Steven Lucy

Over a roughly six-week period, at any given point about one in five stations has no "classic" bikes (the original blue non-electric cycles) for rent and one fifth of docked bikes were flagged as broken.

At the first meeting of the new Chicago Mobility Collaborative on June 30, the Chicago Department of Transportation briefly presented a new plan for the Belmont and Kedzie intersection.  This is a complicated intersection, involving both grid and diagonal streets, an expressway exit and support columns, plus existing and new bike lanes.

While cyclists in Chicago facing blocked bike lanes and dangerous drivers may feel like second-class citizens every day, it is perhaps surprising that, under current Illinois law, they actually are.  Local governments  – municipalities, townships, and counties –  have an obligation to maintain roads in a condition that is safe to drive on, but have no such obligation to people biking.

Chicago has a problem when it comes to bus stops and bike lanes. Too often when a bus needs to access the curb, it enters the bike lane, cutting off cyclists and also providing a gap in physical bike lane protection that is then abused by drivers who block the bike lane with their cars … Continued

Local transportation engineers need to stop reinventing the wheel and just copy protected bikeway designs that work well elsewhere.