I-GO Car Sharing

Big congrats to the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (better known by its acronym CMAP), which studies and implements land-use and transportation planning in the seven-county Chicago area. The agency is one of the recipients of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Sustainable Communities Regional Planning Grant Program. The program supports State, local, and tribal governments, as well as metropolitan planning organizations, in the development and execution of regional plans that integrate affordable housing with neighboring retail and business development.

CMAP will receive $4,250,000 toward implementation of a sweeping regional plan it’s christened “Go to 2040.” And transportation plays a big role in it, as Blair Kamin reported yesterday in the Chicago Tribune, noting that the plan “calls for raising the state gas tax, increasing the region’s slice of the state road funding pie and emphasizing the renovation of existing roads rather than the construction of new ones. The plan also foresees reduced commuting costs, more parks and open space, and more locally grown food to combat inner-city ‘food deserts’ linked to health problems, especially in African-American communities.”

You can read more about Go to 2040 in detail on its website. Or watch this video:

I-GO was present at the announcement event yesterday in Millennium Park. Car sharing will undoubtedly contribute to less congestion on our roads, an important goal stated in the plan. We provided demos of our plug-in Prius that’s parked in the Millennium Park north garage. One of two converted hybrids currently in our fleet, the car gets up to 100 miles to the gallon and is located next to a dedicated charging station that our members use to recharge the vehicle’s powerful battery between trips. I-GO is currently planning to add more electric vehicles to our fleet, which will help us reduce our carbon footprint even more.

We’d also like to mention the hard work our colleagues at the Center for Neighborhood Technology put in on a fantastic online tool they developed, which closely correlates with all this: the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index. The H + T Index is an innovative mapping tool that measures the true affordability of housing by estimating not just the cost of the housing itself, but also the costs of transportation. Using this index you can compare neighborhoods you may be considering based on both housing and transportation costs.