By Todd Savage
Dedicated bicycle lanes are a key element of the city’s comprehensive plan to promote bicycling. Over the last decade, with Mayor Daley’s support, the city has been building an infrastructure, including a citywide bicycling advisory council, a full-time bicycle planner, and 5,000 new bike racks, to encourage Chicagoans to help cut pollution and traffic congestion by riding bikes to work or to do errands. The blueprint calls for a 300-mile network of bicycle ways on city streets, including five-foot-wide lanes set apart from car traffic, and signs identifying bike-friendly routes. Sections of Elston, Wells, Dearborn, Roosevelt, and Milwaukee have already been striped with the lanes, and next year the city plans to begin using a $1.5 million federal grant to establish up to 60 more miles of them throughout the city. Halsted has been proposed as a major bike route, but the removal of the lanes on its northern end worries bicycling advocates.
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The city had given the go-ahead to the lanes after Ben Gomberg, the city’s bicycle coordinator, did some research that showed they might still fit. He found that cities such as Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, had made room for the lanes on streets as narrow as 44 feet, the width of the newly reconfigured Halsted. But no one from the city called 44th Ward alderman Bernie Hansen or neighborhood groups to tell them the good news.
It’s never a good idea to surprise an alderman in his own ward. Hansen found out about the lanes after they were painted. When he started getting angry phone calls, he insisted that the city remove them. A couple days before the November dedication of the streetscape project, attended by Mayor Daley, city crews returned with rollers and buckets of black paint.
But it’s not just the bicyclists’ riding habits that frustrate opponents of the Boys Town bike lanes–they’re also annoyed by their attitudes. “I’m getting tired of being preached to like it’s some moral good to ride a bicycle,” says Hoffmann. “You cannot pretend this is a forest preserve with beautiful bike paths. This is the city that works.”
Hansen was obviously nettled that the city had bypassed him when they installed the lanes and by the bike activists’ campaign to reinstate them. He said he didn’t like the “cavalier” attitude of Gomberg and accused him of stirring up trouble. “Mr. Whatever His Name, Mr. Bicycle Man decides he’s going to organize some of the bicycle riders and start aggravating me,” Hansen said. “He did, and I don’t have enough time to get aggravated with his nonsense.”
Department of Transportation commissioner Thomas Walker says that for now the city’s thrown in the towel on pressing for lanes on that stretch of Halsted and it’s considering moving them over to Clark Street, which slightly leads Halsted in city counts of bicycle usage. Walker wasn’t eager to dissect the particulars of what went wrong in Boys Town, but communication was clearly a problem. “I think we didn’t go around and touch all of the bases,” he said.
