NIMBY Cronicles 2, What happened to all the parking?

I moved into Wicker Park over thirty years ago. Back then, a bad parking spot was next door. Kids still played baseball in the street. A truck making deliveries could pull up to the curb and not block traffic, because the streets were wide open.

Nowadays, if I park closer than a block away, it’s a good day.

Like most folks, I blamed the new development. It seemed a good bet. After all, I was standing on the corner at ground zero when the condo bomb went off, All the vacant lots were filled with infill construction, the factories had been turned into loftominiums. North Ave. used to look like Armitage, dotted with single family and small commercial. Now it is lined with four story buildings. Like most folks, I figured that the increased population  used up all of the parking spots.

Then I read a three part article in The Straight Dope by Ed Zotti, called “Where everybody went”

http://chicago.straightdope.com/sdccensus1.php

He had crunched the data from the 2010 census and produced a bunch of maps showing demographic shifts throughout the city.

In part three he had a map showing the change in housing units from 1970 to 2010.

I was squinting at the map, trying to pick out my census tract when I realized something.

Despite my impression of massive development, the number of housing units in Wicker park was pretty much the same as it was in 1970. I went back to part one and looked at the population density in 1980 and 2010 and again I was surprised. The population here is about the same as it was when I got here.

I was still incredulous, and looked at the census data myself. It was true. Here are a couple of graphs I produced from the data for the 8 census tracts that make up Wicker Park.

  

So where have all the cars come from? This is a problem 24 hours a day. They can’t all be day trippers and barflies?

Here’s another graph from 1970 to 2010 stacking the count of resident’s cars over the number of dwelling units.

The answer is clear. We don’t have too many people, we have too many cars.

And look at the timeline, this isn't some fallout from the postwar car culture, this is a pile of buffalo chips we dragged in our shoes.

We tried mandating minimum parking ratios for new construction.

Here’s a graph of our worst tract.

 This tract has probably the highest off street parking ratio in the neighborhood.

Only 5% of the units are in historic buildings with no parking, 15% are in single family homes with 2 car garages and fully 75% of the housing was built after 1990 and has a mandated 1-1 parking minimum. Despite an average parking ratio of at least 1.1 the automobile ratio is 1.3.  And judging by the street parking at least half of the people are using their garages to store lawn furniture

I have come to the conclusion that cars are like goldfish. If you keep feeding them, they will grow until they fill the bowl.

Neighborhoods are  funny things, when they stop growing, they start dying.

We have reached a point where the parking situation is strangling our growth.

That is why I am flexible about reduced parking ratios.

We haven’t room for any more cars. 

Paul K. Dickman

A Cautionary Tale...Redux

Mayor Neri's last gift to Northlake was the O'hareport hotel, an 18 story hotel and convention center next to the Tri-state expressway. The locals figured it to be just another vehicle for mob skim. Lacking a highway exit, it proved to be nearly inaccessible to anyone who didn't already live in town and it closed in June of '72, two years after it opened. It fell into foreclosure and eventually (in 1987) if found a useful life as a retirement home.

In December of 1971, during its tenure as a nearly vacant hotel, a Ford Mustang was found abandoned in the O'hareport Hotel parking lot. It had been reported stolen from the repair lot at Al Piemonte Ford a few months earlier. The car was towed to the insurance office in Freeport, Illinois, about a hundred miles away. When the insurance adjuster popped the trunk, he got a surprise.

In the trunk was the naked body of a man. He had been beaten, strangled and stabbed. A tattoo and fingerprints eventually identified the man as Henry Rufo, a Lombard, Illinois resident who had gone missing about a week before.

Back then, trunk music was bigger than disco. The joke around town was that the mob built the hotel because they were running out of parking spaces at the airport

That was the extent of the news coverage at the time. What we didn't know was that Henry Rufo was in fact Henry LaKey, the prime witness against Battaglia. He had opted out of witness protection and figured that changing his name would be good enough.

Apparently, the feds had been keeping William G. Riley, the developer, in Cleveland. Not long after Joe Shine Amabile's death he leaves protection and shows back up, under his own name, in Denver. This time he has a whole new real estate scam. This one involves "Installment Land Contracts" or what we used to call a "Contract for deed"

If the seller owns the land free and clear, these are straight forward things, but if there is a mortgage on the property, it's another kettle of fish. Banks like to know who owns the property they have lent on and put a due on sale clause in mortgage contracts.

