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| Bikes parked at the Copenhagen train station. |
I first rode a bicycle in downtown Chicago the summer of 2000. We were about to move from East Lakeview to Northbrook, and I figured this was my chance to bike to work. I took the lakefront bike path to Grand Avenue, then cut over to the paper, then on Wabash.
Or tried to.
Nearly a quarter century later, I still remember that terrifying gantlet of zooming cars and idling trucks. I felt lucky to get to 401 N. Wabash alive.
That might have also been my last bike ride downtown. But in the summer of 2013, Chicago introduced the Divvy bikeshare system. Pay a few bucks, undock the heaviest bicycle ever made and ride around the city to your heart’s content. A dock was installed right outside the paper: duty called.
Starting small, I’d Divvy to lunch spots a bit farther than comfortable walking distance. Before I knew it, I was a pro, riding in February, my hands snug in their pricy lobster gloves. Zipping up the center of LaSalle Street at noon felt like being 12 years old again and standing on the pedals of my green Schwinn Typhoon. Riding a bike meant freedom, happiness.
The Divvy led to adventures. Riding a Divvy, I was mocked by both Rahm Emanuel (rolling down the window of his SUV to give me grief in traffic) and Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, the president of Mongolia. (I went to his opening of the new consulate here in 2013 because there was a Divvy dock out front. As the only journalist present, I was bustled over and told to ask a question. I inquired about their border with China. “That’s a stupid question,” the Golden Swallow of Democracy replied, to general hilarity.)
I haven’t Divvied since COVID struck — I’m not downtown enough to justify the annual fee. But my experience left me attuned to the struggles of those who navigate Chicago by bike, or try to.
My social-media-formerly-known-as-Twitter feed is filled with reports of riders killed by careless motorists and the frustrating struggle to make Chicago more bike-friendly, which can seem one of those impossible tasks like building affordable housing or reforming the police.
It was certainly on my mind during my recent trip to Copenhagen and Amsterdam, which can be considered the bike heaven and bike hell of Europe.
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I agree Neil Chicago could do a better job of figuring out how to make bicycling a larger part of people's transportation options.
ReplyDeleteThey actually have come a long way in the last 30 years and divvy bike is a part of that.
I think single rides on divvy are pretty affordable. No need for the yearly sign up fee. And they're not just available downtown. They're pretty much everywhere.
One reason why it will never be the dominant feature on our roadways is because Chicago is so large compared to the European cities you visited and riding your bike. 10-12. Mi each way every day is a tough ask.
I've been a passionate bike rider since childhood, but commuting in the city is not for me, especially since the advent of the smart phone wielding auto driver. The last thing you want on your tombstone is "I had the right of way". I stick to paths.
ReplyDeleteI must admit it pains me to see my favorite writer on a bike without a helmet. That's a mighty precious collection of neurons to leave unprotected amidst two ton chunks of metal rushing about on concrete.
You're right — I meant to mention that only children wear helmets there. Otherwise I'm fairly meticulous about helmet usage.
DeleteI never owned a car & rode a bike around Chicago 7 nearby suburbs for 60 years, until I had to quit due to my hips giving out at 70.
ReplyDeleteI always knew the best routes, almost always side streets & alleys that went for miles without any traffic. Always far safer than any main street. I also knew the rare streets where there was absolutely no walkers on the sidewalk & it was safer to ride there, even though it is against the law for an adult. On the day of the first Chicago Marathon I rode from Rogers Park to Midway, which at that time was a ghost town & rode the entire four miles of sidewalk around the airport, & never saw a single walker. I almost went into the empty terminal to ride through it, but didn't, as there wasn't a single airline running flights out of Midway at that time.
So I genuinely hate the city's asinine new separated bike lanes, as they are now making my trips on the buses take way longer.
What the city has done to Clark St. in Edgewater is an outright crime, taking a functioning street with two traffic lanes in each direction, now down to one lane in each direction, causing traffic backups that go for at least a quarter mile each way. I've always known that Chicago has the absolute worst traffic engineering department in the world, since a long interview with one in the Trib over 20 years ago, in which that idiot stated: "We don't believe in left turns, we want traffic to go straight", a quoted idea that makes no sense. So Chicago has fewer left turn signals than anywhere e;se & also refuses to "Fully actuate" them, which means an induction loop buried in the left turn lane determines whether the left turn signal is activated or not. So even if there's no one turning left at the few intersections in Chicago with left turn signals, it's turns on anyways. Every intersection in the suburbs are fully actuated, because the state department of transportation installs them! There is also no consistency in the countdown walk signals in Chicago. In some, when they hit zero, the cross traffic gets a green light & some have a delay of a few seconds when they hit zero. Why are they different?
