Thankfully, the 40-year-old bicyclist who was struck by a Suburu driver near the Navy Pier Flyover construction site last week wasn’t seriously injured. But the crash sparked a new conversation about why the $60 million initiative to build an overpass for cyclists and pedestrians, to improve safety near Illinois’s second-most-popular tourist attraction, is taking so damn long.
“We at the city have discussed this, we have debated it, we have deferred it for decades, and now it’s time to build it,” Emanuel said at the 2014 groundbreaking. At the time, CDOT announced that the overpass would be completed in 2018, which means the project is technically still on schedule.
“It makes me weep to think of how much good could have been done for cyclists and pedestrians in Chicagoland for the $60 million they’re wasting on that ill-conceived boondoggle,” Reho wrote.
The day after the Grand/Lower LSD crash, I got a message from one of the anonymous creators of a new Facebook page called Complete the Navy Pier Flyover. And Soon. The sender told me there are three people involved with the campaign, but they need to remain anonymous to avoid jeopardizing their day jobs. He or she said the group was “organized to put pressure on the city to complete the Navy Pier Flyover without further delays. With increased usage on the [existing trail], we are very concerned about public safety.”
While there was a tight deadline to complete phase one, Claffey says the city needed more time to line up funding for phase two—from the Ogden Slip to the river, starting this summer—and phase three—the southernmost flyover portion crossing the river, slated to start this fall.
Jorge also pushed back at the notion that the $60 million project is a boondoggle, noting that it will prevent crashes and injuries, and improve access to Navy Pier. “When are cyclists ever afforded luxuries in our car culture?” he wrote.
