City has big Plans to Straighten out North Lake Shore Drive
By Jim Vail
Last month Chicago Alderman Brian Hopkins – whose 2nd Ward runs along parts of LSD – met with delegates of the Lakeshore Improvement Committee for a detailed discussion and progress update on the Lakeshore Improvement Plan. After an initial presentation from the Illinois and Chicago Departments of Transportation, representatives from community groups, Friends of the Park and other interested parties focused on both transportation and park elements of the plan.
Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive is known worldwide as a beautiful drive along the eastern part of the city with a majestic view of a sea blue lake sparkling in the sun.
It stretches along bustling beaches and parks where cyclists and pedestrians and joggers travel up and down the lakefront trails. It’s so nice it even became a popular song by lyricist Skip Haynes, of the group Aliotta Haynes Jeremiah, with the memorable line – ‘Just slippin’ on by on LSD, Friday night trouble bound.’
This strip of lakefront roadway was first constructed more than 80 years ago so the city has been holding a series of public meetings to decide what needs to be done to update the Drive and make it more accessible and safer for the tens of thousands of cars, pedestrians and cyclists who travel up and down it each day.
Everyone who’s walked, biked or driven along the lake shore knows the same old problems – cyclists bumping into walkers, traffic bottlenecks slowing down traffic and flooding from Lake Michigan waves which can shut down part of the Drive at times and makes for some harrowing bike rides along the curves.
The proposal, a radical departure from the past and would completely overhaul N. Lake Shore Dr. from Navy Pier to its northern terminus at Hollywood Ave. The estimated $2 billion to $3 billion overhaul is being referred to as “Redefine the Drive.”
The proposal calls for shifting some beaches, adding an extra moving lane in each direction to keep traffic moving and straightening out the Oak St. “S”
curve, considered one of the more dangerous stretches of the Drive today. It is a spot where many crashes now occur as cars need to decelerate to 25 mph; but mostly cruise by at much higher speeds.
While still in the early planning phases, one primary objective would be to bring the Drive up to current highway grade standards. A nother stated objective is to increase traffic flow at peak rush hours, between 7:30 and 8:30 a.m. on weekdays. Instead of calming traffic and reducing traffic speeds to prevent accidents, the focus is on increasing traffic speeds and increasing traffic volumes.
The proposed work includes the potential to widen the Drive from its current four lanes to five in each direction, and also lowering the road grade to below lake level thereby opening up the sight lines to the lakefront from west of the Drive.
To help pay for this, CDOT is considering adding a possible tollway to Lake Shore Dr.
This project, which would begin in 2019 at the earliest, is only for the north part, between Grand and Hollywood avenues.
Other big ideas being considered include relocating the Drive to the west side of the Lincoln Park Lagoon and creating a Lake Michigan dune landscape with camping to the east; re-configuring the Chicago Ave. interchange to eliminate the traffic signal, and eliminating the Wilson St. interchange to reduce interference with the Lakefront Trail. Other ideas include converting Clarendon Park into a high-density, mixed-use development to help “provide revenue” for the proposed improvements and create a new multi-story parking structure at Montrose Beach to serve new transit riders.
The city has already started rebuilding separate bike lanes from the pedestrian lanes on the North Side, with some $12 million in donated funds from billionaire financier Ken Griffin.
A long-delayed pedestrian and bicycle flyover bridge adjacent to Navy Pier is also in the works that will take bike traffic over the congested sidewalks and streets below. Sadly this job has hit rough patches so much so that it has now taken the city longer to build this one bridge than it took to rebuild most of downtown Chicago after The Great Fire of 1871. The bridge, which will stretch from the Ohio St. Beach to the south side of the Chicago River, was started in 2014, after more than a decade of planning. The city originally predicted it would be finished in 2018. Now the earliest this is expected to be done is by the middle of 2019.
The officials at the meetings said the plan also calls for shifting Oak St. and North Ave. beaches so they can straighten out the curve and add parkland space.
“It’s not just a road or a highway,” Jeff Sriver, Chicago’s director of transportation and programming, told the Chicago Tribune.
“As many transit passengers take it as take CTA rail lines, with 70,000 riders using the corridor on buses. There’s also the Lakefront Trail. Then all the park activity. It’s much more complex and interesting than your standard road project.”
The officials at the meetings said they would add a few hundred feet of lakefill on the Near North Side in the hope that they would not have to close parts of the road during storms.
The task force also looked at reserving lanes for buses or car pools, and express toll lanes, where people can pay tolls if they want to bypass snarled traffic. But this proposal would likely face serious opposition from those drivers who use it every day for transportation in cars.
They also proposed removing or replacing some of the tunnels under the Drive adjacent to Streeterville because some are in poor condition, while others are security risks, and creating new ones.
Proposals that didn’t fly because they were too expensive included a light rail line, an underwater tunnel in Lake Michigan, an underground tunnel along LSD and a causeway over the lake.
How much the project will cost and where the city will get the money has not yet been determined. But tax payers can count on a tab in the multiple billions.
“It’s really redefining the way the drive works for the future,” CDOT’s Sriver said.
“It will be the ‘new drive’ not the drive we got for 80 years.”