I commuted to work for 25 years, albeit never more than three miles. Like Clark St I like side streets cause that worked for me to the three Cta terminals on the west side. Even doing that I managed to get doored 3 times. It’s very easy to plan a route with your cell phone maps to find a logical thruway.
DeleteHere in Oak Park, our planners took a functional 4 lane East/West street (Madison) and gave it a “road diet” from 4 lanes to 2 and added a bike lane that no one uses. Of course, that resulted in long backups at intersections. That result could not have been more predictable.
Francis
So you've hit a hot button for me with this story. Bikes on the road with motorized vehicles. It is a death trap for everyone, here in Chicago, the way it stands now. The problems are, as I see it: too many bikes not following the rules of the road; too many lane share options; too many motorized bikes using bike lanes; too many motorized vehicle operators who don't know, or don't seem to know, that bikes should follow the rules of the road, and do have, for lack of a better word, the right to be, let's say, in the lefthand turn lane to make a left-hand turn; too many crosswalks in goofy places and often, within feet of each other. According to studies, painted lanes seem to be the safest option, but let's pick ONE option, and tell people how it will work. Bike riders need an operator's license, for which they'd have to take a rules of the road test to obtain. At least then we'd know who is a scofflaw v who is just an asshat. Motorized bikes are not bikes and should not be on the bike lanes. Those guys are asshats.
ReplyDeleteThe view from Evanston (which I'm guessing is not unique) : Grown-arse adults riding bikes on sidewalks, going the wrong way in one-way bike lanes, skateboards and scooters, some motorized, some not, and a pervasive sense of entitlement and/or invincibility not limited to HS/NU students
DeleteSorry to hear that Evanstonians have become such entitled glassbowls. I inherited my cousin's Schwinn at seven, and a few years later got a better Schwinn from another cousin (an "English racer"), and rode all over the neighborhoods and the nearby suburbs and down to my grandmother's neighborhood (Touhy and Sheridan). In my teens, during the days of JFK's healthy hiking crazes, my buddies and I attempted to ride way up through the North Shore, and on to Wisconsin, not an easy task on Sheridan Road, and on the tree-speed bikes of 1963. Not surprisingly, we didn't make it.
DeleteThe unwritten rule in high school was: NOBODY rides a bike. It was the early Sixties. it marked you as an ultra-dork. You either walked, rode buses, or drove a car when you turned sixteen. Nobody rode bikes in college, either. Not even the hippies or the radicals. My campus was not a bicycle campus. The racks were always empty. I rode an old beater bike to early-morning classes, and people looked at me like I was from Uranus. Finally, somebody stole it.
When the "bike boom" hit in the 70s, I rode along the lakefront, on bike paths in Boulder, all year round in Florida, and finally in Evanston and Rogers Park again. By the mid-80s, I was riding a French racing bike from Devon and Western to the Wrigley Field bleachers, on empty side streets with little traffic. I'd stroll through the gate after hitching my faithful metal pony to a no-parking sign. That ended when a tourist bus drove over the curb and crushed it.
After I moved to Cleveland in the early 90s, I rode less and less on city streets. There were, and still are, dozens of miles of bike trails in county parks that encircle the whole city., and outlying areas have a lot of lovely and leafy bike trails. There are gorgeous paths in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The Ohio and Erie Towpath Trail will take you all the way to New Philadelphia, more than a hundred miles south of here. The city is another story. There are bike lanes that nobody ever uses, and streets that have been narrowed and "sharrowed" for bike riders. But Cleveland is not really such a bike-friendly city. Bike riders don't get enough respect. They get a lot of upraised middle fingers.
There is a hard-core nucleus of urban bikers here, who tough it out all year long. They even ride in the winter, which my Minneapolis brother-in-law also did, until his knees and hips gave him too much trouble. Meanwhile, our four bikes mostly gather dust in the garage. My days of being out spokin' are pretty much over, at 76. Still outspoken, though. That ain't gonna change any time soon.
This is what I've encountered on the corner of Lincoln and Berenice: I'm on the curb waiting to enter the pedestrian crosswalk. Traffic slows both ways to let me cross. I wave my thanks to the drivers and head to my apartment building. Suddenly a biker swerves to avoid me and shouts, "Watch where you goin', asshole."
ReplyDeleteThe previous comment was mine. I hit publish too soon.
