Chicago transportation planner Steven Vance is under no illusions that his new Chicago Bike Laws app is going to light up the top ten list on the iTunes Store when it’s eventually approved. The free app, available for Android as of this week, details the sections of the Illinois and city code that are particularly applicable to riding your bike down Chicago’s streets. "It’s useful for me," Vance said today with a laugh, "and my friends who are lawyers that frequently represent bicyclists."
The app’s genesis goes back some years. Working as a bike parking planner at Chicago’s Department of Transportation between 2007 and 2010, Vance and a colleague built a website that pulled together bike laws into searchable form. After he left, the site was scrapped and replaced with ChicagoCompleteStreets.org, which is sort of a portal onto American Legal Publishing’s painful interface. He doesn’t blame the city for not keeping his site going. He built it poorly and didn’t leave them a way to update it. But since he already had done the work, he poured it into an app. It tells you such useful things like that Chicagoans can ride on city sidewalks until they’re 12-years-old, unless they’re in a business district, in which case the sidewalks are off-limits.
Vance, now deputy editor at Streetsblog Chicago, did do some tweaking. He supplemented the code by adding keywords normal people use to describe biking, like "right hook" for a car crossing a bicyclist’s path from the left and "dooring" for, well, getting hit by a door. Those don’t appear in the law, but they’ve been added to the law’s metadata so that the relevant bits of code pop up when you search for them.
One might even, jokes Vance, whip out the Chicago Bike Laws app right after being doored. Ignorance of bike laws is becoming more of an issue as bike share, including Chicago’s own blossoming Divvy program, is expanding the pool of "cyclists" to include those of us who aren’t steeped in wearing helmets or using proper arm signals. But the principle involved is the sort of thing that open government advocates are talking about when they point to the Code of Hammurabi. Way back in 1700 B.C., the Babylonian king by that name had his kingdom’s laws inscribed on giant stone slabs called steles and left around so that people might easily know the laws they were expected to follow.
The approach had its limitations, though. Few Babylonians could read and steles are difficult to carry around by bike. Even if Steven Vance’s app isn’t used by anyone other than himself and a few friends, it’s a step in the different of making the laws that govern you as accessible as the cell phone in your pocket.
Update: Vance notes that the Apple iOS version of the Chicago Bike Laws app is now available in the iTunes Store.