The cyclist killed in a car crash Friday worked for the city’s program dedicated to preventing collisions on Chicago streets.
The Chicago Department of Transportation identified the cyclist as Riley O’Neil. The 35-year-old had worked for the department for over two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
O’Neil was riding south along the painted bike lane in the 3200 block of South Halsted Street before 5 p.m. Friday when a man exiting a white BMW hit him with his door, throwing O’Neil into traffic, according to Chicago police and a witness at the scene. O’Neil fell under the back wheels of an 18-wheeler semitruck also heading south.
Dr. Travis Curtis, a Bridgeport resident, was across the street when he saw the truck run over O’Neil near the parking garage for the Chicago police station at 3120 S. Halsted St. He rushed over and immediately rendered first aid to O’Neil, he told the Sun-Times.
Curtis, a practicing doctor who worked as a paramedic before medical school, said he performed CPR on an unresponsive O’Neill until paramedics arrived.
He said others at the scene saw the driver try to leave. Chicago police issued the driver, who has not been publicly identified, four citations: parking illegally, for unsafely opening the door, driving on a suspended license and driving without insurance.
“I shouted, ‘Don’t leave, don’t let them leave,’ and a woman got in front of the car I think to make sure they didn’t go anywhere,” Curtis said.
Paramedics took O’Neil to Stroger Hospital where he was pronounced dead. The medical examiner listed his death as an accident caused by a semitruck and bicycle collision.
“We need more protected bike lanes, especially on a busy street like Halsted; a lot of big rigs and semis go down that street every day,” said Curtis, an avid cyclist who rides to work every day. “I pass semitrucks every day on my bike. Having a protected bike lane is a way to prevent this kind of tragedy from happening.”
O’Neil was a planner for the transportation department’s Complete Streets program, which redesigns roads to make them safer for pedestrians, cyclists and drivers.
He was “a dedicated public servant committed to making Chicago’s streets safer and more accessible for everyone. He will be greatly missed,” CDOT wrote in a social media post.
O’Neil was one of Joe Schwieterman’s students in DePaul University’s graduate program for sustainable urban development from 2015 to 2017.
Schwieterman, also the director of DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development, said O’Neil stood out in his class, especially for his love of biking.
“I remember during the first day in class, his extraordinarily friendliness stood out,” Schwieterman said. “Riley found every excuse to jump on the bike and travel around the city. He would ride to class in rain, sleet or snow with no hesitation.”
During a school trip to Milwaukee, the class took an Amtrak train from Chicago; O’Neil instead biked the 90 miles — and beat the class to the station by about an hour, Schwieterman said.
“It’s a bitter irony that he lost his life on a bike,” he said.
After graduating, O’Neil continued to be a champion for better biking in Chicago. He worked for Quigg Engineering, which had contracts with the city for biking infrastructure, Schweiterman said. Among his accomplishments, O’Neil helped install over 1,000 bike racks throughout the city, created a database of public requests for bike racks and organized the distribution of abandoned bikes to local bike shops and community groups, according to his LinkedIn.
CDOT liked him so much, Schweiterman said, they hired him away from his engineering firm.
“That’s unusual,” he said. “It’s hard to get into CDOT.”
O’Neil was “the person we have to thank for Chicago’s significant growth in bike parking,” Bike Grid Now said in a statement.
The group is organizing a memorial bike ride for O’Neil at 7 p.m. Monday, stretching from Palmisano Park in Bridgeport to where O’Neil was killed on Halsted Street.
Christina Whitehouse, founder of Bike Lane Uprising, said that stretch of Halsted is a notorious “high-crash corridor.” But cyclists have few options for going north or south there, and “painted bike lines don’t stop anything,” she said.
“We’re seeing elected officials post that they’re so sorry, but many of them have done nothing to improve cycling safety in their wards or the city, so they have a role in this, too,” Whitehouse said. “I just really grieve for [CDOT employees] knowing they have to go to work and face the same pushback after their coworker who tried very hard to improve cycling safety was killed in unsafe bike lanes.”
O’Neil is at least the third cyclist hit and killed by a driver in Chicago this year; at least 10 pedestrians were killed by cars between January and April, per CDOT data.
In January, 63-year-old Roman Havelka was riding his bike when he was fatally hit by a driver in the 8600 block of West Irving Park Road on the far Northwest Side. Then in April, Damian Gomez was killed by a driver speeding at the intersection of West 63rd Street and South Kedzie Avenue. Two teenagers riding e-scooters were also hit and killed by drivers this year.