50 signatures reached
To: Redefine the Drive
Imagine Lake Shore as the Boulevard It Once Was
Lake Shore Drive began its life as a leafy boulevard with crosswalks at street corners allowing frequent access to Lincoln Park and Lake Michigan. Lake Shore was still a busy street with six lanes of traffic and a landscaped median, but it was permeable to the nearby residents who could easily cross back and forth from the city side to the park side. Think of Michigan Avenue across from Grant Park.
Last century's motorway building frenzy scrapped the boulevard, filled in parts of Belmont Harbor, paved over park space, and erected a formidable barrier between Lake Shore neighbors and the world renowned Lakefront.
Motorways are only constructed to do two things: move cars and move them fast. Highway engineers, along with Big Oil and the automotive industry, have learned the high art of owning any discourse around urban transport and urban design. It's time for Lakefront residents to reclaim those discussions affecting the future of our street.
Right now, 'Redefine the Drive' wants to pave over even more of our park, fill in even more of Belmont Harbor, and further isolate Lake Shore neighbors from the park and Lake right in our front yards.
'Redefine' is looking resolutely back at mid-20th century notions to fix 21st century issues, meanwhile completely ignoring the needs of the generations of Chicagoans yet to come.
Join me in reaching out directly to 'Redefine the Drive' and beginning the long process to reclaim our narrative, our voices, and our street.
Why is this important?
Dear Redefine the Drive,
Attached please find the signatures of Lake Shore residents, neighbors, and allies voicing vehement opposition to your project to rebuild Lake Shore Drive as ever more extensive motorway infrastructure.
Your project is short sighted and does a severe disservice to residents up and down Lake Shore and Marine Drives.
The only language you seem to speak is vehicles per hour. Life is more than moving cars and moving them fast.
These are a few of the negative impacts that a Lake Shore motorway currently embodies and which would be exacerbated by your project:
- Accessibility: Among nine Chicago parks and 44 park edges surveyed in 2022, Lincoln Park between Belmont and Montrose ranked nearly dead last in park accessibility. Only one park with an Interstate highway as its boundary and another with a Metra viaduct as its boundary impeded access more. For the 33,000 residents living in some of the densest Census tracts in the city, Lakefront life means that crossing the street is significantly inferior to any other park frontage in the city.
- Spatial Pollution: The motorway footprint between Belmont and Montrose blankets +/-35 acres; a Lake Shore boulevard would return almost 20 of those acres to active, usable green space.
- Visual Pollution: A limited access, divided motorway ruins the beauty of our park and Lakefront through its very existence. It is possible to build a less visually intrusive motorway, but by nature, motorways are visually intrusive.
- Auditory Pollution: Midnight drag races aside, if you build a motorway, decibel readings in the surrounding area, both in the park and in neighboring buildings, increase. Slow the motor traffic down, reduce the street footprint, and noise pollution recedes.
- Health Pollution: Even if all autos were EV tomorrow, particulate pollution from the friction between tires and pavement is the more grave health concern for young, old, respiratory impaired, and really all lungs in near proximity to a motorway. There is no way around this impact except to reduce lanes and reduce speeds.
- Safety: We all know that Force equals Mass times Acceleration. If we plug in higher and lower values for Acceleration, it is readily apparent that high speed crashes are more dangerous for motorists. If we plug in higher and lower values for Mass, it is clear that pedestrians, navigating park access which is intersected by on-ramps and off-ramps, are in a more perilous position than if they were accessing the park at a crosswalk with stop lights.
Most significantly, your project incorrectly answered the very first question you had: "What do we build?"
Your insistence on only considering motorways or various ilks thereof and refusing to acknowledge the boulevard roots of our street casts your entire project into question.
Based on these concerns, we invite you to engage in some retrospection about your answer to that first question, admit that you got the answer wrong, and realize that it is not yet too late to invite urban designers to imagine a Lake Shore boulevard.
Thank you,
The Residents, Neighbors, and Allies of Lake Shore Drive