Dearborn Street

"Fancy." "I Love It."

Reilly also promised to approve a permit for Clark if he's given the chance, and said the best strategy for saving the car-free district is for residents to lobby Mayor Johnson.

The bikeway does make Dearborn safer for all road users, which means there will be fewer crashes for first responders to respond to in the first place.

"It takes forever to get the city to even repaint a bike lane or repair a flexi-post, but they can remove the posts and markings almost overnight," a reader noted.

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

[Last year the Chicago Reader launched a weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership allows Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We syndicate a portion of the column after it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]

The City of Chicago has made notable progress on expanding its network of protected bike lanes into more community areas and communities of color than it had before Rahm Emanuel became mayor, but it seems nothing is better about the way bicyclists and pedestrians are accommodated around construction projects. The city has even beefed up detour rules contractors must follow multiple times to benefit human-powered transportation.

A mysterious dumpster blocked both lanes of the Dearborn protected bike lane this morning, causing Chicagoans to tweet their displeasure.

Biking downtown has improved substantially with the addition of protected bike lanes on Kinzie Street and Dearborn Street, but much work remains to be done to create a safe, cohesive bike network linking people to Chicago's biggest employment center.