On New Year’s Day, shortly before noon, Kathy Schubert’s bicycle slid across the metal grating on the LaSalle Street bridge and she crashed to the ground. Ever since, she’s been trying to force the city to pave over or fill in the gratings on its major bridges.
She’s passionate about a lot of things related to biking. She helped form the Chicago Cycling Club, and she offers biking advice on two Web sites, one of which is devoted to carrying a dog on a bike. “I love so much about biking,” she says. “I like the freedom. It’s good for keeping your weight under control. I like to save the environment. I like it all.”
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So it wasn’t surprising that she was tooling along the southbound lane of LaSalle Street as part of an organized around-the-Loop ride on New Year’s Day. The bridge, like many others in the city, has metal grates that run lengthwise, creating one-inch ruts. “There was a car in front of me,” she says, “and I didn’t want to stop suddenly to avoid it because I’d have to put my foot down on the metal grates. I was wearing bicycle shoes with cleats, and they could have got stuck in the grating.”
On January 6 she wrote a letter to Miguel d’Escoto, commissioner of the Department of Transportation. “The mayor’s vision for this city is to make it the best city in which to ride a bicycle, but unless these bridges are modified to make cycling across them safer, that will never be the case,” she wrote. “Please direct your Deputy Commissioner of Bridges and Transit to make modifications on these bridges to make a smooth ride for bicycles.”
Unfortunately, he continued, the city can’t replace or fill in all the metal gratings without offsetting the delicate balance that enables the bridges to be raised and lowered. “The issue is one of simple physics: Chicago’s bascule bridges work as the French word ‘bascule’ implies, like a teeter-totter,” he wrote. “In order for the bridges to raise and lower properly, the weight of the decks and steel over the water must be offset, or ‘counterbalanced,’ by a proportional weight within the counterweights located below the roadway. In many cases, the existing bridges are at their limits for adding more counterweight to balance the increased loads of the deck.”
Steele says the city agrees it’s an important issue. “I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the city’s been embarked in the last ten years on a citywide bridge-rehab program,” he says. “And bicycle safety is part of what we’re looking into. There have been 20 or so bridges we’ve done in the last decade, and half of those we have been able to fill in the bridge deck. So yes, this is important to us. You’re probably not aware that Chicago’s got this recognition from Bicycle magazine–it was named as the best big city in the U.S. for bicycling. And we’re number two in North America, behind Toronto. So obviously the biking community is a big concern to us.”
He shrugged. “You know, I haven’t given it a lot of thought. But now that you mention it, I think it would be great if the city would resurface it. I’ll tell you which bridge is really bad–the one on Wells.”
