Details on the Chill New Way to Bike to Evanston

Among the 20 new miles of bikeways the Chicago Department of Transportation has planned for 2018, one of the most useful new routes will be the Rogers Park Greenway. It will extend the popular Glenwood Greenway in Uptown and Edgewater by a couple of miles miles and create a low-stress way to visit Evanston, our neighbor to the north.

Currently there are two basic ways to bike to Evanston from the Lakefront Trail. There’s a mellow, but very circuitous, signed route from the northern terminus of the trail at Ardmore via Kenmore, Devon, Glenwood, Arthur, Greenview, Pratt, Ashland, and Rogers — got all that? The itinerary is somewhat different heading south from Evanston. The northbound route drops you off on busy Sheridan Road, at which point you have to ride around the east side of Calvary Cemetery (just north of the border), a maneuver best done via the lakeside sidewalk.

The more direct option is to take Ardmore/Kenmore/Glenwood to Clark Street and ride it all the way north to the west side of the cemetery, at which point there’s a bike lane. Clark in Rogers Park is a bikeable, but somewhat hectic, two-lane street (although it’s lined with many good Mexican restaurants – I recommend the massive chile relleno burrito at El Famous.)

The Rogers Park Greenway will offer the best of both worlds, a relaxing, but relatively direct, route to the home of Northwestern University. During a participatory budgeting election a few years ago, 49th Ward residents chose to spend menu money to pay for the required 20 percent local share of the federally funded project. The ward recently passed along the details of how the new route will work.

Earlier this year CDOT extended the Glenwood Greenway from Ridge to Devon, installing new bikeway markings and signs. The Rogers Park Greenway (officially called the 49th Ward Greenway, but I expect nobody but Alderman Joe Moore is going to call it that) continues on Glenwood north to Pratt. A green-painted bike box will be added at Devon, four-way stops at minor cross streets will be removed to help cyclists keep their momentum, and motorized traffic will be calmed with curb extensions, a raised crosswalk at North Shore Avenue, and a bike-friendly sinusoidal speed hump. North Shore and Albion will serve as connector routes to the lakefront. A new sidewalk will also be built on the east side of Glenwood south of Pratt.

North of Pratt, the route jogs west on Farwell, then continues north on Greenview to Howard. The southbound stretch of Glenwood on the west side of the Red Line embankment, the eastbound block of Farwell, and northbound Greenview will all get contraflow bike lanes to allow for two-way bike traffic. This segment of the route will also get curb extensions, stop sign removals, and speed humps, and a new traffic circle will be built in the Genview/Greenleaf intersection.

North of Touhy there be more traffic calming, including three new traffic circles. The route heads west on Jonquil Terrace (a block north of Howard) for a couple blocks, then jogs north on Paulina to Juneway Terrace, which will get a westbound contraflow bike lane. Cyclists will cross tiny Triangle Park via a sidewalk, then continue on Juneway to Clark, at which point they can head north to Evanston.

The Rogers Park Greenway design cleverly uses contraflow bikeways and traffic calming to design to create what should be a handy and popular new bikeway. All Chicago neighborhoods should have such facilities, so it would be great if neighborhood greenways didn’t require ward funding, so that they could also be implemented in parts of town where there might be less support for spending ward money on bike infrastructure. So far all of Chicago’s completed or planned greenways are on the North Side.