Tyler Nickell
The tight gripping of the handles, the wind blowing in your face, the freedom of cruising down a rocky trail—what’s not to enjoy about bicycling? Growing up in Chatham, riding bikes was always the natural way to get around for Olatunji Oboi Reed when he was young. But as he grew older, and as cars became the norm among his peers, Reed slowly began abandoning his bicycle in favor of the increased independence and speed of the car.
Courtesy of Sol Patches
This week on SSW Radio, we spoke with a musician, discussed transit activism in Chicago, and heard your New Year’s resolutions
Lizzie Smith
If you lived in Pilsen in 2005 and wanted to get to the Loop, you might have walked to the 18th Street station and waited. And waited. And waited.
Ellen Hao / The Chicago Dispatch
Metra’s plan to enhance Electric District service to Hyde Park has provoked chatter on the South Side and beyond since its announcement in May. Is the return of frequent, quality service on the Electric close at hand? Unfortunately, it seems that the current plan misses many opportunities and takes as many steps backward as it does forward.
Tony Webster
Over the past year, the city’s Divvy bike share program—one of the largest in North America—has added over a hundred stations across the city, dozens of them on the South Side. A year ago, the last time the Weekly reported on Divvy’s service of the South Side, we found that South Siders accounted for just a twentieth of total riders. At that time, Divvy had recently announced its expansion, so there was some cause for optimism—perhaps the city would successfully replicate the dense network of popular stations in the North Side and portions of the West Side and the statistics would improve.
Courtney Kendrick
The Red Line’s 95th Street station in Roseland is indisputably the transit capital of the South Side. Some 12,000 people tap their Ventra cards to ride the Red Line at 95th every weekday—and another 8,000 people transfer to one of the dozen CTA bus routes that meet outside the station.
Katie Bart
As the year comes to an end, the Chicago Transit Authority is preparing for a changing of the guard at the federal level, and city officials are doing everything they can to secure funds for high-cost ventures before President Barack Obama leaves office. The Far South Side expansion of the Red Line, however, will have to wait another year, well into a Donald Trump presidency, to secure federal funding.
Katie Bart
On November 1, the St. John Missionary Baptist Church on 115th Street in Roseland became the forum for discussions that could shape the future of the area for years to come—with changes potentially rippling across the entire South Side. Community members, CTA officials, and organizers came together for the only public hearing on the environmental impact statement for the Red Line extension project, the details of which were announced in late September. “The draft environmental impact statement looks closely at the potential benefits and impacts of both the east and west options,” says Jeffery Tolman, a spokesperson for the CTA, referring to two possible routes for the extended Red Line.“The public meeting was to seek out the community’s feedback.” The final route and impact statement will be unveiled in 2017, Tolman says.
Kate Bart
For years, talk of extending the Red Line to Chicago’s southern-most limits was an urban legend. Longtime African-American residents of the South Side discussed it, but nothing has happened since the public train line, which runs along the city’s north-south racial divide, began operating in 1969.
This interview is republished from The Chicago Dispatch, an online magazine of interviews, essays, and creative work about Chicago, edited by Daniel Kay Hertz.