Riley's idea is "what the banks don't know won't hurt them." The original owner just keeps paying the mortgage from the buyer’s payments and pockets the difference. Riley's scheme is even better. He organizes his company (Investment Realty and Mortgage) into separate buying and selling divisions that don't talk to each other. When someone wants to sell a property they go to the buying division and offer it at a price. Then the selling division looks for a buyer. When they find one the property is first sold by contract to Income Realty and then instantly resold to the buyer at a 25% profit.

Riley can get a commission from the seller, gets a piece of the buyer's downpayment, makes the float between all the buyers payments to him and his payments to the seller and puts an accounts receivable asset on his book for his profit on the sale.

Then he capitalizes these receivables by selling bonds.

You can see that this is a house of cards. Eventually, the banks get wind of the sales and start enforcing the due on sale clause.

A law suit ends proving that the banks have every right to demand this payment or to renegotiate the mortgage with the new buyer.

In 1980, to save his scheme, Riley spends his bondholders investments to finance a amendment to the Colorado State Constitution  that would limit the amount of interest the banks can charge on an assumed mortgage. The ballot initiative fails.

Once again, the feds are looking at his books and investors are looking for their money. In 1981 Income Realty goes bankrupt and steps ahead of a 28 count indictment for defrauding investors out of $6 million, Riley takes it on the lam to Santiago, Chile.  A year later, he's found in Florida, under the name of Grover W. Williams, trying to buy some real estate.

He was tried, found guilty, won an appeal and pleads guilty to a related theft. In the end he did about two years plus parole and relocated to Florida where he continued in real estate. He died in 2006.

The NIMBY Cronicles Part 1, Zoning is money.

Developers don’t ask for a zoning change because they have a shining vision of the city’s future. They ask because it puts more cash in their pockets. This is why they submit to public input, because they are asking for free money.

It’s big money and here, I hope to explore exactly how much.

To the developer every development parcel has a highest ultimate value.

Put simply, the highest you can pay for a plot of land is the value of what can be built on it at its highest and best use, minus the cost of construction.

This is not necessarily the market price. If the market price is above this value, it is a bad investment. If the market price is equal to this value, it is still a sound investment to some one who sees it as a long term hold. If the market price is below this value, it gives the developer a chance to make his profit by selling the completed building. This is as it should be; these guys need to eat too.

This price is typically expressed in the form of dollars per buildable square foot. That is, if a lot's price is $1 million and you can build a 20,000 sq feet building, its cost is $50 per buildable sq ft. If the lot next door also costs $1 million but allows you to build 40,000 sq ft, despite the same price its cost is only $25 per buildable sq ft.

All these variables, save one are governed by the vagaries of supply and demand. The highest and best use is governed by zoning.

Zoning wasn't done willy nilly. It is part of grand plan for the city. It was made by intelligent and well meaning men and it’s still a good plan. It sees a crescendo of population and business at the city center tapering off the borders. It has a series of radiating lines that that allow for moderately higher use along transportation corridors, and industrial uses along freight corridors. Still it tapers from downtown out to the burbs.

Back in the day you bought a plot of land and built a house, a store, an apartment building, but mortgages were tough to get and demand and consequently value was driven solely by the end user and his financial state.

With the invention of mortgage backed securities, we increased that pool of demand. This seemed to be a good thing, but when these securities became a widespread investment vehicle, the demand for the securities started to drive the real estate market. Eventually, a residential mortgage was available to anyone with a pulse, so that more mortgages could be created to feed the insatiable thirst for the securities.

This is when the condo was king. When a developer asked for a zoning change it was to slap another condo on top and make more money. This tended to build bigger units maximizing bulk but moderately impacting density. It was easy to figure out the value of a zoning change, it was simply the price of the additional unit minus its construction costs.

With the crash, this changed. Everything is about apartments, at first we thought it was about renter demand, but this isn't really the case. The same investors who were clamouring for securities are looking for somewhere else to invest their money. The demand stems less from people wanting to rent and more from people wanting to buy apartment buildings.

Investors judge a rental property's value by something called the capitalization rate.

Think of an apartment building like a municipal bond.

You invest X dollars and it pays you Y percent each year. Y percent is the Cap Rate.

Detroit bonds are riskier than New York bonds and consequently have to pay a higher Y to attract investors. It is the same with rental property. Some are riskier than others and have to pay more. The dividend the building pays is the profit. i.e. the yearly rental income minus the operating expenses. If a building shows a profit of $50,000 each year and you judge the risk to demand a 10% return, than the most you should pay for the building is $500,000. ($50,000/ 10%)

But here’s the situation, the collapse made other investments riskier or less lucrative and increased demand by REITs, pensions and other bigger investors for rental real estate. This lowered the required cap rate. Now it’s around 5%, so that same building showing the same profit of $50,000 each year is worth $1,000,000.

