DuSable Lake Shore Drive

See the update about the new signs at the bottom of this post, originally published on April 16, 2025.

McCoy Cantwell was born and raised in Chicago and now live in Los Angeles, where he's pursing a master's degree urban and regional planning at Cal Poly Pomona. He wrote this piece as a class assignment to discuss a current planning issue.

Attendees want to see the waterside highway transformed into a people-friendly boulevard with a dedicated transit corridor.

While IDOT implied that having 25 percent less road capacity for cars on the lakefront is a defect of the proposal for dedicated transit lanes, it's actually a feature.

The advocates and elected officials who attended and spoke are upset that IDOT and CDOT's current plan simply rebuilds the 8-lane shoreline highway with no transit lanes.

Let decision-makers know it would be a huge mistake to rebuild the eight-lane shoreline highway without transit lanes during a global warming crisis.

Streetsblog Chicago readers are familiar with how last month sustainable transportation and environmental advocates joined forces with 14 forward-thinking alders. They called on the Chicago and Illinois transportation departments to halt plans to simply rebuild North DuSable Lake Shore Drive as an eight-lane highway, and instead make the lakefront more walk/bike/transit-friendly.

While the Tribune called for coddling motorists by maintaining the status quo of an eight-lane highway, today's challenges call for a more walk/bike/transit-friendly lakefront.

They sent a letter to IDOT and CDOT calling on them to put the brakes on plans to simply rebuild the eight-lane highway next to our gorgeous lakefront.