The Illinois and Chicago Departments of Transportation are studying improvements to the northern portion of DuSable Lake Shore Drive, from Grand Avenue to Hollywood Avenue, and, of course, the highway engineers want to build a great big highway and bring more traffic and danger to the lakefront.
The name of the project is “Redefine the Drive.” This is a once-in-a-century opportunity to undo the vandalism Lake Shore Drive has visited upon our lakefront since the 1930s.
Nobody would build Lake Shore Drive as an expressway now if it didn’t already exist. In fact, extending the drive north through Edgewater, Rogers Park, Evanston and Wilmette hasn’t been discussed for 20 years and hasn’t been seriously contemplated since the 1960s. The only reason the construction of an Eisenhower-style expressway on the lakefront is being considered now is because an expressway already exists there.
I urge our planners and politicians to open their minds as to whether an expressway would be appropriate for our lakefront, in the mid-21st century, if there wasn’t an expressway already there.
What we need, instead of anything like the existing DuSable Lake Shore Drive or the currently proposed reconstruction, is a Michigan Avenue-style boulevard along the lakefront.
By way of background, in the 1990s, I resided on Winthrop Avenue near Hollywood and was president of THABS, the block club for that area. We were constantly dealing with the effects of this car sewer starting and terminating in our neighborhood, making Hollywood Avenue and Sheridan Road difficult to cross for pedestrians and side-street car traffic. It gave us disproportionate car-generated air pollution, noise pollution, horn honking and numerous car crashes, which are not limited to the roads.
Cars involved in crashes, especially at high speed, often rebound over the curbs, where they can kill or injure pedestrians on the sidewalk and cause property damage. The threat of all that traffic violence and pollution makes it difficult for people to visit and enjoy the lakefront.
Undo DuSable Lake Shore Drive
In the early 1990s, I personally made the proposal, now in effect for 30+ years, to allow northbound Lake Shore Drive traffic to go through to Hollywood Avenue during the morning rush period and make a right-turn-only onto northbound Sheridan Road, rather than forcing all traffic off at Bryn Mawr Avenue to clog neighborhood streets. So I have some knowledge and history with this road, and I believe the time is now ripe to undo DuSable Lake Shore Drive. “De-pave,” if you will.
Unfortunately, engineers began this current project with the assumption that the existing 170,000 daily car trips on North DuSable Lake Shore Drive (85,000 in each direction) must be accommodated in the new project, and it would be great if the road was so awesome that it could induce even more motor vehicle traffic.
This is the faulty premise at the crux of the disconnect between those of us who want the lakefront to be for people and engineers flummoxed by this concept.
On a final note, when I complained to one of the engineers that DuSable Lake Shore Drive is like the Eisenhower, he told me DuSable Lake Shore Drive is nothing like the Eisenhower, in that it doesn’t carry trucks.
I would say the similarities are greater than the differences: This is an eight-lane, limited access superhighway, with traffic traveling at dangerously high speeds. And, by the way, the landfill used for the extension of Lake Shore Drive from Foster Avenue to Hollywood Avenue in the 1950s literally included rubble and debris from the destruction of homes on the West Side that were condemned and demolished to make way for the Eisenhower.
After 100 years of having an expressway on the north lakefront, let’s use this opportunity to remake our city’s greatest natural asset in favor of people, not cars.
James R. Anderson is a member of Better Streets Chicago, which is advocating for a better DuSable Lake Shore Drive.
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