FOTP: BICYCLISTS WORST FRIEND
Friends of the Parks portrays itself as the friend of the bicyclist. In fact, it is really nothing more than the friend of bicyclists who currently use lakefront bike paths, period.
FOTP couldn’t care less about bicyclists throughout the city of Chicago, because the lakefront expansion plan that it so ceaselessly promotes will end up jeopardizing the envisioned expansion of all others bikeways in the city. Here’s why……
The city of Chicago has recently published the Bike 2015 Plan, which details the current and proposed (year 2015) bikeway network. Currently there are 315 miles of bike lanes/paths in the city. The goal is to increase that number to 500 miles by 2015. Virtually all of that increase would come from increases in bike lanes and signed routes.
The plan calls for upgrading existing lakefront paths, and expansion of those paths where possible. A key goal is to develop a network of paths that will be within one-half mile (4 blocks at most) of every Chicago resident. Nowhere is there a goal of providing immediate, instant access to lakefront paths, just steps from ones front door. But FOTP says one half mile is not fair, and that access should be immediate.
Only a small portion of the city population is within one-half mile of the lakefront path, and that is why an extensive network of paths and routes has been developed throughout the city. Simply put, the paths are being laid out where the bicyclists are and where the demand is, and most are not even close to the lakefront.
If allowed to be implemented, the FOTP expansion plan would dedicate money for lakefront paths, which on a per mile basis would be hundreds of times, if not thousands of times the cost per mile for planned bike lanes, lane markings, signed routes and the like, which are truly the focal point for the city of Chicago plan.
The FOTP plan would create at most 4 miles of bike paths. The Chicago 2015 Bike plan envisions creation of an additional 185 miles of signed routes, bike lanes and the like by 2015.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if the FOTP plan literally sucked up all the money that would have been allocated to increasing the integrated bike network by 185 miles so that its plan could increase the lakefront path by 4 miles? This hardly sounds like a sound economic choice, or logical equivalence, but its one that FOTP doesn’t want you to think about, or know about, as it zealously pursues it expansion plan.
If you are a bicyclist who enjoys traversing the city by bike, and looks forward to more routes each year, you had better peddle away from your “friends” at Friends of the Parks. Their plans will likely drain funds from citywide bike route expansion, all to benefit a tiny minority of bikers near the lake at your expense. It hardly seems fair.