By Craig Stern
If you look at Mayor Brandon Johnson’s old campaign website, you’ll see that he had an entire plank of his platform dedicated to building out a citywide network of connected, low-stress bikeways. “A safe bike lane is more than a stripe painted on the pavement,” he opined. “Chicago needs a dedicated set of streets with slow speeds and protected bike lanes to keep cyclists safe.”
It has now been more than two years since Johnson ascended to the mayor’s office. But one North Side neighborhood that remains largely isolated from the protected bike lanes in other communities, and basically devoid of any its own PBLs: Rogers Park.
According to the Chicago Department of Transportation's Existing Bike Network map, which was last updated in January of this year, at that time there was not a single protected lane in Rogers Park. (The community area's boundaries are Ridge Avenue, Devon Street, Lake Michigan, and Evanston.)
Rogers Park has a Neighborhood Greenway, mostly on Glennwood and Greenview avenues, but that's a side street route that doesn't provide direct access to many major destinations. And the Glennwood-Greenview Greenway is pretty much the only low-stress north-south route in the neighborhood.
To the south, the Edgewater neighborhood has more options, including protected lanes on Clark Street, and a greenway couplet on Kenmore (northbound) and Winthop (southbound) avenues. But thos facilities vanish at Devon Street, the borden between the two communities.
In addition to Rogers having limited options for low-stress, cross-neighborhood bike travel, it's got a major barrier to north-south cycling and lakefront access. That's Sheridan Road, a four-lane "stroad" that serves as a traffic sewer connecting DuSable Lake Shore Drive to North Shore suburbs.
Streetsblog Chicago has previously discussed the safety and livability challenges posed by Sheridan, and proposed doing a four-to-three road diet to make room for protected bike lanes, and reduce speeding and serious crashes. I'd like to take another look at that subject, focusing on the portion in Rogers Park. Here are some important facts about Sheridan:
- The street started out in the 1880s as a way to extend Lake Shore Drive out to the suburbs. It was named Sheridan Road in 1889.
- In 1924, Sheridan was designated Illinois Route 42, officially recognizing it as a state highway.
- Although Illinois stopped calling Sheridan Route 42 back in 1972, it remains a highway in all but name.
- Sheridan is a constant source of road noise due to its high traffic volume speed. Even indoors, half a block away from the road or more, cars can still heard at all hours of the day and throughout the night.
Sheridan Road is also a major source of air pollution, with some of the worst ozone pollution in the entire city. In 2023, Northwestern University researchers found that Lake Michigan traps ozone precursors such as nitrogen oxide and volatile organic compounds leading to the bright yellow of high ozone levels that you see in the chart below.
According to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, gas-powered vehicles are a major source of these ozone precursors. So it's not surprising that car-choked Rogers Park shows up solid yellow on that map. It's especially frustrating when you consider that much of the smog is generated by suburbanites using the neighborhood as a cut-through route.
On the bright side, one could view Sheridan's massive road width as a feature, not a defect, because it provides plenty of room for protected bike lanes. Granville Avenue, located two blocks south of Devon, is currently undergoing a Complete Streets makeover that will turn it into a 2.8 mile greenway between the North Shore Channel Trail and Lake Michigan.
So it would be a no-brainer to connect Rogers Park to Granville with protected lanes on Sheridan. They could start at Howard and run until Devon, where Sheridan jogs east, and then continue south on Broadway to Granville. Doing this would also make it easier to access Winthop/Kenmore and the Lakefront Trail.
Again, doing a road diet on Sheridan would provide right-of-way for the bike lanes, which would be curside. Car parking would be moved to the left of the bikeways, and if curb protection was added as well, that would create a comfortable bike route.
This will encourage Rogers Parkers to use bikes for short-to-medium-range trips instead of driving motor vehicles. Every time I go for a walk down Sheridan—which I do regularly—I see people biking on the sidewalks, evidently terrified of being run over by drivers on the four-lane road. Faced with breaking a city ordinance or the risk of being flattened into an impromptu road decal, many people will choose the former option. Sidewalk riding on Sheridan is a clear sign of latent demand for safe bike infrastructure there.
Once biking feels safe, studies show that many more people will do it, thereby reducing the number of cars on the road. With fewer drivers using Sheridan at any given point in time, that will reduce travel times for those motorists who remain, as well as reducing the road noise and pollution those vehicles generate.
In addition, protected bike lanes will improve revenue for local businesses as Sheridan becomes more inviting to locals and less clogged by suburbanites blasting through with no intention of stopping and contributing to the neighborhood economy. Study after study has found that adding protected lanes significantly boosts sales for local shops, restaurants, and other businesses.
Ironically, Evanston—the number one suburban beneficiary of Sheridan Road – has already built protected lanes on the own portion next to Northwestern University. South of there, the north-south road is called Chicago Avenue, the equivalent of Clark Street in Chicago. There's currently a plan to add PBLs on Chicago Avenue from Davis all the way south to Howard as part of a forward-looking complete street project, with IDOT’s blessing and $3 million in state funding.
So the City of Evanston, with $138.7 million in annual revenue, is able to build protected bike lanes on Sheridan Road / Chicago Avenue. Surely the City of Chicago (with $17.3 billion in revenue, more than an order of magnitude more) can do the exact same thing on Sheridan south of Calvary Cemetery.
Rogers Park has suffered as afunnel for suburban car traffic for far too long. It’s time to get serious about making Rogers Park a safer, cleaner, more prosperous, more pleasant place to live. It’s time for protected bike lanes in Rogers Park, and what better place to start than on the neighborhoo'd most notorious main street?
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