State Street

The Loop Alliance hopes their program will be a shot in the arm for a downtown that is still struggling with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

State Street between 69th and 79th, in Park Manor and Chatham, is currently a pretty grim roadway. Located just east of the Dan Ryan, it’s essentially a frontage road, which drivers treat as an extension of the expressway. The pavement is a moonscape, and the street is lined with a motley mix of retail.

At yesterday's Mayor's Bicycle Advisory Council, Chicago Bicycle Program project manager Mike Amsden revealed a new detail about the missing piece of the Clybourn Avenue buffered bike lane. The Chicago Department of Transportation is working with the Illinois Department of Transportation to install a protected bike lane on Clybourn that may be separated by a curb.

To borrow from a famous song, on State Street, that great street, I just gotta say, they’ve done something they haven’t done yet on (Chicago’s) Broadway. They’ve installed nearly perfect Windy City-style protected bike lanes.

If support from aldermen Patricia Dowell (3rd) and Will Burns (4th) expressed at a public meeting on Tuesday is any indication, it should be relatively easy for the Chicago Department of Transportation to install buffered and protected bike lanes along State Street from 18th to 26th streets. This eight-block stretch is .8 miles long, since blocks are shorter than usual on the Near South Side.

The Gateway, Chicago's first "People Plaza" seating area, recently opened at what Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein described as an "under-acknowledged public space" in the median of State Street between Wacker Drive and Lake Street. The installation is funded by the Chicago Loop Alliance, one of the downtown chambers of commerce, via a Special Service Area, and it was implemented as part of the Chicago Department of Transportation's Make Way for People public space initiative. Red and blue metal tables and chairs, several of them shaded by umbrellas, as well as several new flower boxes, dot the former concrete no-man's land. A couple weeks ago, at around 2 p.m., a handful of people were enjoying the space, including a group of women engrossed in conversation despite the traffic on either side of them.

Kevin Zolkiewicz sent us these photos on Saturday showing the new pedestrian crossing signals pointing diagonally across the intersection of State Street and Jackson Boulevard, right outside DePaul University's Loop campus. We're waiting for confirmation from CDOT, but it looks like these signals are designed to work as part of an exclusive pedestrian phase -- known as a pedestrian scramble or Barnes Dance -- in which people on foot can cross the intersection in any direction. This treatment is common in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Tokyo.