Jefferson Park

We’ve done write-ups of many bikeways the city installed this year as part of their effort to reach 100 miles of buffered and protected lane, including facilities on South Sacramento, South State, Vincennes, Clybourn, Milwaukee, and Washington. However, there were a few more new lanes I’d been meaning to check out, and some others that weren’t on my radar because the Chicago Department of Transportation hadn’t announced them on the bike program’s Facebook page. Recently, however, CDOT provided this list of bikeways they built this year:

Last Tuesday, the city's Community Development Commission put the brakes on Mega Realty's plan to build a housing and retail development on two vacant lots located a five-minute walk from the Jefferson Park Transit Center. One of the parcels is city-owned, and the commission voted against a proposal to give the land, valued at $530,000, to the developer free of charge.

Some Streetsblog Chicago commenters have argued that Steven Vance and myself are always in favor of limiting car access in the name of street safety, but that’s not the case. We're still not sure whether a Chicago Department of Transportation street closure project in Jefferson Park was prompted by a speeding and crash problem, as CDOT claims, or if the main motivation was to make room for a digital billboard.

The Jefferson Park NIMBYs are at it again. First they went nuclear over the city’s proposal for a road diet with protected bike lanes on Milwaukee Avenue, which would have reduced speeding and crashes, and created more people-friendly retail strips. Now they’re freaking out about 45th Ward Alderman John Arena’s proposed ordinance to designate a few blocks of Milwaukee and Lawrence as Pedestrian Streets.

Last night, announced aldermanic candidate John Garrido hijacked a crowded community meeting about the city’s proposal for a safety overhaul of Milwaukee from Lawrence to Elston. He interrupted the event to present Chicago Department of Transportation engineers with what he said were 4,000 signatures in opposition to any reconfiguration of the street that would involve fewer travel lanes.

The 5900 block of North Elston from the driver's perspective.

Last year, residents of the 45th Ward, made up largely of the Jefferson Park neighborhood, had the opportunity to vote for a number of outside-the-box transportation projects in the ward’s participatory budgeting election. Most of those proposals, including bike lanes on Lawrence and Milwaukee, and on-street bike parking corrals, didn’t win, but voters did opt to spend $125,000 of the ward’s $1.3 million in discretionary “menu” funds to install a new pedestrian crossing light at the Jefferson Park Transit Center.

John Garrido, a Chicago cop and part-time lawyer, narrowly lost to 45th Ward Alderman John Arena in the 2011 election. Now Garrido has started an online petition against the city's plan for a road diet and protected bike lanes on Milwaukee in the district, a project that Arena has endorsed. The Chicago Department of Transportation proposal calls for reconfiguring the street between Lawrence and Elston in the Jefferson Park, Norwood Park and Gladstone Park neighborhoods.

Current conditions at Milwaukee and Manila.