City Proclaims Dearborn Street Bike Lane A Success

By Chuck Sudo in News on Jun 10, 2013 8:20PM

Here’s a story that’s perfectly timed to coincide with Chicago Bike Week. Tribune transportation reporter John Hilkevitch reports bicyclists have responded so well to the Dearborn Street two-way protected bike lane that “all cyclists really need to obey traffic laws are signals of their own, telling them that stop means stop.”

Before we get impulsive and call bullshit on that along with the drivers of legitimate vehicles, both Transportation Commissioner Gabe Klein and Lee Crandell of the Active Transportation Alliance swear that if bicyclists will mind the rules of the road if there’s infrastructure that “speaks to people who are biking,” as Crandell told Hilkevitch.

In the six months since the Dearborn Street lanes have been open to bicycles, stopping for red lights has improved by 161 percent. Those numbers are tempered, however, but the percentage of bicyclists stopping for the bike-specific red lights.

CDOT monitoring and Hilkevitch’s independent spot checks found eight out of every 10 cyclists stopping at the Dearborn bike lane lights. That’s a good percentage, but not the numbers CDOT was hoping. You’ll still see some stupid running the red light and making traffic grind to a halt as vehicles try to make their turns. Klein said that education will eventually get better. "Cyclists need to pay attention. You cannot drift into the other lane,” he said. “I think it will take time for people to get used to the new traffic pattern, but so far it has gone pretty well."

Hilkevitch, to his credit, asks if cyclists are so receptive to the stop lights on the Dearborn bike lanes, why don’t they stop at other red lights with shared traffic? That, after all, is the $64,000 question.