To get the most out of this boom, the developer wants to maximize the income.

One way is with smaller apartments, but more of them. Imagine you can get $1500 each for two 750 sq ft apt ($2/sqft). To get the same sq ft rate for one 1500 sq ft unit. You need $3000 a month. This jumps a threshold that makes it more difficult to keep rented. You would need to charge less, say $1.75/sqft ($2625) for the larger unit to stay rented.

So, smaller units rent for about 25 cents/sqft more each month. How much could this be worth?  .25 x 12mo / 5% = $60. A zoning request solely for an increase in density with no extra floor space, adds $60 per buildable square foot to the ultimate value of the vacant land.

Other ways to maximize profits include adding amenities, but this is the developers choice and is not dependent on any zoning change. Two ways that are dependent on zoning, are building more square feet, or building taller (units with skyline views rent at a premium)

So, let’s construct a model.

Three standard city lots, initial zoning B3-2

You can build a 4 story mixed use building. 20,625 total sqft

9 residential units + around 8000 sqft retail.

Residential units around 1400 sqft

Good retail in the area commands $20/ft/yr NNN

Retail gross rent $160,000- $2000 expenses Net income $140,000

Retail cap rate (per CBRE) 6%

Investment value of retail $2,333,333

Investment value of retail

Residential gross rent @ $1.75/sqft/mo 29400/unit/year. $264,600 total

Costs, $24,000 taxes $6000 insurance $20,000 maintenance.

Net $214,600

Residential cap rate (per CBRE) 5%

Investment value of residential $4,292,000

Total Value $6,405,433

Construction costs (per RSMeans 4-7 fl apt) $205/ sqft

Total $4,228,125

Ultimate value of undeveloped land $2,177,308

Or $105 per buildable square foot.

Three standard city lots, new zoning B3-3

You can build a 5 story mixed use building. 28,125 total sqft

18 residential units + around 8000 sqft retail.

Residential units around 970 sqft

Good retail in the area commands $20/ft/yr NNN

Retail gross rent $160,000- $2000 expenses Net income $140,000

Retail cap rate (per CBRE) 6%

Investment value of retail $2,333,333

Residential gross rent @ $2.00/sqft/mo $23,400/unit/year. $ 421,200 total

Costs, $28,000 taxes $6000 insurance $22,000 maintenance.

Net $365,200

Residential cap rate 5%

Investment value of residential $7,304.000

Total Value $9,637.333

Construction costs (per RSMeans 4-7 fl apt) $205/ sqft

Total $5,765,625

Ultimate value of undeveloped land $3,871,708

Difference $1,694,400

There it is. A fairly minor zoning change on a fairly small project represents about 1.7 million dollars in additional profits. Probably more than they paid for the land.

If the change is to a B3-5 those numbers add up to $5.2 million, and over $6 million if you add a 25 cent bump in rents for the skyline views on floors 6 & 7

Ashland Ave BRT 3, The route we left behind.

Now I want to turn back the clock and compare the proposed, center running Ashland BRT with the one I thought was a no brainer, Western Ave, Parking and Median  Removal.

The main disadvantages of this plan would be the removal of both the median and parking on one side of Western.

The parking removal seems terrible but nothing says it all has to be on the same side. The entirety of Western Ave is lined with high schools, hospitals, parks, shopping centers, strip malls, used car lots, factory blocks and fast food joints. Get the picture? These are all places with their own parking lots. In fact there are only about eight blocks where street front commercial and residential uses (these uses rely on street parking) dominate both sides of the street.

O.K. You would have to make the traffic lanes slalom from the east to west to take advantage of this, but that could be a good thing. Increasing the complexity of the road way  should have a minor effect during the peak hours, when everyone is traveling slow and following the guy in front, but it might serve to have a traffic calming effect in the overnight hours when a wide open, dead straight road encourages driving above the speed limit..

You would have to annoy about 150 Property owners and LAZ., but LAZ has only 532 parking spaces on all of Western. Even if we eliminate half of them, LAZ could easily be bought off by increasing their holdings on the cross streets. There are a hundred spaces on North Ave alone that would make LAZ wet their pants if they thought they could a hold of them.

Median removal? This is a joke. The median on most of Western is a stripe painted on the asphalt. For ¾ mile the median is a bridge to nowhere that they have been talking about removing for 40 years. For five miles, the median is a 100 foot wide park and there are two Westerns on both sides. There are only a few blocks of actual raised medians on the whole street.