ReplyDeleteSome months ago, I witnessed a somewhat similar situation, not involving bicycles, but rather another idiotic traffic "improvement," the signs stating that a car must stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk at certain intersections. I was driving in the left hand lane on LaGrange Road and 42nd Street or so and stopped for a couple with 2 kids who were running, not walking, across LaGrange. I stopped and just as the couple and kids were crossing in front of me, a car in the right hand lane went whizzing by. If the couple had been running just a tad faster, they'd been creamed. A very likely result wherever such signs are posted.
Deletejohn
John, I thought cars were required to stop if one was waiting to enter a crosswalk in Illinois. I was wrong. The law states that cars must stop if one is IN the crosswalk, but not if one is waiting to enter it. But there doesn't need to be a sign telling drivers to stop if a pedestrian is in the crosswalk.
Delete"Where there is no stop light or sign, crosswalks will usually be in the middle of the block 'elsewhere'. There, the law gets specific. Cars must yield to pedestrians IN that kind of crosswalk. They must yield, only to pedestrians on 'the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling.' They must also yield to pedestrians 'approaching so closely from the opposite half of the roadway as to be in danger.'
Then, the pedestrian has the right of way, and cars must stop—not just slow down. When a car stops to yield that right of way, it’s illegal for other cars to pass.
In those middle-of-the block marked crosswalks, cars must stop for pedestrians. That is, if they are in the crosswalk, on or close to the car’s half of the street. They don't have to stop for pedestrians approaching or waiting at the curb."
I agree with you that, depending on the nature of the road, it seems like it can be pretty dangerous, regardless.
https://www.illinoislegalaid.org/legal-information/who-has-right-way-crosswalk
I kinda figured that much of the EGD readership would not be a particularly supportive group when it comes to impinging on the automobile-friendly city infrastructure to accommodate the wishes of the very vocal bicycling advocacy folks, who seem to be gaining an outsized influence on street design of late.
ReplyDeleteDuring my decades as a city resident, I've pretty much been a pedestrian / transit user / driver / bicyclist, in that order. Featuring ten years of not owning a car. So I have experience with the different sides of the bicycling issue.
There's much to agree with among today's comments.
FME's last paragraph: Bingo! Based on the figures at Wikipedia, Copenhagen covers about 15% of the area of Chicago.
Dennis is right about having the right of way not being much consolation if you're hit by a car.
I agree with Clark St. with regard to preferring side streets when riding my bike. I'd rather ride on a quiet side street than a busy street with a bike lane. He's right about some of the pathetic traffic engineering, as well. Here's a nice map that one of the primary bicycle advocates in the city, John Greenfield, devised for "mellow biking" around town: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=14T5Li8YGghuNvxo8GbuAsEGLyMm4G1ud&ll=41.83599133959713%2C-87.72369065&z=10
While I appreciate some of the efforts to make the city more bike-friendly, I kinda think it's going too far. Many, many Americans are not gonna start biking no matter how much safer the roads are made, so the car vs. bike thing is going to be a problem for a long time. The powers-that-be have decided to redesign Belmont Ave. to facilitate biking. It's not that wide a street, and in many areas, there are good alternatives not that far away to the north and south. I shudder to see some of the folks riding along, squeezed between traffic and parked cars, not to mention the folks choosing to use it on scooters. I hope it works out well, but I have my doubts about it being a best-use situation. To me, the main goal should be to offer safer ways to cross the river and highways, not to make the entire length of busy streets bike routes.
I just looked a Greenfield's map & I've known & used many of them over the years. Here's a route to go to Old Orchard in Skokie from Rogers Park, almost all side streets or empty sidewalks: Go west on Howard & then take the sidewalk along the Sanitary District plant, go north on Hamlin, [against the one way traffic, but almost no traffic], go west a block to East Prairie & cross the Skokie Swift tracks & then go west on Mulford to Keeler. Take Keeler all the way north to Emerson & go west on Emerson to Terminal Park & go through the park to Kenton Ave. North on Kenton & cross Gross Point & go through the Jewel parking lot & go to the traffic light at Foster & Skokie & cross over Skokie & take Foster to Lavergne & north on Lavergne to Church & cross at that traffic light into Old Orchard. If you want to go on to the Skokie Court House, continue north to Old Orchard Rd & use that to cross the Edens & then a couple of blocks west to the Skokie court house.
ReplyDeleteI got a dozen people to do that many years ago!
