Summer is coming and with it seemingly endless roadwork on expressways feeding into and through Chicago. My 5-mile drive from my work at the University of Illinois at Chicago to my home in the North Center neighborhood has ballooned from a swift 20 minutes to an excruciating hour, an extra 30 minutes that could be better spent. And my main thought during the long-in-time but short-in-distance drive home is that I should have cycled, closely followed by the memory that cycling in Chicago is a dangerous undertaking.
Chicago is, in principle, the ideal city for biking. It is flat, and almost all the roads are straight, giving cyclists a clear view of what is ahead and behind. While the weather from December to March is perhaps too cold for the average biker, climate change has meant that we get less snow and earlier springs, extending cycle- friendly weather to most of the year.
At the same time, there has never been a better time to switch to cycling. The cost of owning and operating an automobile is higher than ever, at more than $1,000 per month for a new car. And with the realities of climate change becoming ever more apparent, the cost to the planet has perhaps never been higher. More practically, a quick check on your phone often tells you that cycling can also be quicker than driving or taking the CTA.
Nevertheless, Chicago’s “cyclability” is ranked in the bottom 7% among national and international cities by People for Bikes, a grassroots bike safety advocacy group. Even more shockingly, it is ranked 50th in Illinois. From June to August in 2023, there were 819 bike crashes, of which 75 were incapacitating injuries. Casual conversations with fellow cyclists often involve the sharing of hits and near misses with traffic and pedestrians.
To be sure, the city has made great strides to improve the cycling infrastructure in Chicago. The city subsidizes bike-share programs and has expanded the cycling network by 31% between 2018 and 2022, with more than 400 miles of bikeways. However, while Chicago has more recently been focusing on developing low-stress bikeways, in which bikes are prioritized or separated from traffic, the vast majority of bike paths are shared lanes or protected from cars by a painted line on the pavement.
Several studies have shown painted bike lanes are actually more dangerous for cyclists, meaning the benefit of these lanes is literally cosmetic. Further, while protected bike lanes are more defensive, they can accumulate trash and are not easily cleaned with standard street cleaning equipment, making them an obstacle course in places.
Most bicycle accidents, however, happen at intersections. Basic physics means that stopping and starting at intersections is energetically challenging on a bike, making it difficult for cyclists to rapidly get out of the way of oncoming traffic. Further, bikes are less maneuverable when they start moving after a complete stop. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that one-third of bike fatalities happened at intersections in 2019.
The solution taken by almost all cyclists is to yield rather than stop at intersections, regardless of signage. But this presents its own dangers. I was hit by a car in which the driver thought I was stopping rather than yielding. I have a very distinct memory of being grateful for wearing a helmet as my head hit the ground, smashing my glasses.
To be clear, I was breaking the law, and the driver was perfectly reasonable to expect me to stop. But the law should be changed. In 1982, Idaho introduced a stop-and-yield law, which allows cyclists to yield at stop signs and proceed when safe, rather than coming to a complete stop. Several other states have subsequently adopted the law. And it works: After adopting the law, bicycle crashes declined by 14.5% the following year. Indeed, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration advocates for stop-and-yield laws to encourage cycling.
The world is slowly but surely moving toward the elimination of polluting combustion engines as we deal with the realities of climate change. Part of this must be to encourage less impactful modes of transportation. While it may be too much to expect bikes to take precedence over cars in Chicago, as they do in cities such as Gronginen in the Netherlands, small changes in the law can make a substantial difference and set priorities for the future.
There is little point in building networks of bikeways — no matter how protected — when they drop us into intersections that are unsafe and we feel vulnerable. It’s time to change the law.
Alexander Shingleton is a professor in the department of biological sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
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