How about a line by line comparison

           

                                   Western curbside             Ashland center running

Bus speed                         15.6mph                           15.9mph

Increased boardings   9549 new riders            8440 new riders

Average late bus           39secs                               22secs

Pedestrian space           30ft                                   43 ft (inc 14ft station)

Traffic capacity lost      0%                                     50%

Cost                                     110 million                     165 million

Why did they choose the current proposal?

The only advantage it has over the Western proposal is the loss of traffic capacity.

I am not a conspiracy nut. I think Oswald was the lone gunman. I think that 85 yards is such an easy shot, even with a junk rifle, that if anyone thought of putting a second shooter on the grassy knoll, it would have been dismissed as a waste of manpower.

But here’s what I think.

I think that center running traffic lane removal was the plan all along.

I think they played the community like a cheap violin. Ginning up fears of parking and planted median loss. Hyping percentage improvements in reliability speed and “transit use share” until travel lane removal seemed like a reasonable choice.

I think they chose Ashland simply because they thought the fall out would be less.

I don’t believe that they are doing this to force some municipal vision of a transit state or bicycle utopia. I don’t think that even the mayor has that much clout.

I think their reasons are much more mundane.

I suspect that somewhere out there is some ginormous federal grant for congestion abatement and we are being trampled while the city fathers scramble to get a piece of that pie.

The fact that the 2014 budget shows that CDOT plans for an additional 200 million dollars (over last year) in federal infrastructure grants, only reinforces that suspicion.

 Paul K. Dickman

Ashland Ave BRT 2, The report.

The city finally released their Environmental Impact report last week.

http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/#ea

It is several hundred pages and I have been wading through it as fast as I can. They say it will have no impact, but that is what we expected them to say. So I will give my review so far.

First, my predictions…

Prediction #1

The rush hour traffic count will come out higher than expected, and the parts of the plan the CTA won’t want to talk about will include rush hour bans on all of Western and Damen (with loss of bicycle lanes) and probably parts California, Kedzie and Halsted.

 True.

They didn’t make it easy, but the rush hour traffic counts are there in

Appendix B-2: Level of Service Analysis

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/AshlandBRTDraftEA_AppendixB-2_20131113.pdf

It’s labeled “Existing Volume Schematics” on pages 6-14 and it is in the form of a bunch of intersectional counts for every intersection.

They’re confusing, but to get a count for, say, the south side of any intersection,  you add all the vehicles in the north bound lane (inc turns) and the count in the south bound lane that travels straight and the south bound turns from the cross streets.

I did that and they showed that my seat of the pants AM rush traffic counts were right on the money. They indicate that compared to IDOT’s 2010 counts, they are 25% higher in the phase 1 zone (Cortland to 31^st), 6% lower in the north section (Irving Pk to Cortland) and 13% higher in the south (31^st to 95^th). And when I estimated they would have to divert 650 car per hour in the rush, the actual number is more like 1000.

Even with these variations, IDOT’s counts were the closest to current conditions.

I tried to figure out which counts they were using for their planning. They show a map of what they thought it was at:

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/AshlandBRTDraftEA_AppendixB-1_20131113.pdf

Page 12, (13 by screen count)

But it didn’t match any I had seen. They show traffic counts on Damen where it jumps over the South Branch and Stevenson in the 40,000 range. I can’t imagine that happening unless one of the other bridges was out.

It turns out that the numbers were based on CMAP’s Travel Demand Model, which was based on counts from as far back as 2002. They crunch the numbers and create a model that estimates the current conditions. Every so often they check it against the real world to see if it is accurate. This works well enough for the broad brush planning that CMAP does,  but it falls apart when it comes to pin-striping out what is going to happen at any one street.

I’ll get into that later. Right now, let’s go back to the intersection schematics.

The complex nature of the counts has some advantages. Because they counted every turn, on every intersection (down to alleys), you can get a reasonably accurate measure of how many automobile trips are taken on Ashland on the average rush hour.  This number would be analogous to the CTA boarding counts.

I added up the AM rush count  and found that  22002 vehicles enter Ashland Ave between Irving Pk and 95^th each hour during the typical AM rush. I cross checked this by adding up the number of vehicles leaving. That total was 22342.

That is what you would expect. Roughly every vehicle that enters the road leaves at some point.

I ran the same calculations on their projected “Build Alternative Volume Schematics”. Those totals were 21666 vehicles entering and only 11940 leaving.

I am not sure how that is supposed to work. The increase in CTA ridership would only account for about 100 of the 1000 vehicles diverted each hour. The only scenario I can imagine where that would work is if half of the people who get on Ashland to take a 1-2 mile trip get stuck in traffic for over an hour.

