Original 1930 illustrated cover of The Little Engine That Could: a small blue steam engine pulls a curved train uphill through snowy mountains, hauling brightly colored red and yellow cars filled with toys and animals—including a giraffe, elephant, and teddy bear—under the bold title text “THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD” at the top.

⏰ 12 HOURS TO GO 👀

When the new year begins, so does #PublicDomainDay2026.

At 12:00 a.m. ET, iconic books, films, and music move into the public domain—and we’ll be sharing highlights #here all night long.

🔔 Set your reminder ➡️ blog.archive.org/public-domai...

if anyone wants to be a cta rail operator, cta just posted the flagger role that's the prerequisite:

The Metra, CTA, Pace regional day pass is finally available!

metra.com/rdp

Crashes since January 1 Between Sunday, 1/01/2025, and Saturday, 6/14/2025, there were 48,302 reported traffic crashes in Chicago. Many people were reported killed or injured: 35 people were killed 673 people had incapacitating injuries 5,479 people had non-incapacitating injuries Costs of these crashes $371,404,460 due to the deaths $181,415,899 due to the incapacitating injuries $467,753,188 due to the non-incapacitating injuries $1,020,573,547 total Costs include medical care, work loss, and quality of life loss, using WISQARS study data

$1 billion lost and spent due to medical care, work loss, and quality of life loss because of traffic crashes in Chicago this year so far

I can’t stop watching this. How does a professional driver allow this to happen?

Degraded air quality in Chicago suburbs, northern Illinois due to Canadian wildfires. What to know Residents in northern Illinois will experience degraded air quality today as rain brings Canadian wildfire smoke south. Find out the AQI in your area.

Degraded air quality in Chicago suburbs, northern Illinois due to Canadian wildfires. What to know

I’d love to try this out this summer. Any recommended route?

Businesses: “I don’t want the community my business is in to have safer streets, more public space, and better accessible transit options to get here”

People in the community the business is in: “Why doesn’t anyone care about the businesses????”

I think the kids who got to school on these bikes today deserve an explanation from the adults who hung up signs saying it’s ok to park their cars in the bike lanes in front of their school.

If you're available at 3:30pm on Thursday, and are interested in a transparent, nationwide search for transit leadership, this would be a good time to sign up for public comment.

Just going to put it out there that appointing a CTA President with no transit experience, after the public has lost confidence in both the leadership at CTA in the past and the current Mayor, may not be the best move.

Johnson faces pushback over CTA pick as advocates push for broader search Mayor Brandon Johnson is looking to appoint the city's chief operating officer John Robertson to lead the CTA, but is being urged to conduct a national search after Springfield acts on legislation to ...

Crain's is reporting that MBJ has already made his pick for CTA President (City COO John Roberson), but advocates are still pushing to broaden the search www.chicagobusiness.com/politics/tra...

#BikeChi

Get ready.

Need BikeChi peeps to attend this.

Empty space where a bus shelter once stood. Knocked-down traffic light pole on the ground with car debris next to it.

Vehicles continuing to ruin public infrastructure, this time taking a traffic light pole and an entire bus shelter.

We need your help right away! Senate Bill 2111 is currently under consideration. It would allow bicyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs — a proven method to reduce crashes at intersections. Please ask your state senator to support SB2111! activetrans.quorum.us/campaign/118...

Chicagohenge Panorama. Friday in Chicago.

People tell me to be safe while biking, and while I appreciate it, what I'd really appreciate is people going a step further and pondering *why* they think biking is unsafe. Because then they'd have to grapple with the fact that we've designed our society to make biking "dangerous" for many people.

Question for any data experts out there. Let’s say’s I have data files, each with its own data use policy. If I combine and transform that data into intermediate files and ultimately a final dataset, how can I track data use policies, on a data point level, throughout the entire data lineage map?

Hey...remember that time a City of Chicago employee threatened and followed someone home for documenting them illegally blocking a bike lane? Ran across this today. The office of the Inspector General "OIG" recommended the person be fired. The city decided to keep them on staff.

January '25 numbers are in!

2483 infractions captures
352 tickets issued (2131 first time offenders)
42 paid for $6,180 collected
$39,630 in outstanding revenue
779 service hours from 8 veh across 20 days (3.2 captures/hr, .45 fines/hr)
Violations are 26% bike lane, 74% bus lane
Top hours: 1pm, 4pm

As I show in Holding It Together, "Billionaires like Musk use the myth of meritocracy to paint themselves as worthy of their wealth and the power that wealth provides." And the media plays a role in reinforcing these delusions of genius by holding him up men like Musk as meritocracy's poster child.

Does anyone know if longitudinal ward-specific traffic crash reports for Chicago exist anywhere? I want to see where in my ward crashes are happening and how this has changed over the years.

I'm disappointed to see Ruth Cruz voted no on this since she was just telling me about the work she was doing to make her ward safer for pedestrians and cyclists.

Freezing Friday. Today on the Chicago River.

tidymodels Internship for 2025 - Tidyverse The tidymodels team is sponsoring a summer internship in 2025.

This summer, join the tidymodels team as an intern and help expand the possibilities of feature selection!

Learn more and apply: www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/01...

#RStats #tidymodels

Download Party by Better Streets Chicago. Saturday, January 25th from 2-4pm at Beermiscuous, 2821 N Lincoln Ave. Hybrid option available. RSVP: bit.ly/DwnldParty Bring a laptop, grab a beer, and join us for this workshop as we take action to archive important federal studies and resources on transit, safe streets, and climate action before they disappear.

Join us this Saturday at @beermiscuous.bsky.social for our first ever download party!

We're working on an archive of federal transit and climate studies before they disappear again – and we need your help. Bring your laptop, grab a beer, and take action.

RSVP: https://bit.ly/DwnldParty

So the new Board of Ed President, appointed by Mayor Johnson, put in a request for $150,000 a year to pay for a car and driver, using CPS funds, in a time where CPS is having challenges in settling a union agreement and paying pension debt.

Do I have that right?

Know Your Rights | 100 Mile Border Zone | ACLU The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects people from random and arbitrary stops and searches. Although the federal government claims the power to conduct certain kinds of warrantless sto...

Chicago lies within the 100-mile "border zone" in which CBP carries powers that it doesn't in other parts of the country. Beyond these imminent raids, CBP often targets public transit to question people about immigration status. This ACLU guide discusses your rights in that situation and others:

Defend immigrants with a donation to NIJC Your donation to the National Immigrant Justice Center provides life-changing legal services to keep families together and protect human rights.

If you're not already involved in organizing around this locally, it might be so chaotic in the coming weeks that trying to plug in now with no training or familiarity may not be helpful. If you don't see a clear call to action but you want to help, NIJC has a legal defense fund you can donate to:

This guide from NILC is a good start for understanding whether you have to open your door for an ICE or CBP agent who has a warrant in hand - usually the answer is no, but immigration warrants are often wielded by people who aren't interested in informing you about the limitations of their power.