This month, safe streets advocates in Chicago have been mourning one of their own.
On Friday, June 5, Riley O’Neil, 35, a Complete Streets planner for the city’s transportation department, was pedaling home to the South Side’s Bridgeport neighborhood. He was riding on Halsted Street, one of the Chicago’s busiest bike commuting corridors, in a non-protected bike lane. A driver in a parked car suddenly opened his door in O’Neil’s path. The skilled urban cyclist tried to swerve out of the way but clipped the door, and was thrown under the rear wheels of an oncoming semi, losing his life.
“Riley O’Neil led Chicago’s bike parking program for several years and completely transformed it,” his coworker and good friend David Powe wrote in a eulogy soon after the tragedy. “More recently, he was helping lead both CDOT’s school zone safety work and bus priority projects. He cared deeply about making biking, rolling, walking, and riding better for everyone.”
A few days after his passing, on Monday, June 8, hundreds of livable streets advocates, including several City Council members, gathered in Bridgeport for a memorial ride and “die-in” protest at the crash site, which happened to be next to a police station. The event was organized by Chicago, Bike Grid Now!, a grassroots group that is pushing for 10 percent of Chicago’s streets to be transformed into low-stress, pedestrian-and-bike-priority routes.
Specifically, Bike Grid is demanding that the City install protected bike lanes on the entire length of Halsted Street. Building these facilities involves relocating the bikeway curbside, with a physical barrier such as concrete curbs and/or parked cars to shelter bicycle and e-scooter users from moving traffic. The activists pointed out that if Riley had been riding in a protected lane, instead of just stripes of paint on the road, he’d still be alive to continue his important work.
Residents of cities like Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Mexico City, Bogotá, and most recetly Paris eventually understood that creating walkable, bikeable, transit-friendly streets is worth reallocating some space used for moving and storing large metal boxes. But in the U.S., that’s generally a foreign concept…