Curb-Protected Bike Lanes

Dozens of people showed up to voice their support for planned protected bike lanes on Grand Avenue in West Avenue at an open house Wednesday night.

Chicago Department of Transportation crews are busy making good on CDOT's promise to upgrade all existing "protected" bike lanes with precast concrete curbs by the end of 2023.

A protected bike lane doesn't give you much protection from drivers if the precast concrete curbs crumble like a Kit Kat bar when a motorist drives over them.

Adding robust physical protection is very important for making bikeways safer and more appealing to less-confident cyclists.

Some business owners are grumbling about customers having to cross the street from their parking spaces, but CDOT says projects like this are the wave of the future.

The curb-protected bike lanes are a win, but the wide new section of Elston encourages speeding. It remains to be seen whether the street remix will result in a safer situation overall.

As I’ve written, it’s a shame that the valuable riverfront land at the southeast corner of Fullerton and Damen will likely be redeveloped as big box retail with tons of parking in the aftermath of a project to reroute Elston Avenue so it bypasses that intersection. The silver lining of the project is that this new, curving five-lane stretch of Elston, which opened to motorized traffic last week, will have curb-protected bike lanes.

No, I haven’t been binge watching “Wayne’s World.” I’ve had Aurora, Illinois, on the brain lately because the western suburb has been doing some babelicious street makeovers.

Last year, Streetsblog USA's Angie Schmitt demonstrated how a new feature of Google Street View can be used to highlight street remix projects that have made cities more livable. Google now lets you look at archived Street View images, so it's easy to compare what streets looked like before and after they were reconfigured.