CTA bus riders traveling northbound on Michigan Avenue in the Loop will soon ride in a dedicated bus lane, the city announced Wednesday.
The new bus lane, which officials hope will make bus travel faster, will span almost 1.5 miles of Michigan Avenue between Roosevelt Road to the south and Wacker Drive to the north. It will be located only on the northbound side of the street.
Work required to open the bus lane — including the installation of new pavement markings and signage — is expected to be completed by the Chicago Department of Transportation over the next seven to ten days, the city said.
“Chicagoans depend on our buses every day to get to work, attend school, access essential services and connect with their communities,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in a statement. “By creating a dedicated bus lane on Michigan Avenue, we are making a critical investment in reducing delays, improving service and ensuring that the thousands of residents who rely on public transit can get where they need to go.”
About 22,000 bus riders travel through the stretch of Michigan Avenue in question each weekday, the mayor’s office said in a news release. During the morning rush hour, CTA buses carry about 35% of the trips on Michigan Avenue but make up only 3% of the vehicles on the street, the city said.
As it stands, there are a little over six miles of bus lanes within the city’s central business district and about 23 miles throughout the entire city, Chicago Department of Transportation spokesperson Erica Schroeder said. She said the new bus lane is on the northbound side of the street only because the southbound lane “has more curb cuts, loading zones and other competing curbside uses that would require additional design work to accommodate an effective dedicated bus lane.”
Acting CTA president Nora Leerhsen, who has pointed to bus infrastructure as a priority for the agency, touted the new bus lane, saying it would make CTA buses “faster and more reliable.”
Last week, Leerhsen warned that Chicago is “lagging” some other major cities on bus lanes.
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The city currently has about 15 bus lanes, Leerhsen said during the agency’s monthly board meeting last week. Meanwhile, she said, New York has more than 140. San Francisco has 40 bus lanes, she said, and Los Angeles has 100.
“There’s a ton of opportunity there,” Leerhsen said.
Later in the meeting, the CTA’s board chair, Lester Barclay, asked the agency’s chief planning and innovation officer, Molly Poppe, what she would do to increase CTA ridership if she could do something “bold.”
“If you could do something bold to increase ridership, what would you do?” Barclay asked.
Poppe responded that the region should set a commitment for dedicated bus lanes.
“What I would say bold is let’s set an aggressive …100 miles, 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes in the region,” she said. “That also will allow us to move people better.”
Bus priority infrastructure isn’t something the CTA can do all by itself. In this case, the city said, the project required cooperation between the city and state transportation departments because Michigan Avenue is within the Illinois Department of Transportation’s jurisdiction.
Illinois transportation secretary Gia Biagi and CDOT commissioner William Cheaks Jr. both praised the project in statements Wednesday. So did Jamie Rhee, the interim executive director of the Northern Illinois Transit Authority, the new governing body that oversees the CTA.
“This new dedicated bus lane is the kind of change that NITA was created to deliver—working hand-in-hand with CDOT, IDOT and CTA to make travel faster, safer and more reliable for everyone who rides,” Rhee said.