protected bike lanes

The Chicago Department of Transportation is almost finished building the city’s latest protected bike lanes, on Harrison between Desplaines and Wabash, and they’re useful ones. The new PBLs serve as a handy connection between protected lanes on Desplaines, Canal, and Dearborn, as well as conventional and buffered lanes on Clinton, Franklin, and Wabash, and they’re mitigating a couple of problem spots on Harrison.

Harrison Street is often used by many bicyclists as a stealth route, particularly since it has one of the rare bridges without open metal grates, sees surprisingly light car traffic, and is the only east-west route that connects the South Loop and UIC. Harrison is marked as a "crosstown bike route" from Loomis Avenue (1400 W) to Michigan Avenue (200 E) in the Streets for Cycling Plan 2020, so it's due for an upgrade.

It was great hanging with Streetsblog Chicago readers at yesterday’s meet-and-greet with noted bike and pedestrian planner Mia Birk, co-hosted by her planning firm, Alta Planning + Design at Vinyl in River North. Birk also heads Alta Bicycle Share, which runs the Divvy program for the city of Chicago. She served as Bicycle Program Manager for the city of Portland, Oregon, from 1993 to 1999, and helped launch the National Association of City Transportation Officials. Birk recently published the memoir Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet.

[This piece also ran in Checkerboard City, John's column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

Due to the cold spring, the Chicago Department of Transportation's bikeways construction season got off to a late start. Thermoplastic pavement markings don’t adhere properly to asphalt at temperatures below 50 Fahrenheit, as evidenced by bike lanes and crosswalks in various parts of town that were striped too late in the season in 2013 and have quickly deteriorated. Therefore, it was wise to wait for warmer weather this year.

In this final installment of my interview with Chicago Department of Transportation Commissioner Rebekah Scheinfeld, we talked about the Divvy expansion, traffic cameras, protected bike lanes, and her overall goals as CDOT chief. Read the first and second parts of the interview here and here.

[This piece also runs on the Green Lane Project's blog.]

The City of Chicago announced a new slate of bikeway projects today, outlining about 15 miles of new buffered bike lanes and a little more than four miles of protected lanes to be built in 2014.

Years ago, under Mayor Richard M. Daley, the Chicago Department of Transportation proposed piloting the city’s first protected bike lane on Stony Island between 69th and 77th. By February 2011 they’d received a $3.2 million federal grant to build it. However, construction wasn’t slated to begin until 2014.