Ald. Andre Vasquez (40th) addresses a rally against IDOT and CDOT’s proposed overhaul of North DuSable Lake Shore Drive on Thursday, Aug. 8, 2024 at Truman College. (Nick Blumberg / WTTW News)

City and state transportation officials showed off their recommended plan to overhaul North DuSable Lake Shore Drive on Thursday, touting its expected benefits for all modes of travel, improvements to parkland and other public space, and its enhanced shoreline protections.

But the “Redefine the Drive” project got a chilly reception from some transportation advocates and lawmakers who say the proposal doesn’t go far enough in advancing climate goals, increasing public transit capacity or making improvements to the city’s cherished lakefront beyond the Drive itself.

The yearslong project, a collaboration between the Illinois and Chicago Departments of Transportation, is focused on the Drive between Grand and Hollywood avenues, a seven-mile stretch of road that sees up to 170,000 vehicles each day. Planners say they started with more than 20 initial plans, most of which were discarded — including making the Drive into a local street with transit signals and dedicated bus lanes or creating a light rail system.

Over the last decade of work, the plethora of ideas was narrowed down to five plans. Four of them involved adding or converting lanes that would either be dedicated to buses or shared between buses and vehicles paying a toll, as well as adding dedicated on and off ramps for transit.

The option that IDOT and CDOT are recommending, known as “The Essential,” doesn’t create or convert any lanes for buses in the roadway — but does create transit-only lanes and signals at junctions, with buses given signal priority.

The plan also calls for myriad improvements to parkland, with new and easier lakefront access points and infill to increase beach space and protect both the lakefront trail and the Outer Drive from high waves.

CDOT’s Jeff Sriver says the project team worked to strike “the best balance to make sure that we’re dramatically improving transit, dramatically improving access to the lakefront for people walking, bicycling, rolling, other ways, while trying to minimize any negative impacts on the park.”

That was why planners ultimately shied away from adding or converting lanes for transit and creating bus-only access points — because they say it would take away space both in the parks and in the median of the roadway.

The project team also came up with an analysis showing just a one- or two-minute improvement to transit travel times under the options with dedicated or shared transit lanes. And they see restricting auto capacity on the Drive as increasing neighborhood traffic without significantly incentivizing people to take transit, saying it’s not feasible for many drivers to take the CTA instead given where they’re starting and finishing their trips.

“We’re not trying to attract more traffic to the Drive, but at the same time we’re trying to make sure that the neighborhoods aren’t taking the brunt of traffic coming off the Drive either,” Sriver said.

The plan aims to address three “choke points” likely known to and hated by drivers and passengers on the Drive — the Chicago Avenue stoplight, the Oak Street curve and on and off ramps, where buses will potentially be able to bypass any backups. They also say the overhaul will create capacity for more express bus service in future years.

As for what’s stopping impatient drivers from simply using those bus-only lanes at junctions, IDOT and CDOT say that’s expected to come up in the next phase of planning.

Push to Reimagine the Project

But a group of lawmakers, transit advocates and civic groups who held a rally outside the open house say the whole project needs to be put on hold and dramatically reimagined. Many of the speakers say as a world-class city, Chicago shouldn’t have what amounts to an expressway on its lakefront.

“It is amazing how many people who have enough money go to Europe and they go, ‘Oh, I love it here. I walk around everywhere. I’ve got my bike, I’ve got these nice small safe streets’ – and then they come back here and they say, ‘Oh, we can’t do that here,’” said State Sen. Robert Peters (D-Chicago.) “I call bulls--t. I know we could do that here, and we have a unique opportunity to make that happen.”

Peters’ colleague, state Sen. Mike Simmons (D-Chicago), said state lawmakers want the Drive to be the boulevard it was originally meant to be, not a highway. Simmons said for IDOT to argue that a dedicated bus lane at the very least wouldn’t improve travel times doesn’t hold water.

“That’s kind of like an insult to our intelligence,” he said. “It feels really incremental, and it certainly is not gonna help to make sure that we have a sustainable option in terms of doubling the number of people that use buses and trains in the city, which is a goal of the city of Chicago itself.”

Opponents called on Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson to call for a stop to the project and order IDOT and CDOT to come up with plans that do away with a “lakefront highway.”

In addition to Simmons and Peters, alderpeople Maria Hadden, Bennett Lawson, Daniel La Spata, Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, and Andre Vasquez joined the rally. Vasquez noted that many in the crowd had worked to get Mayor Johnson elected – saying that calling him out wasn’t personal, but was necessary to advance progressive goals. La Spata said creating dedicated space for buses doesn’t have to come at the expense of park space: “we can have our cake and eat it too.”

Asked for their take on pushback from an array of elected officials – as well as advocacy groups like Active Transportation Alliance, Better Streets Chicago, Metropolitan Planning Council, Sierra Club and more – Redefine the Drive planners said Thursday’s meeting was an opportunity to address their concerns.

“This is part of why we’re here today is to listen more and to gather feedback,” said CDOT’s Dave Miller. “We’ve been briefing a lot of the folks we’ve been hearing from, trying to help (them) understand — there’s a lot of counterintuitive aspects of this project. There’s a lot of non-intuitive things.”

Miller said planners hope to spend the next year to year and half fine-tuning the design based on input from stakeholders. But Rony Islam of Bike Grid Now charged IDOT and CDOT with “manufacturing consent for a highway project” rather than meaningfully gathering and incorporating feedback.

“The community input is not inside that building,” Islam told the crowd. “It’s out here right now. We are telling them no highway on our lakefront. We want prioritized investment in our public transportation, in our parks and in accessibility. The community is telling them that Chicago is for people, not for cars.”

With an estimated price tag likely around $4 billion, the project will need a mix of federal, state and local funding to get off the ground. And to qualify for federal funding, the plan needs extensive reviews, including regarding the impacts on historic features and parkland. Planners say construction would be done in phases and take five to ten years.

“We’ve heard concerns from the community about making sure that the project accommodates better access to the lakefront for people walking and biking, and at this meeting people have a chance to see how we’ve incorporated their thoughts on that into the designs,” Sriver said. “There’s still opportunities to make tweaks, but we need to start making some of these big-picture decisions.”

But protesters at the rally had big-picture ideas of their own, invoking Daniel Burnham’s well-known “make no little plans” axiom.

“We’re the city that did impossible things like turn the direction of the river,” Vasquez said. “So why can’t we just do this right?”

Contact Nick Blumberg: [email protected] | (773) 509-5434 | @ndblumberg