I did all that, circa 1960, as I grew up in that area between 1954 and 1965. Rode to Old Orchard many times as a kid, along basically the same route. But if you returned to Hamlin after crossing the Skokie Swift tracks, rode north and crossed Oakton, and then took an E-W side street like Cleveland (8200 N) to Keeler, you had the additional privilege of passing the Skokie Shops.
DeleteRail junkies (like me) already know that the Skokie Shops are CTA's heavy maintenance facility for the entire fleet of railcars on the "L" rapid transit system. All major repairs and overhauls have been done at the Skokie facility since 1926.
I'm so old that I remember when they stored the original wooden "L" cars on sidings there, prior to burning them...and I choked on the smoke when they were finally put to the torch. Also saw their replacements, the CTA 6000s, being unloaded from flatcars there in the late Fifties. And I could hear the lonesome whistle of the North Shore interurban trains at the East Prairie crossing. What a lucky kid I was.
The Village of Skokie is planning to create bike lanes on Crawford from Golf to Howard. This will make Crawford one lane. It is 2 lanes in Evanston and Lincolnwood. There have been several protests an some not to public meetings on this topic. It seems like it is a done deal even though I have heard from no one that this is a sound idea. The one public meeting had a strong turnout and maybe 1% thought this was something that would benefit residents. It will cause traffic and force cars onto side streets. Keeler is a viable alternative as mentioned in a comment above. Not according to the village. We are older towns. We are not set up to be bike friendly on major thoroughfares. Bike paths and less traveled streets are friendly for riders. Lisa April
DeleteThanks for this Neil. I encourage you to try to Divvy post covid. It's worth it. Especially rambling through the south shore bike beach path. It always amazes me the pushback you get in creating a square foot of public space not meant for a car. I'm not a car.
ReplyDeleteIt figures that you’re a rail fan Grizz. I transferred many an effed up car to Skokie from the blue and green lines including the yellow work equipment and flat cars. They still have a pair of 4000’s there that people rent for tours. Not many people are qualified to operate them as they have an extra handle for the air brake system. There’s a couple of old, retired trainmen and shop guys that volunteer for the tours.
ReplyDeleteThe old Linden yard had what I think was a retired wooden car refashioned into a switching shanty that included a wood burning stove and of course benches with the cushions from buses and train seats. These made for many a nap after heating up soup and such on the stove. Those old switchman (mostly Vietnam vets) would teach a new guy well if they showed an interest.
The old Howard yard had great guys too. Everyone knew their role and if you did something stupid they let you know it, no need for management to get involved.
Regarding the proposed bike path on Crawford, I hope they toss that idea in the round file. There’s a bike path just west of Devon and Crawford (in the k’s) that was working its way north. It began at bryn mawr last I heard. It goes along a retired freight route. The trains lulled me to sleep as a kid. Anyone know how that’s going?
Francis
They would dig rectangular holes in back of the Skokie Shops and place old "L" cars in them. The cars made great tool sheds, storage units, and the like. I imagine that over the years, a lot of guys found their way out there and copped some Z's at one time or another. The facility was remodeled a while back, and I assume that all those old cars are long gone.
DeleteWhy does it figure that I'm a rail fan? Because I've been one since I saw my first Green Hornet through the dining room window, at the age of three? Living within sight and sound of rails for half my life (the North Shore, the Red Line, and the Purple line) also helped.The CTA just ran the 4000s in the Loop this summer. I heard they were mobbed.
I didn’t mean offense. It just figures into your Chicago guyedness. I’m Neal’s age so never saw a green hornet as they began as streetcars. When those were scrapped some were refurbished into “L” cars. I believe they were 6500’s, so considered 6000’s, but a little different. I forget what those differences were and don’t want to embarrass myself by guessing but the authority on the subject would be Bruce Moffat. That dude knows it all.
ReplyDeleteFrancis
I've been gone for 31 years now. I miss the "L"...my last ride on it was about six weeks ago. I live two blocks from Cleveland RTA's Red Line. Cleveland has a handful of train lines, but it's not a big rail rapid transit town like Chicago is. Very few places are.
DeleteMany components of the scrapped 1946-47 Green Hornet streetcars...the seats, motors, windows, brakes, wheel assemblies, lighting, and more...were recycled into the brand-new body shells of the "Spam Cans"--the CTA's 6000 series "L" cars--in the Fifties. Bruce Moffat would know. He's the expert...one "L" of an expert. I have one of his great books,--"The L: The Development of Chicago's Rapid Transit System, 1888-1932"--in my collection.