Can’t find a place to lock your bike? Rack it up to bureaucracy.
While an average of 700 bike racks were installed per year while I was there, after I left in early 2007 CDOT slowed the pace to roughly 500 racks annually. Chicago currently has more than 15,000 racks, likely the most of any U.S. city. But since the percentage of Chicago commuters who bike to work has more than tripled in recent decades, from 0.5 percent in 2000 to 1.7 percent in 2017, the demand for bike parking continues to grow, so it’s important for the city to keep installing the fixtures at a steady pace.
In the meantime, residents, small business owners, and the aldermen who represent them have grown impatient. “I’ve had customers asking me, ‘Can’t you get some bike racks out here?'” said John Brand, owner of Beverly’s Open Outcry brewery. He asked for a rack in summer 2017 via the city’s bike parking request web page, and a CDOT consultant stopped by and marked the orange dots last fall, but the fixture never got installed.
Short blamed the current two-year contract gap on the federal Grant Accountability and Transparency Act, passed in 2015, which requires additional state oversight of federal grants to cities. He said the delay caused by this extra red tape was exacerbated by layoffs at IDOT during the state budget crisis.
As a former CDOT consultant, I can attest that the city bureaucracy can be maddening. But now that the installation contract is finally moving forward and we’re getting some bonus fixtures to boot, it looks like we finally may have locked in a win.
