Jess Audey traveled to Chicago from Columbus, Ohio, with her 10-year-old daughter Darcy Evert, to take advantage of the year’s sole opportunity to bike DuSable Lake Shore Drive without cars.
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On Sunday morning, great clouds covered the tops of the city’s tallest skyscrapers, but the weather cleared up while the mother and daughter cruised together as participants in Bike the Drive.
What was Darcy’s favorite part?
“That I got to do it with my mom,” she said.
Bike the Drive, now in its 25th year, is an annual fundraiser for the Active Transportation Alliance, a nonprofit organization that advocates for better infrastructure for people to walk, bike and use public transportation in the Chicago area.
A 30-mile loop of DuSable Lake Shore Drive stretching from Hyde Park to Edgewater was closed to cars and filled with cyclists starting at 6:30 a.m. Participants included families, city staffers and experienced cyclists looking for something new.
About 15,500 cyclists participated this year, according to Clare McDermott, director of events and marketing for the Active Transportation Alliance.
“Bike the Drive is a day to experience what it could feel like if our roads were more comfortable for bikers to ride on,” McDermott said.
Part of making Chicago roads more accessible to bikers, she said, would be putting up curb-protected bike lanes. These are like normal bike lanes, but concrete dividers separate them from the road. This would prevent cyclists from smashing into car doors opened into bike lanes, McDermott said.
In June, such an accident killed Riley O’Neil, a 35-year-old Chicago Department of Transportation employee who devoted much of his career to making city streets safer for cyclists. He died after a driver allegedly opened a car door into his path, forcing him to swerve and be run over by a semitruck.
Bike lanes can be a contentious political issue, though. Proposals to add a lane along Archer Avenue in Brighton Park sparked backlash this summer from business owners and car drivers.
Alongside Sunday’s cycling route, organizers set up activities and refreshments for cyclists in Grant Park’s Butler Field. There, a DJ blasted Smash Mouth’s “All Star” as more than 40 people waited in line for pancakes. While the main festival was in Grant Park, entry locations for riders stretched all the way to the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry on the South Side.
Standing with a bike near the festival was Frantz Jerome, 65. The Lakeview resident started near Fullerton Avenue around 7 a.m. with his wife. Jerome considers himself an avid cyclist, having biked on major paths in the Pacific Northwest. Jerome said he was amazed by Sunday’s turnout.
“You ride the whole thing and get surprised; there’s always someone at arm’s length,” he said.
Jerome noticed several obstructions in the road while biking. It was a “statistical inevitability” that somebody would get injured, he said, and he just hoped nobody would break a collarbone.
“You gotta be careful because there’s potholes; there’s seams in the road,” Jerome said.
The Active Transportation Alliance maintains a list of known potholes on the Bike the Drive website.
Cycling alongside participants was Sean Madison, general manager at Lyft Urban Solutions for the Divvy program.
Divvy is a partnership owned by the city of Chicago that provides rentable bikes and scooters, and recorded its busiest month ever in July, according to the city of Chicago, surpassing one million rides in a single month for the first time in the program’s history.
Madison, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s staff and others started riding on Divvy bikes around 6:30 a.m., he said. The cohort included Nora Leerhsen, Chicago Transit Authority acting president and Amy Rynell, executive director of the Active Transportation Alliance.
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Madison said the event left him with two major impressions.
“One: that Chicago is a bike city,” he said. “And then two: that we will continue to lead and turn our city into a world-class bike destination.”
Car traffic resumed to normal on DuSable Lake Shore Drive starting at 11:30 a.m.