Who gave mayoral hopeful Susana Mendoza the idea to trash the Archer protected lanes on WBEZ?

During Chicago mayoral candidate Susana’s Mendoza’s long career in local and Illinois politics – including stints as a state representative, City Clerk of Chicago, and her current gig as Comptroller of Illinois, her positions on transportation issues have been a mixed bag.

On the one hand, when she ran for mayor in 2019, she responded to Streetsblog’s candidate questionnaire with encouraging statements about encouraging cycling and making it safer; speeding up buses; and building affordable transit-oriented development.

On the other hand, after losing that election, in early 2020 she urged suburbs to consider ending their red light camera programs, which would probably would have resulted in more traffic fatalities.

On the other other hand, she was pretty badass that time she was out bicycling with her family in 2017 and she saw a pickup driver rear end a car, causing a multi-vehicle crash. She videotaped the offender and chased him down to a convenience store, where she confronted him. He turned out to be the notorious John “Quarters” Boyle from the “Hired Truck Program” fiasco.

Here’s video Mendoza shot of Boyle fleeing the crash scene, via Block Club Chicago.

That said, I was pretty disappointed with Mendoza’s appearance today on WBEZ’s “Ask the Candidate” series, hosted by Sasha-Ann Simons. In fairness, the comptroller said some reasonable stuff about wanting to improve safety and cleanliness on the CTA, and put in a good word for the the system’s Acting President Nora Leerhsen, who has generally gotten a thumbs-up from transit advocates. “I love that she’s working hard,” Mendoza said. There’s no doubt in my mind that she is working very hard.”

But during the Q & A with audience members, a guy named Mike from bike-friendly Bowmanville asked her a good question about ideas “to improve traffic congestion… by getting people out of their cars more often.”

The candidate began her response by complaining about being stuck in traffic jams while driving, and then quickly pivoted to grousing about bikeways. “We do have this issue of a lot of bike lanes that are very controversial in the city,” she said.

Like clockwork, Mendoza trotted out the old “avid” cyclist” cliche. (For background on this annoying phenomenon, read Bike Snob NYC’s evergreen article for Outside Magazine, “A Cyclist’s Worst Enemy: the “Avid” Cyclist.)

“You know, as a cyclist myself, I love riding my bike, and I’ve ridden my bike from my house in Little Village to City Hall when I was City Clerk every day throughout the year,” Mendoza said. “But the bike lanes make sense in certain areas, but not in all areas.”

That sounds an awful lot like what her political ally, notorious Complete Streets hater Ald. Ray Lopez (15th) recently told Loop North News about bike lanes. “You can’t expect what works in Uptown to work in Englewood or Little Village,” the alder said.

(Here’s another thing Mendoza and Lopez have in common. Lopez proposed honorary “Ald. Edward M. Burke Day” at City Hall not long before Burke was convicted of corruption. And Mendoza previously held her wedding at Burke’s home, where the future felon entertained guests on piano.)

This year, drivers have fatally struck bike and e-scooter riders in community areas all over town, ranging from O’Hare, to South Shore, to Chicago Lawn, to Douglas, to Bridgeport, to – yesterday – North Center. Contrary to what Mendoza said on WBEZ, installing protected lanes to help prevent these tragedies does make sense in all areas of our city.

“And that’s a conversation that I know is a touchy one to have, but I think it’s an honest one that we have to have.” the comptroller said on WBEZ. “Because, for example, what we saw with the debacle of the bike lanes on Archer Avenue. It used to be like a shortcut for a lot of people – a fast-moving throughway, and now it became a parking lot.”

It’s debatable whether a street lined with retail in a residential neighborhood should be “a fast-moving throughway.” Brighton Park, the project area, has had 90 percent more crashes than the average Chicago neighborhood, which suggests the answer is “no.”

At any rate, it’s absurd that Mendoza blamed recent congestion on Archer on its traffic safety initiative – which includes pedestrian and transit improvements, as well as protected lanes – without mentioning the massive utility project on the street. For many months, several blocks of the street in Brighton Park have ungergone water and sewer line replacement, which limits the corridor to two narrow mixed-traffic lanes, with no turn lanes or curbside parking. That’s likely the main cause of increased traffic jams.

Scapegoating the Archer bikeways for traffic congestion is right out of the playbook of the “Archer Guardians,” who protested against the project on a weekly basis from last December to June in front of or near the office of Ald. Julia Ramirez (12th). She’s a progressive who supports the Complete Streets initiative. Recently it was revealed that these organized demonstrations were almost certainly a strategy to help elect Ramirez’s challenger, protest regular Claudia Zuno.

Zuno at the February 9 demonstration. Photo: John Greenfield

Streetsblog Chicago readers know that the evil mastermind (I’m being tongue-in-cheek here) behind these political rallies posing as a grassroots “rebellion” is a character named Juan Rangel. Formerly CEO of UNO Charter Schools, he now leads the “centrist to conservative” pro-charter school lobbying group Urban Center, and he’s a full-throated Donald Trump shill.

You might ask, “OK, but what does Juan Rangel have to do with the fact Susana Mendoza called the Archer traffic safety project a ‘debacle’ on the radio?” I’ll let this paragraph from a blog post by the Chicago Teacher’s Union, published shortly before Mendoza lost the 2019 mayoral election, answer that question.

“[Susana Mendoza] voted ‘yes’ in 2009 as a state representative on Senate Bill (SB) 1221, which awarded a $98 million grant for school construction to the UNO network of charter schools and CEO Juan Rangel,” CTU stated. “At the time, this was the largest taxpayer subsidy to a single charter network in Illinois, with Mendoza praising the network for its work in her district. Rangel stepped down from UNO in 2013 after a series of scandals, and was later charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.” He wound up paying a $10,000 fine to settle that case.

So that provides a clue on where Mendoza might have gotten the idea to disparage the Archer protected bike lanes on WBEZ.

Listen to Mendoza’s “Ask the Candidate” segment here.

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