To be fair, I don’t think this is part of an evil plan to turn Ashland into a 16.1 mile parking lot. I think they didn’t check the numbers because they just didn’t care. They were worried about what would happen when they magically cut the traffic rate in half and got rid of the left hand turns. All they cared about was whether CMAP’s model showed enough through lane capacity on the alternate routes.

Nothing in their calculations show what will happen when the 52 cars that used to make a left hand turn, eastbound onto Augusta are queuing up on Damen to make the same turn.

Prediction #2

If phase one gets built as planned, the route of Elston to Ogden to California will turn into an unintended bypass. This will piss off the people on Fry St. to no end, because everyone will be using their street to dodge the traffic snafu in the Elston-Milwaukee-Ogden interchange.

True.

Go back to Appendix B-1: Regional Traffic Diversion Analysis

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/AshlandBRTDraftEA_AppendixB-1_20131113.pdf

Down at the bottom they have (pgs 23- 28) they have maps of projected diverted volumes. Ogden has the second highest diverted counts. They blip over Elston and use Sacramento instead of California. The reason for these differences from my prediction is that they are using CMAP’s demand model that thinks these streets are already saturated.

Look at Appendix B-1: Regional Traffic Diversion Analysis page 11.

They have a chart called Table 1: Existing Conditions Results by North‐South Routes.

 Here they show something called the VMT.

VMT or “vehicle miles traveled” is the daily traffic count times the length of the road measured. It is simple enough. For roads of equal lengths, the road with the higher VMT has the higher average traffic counts.

Take another look at that chart. Particularly these three (the three highest)

Western Ave.                                                               VMT 306,429

Damen Ave.                                                                 VMT 322,336

Ashland Ave.                                                                VMT 264,626

They are operating with a model that shows Damen has a higher ADT than either Western or Ashland.

Damen is actually a couple of miles shorter then the others and this translates to Damen having a daily traffic count in excess of 22000 for its entire length. Damen only approaches 20000 in a few places. For the most part it is below 15000 and for a third of its length (Back of the yards) it is below 10000.

                

On page 12 they say:

“In reviewing the existing conditions travel demand model outputs, the VMT for Damen Avenue appears to be higher   than expected when compared with other parallel routes in the study area. However, the modeled VMT value is  not used in the  analysis, rather the relative change between Existing and Build Conditions is used, which is the best indicator for regional traffic diversion.”

           

So they noticed and ignored it. The VMT is the product of two numbers, one of which (the road length) is literally set in concrete. It didn't occur to them that the other (the modeled daily traffic count) is the very number they used to analyze the impact on every other route. It is a sad day when you hire a room full of engineers and not one of them has the good sense god gave a turnip.

Remember those maps at the bottom of “Appendix B-1: Regional Traffic Diversion Analysis”, well take another look. Damen at North Ave (based on IDOT’s counts) has excess rush hour capacity of around 375 vehicles an hour. They predict that it will only get 12 of the diverted vehicles during the AM rush. Western which has an excess rush hour capacity of less than 200, will see an increase of 348.

Why such a difference? Because of CMAP’s model they think Damen is way over capacity and Western is way under. They also think that Elston and California are over run with autos and that Sacramento Blvd is a good alternate despite the fact that a third of the phase 1 section winds its way through two huge parks.

Except for the actual time spent counting cars, the 7000 hours they spent modeling the traffic effects was a waste of time. It was based on data that was too coarse to be used in this way.

There are only three basic truths about the impacts on other streets

1,         Starting with the closest, all alternates will fill to capacity until all the traffic displaced from Ashland is absorbed.

2,         In as much as the average trip on Ashland is less than 2 miles, those alternates less than 1 mile away, will be under the highest pressure to exceed capacity. Increases on California and Kedzie will mostly be people who would normally take Western but have been diverted because of the congestion.

3,         The level of service, particularly on the two lane alternates, will decline in proportion to number of new left turn maneuvers in excess of available queuing capacity.

Prediction #3

If phase one ever gets built, phase two will be the southern portion. Traffic on Ashland and Western are 10% lower down there and shouldn’t present a problem.

Remains to be seen…

They are still referring to both the north and south segments, collectively, as phase two. However they always mention the south segment first.

Prediction #4

Phase three, will be from Clybourn to Irving Park and it will never be built. Traffic on Ashland is 25% higher up there and all the alternates are near capacity.

Remains to be seen…

The traffic rate is still higher up there. There is one possibility though. Reviewing the intersection schematics, I noticed something. The traffic rates spike between Belmont and Armitage. This leads me to believe that these are the result of people accessing the Kennedy.  Around 1000 cars turn onto or out of Webster and Armitage each rush hour. If a full time snafu at the Cortland lane reduction backs up into these two intersections, enough traffic may switch to an alternate ramp and lower the count to a more attractive number.

