Open Streets

Having supportive city officials has been key to opening opening up streets to people during the COVID-19 crisis.

During the pandemic, cities are recognizing it makes sense to take road space away from cars and give it to people.

The official name for it was the "traffic box" -- the 4.7-square-mile chunk of center city Philadelphia where incoming motor vehicles weren't allowed when Pope Francis was in town this weekend. But rather than the traffic nightmare some anticipated, something wonderful happened: #popenstreets.

It pains me to report there probably won’t be an Open Streets event in Chicago this year. Since 2005, the Active Transportation Alliance has been lobbying the city of Chicago to stage a ciclovía, a Latin American-style car-free event, in which the streets are opened for walking, biking, and other forms of healthy recreation. Various city departments declined to help organize and raise funds for Open Streets (originally called Sunday Parkways), so Active Trans did the work themselves, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to hold a number of events between 2008 and 2013. Much of the money was used for paying for the police officers and traffic control aides required by the city.

The longer route and new activities of this year's Milwaukee Avenue Open Streets cicloviá promised to bring the car-free playground into more neighborhoods and attract more people. The event expanded from last year's 1.4 miles to 2.6 miles, and the city had signed up -- for the first time ever -- to pay for police officers and traffic control aides. The event was paid for mostly by the Wicker Park-Bucktown Special Service Area (Steven is a member of the transportation subcommittee) and sponsors Aldi, Walgreens, and Revolution Brewing.

Although Chicago was one of the first U.S. cities to consider staging a ciclovía, a Latin-American-style event that creates temporary car-free street space in order to encourage healthy recreation, community interaction and commerce, we’re currently way behind peer cities. New York, Los Angeles, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco are each hosting several ciclovía events this year on routes that are several miles long. Meanwhile Chicago will be hosting one event, called Open Streets, on Sunday, September 15, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., on a 2.6-mile stretch of Milwaukee Avenue between Division Street and Kedzie Boulevard in Wicker Park, Bucktown and Logan Square.