Roger Romanelli

Fulton Market Association Executive Director Roger Romanelli is well-known to longtime Streetsblog Chicago readers as a resident of suburban Hillside who often intervenes in urban sustainable transportation matters. He's usually on the wrong side of these issues, with a decidely car-centric point of view. Most notoriously, his tireless lobbying against the City's Ashland bus rapid transit proposal helped get that project shelved.

Reporting for this piece is by Igor Studenkov, and commentary is by editor John Greenfield.

The general reporting on the meeting is by Igor Studenkov, and the commentary on the Grand Avenue project is by John Greenfield.

To justify spending billions to rebuild the Lake Street 'L' to facilitate driving, he falsely claimed it's "the only rail line that doesn’t have a corresponding bus service within an eighth of a mile."

At a meeting last week, CDOT staffers committed to exploring the idea of warning signs, but ignored Romanelli's call to spend $1.8B rebuilding the tracks.

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.

Both IDOT's plan to reroute the trail, and village trustee hopeful Roger Romanelli's counter-proposal, have shortcomings.

Romanelli, who helped kill Chicago's plan for bus rapid transit, is now trying to do the same thing with an Illinois Department of Transportation proposal to relocate a section of the Prairie Path.