I am still holding to my prediction though.

So far I have two confirmed predictions and two pending, that’s a better batting average than Jeanne Dixon.

I feel emboldened to make a fifth prediction.

           

CMAP’s projections say that the building the BRT will result in 2% of the corridor wide VMT disappearing. A whopping 34000 Vehicle miles traveled. Don’t get worked up though, it works out to about 16 cars per typical rush hour on each of the 8 primary alternates.

Prediction #5

Geography and traffic lead me to suspect that the people accessing the Kennedy at Armitage and Webster are mostly from the east side of Ashland. Their access routes to the alternate ramps at Division pretty much suck. Elston is on the wrong side of the river, Racine doesn't go through and, Clybourn and Halsted squeeze them through a nasty choke point caused by the all the shopping at North Ave. These people represent 25% of the disappearing traffic and they will not disappear. Instead they will reroute outside of the corridor by using Clark and the Drive.

Paul K. Dickman

Coming soon

Ashland Ave BRT 3, The route we left behind.

Ashland Ave BRT

This is about the CTA’s Bus Rapid Transit plan. An idea to run busses like trains up and down existing streets.

If you are unfamiliar with it, you can read about it here:

http://www.transitchicago.com/westernashlandbrt/#infographic

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/PR_CDMSmith_AM_October_Boards_FINALlowres_20101015.pdf

If you are not from around here you should probably just skip over this one. It is pretty dry and full of technical gibberish and location references that are pretty specific.

I have been shooting my mouth off and now it is time to put my predictions down in writing.

The Phase one of the BRT plan, in its current incarnation, involves Ashland Ave between Cortland and 31^st St., but in the future, the plan is for it to run all the way from Irving Park to 95^th .

At the start, there were eight possible systems, four different configurations on two different streets. Ashland and Western. The one they have settled on is this:

They will turn the two inside lanes of Ashland Ave (a four lane street) into Bus only lanes, using the median like an El platform.

They will reduce the number of stops to two per mile (because they realize that it is not the traffic that slows down busses, it’s the passengers) and eliminate virtually all the left turns. This will cost $10,000,000 per mile ($161 mil total) not including the new fleet of busses with their doors on the left side.

The city’s presentations have all been sweetness and light, and pretty much devoid of any actual facts that haven’t already been spun tighter than a violin string.

Owing to this, my first analysis was based on the only real facts I had, existing traffic volume and road capacity.

Yes, roads have a capacity and a pretty well defined one. According to IDOT (the people who control the purse strings) a 2-way urban arterial road has a capacity of 1250 vehicles per hour for a two lane (one in each direction), 1250-2050 for a four lane, and 2050-2900 for a six lane. Roads are supposed to be built so that their capacity should meet or exceed their Design Hourly Volume (DHV). DHV represents a fairly bad rush hour, but not the worst ever.

The most recent traffic count I found was from IDOT in 2010. It said that the Average Daily Traffic (ADT) on most of Ashland in Phase one was 27,200 vehicles a day.

CDOT has more in depth counts from 2006. Not only are they older, but 2006 was the year of the Dan Ryan reconstruction (on the south) and the North Ave bridge removal (on the north). In my opinion these numbers were too skewed to be of any value. They were also much, much higher than the state’s numbers.

To obtain a DHV from the traffic counts, you can multiply the ADT times something called the K factor. This is nothing more than an approximation of the ratio between the ADT and the hourly count for the thirtieth highest traffic hour of the year. Typically, urban arterials have a K factor of around 9% but on a street like Ashland, that still has a lot of traffic after midnight, you can make a sound argument for a K factor in the 7% range.

So, we take 27200 x .07 = 1900 DHV existing. If you want to switch this four lane into a two lane, you have to get rid of 650 cars during rush hour or about 10,000 vehicles a day.

Where are they gonna go?

Figure half of them will take the biggest alternate (Western) and another quarter of them will take the nearest alternate (Damen) and the rest will scatter around. 325 cars at rush hour will put Western near or above the 2050 capacity for a four lane. That’s OK, you can put in a rush hour parking ban.

Damen, up here in the Wickerbuckukie Parktown Village, could probably escape this fate, but south of Grand Ave. the count is high enough that a similar ban would probably be needed.

Realize that a parking ban will also get rid of the bike lanes. The difference between the minimum width of an auxiliary lane and the minimum width of a parking lane is the width of a bike lane.

At first glance, it’s doable with rush hour bans on Western and parts of Damen.

