A group of aldermen is asking the city to take steps to improve traffic safety — steps, they argue, that could have prevented the death of Chicago Department of Transportation employee Riley O’Neil in a Bridgeport traffic crash earlier this year.
O’Neil, 35, worked for a team within the city’s Transportation Department that is focused on making city streets safer and preventing crashes. Bike safety advocates have said his own death could have been prevented with better bike infrastructure.
Now, 21 aldermen are calling for the city to take steps to improve traffic safety throughout the city — including by not cutting the Transportation Department’s budget and exempting it from a city hiring freeze.
The aldermen also want the city’s Smart Streets pilot program — which is intended, in part, to cut down on crashes by dissuading drivers from blocking bike lanes — to be made permanent and eventually expanded throughout the entire city.
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“Each of these items could have prevented Riley’s death if enacted sooner,” the aldermen wrote in their Sept. 10 letter addressed to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, City Clerk Anna Valencia and the rest of their City Council colleagues.
“Each year dozens of people walking and biking are killed on Chicago’s streets. Thousands more are seriously injured,” their letter read. “Drivers and people riding in cars are likewise killed and injured in crashes that can be prevented by better infrastructure designs and more robust investment.”
Through July this year, two dozen people had been killed while walking, biking or riding motorized scooters in Chicago, according to city data. Thirty-eight people driving in motor vehicles had died.
The aldermen said that while the city “has made progress” in reducing fatal crashes on Chicago’s roads, “they remain stubbornly high because of a lack of committed action.”
The aldermen are asking for Chicago’s Transportation Department to be made exempt from a citywide hiring freeze and for the department to see an increase in its budgeted number of traffic engineers specifically. A dearth of traffic engineers, the aldermen wrote, “is a bottleneck that delays all traffic studies and road improvements.”
The aldermen also call for the city to “maintain — and where possible grow” CDOT’s funding during the city’s upcoming budget process, a request that could be a tall order as the city faces what promises to be a challenging budget cycle.
“We need safe infrastructure for everyone in our city. I just don’t believe that those are the places where we can cut corners,” said 47th Ward Ald. Matt Martin, who signed the letter. “A lot of what we’re talking about is not going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Among the letter’s other signatories are some of Martin’s fellow pedestrian and traffic safety committee members: Daniel La Spata, 1st, Ruth Cruz, 30th, Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth, 48th, Desmon Yancy, 5th, Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, Lamont Robinson, 4th, and Bennett Lawson, 44th. A list of signatories, and the full text of the letter, is available here.
Ald. Nicole Lee, in whose 11th Ward O’Neil was killed, told the Tribune Monday that she was signing onto the letter. She described the requests in the letter as “really thoughtful and frankly reasonable.”
Mayoral spokesperson Griffin Krueger said in a statement that Johnson’s office was reviewing the aldermen’s recommendations and was “open and committed to a productive dialogue and further conversations about how the City can best leverage its resources to continue building on our progress driving down traffic fatalities.”
“Street safety is community safety, and Mayor Johnson shares the urgency to invest in safe, sustainable infrastructure that serves every Chicagoan,” he said.
In a statement, CDOT spokesperson Erica Schroeder said the department has continued to fill vacancies through the city’s hiring process and “works closely with ward offices and community partners to identify and address traffic safety needs across the city.”
“This includes completing hundreds of traffic studies each year, along with analysis, design, and community engagement needed to deliver impactful traffic safety improvements,” she said, adding that the department “has been evaluating a variety of potential traffic safety improvements” along and near Halsted Street in coordination with Lee’s office.
Lee said she expected a full report on a traffic study in her ward later this fall. Asked specifically if she was supportive of protected bike lanes on the section of Halsted Street where O’Neil was killed — which has only a painted bike lane, without protective infrastructure like concrete — she said that was a “conversation” she “(wanted) to have with the entire community.”
The aldermen’s letter also calls for the city clerk’s office to distribute bike safety information to drivers, such as education about the “Dutch Reach,” or the practice of opening the driver-side door with the right hand. The maneuver is intended to help prevent crashes by causing drivers to look for oncoming bicyclists as they open their doors. Education about the Dutch Reach could happen as part of the annual renewal process for residents’ vehicle stickers, the aldermen said.
Diana Martinez, a spokesperson for the clerk’s office, said in an email Tuesday that the office had not received the letter but “would be willing to participate in efforts to keep bike riders safe.”
The letter also calls for an ordinance to make the city’s Smart Streets pilot program — which uses automated cameras mounted on city vehicles and buses to ticket drivers who block bus and bike lanes — permanent, with a path toward expanding it throughout the entire city. At the same time, the aldermen called for the city to work toward passing recommendations made around making Chicago’s automated speed camera enforcement more equitable and transparent.The Smart Streets pilot program, in which drivers who are captured on camera blocking bike lanes are issued warnings and then tickets of $250, is currently active only in part of the city. It’s also set to expire in December unless aldermen vote to extend it.
On Tuesday, the City Council’s pedestrian and traffic safety committee held a subject matter hearing on the Smart Streets program.
Staff from the city’s Departments of Finance and Transportation, which jointly manage the program, faced generally friendly questioning from committee members, including some who have called to expand the program and make it permanent.
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The city has collected $2.5 million under the pilot program — which is now active in an area bounded by Irving Park road to the north, 26th Street to the south and Ashland Avenue to the west — since it launched in 2024, Chuck Billows of the city’s Department of Finance told aldermen. More than $4 million in potential revenue is outstanding, he said, meaning the city has not yet successfully collected it.
Under the program, tickets are issued for bike lane, bus stop and bus lane violations as well as for some other parking violations, such as for expired parking meters.
CDOT Deputy Commissioner Sean Wiedel said the city has issued about 140,000 warnings and violations under the program since it launched. Seventy-five percent of those citations are zero-fine warnings, he said. Those warnings are working, he argued, noting that 84% of drivers who received a zero-fine warning never got a fine.
Drivers who block bike lanes put bicyclists in danger by forcing them into traffic, advocates say. Proponents of the Smart Streets program have argued the primary purpose of the program is to change behavior, more so than to generate revenue for the city.
Committee member Martin asked about when the city would want to see an indication of a reduction in violations under the program. “We have consistently pitched this as not something to help chip away the city’s budget gap, but something to at the end of the day change habits,” he said.
“We are definitely seeing that with bike and bus lane violations,” Wiedel said, “especially” when it comes to the drivers of individual passenger vehicles.
It’s harder to move the needle, he said, on delivery vehicles.
“That’s really the continuing, repeat offenders … I do think that it becomes a cost of doing business to some of the larger delivery companies.”
The Tribune has previously reported that package delivery companies are among the most consistent scofflaws of the city’s Smart Streets program.