CHICAGO — The city’s latest cycling strategy offers a vision for improving bike infrastructure over the next few years — but some advocates fear the plan lacks urgency.
The 27-page plan says coming infrastructure should focus on building neighborhood bike networks that allow Chicagoans to easily make small trips by bike, and those should be determined by talking to residents about what they need and want. It also calls for the vast majority of new bike lanes to be protected.
The report documents the progress the city has made and provides a malleable strategy that will guide how bike infrastructure is implemented, Chicago Department of Transportation officials said.
The agency’s last cycling strategy was released in 2012 under then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration. After hundreds of car crashes that have killed numerous cyclists in the past several years, the update alone is a win for some.
“Just having a cycling strategy at all that shows details about the vision and approach for making biking safer is a great resource for everyone,” said Jim Merrell, managing director of advocacy at Active Transportation Alliance. “So, we’re glad to see that the city has put pen to paper. Laying out that vision is great for transparency and accountability and will be a good resource for educating the new decision-makers coming on board.”
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But other advocates said they’re concerned the document doesn’t provide concrete plans for what comes next to make bicycling safer in Chicago — especially since the city’s leadership is about to change hands.
“If this document was published in the first year of the Lightfoot administration, it would be a more hopeful document,” said Christina Whitehouse, founder of Bike Lane Uprising. “But the reality is, this was published weeks before she’s leaving office, and there’s still no actual recipe for getting it done. There are some vague, esoteric, theoretical ideas here, but they’re things everyone kind of knew already.”
The Department of Transportation’s plan calls for creating 150 miles of bike infrastructure, with 85 percent of that lower-stress pathways that separate bicyclists and drivers. Once these projects are complete, 70 percent of residents will live within a half-mile of a low-stress pathway, according to the plan.
Protected bike lanes have been proven to improve road safety. A stretch of Milwaukee Avenue from Western Avenue to California Avenue saw a 56 percent reduction in crashes in 2021 after lanes for cyclists were installed in October 2020, according to data provided by CDOT.
A handful of the projects were started before the strategy was released and will be completed this year, but the entire 150 miles of the potential new bike lanes will likely take a few years to implement, officials said.
Some advocates said they’re concerned the strategy doesn’t thoroughly address how future bike infrastructure projects will fit into the rest of Chicago’s transportation system.
“Bikes alone aren’t going to get us all the benefits that walking, biking and transit working together can bring us in terms of having a healthier, more sustainable and equitable city,” Merrell said. “Sometimes, we don’t do a good job of laying out how all these things work together. It could be a missed opportunity to help support the whole package of things that we want to see.”
But the strategy is intended to be more open-ended, officials said. It lays out a process for engaging with community members about where there are gaps in the system and what unique circumstances prevent people from biking.
By collecting more feedback from residents and neighborhood groups, officials hope to ensure the infrastructure that’s created is targeted to the neighborhood’s concerns and more likely to be used, according to the strategy.
The strategy notes protected bike lanes on the West Side — which were along Independence, Douglas and Marshall boulevards— were demolished because the city installed them without asking neighbors if they needed them.
“Skipping steps in the community’s progression of network development did not result in sustained success,” according to the strategy. “Only after developing relationships and earning trust with a community can we create lasting change. Our Neighborhood Bike Network Process is designed with these lessons in mind.”
Michael Podgers, an organizer with transit advocacy organization Better Streets Chicago, said it’s understandable that bike lanes might not be “the first viable improvement” in neighborhoods that lack access to other adequate transportation services.
“It’s good to see CDOT recognize the nuances and complexities of this,” Podgers said.
On the other hand, alderpeople and residents have been known to stall or squash plans to create protected bike lanes — which can create dangerous inconsistencies on the streets for bicyclists.
It could be a long time before the bike lane network is actually continuous if there aren’t clearly defined metrics for how much community engagement is necessary before bike infrastructure becomes a standard part of improving streets, Podgers said.
“We need to see more consistency and urgency and more robust investment in this infrastructure,” Podgers said. “We need to know that, eventually, bike lanes aren’t going to be up for public debate every time they’re built, because we don’t do that for cars. We keep building the same streets over and over again, but they’re not safe, and, frankly, they’ve been killing us for a long time. We need to move away from that, and quickly.”
Merrell said he appreciates efforts to include neighbors in decision-making, and it could help officials make sure infrastructure is built equitably throughout the city.
However, “a much more aggressive response is needed” to “reprioritize how we invest in transportation so that [the city is] targeting resources where they’re needed most and where people stand to benefit most,” Merrell said.
Without a clearly defined timeline for many of the envisioned projects, transportation advocates said they fear more Chicagoans will be hurt and killed while they wait for the city to complete the next 150 miles of the bike network.
“Every year that the bike networks aren’t filled out properly is another year that people will die in Chicago’s streets and that’s not acceptable,” Podgers said. “There are real lives at stake, and it’s the lack of urgency that I think is still really concerning for a lot of people.”
Drivers killed 29 cyclists and pedestrians in crashes in Chicago in 2022, according to Streetsblog Chicago. They included people from professional cyclists to toddlers riding with their parents.
“We have an unprecedented number of people getting killed in Chicago while they’re biking and walking,” Whitehouse said. “We’re past the point of low-hanging fruit bike lanes. We need radical change.”
Read the full strategy:
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