We’re all for keeping cyclists as safe as possible and thus the provision of separated bike lanes and broader sidewalks and midstreet refuges on many of our city’s arteries. We’d love to see more people walking and biking downtown. But Archer Avenue, a diagonal throughway on the Southwest Side, a longstanding alternate to the oft-clogged Stevenson Expressway and a street heavily used by trucks, always was a bizarre candidate for reduced vehicular capacity.
No wonder many of the residents of Brighton Park were up in arms about what the Chicago Department of Transportation has branded as its Complete Streets program, complete in this case being without many of the preexisting parking and loading-zone spaces that served local businesses on a heavily commercial street.
Bike activists in this city have, to our minds, successfully enhanced the lot of cyclists in Chicago and are fully entitled to keep pushing for more reasonable improvements. But in recent months, they have turned more to demonizing anyone who dares to oppose their views as members of the “right-leaning political class” or in the debate for personal gain. They’ve delved into people’s backgrounds in an attempt to demolish the arguments of those deemed “car-centric.” They’ve gone after journalists and outlets they consider insufficiently sympathetic to even the extremist edges of their cause. And they’ve tried to minimize or neutralize what is substantial opposition to these changes in Brighton Park, where thousands of ordinary Chicagoans are just trying to go about their lives and would rather see these improvements on the streets where they live and their children play than on Archer itself.
Chicago does not have the climate nor the compact footprint of, say, Amsterdam. Nor do we have a subway system that blankets the city, like New York, Paris and London (and the CTA has chosen to extend a Red Line limb rather than fill in the heavily trafficked gaps in densely populated areas). We will always have people who drive, especially in winter and especially people carrying stuff.
Some bike activists have taken a page out of the airline playbook: If you want to sell premium economy, you have to make economy seats worse. If driving is made difficult enough, this thinking goes, more people will abandon their cars. That’s where we deviate from their modus operandi. And while it’s true that fewer cars traveling more slowly increases safety for pedestrians, you could of course extend that argument to banning cars entirely, for maximum safety. So it’s not entirely that reductive.
We think Chicago streets have to be for everyone without so much moral righteousness and, as we write, there has been so much reduction in capacity on our streets (Elston Avenue, long a substitute for the Kennedy Expressway being another diagonal example) that some parts of this city are clogged. Andrew Chismer made this point on our pages this week in a smart Opinion piece on the unconscionable snarls on Halsted Street near the city’s new casino, to which many future customers will surely drive.
So while backtracking and removing costly “improvements” midproject, as has happened on Archer, hardly is ideal, we’re glad to see the compromise there, which maintains much of what the bike activists wanted but adds back some parking spots and loading areas. Neither side is entirely happy, but it’s the start of a more reasonable debate about making room for everyone.
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