Lake Street

In reality Romanelli's proposal to rebuild the tracks to make driving easier is a road project. As such, he should be pursuing road funding for it, not transit money.

There's essentially zero support for Romanelli's absurdly car-centric proposal people who actually know what they're talking about when it comes to transportation.

As the old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.

In a surprise move, the Chicago Department of Transportation recently began building the city’s first curb-protected bike lanes on Sacramento Drive through Douglas Park. This morning, assistant director of transportation planning Mike Amsden provided an update on this game-changing facility, plus a slew of other bikeways projects slated for 2015.

As part of the Mayor Emanuel’s goal of building 100 miles of buffered and protected lanes in his first term, the Chicago Department of Transportation is chugging along building new bikeways. Last week, I checked out buffered lanes on Central Park Avenue, between Jackson and Franklin boulevards, and protected lanes on Lake Street, from Central Park to Laramie Avenue.

Although I currently live a stone’s throw from Lake Street's protected bike lanes, I almost never ride in them. I moved to East Garfield Park during this snowy winter, when the PBLs rarely seemed to get plowed. Now that it’s springtime, the lanes are often filled with broken glass and garbage, and many of the flexible posts that separated them from the parking lane are lying on the sidewalk or in the bikeway. As a result, I almost always take Fulton, Warren/Washington, or Jackson to get downtown – anything but Lake.