A Map of All New the Bikeways Built in Chicago This Year

During Mayor Rahm Emanuel's first term in office, the Chicago Department of Transportation installed about 100 miles of buffered and protected bike lanes. In spring 2016 the mayor announced a more modest goal of installing 50 miles of bikeways by 2019.

Still, 2017 has been a fairly productive year for bikeway construction, with CDOT installing a total of 21.6 miles. These included:

• 1.3 miles of protected lanes (green lines on the Streetsblog-created map below)
• 1.4 miles of “neighborhood greenways” (brown)
• 10.1 miles of buffered bike lanes (red)
• 4.4 miles of non-buffered bike lanes (purple)
• 1.5 miles of mixed dashed and non-buffered bike lanes (orange)
• 2.9 miles of shared-lane markings, aka “sharrows” (blue)

As you can see from the chart at the bottom of this post, many more miles of existing bikeways were restriped this year, often as part of street resurfacing projects.

The new bikeways were distributed fairly evenly across the city from north-to-south. However, the West Side got little in the way of new facilities, other than a cluster of buffered and protected lanes near the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Illinois Medical District.

Note that the protected bike lanes that were installed this year – the green lines on Polk by the IMD and Loomis near the Chicago River – are actually curbside buffered lanes with flexible plastic posts. The posts represent an upgrade from standard buffered lanes, but don't offer physical protection from cars.

Also note that the Loomis project did not include installing non-slip plates on the metal bridge deck, which would have required recalibrating the counterweights of the bascule bridge. Despite many request for this safety upgrade from cyclists, it’s likely the bridge won’t get plates until the bridge undergoes a major overhaul.

Check out previous Streetsblog Chicago coverage of some of these projects:

• Baltimore, Root, Harrison, and Jackson
• Cottage Grove and 115th near Big Marsh
• Milwaukee dashed bike lanes in Wicker Park/Bucktown
• Milwaukee in the 45th Ward
• Halsted in Lakeview
• Ardmore and Argyle in the 48th Ward
• The Glenwood Greenway

Have you ridden any of these new bikeways? Let us know what you think in the comments.