Before you can understand the nature of the problem of bike parking inequity, you must understand the political structure of Chicago, the operations of the Bicycle Program and its Bike Parking Program, and how the Bike Parking Program operates.

Since 2007, Chicago is a Bicycle Friendly City (silver level), an award bestowed by the League of American Bicyclists based on criteria in five categories. The current Bike 2015 Plan was adopted in 2006 to guide the City agencies and interested organizations to increase the frequency of trip by bicycle, and to make bicycling safer. Bike parking comprises Chapter 3.

Chicago has fifty legislative districts called wards, whose aldermen sit on the City Council. The aldermen have considerable control over development in their wards. The ward boundaries are changed after each Decennial Census, much like the redistricting seen with districts for seats in the Houses of Representatives. Therefore, upon their creation, each ward has the same population.

Additionally, there are 77 additional defined areas called Community Areas (see list), whose boundaries do not change . The purpose of these areas is to monitor and investigate changes over time. Researchers at the University of Chicago and workers at the Chicago Department of Public Health drew the districts in the 1910s. One of the aims of this project is to monitor and investigate bike parking installations in areas over time, but I chose wards as that was most convenient and relevant to my employer. The data are collected in such a way that the Screening Methods, Predictions, and Modeling could be re-run and a level of service obtained for Community Areas.^[A]

As part of the Department of Transportation, the Bicycle Parking Program is occasionally expected to report its activity to the Mayor's Office and the City Council so must of the published data is reported in terms of service per ward. The bike parking data includes Community Area information; as such, the data can be re-analyzed in order to publish data to report in terms of service per Community Area. This project will only discuss wards.

The CDOT Bicycle Parking Program (BPP) installs, maintains, and removes bike parking in the Chicago city limits. It is a small but productive section of the CDOT Bicycle Program, part of the Chicago Department of Transportation's Division of Project Development. All of its current work is guided by the Bike 2015 Plan.

The Bike Parking Program Manager, as of this project's publication, was Christopher Gagnon. Christopher became the manager in May 2007. The author joined the program on October 31, 2007. The changes in data management I've made have revolutionized the program.

The CDOT Bicycle Parking Program is responsible for installing hundreds of bike racks each year on City of Chicago right-of-way for the public’s use. The most common installation location is the sidewalk in front of a business.

The BPP receives requests from residents, business owners, and organizations (like the Chicago Transit Authority) to install bike parking at specific locations. These requests come primarily from the 311 call center and the BPP website . By the end of 2009, the BPP accepted over 900 requests for bike parking from all sources.

The BPP surveys potential new locations for bike rack installation based on incoming requests it received from aldermen and the public, including workers, and business owners. Field work in the Underserved Wards as part of this project deviated from the normal survey procedure because the number of existing requests was extremely low in each ward - read the article on self selection to learn how I worked around this problem.

I invited the Bike Parking Program manager, Christopher Gagnon, to describe how equity fits into the program.

“Providing bicycle parking to cyclists throughout Chicago has always been a core value of the Bicycle Parking Program. When I took over in 2007, the program had already installed over 10,000 bike racks, and I wanted to study how they had been distributed historically. The development of the web application, and its flexibility in organizing and visualizing data, revealed a lot of variability in bike rack distribution. For the fist time, we could identify and target underserved areas—often just by looking at a map. We still have a lot of work to do, but at least now our planning can better reflect that core value of equity.”^[i]

See also Money section in Equity.

The Bike Parking Program is funded by grants from the Federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) program. Congress has continued to fund the program since its inception in 1991 as part of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act transportation bill^[ii].

The Bike Parking Program is officially known as “Commuter Bike Parking and Encouragement” and both CDOT and Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning^[a] maintain documentation on funding and work.

I created an online database and website (“web application”) to make program management more efficient and accountable. I built a mapping tool into the web application that displayed the locations of all bike rack requests and installations, among other statuses. The original goal was to make planning field work more effective by concentrating on requests close to each other. The web application also made post-field work data entry faster.

This web application supports the Bike Parking Public Interface where Chicago residents, workers, and business owners make requests for bike parking, check the status of their request, and find the locations of existing bike racks.

Continue reading in Problem History.