For much of its length, Stony Island Avenue is basically an expressway with stoplights. Located on the southeast side between 56th and 130th, it generally has eight travel lanes, the same number as Lake Shore Drive, although it carries half as many vehicles per day—35,000 versus 70,000. Due to this excess lane capacity, speeding is rampant.
The complex intersection of Stony Island, 79th, and South Chicago, a diagonal street, is particularly problematic. Located beneath a mess of serpentine Chicago Skyway access ramps, the six-way junction has terrible sight lines. It was the site of 444 traffic crashes between 2009 and 2013, the most of any Chicago intersection, according to CDOT.
But the 2014 community meetings didn’t go smoothly. According to DNAinfo Chicago, at a March 2014 meeting in the Fifth Ward, residents expressed doubt that cyclists would bike on Stony, and fear that the road diet would lead to traffic jams.
However, bike advocates who live near Stony say it would be misguided for Hairston to block the bike lanes. “The idea that the street is too dangerous for bike lanes is something of a cop-out,” said Shawn Conley, a 41-year-old real estate investor. He’s the chair of the Major Taylor Cycling Club of Chicago, a mostly African-American group.
Blanks said he had a similar exchange with Eighth Ward alderman Michelle Harris at a recent ward meeting after he argued that motorists should be ticketed for driving in the bike lanes on South Shore Drive, located a mile or two east of Stony. “She said, ‘I don’t like that project—we don’t bike on this side of town.'”
John Greenfield edits the transportation news website Streetsblog Chicago.