Next, I wanted to cross check using few scraps of actual data the CTA let out, mostly Traffic Mode Share.      

This is not the same as ridership. It is the ratio between the number of people on busses to the total number of people traveling the road. As a ratio it has two variables. To increase the TMS you can either, double the number of bus riders and let the car traffic stay the same, or you can maintain the same number of riders and get rid of 15,000 cars.

The reality is somewhere in between, and that is what I wanted to find out.

The CTA said that their current transit share might be as high as 15%. Working backwards from their different Ashland configuration comparison pages, they said that 17%TMS represented a 21% increase, 19%TMS for a 36% increase 23% for a 64% increase and 26% for a 46% increase. I think that last one (the current proposal) is actually a typo. Otherwise they all represent a current mode share of 14%. The Cta repeats this number on this infographic.

http://www.transitchicago.com/assets/1/brt/BRT_Infographics_final.pdf

If transit share is 14% then auto share is 86%, and  27,200/.86 = total of 31,628 with of a daily average transit passenger load of 4428. This would represent all the bus passengers passing through any single point on Ashland Ave. on an average day and is analogous to ADT.

An earlier report from the metropolitan planning council said that you could expect an increase in ridership of 14.3% from BRT schemes. So, I tried that first.

4428x1.143 = 5061 passenger load with BRT. The current plan for Ashland says that it will capture a 26% Transit Mode Share. 5061/.26 = 19,466 total travelers minus 5061 on busses leaving 14,405 in cars or a loss of about 13,000 cars a day (only 600 of which could be accounted for by mode switchers). This seemed a little ambitious, so I increased the new passengers to 30% and ran the numbers again.

They gave me a passenger load of 5756, total travelers of 22140 and an ADT of 16390, or a loss of about 10,000 cars a day. This is the same as my road capacity calculations.

At our most recent presentation from the city, they put up a graphic that projected an increase in ridership of 29%. I am pretty sure that I nailed down the assumptions they were dealing with.

CDOT has been doing new traffic counts and they have spent 7000 hours collecting and modeling the counts. Myself, I performed a few seat of the pants AM rush counts and they indicated that my assumptions about either the ADT or the K factor were way too low. I suspect this is correct. Why would they need 7000 hours to model the traffic if it wasn’t?

The city’s traffic analysis is due out next month, so now I’ll make my predictions.

Prediction #1

The rush hour traffic count will come out higher than expected, and the parts of the plan the CTA won’t want to talk about will include rush hour bans on all of Western and Damen (with loss of bicycle lanes) and probably parts California, Kedzie and Halsted.

Prediction #2

If phase one gets built as planned, the route of Elston to Ogden to California will turn into an unintended bypass. This will piss off the people on Fry St. to no end, because everyone will be using their street to dodge the traffic snafu in the Elston-Milwaukee-Ogden interchange.

Prediction #3

If phase one ever gets built, phase two will be the southern portion. Traffic on Ashland and Western are 10% lower down there and shouldn’t present a problem.

Prediction #4

Phase three, will be from Clybourn to Irving Park and it will never be built. Traffic on Ashland is 25% higher up there and all the alternates are near capacity.

Barring thermonuclear war in the Middle East, they will not be allowed to reduce that stretch to two traffic lanes. To build it as a four lane could not be done without fulltime loss of the medians and all street parking, or widening of the roadbed. That would involve moving storm drains, streetlights, signs and stoplights and would substantially increase the per mile cost.

Understand, I am pretty much a pro transit kind of guy. I admit to owning a car, but it is thirteen years old and only has 37,000 miles on it. That is because I take CTA as much as possible.

I think BRT is a great idea! I would have piped up sooner, but one of their proposals for a curbside BRT on Western would, travel just as fast as this plan, carry just as many new riders as this plan, cause negligible traffic impacts, and cost 55 million dollars less.

Frankly, it never crossed my mind that anyone would be crazy enough to not choose that one.

Dining Al’fumo

This is about sidewalk cafés.

Specifically, it is about the fact that the city gives away chunks of the public way for chump change.

These aren’t some trash filled lot or a mothballed school building, these are our sidewalks, paid for and maintained by our motor fuel taxes and city sticker fees.

I first looked into this when the restaurants on Division Street, on the border between Wicker Park and the East Village, wanted to remove the tree pits in the sidewalks in order to expand their café seating.

Let me set this up a bit. In Chicago, the size of a sidewalk café is pretty much limited by the width of the sidewalk. You have to keep a 6 ft path for pedestrians and dodge around the street furniture, but anything else that’s paved is fair game.

