16 Apr 2007 0838H

The ethnography of traffic in Chicago Chinatown

I’ll probably do a screencast, a la Mike Madaio, about this soon, since it’s an obvious fit, but I just want to throw this out there first for potential feedback.

The traffic pattern for this street is quite predictable given the design of the mall across the street, and yet it’s astounding to me, as I look down towards the Walgreen’s, and at the other end of the mall, towards Mulan, how poorly designed the street turned out. Even here there is a kind of information architecture at work: users have intents they want to carry out within certain contexts and are given a certain amount of content by the shape and conditions of the environment. User experience design techniques such as ethnography could be useful for analyzing and formulating a possible solution to the problem for this and potentially, any Chinatown, really where the pattern of commercial and residential interaction is similar.

Owing to the design of the mall, the backdoors of the shops and restaurants in Chinatown Square face out onto South China Place. In the morning the commuter workers of these shops and restaurants come and park their cars along the residential side wherever they can find an empty spot. Soon these fill up and the opposite, coin-metered side, the commercial side, where the shops and restaurants have their backdoors, also fill up with the stragglers, suburbanites, and late workers who let out at 2AM last night as they do every night.

Now that the north and south sides of the street are full, this means commercial traffic in the form of trucks, delivery vans, cargo vans, and SUVs, of which there are many during the day, have to stop on the south side of the street, double parked with blinkers flashing, as they unload their goods to the backs of the shops and restaurants. Obviously they are on the commercial side of the street, and this offloading could take fifteen minutes to half an hour if it’s a big load. Since this is a two-lane, east-west oriented street, that curves north at the end, this stoppage creates a bottleneck as non-commercial traffic tries to flow around the stopped vehicles. This is the first type of traffic stopper.

The second type of traffic stopper is the visitor who also double-parks, or rather, double-stands, on South China Place. They are still in their vehicles, the blinkers are on, but they are sitting in them waiting as their family members run into the mall to purchase groceries or food or pick up relatives who had been eating or shopping at the mall. They also stop on the north residential side if they are picking up or dropping off relatives, or if they happen to be moving in that direction, and don’t want to bother with turning around. They tend to stop occasionally in front of the shared driveways of residential inlets along South China Place, and have been known to park inside if not for the steel gates that section off these areas from visitors looking for a free parking space.

Since this area is a destination for many visitors during evenings and weekends, they scrupulously avoid parking at the two nearby, inexpensive, subsidized pay lots just north and south of Archer and Wentworth. Instead, they tend to park on the unfinished parts of Wentworth between 18th and Archer that have lain mysteriously fallow the last ten years, which are prone to occasional break-ins by predominantly non-Chinese thieves of African American and Latino descent. In order to not pay a few dollars, visitors fill these spots quickly and sloppily. During the week, many commuters taking the adjacent Red Line also park here and the majority of them are not Chinese, just in a hurry.

The rest of the visitors who do not snag one of these spots then tend to circulate around and around South China Place and Tan Court looking for a spot to open up. This slowly meandering creek of cars also presents a traffic issue as when they find a spot, or when people exit their parking spot, traffic must stop to allow the visitor to park, since the other way is likely to be blocked by traffic along the commercial side of the street. This is the third type of stopper.

If it were possible, the flow of the street could have been much improved by removing the first two types of stoppers and redesigning the north end of the mall. The first lane, which would have been two lanes, or could have been designed as bays, would have led directly to the back of the restaurants and shops and would have been one-way, commercial traffic, drop-off or pick-up only, limited time. This solution removes the commercial traffic from the main flow and probably would alleviate most of the daytime and weekend problems.

The second lane would have been located adjacent to it and designated standing only to accommodate people waiting. This lane could be done away with, but there is a tradeoff there, since this would flow them into traffic and traffic enforcement by the local constabulary is infrequent at best. Thus, they have to be removed from the flow, but it would not remove the stoppers who are picking up or dropping off relatives on the residential north side of the street or those who decided close enough is good enough and can’t be bothered to make an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street, as also often happens. Those drivers should be forced to move on or get out of the flow. Alternately, rally points using traffic turnabouts, located at the four compass points of the mall where ceremonial gates are located could be established to facilitate passenger pickup and drop off points. Rally points and traffic turnabouts make it easy for people to remember where to meet someone.

This would have allowed the remaining traffic to flow unencumbered. Next, we’ll try and tackle the problem of garbage in Chinatown — plastic and paper, not human, which is an intractable problem.

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