CDOT

"With more people in the street, we'll create more advocates for better infrastructure," noted Equiticity's Jose Manuel Almanza.

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.

The CTA and CDOT have a toolbox of ideas to make bus service faster and more reliable. Will decision-makers be bold enough to let them follow through?

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.

The project also has lots of other nifty Complete Streets features, like raised crosswalks, bus islands, and the conversion of a dangerous slip lane to a new plaza.

The alder says constituents in this affluent neighborhood feel the new street layout is "very problematic and unsafe", but the same configuration has worked fine in other communities.

Will Ashland opponents try to kill the plan at Wednesday's Transportation committee meeting? And ATA and CTAction respond to the transit agency's bus network plans.