Choosing the low-stress routes when riding a bike

by Michelle Stenzel

When you drive a car from one place to another on the north side of Chicago, you usually take the most direct route. This mostly involves major arterial streets like North Avenue or Halsted Street, which may have too many stoplights for your liking, but when traffic is light, you can drive fast and get to where you’re going in minimal time.

When you ride a bike from one place to another, you could also take the most direct route and use major arterials if you’d like, the same as if you were driving. However,  the advantages to a major street for a driver – fast speed of motor vehicle traffic – is a huge detriment to a person on a bicycle. Unless you’re in a bike lane that is separated from motor vehicle traffic with a physical barrier, fast-moving cars, buses and SUVs whizzing by you on the street are nerve-wracking, to say the least.

This part of Lincoln Avenue has a full-width bike lane, but in other sections, there are only "sharrow" markings, and it makes the street feel too stressful for many bike riders. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

To make your bike trip more pleasant and relaxing, you’d be better off choosing quieter streets with fewer vehicles that are moving at slower speeds. These might be secondary streets like Sedgwick and Webster, or better yet, very quiet neighborhood streets like Cleveland or Dickens. The route that you patch together to avoid main arterials may mean that you’ll have to cover a slightly longer distance than you would on the more direct route, but you’ll arrive in a happier, more relaxed state.

Bicyclists riding on Altgeld Street, a calm east-west route through Lincoln Park. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

The best route to take on a bicycle may be very different from the one you’d choose if you were driving. This seems like a very basic idea, but honestly, it took many years for it to occur to me, so I’m writing about it now in hopes of encouraging others to consider the concept, and perhaps inspiring you to plan a low-stress route yourself.

What's in store for Lincoln Park under the Streets for Cycling 2020 Plan?

by Michelle Stenzel

The visually exciting news of last week was the opening of the Loop's first two-way protected bike lane on Dearborn Street, of course. Who can resist the sight of our mayor high-fiving smiling bicyclists? Well not me, that's for sure. 

Somewhat overshadowed was the release on the same day of the Streets for Cycling 2020 Plan, which lays out the upgraded infrastructure that we hope to see installed citywide over the next eight years. You may remember that I was a volunteer leader of the north side Community Advisory Group, and Bike Walk Lincoln Park co-chair Michael Reynolds attended all the meetings faithfully, as did many other BWLP supporters. (You might spot yourself in a picture or two in the plan.)

Please download the plan and read it (link directly to PDF here)! Don't rely on this flimsy blog entry to summarize for you; there's just too much there. It's a beautifully done 57-page document that takes you through the process of putting together the plan, and then describes the recommendations for each area of the city. 

(More after the jump)

Take the community survey about potential north side neighborhood greenways!

By Michelle Stenzel

The Streets for Cycling Plan 2020 Community Area Group co-leaders (including yours truly) invite your input on potential north side streets to be transformed into neighborhood greenways!

Please read about neighborhood greenways (sometimes called bike boulevards) first and watch the video link, so that you have a clear idea about what makes a good candidate, and what kind of treatments can be implemented to make the street optimal for bicyclists, pedestrians and residents of the street.

Wouldn't it be nice if bicycling were always this peaceful? Olive Park near Ohio Street Beach.
(Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

Thanks to the maps produced at last month’s open house downtown, our December community group meeting, and all of your e-mailed comments, we have already collected significant feedback about routes suggested for potential neighborhood greenways. 

"Neighborhood greenways" and other news

Today will be a round up of news and reminders.

Name change to “neighborhood greenways”

First, it was recently announced that the bikeways formerly called “bike boulevards” will be called “neighborhood greenways” in Chicago. Hopefully by now you’re familiar with the features of these bikeways, perhaps from our prior post on the subject, which we have edited to make note of the name change. These are side streets that are given design features that calm motorized traffic. 

A neighborhood greenway in Portland, Oregon provides features that benefit bicyclists, pedestrians, and street residents.
(Photo Credit: Flickr user Neighborhood Greenways)

The name is being used already in Portland and Seattle, which are a few steps ahead of Chicago in implementing them. The name change make a lot of sense because even though the result of fewer and slower-moving cars makes the street welcoming to bicyclists, the benefits go beyond that, in that the street becomes quieter and much more walkable for pedestrians, and much more livable for residents along the street.

Plan & Ride recap, and Streets for Cycling 2020 kicks off!

It was an enthusiastic crowd at the first Bike Walk Lincoln Park "Plan and Ride" session. Thanks for hosting us, CityGrounds Coffee Bar! (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park) 

PLAN AND RIDE RECAP

In spite of chilly air and an early start time, we had a great turn out for the Bike Boulevards Plan and Ride event this morning. There was a big range of bicycling skill sets, from very confident cyclists who have ridden in Chicago for decades, to people who rarely ride at all but would like to more often if they were provided safer facilities.

The Bicycle Boulevards Post

(Note that in January 2012, it was announced that in Chicago, these bikeways will be called "neighborhood greenways".)


In our recent post about different types of bikeways, we touched on the idea of “bicycle boulevards” and today we’re going to elaborate on that concept so that you’re ready to participate in the upcoming bicycle boulevards planning session on November 20, 2011. (Full details at bottom of this post.)

Bicyclists ride on Lincoln Park West at Webster on the morning of the Chicago Marathon, when traffic volumes are low.
(Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park) 

Bike Walk Lincoln Park is working to put together an overall plan for suggested bicycle infrastructure improvements in Lincoln Park, to submit to the CDOT team putting together Chicago’s Streets For Cycling plan. Part of the city’s plan and our recommendations will be installing bicycle boulevards. (These will be in addition to, and not instead of the protected bike lanes that will also be installed.)

A Quick and Easy Primer on Bicycle Infrastructure

The city of Chicago has exciting plans for people who choose to ride bikes as a mode of transportation, or those who would love to, but are still understandably hesitant.

We’ll be talking a lot on this blog about the upgrades and changes to Lincoln Park’s and the city’s bicycling infrastructure. As we’ve mentioned before, Mayor Emanuel is committed to putting in 100 miles of protected bike lanes in the next four years. In addition to that, CDOT is creating a new bike plan for the city's bicycling infrastructure revising our city’s grand plan for bicycling, upgrading the current Chicago Bike 2015 Plan to a new one  called Streets for Cycling 2020, which covers the next eight years.  (Note: This was edited 02/12/12 to correct that the Streets for Cycling 2020 plan does not replace the Chicago Bike 2015 Plan, which addresses policy, education, and enforcement.) That upgraded plan will go beyond the protected lanes to add even more bicycling-friendly infrastructure. (Read about many of these items on the Chicago Bike Program web page here.)

Since there will be some familiar concepts involved as well as new ones, we thought it would be worthwhile to provide you with basic information about the types of bikeways that are available.

1/ OFF-STREET TRAILS

These are the off-road trails that bicyclists and pedestrians often share. The one that is best-known to Lincoln Parkers is probably the Lake Front Trail, but there are others not too far away, like the North Shore Channel Trail, which runs north along the Chicago river starting near Lawrence and Kimball. These trails are often used for purely recreational purposes, but many people use them as their bicycle commuting route as well.

Chicago's much-loved Lake Front Trail, as seen near the 47th Street overpass. (Photo: Bike Walk Lincoln Park)

The advantages to these trails are that they are well separated from motorized traffic, and therefore feel very safe to all users.