on trumped-up charges in an attempt to suppress speech deemed threatening to the occupation of Palestine

Just one time I would like for the weather to be warm without being windy, please

Bus drivers should be allowed to play music while they drive

Gone pseudonymous, DM me if you can't remember who I am

Flagging, but instead of different color handkerchiefs it’s Clark Devon Hardware beanies

Is there a name for this particular style of small multifamily building that seems to be common across Cincinnati’s west side?

Seeing as deed-restricted affordable housing seems to be legal in IL (even if not rigorously tested in the courts AFAICT), would it be theoretically possible to restrict the deed on a multifamily property to require that tenants or owner-occupants not own cars?

One thing I really like about walking is that there’s no chance I could accidentally kill someone

Today is a great day to sweep and mop your Chicago Vintage Tile Floor

Walking 20min down Randolph from Millenium to Ogilvie for a perfectly timed ME ➡️ UP-N transfer, thinking about how one day when we #BuildTheTunnel and make this a one-seat ride we will gain a convenient way to get from Hyde Park to Edgewater but lose the opportunity for a pleasant stroll in the rain

One particularly interesting historical detail here is that the two ads that are visible in the photo are for 1) a day labor agency in Uptown and 2) an anti-fire PSA, two of the most important focal points of political conflict on the far north side in the 1970s

It’s wild to me that: * A non-journalist (Nik) FOIAed for the Red Line Extension budget * Discovered that costs have nearly doubled for mysterious reasons * Found the CTA is planning to issue $2.75B in bonds to plug the hole And yet no local news outlets seem to have picked up the story

McKinley Park corners

Sunny twins in Chatham

I bet I could beat this number in a single day if they let me write tickets

Test your knowledge of 2024 Chicago local news with my quiz! 🏙️🤓 lauriemerrell.github.io/chicago-news...

Thanks to a charging cable from eBay, I have confirmed that the 2008 iPod Nano I found on the street does indeed turn on and does not have any songs newer than 2011

Since the electric Divvy bikes have GPS trackers on them and a lot of analog Divvy riders probably have location services enabled in their app settings, I wonder if Lyft knows what routes riders are taking? Would be an interesting dataset for planning and advocacy purposes

15% increase in single family home prices in Bronzeville/Hyde Park/Woodlawn/Washington Park since summer 2023 is unreal www.housingstudies.org/releases/coo...

Looks like Shannon O’Malley officially lost his judicial retention bid according to the @injusticewatch.org election results tracker, which has 100% of precincts reporting

I’m craving a @stevevance.bsky.social take on the Cut the Tape progress tracker, seems like lots of steps have been marked as completed in the past six months but I’m curious to hear if any of it is translating to on-the-ground changes in developer experience www.chicago.gov/city/en/site...

This one lived up to the hype