Division Street has really big sidewalks. From Milwaukee to Humboldt Park, Division was intended to become one of Chicago’s tree lined boulevards. They laid it out with a large (100 ft) right of way. The boulevard thing fell through. As a result, the sidewalks on division are 25 feet wide.

So, these restaurants, who are probably paying $24000 a year for a single 1200 sqft storefront, can lease a 19 ft wide(300 to 475 sqft) stretch of sidewalk for $600 for the entire 9 month season. This area is ¼ to 1/3 of their entire interior floor area and they felt that they weren’t getting their money’s worth because the trees took up too much space.

It gets even worse.
That $600 is actually the minimum charge for a café. Goddess and Grocer up on Damen, where the sidewalks are much narrower, pays the same $600 for their 58 sq ft café. That is about the size of the tree pits on Division.

It gets even worse.
The base rate the city uses for most* of the city’s sidewalks is $1.10 per sq foot. The price to lease the sidewalk for 9 months is $600 or $1.10 per square foot net, whichever is larger.

Tocco Pizza e Arte on Milwaukee Ave has a sidewalk café on Mautene Court. Mautene Court was a tiny stub of a street that was vacated back in the 1980’s for a public open space. Unencumbered by an actual roadbed, the city leases ¼ of the space to Tocco. 1280 sq ft, larger than most actual restaurants and bars in the area and for this lease the city receives the princely sum of $1408 per season.

This is ridiculous. With retail leases running $15-$25 psf triple net, why are we leasing our sidewalks for a $1.10.

In retrospect the parking meter deal makes a lot more sense. Daley leased the parking space for $2.60 psf a year. He must have thought he made out like a bandit. Now LAZ sublets it back to us for $46.00 psf.


Other cities have sidewalk cafes. What do they charge?

San Francisco $5-6 psf plus $112

Miami $20 psf

Boston is mum on what their sq ft rate is, but they say the average café run $500-$1200 per month

New York is about $26 psf. That isn’t for midtown Manhattan, that is the rate for coffee shops in Canarsie. That is also just for the consent fees. Licensing and permitting costs are more than our minimum charge.

Heck, Seattle charges more than we do.


Why are we on this race to the bottom? I don’t see any of Boston’s beaneries flocking to Chicago because of our liberal sidewalk café policy.


I am not a greedy man, and to me, some of these cities sound a little expensive. My personal belief is that commerce should not be a zero sum game. Everybody has to make a little money or the whole thing falls apart and no one makes anything. So, lets find out how much these seats are worth.

In 2010 the National Restaurant Association published the results of a survey of restaurant operators. The report is a wealth of information.

In full service restaurants with an average check of $15-$25 per person each seat brought in:

$10866 total sales (food and beverage)

$7437 gross profit

and $346 net profit before taxes.


Ok, that net profit doesn’t seem like much, but it also reflects $495 in restaurant occupancy costs (lease, taxes, fire insurance). The occupancy cost for the sidewalk seat is $16.50 ($1.10 x 15 sqft).

Median restaurant seat profit plus occupancy cost equals $841 a year.

The sidewalk seats are only used for nine months and the weather probably puts the kibosh on a third of those.

Pro rated for season and weather, every sidewalk seat is worth $420.50 free and clear.
The city charges $16.50.


Put into perspective, Tocco’s use of Mautene Ct. puts $32232 in his pocket and the city’s gets $1408.

That is way too cheap.



Here is my idea.

First, eliminate the $600 minimum charge. This is extremely regressive and charges the most to the ones who get the least.


Second, we create two separate classes of restaurant each with its own base rate.

The first class is for small local businesses that do not have a liquor license.

Their base rate should be $6 psf (about $90 per seat). At this rate the small coffee shops and hotdog stands that have got a little 100 sqft café will still be paying about the same as they are now.

The Second class is for restaurant chains and any restaurant with a liquor license.

Their base rate should be $10 psf (about $150 per seat). They have higher profit margins and can afford to pay a higher rate.

These two rates should cover most of the city, but they should be doubled in the loop and halved in the enterprise zones.


City hall has been leaving a lot of money on the table and this should bring in millions from the 1000+ cafes and still encourage small businesses. The restaurants will all cry poor, but they will still be making more money each month from each their sidewalk seats than they do from the ones indoors.


As usual, I offer these suggestions for the good of my city, but if they want to reward me, they could wave my property taxes for the next 50 years. I estimate that would equal about 10% of one year’s increased revenue.





Paul K. Dickman



* The city’s rates go up incrementally in the central business district. I have found rates of $1.50, $2.30 to peak of $4.50 for Michigan Ave. facing the park