The city has finished building a bike-friendly path on one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhood roads following the death of a 16-year-old cyclist and calls for safety improvements by the local City Council member.
The milelong stretch of Long Avenue between Belmont Avenue and Irving Park Road — linking Belmont Cragin and Portage Park — now features a reduced 20-mph speed limit, curb extensions that shorten crosswalks, speed humps and two new one-way sections to filter vehicle traffic to Addison Street.
The city’s Transportation Department says the new “greenway” is safer for cyclists, pedestrians and people in vehicles — and addresses neighbors’ concerns that the street was being used as a shortcut for drivers.
The Transportation Department began planning the greenway after two serious crashes on the stretch of road. Sixteen-year-old Joshua Anleu was fatally struck by a driver in October 2023 at Long and Waveland avenues. Another cyclist, 18, was seriously injured months later in a hit-and-run crash at Grace and Long.
Those crashes prompted advocates to call for safety improvements on the street to help slow down drivers that neighbors said often sped and blew through stop signs.
Local Ald. Ruth Cruz (30th) began working with Transportation Department on “day one” to make sure the greenway was built, the rookie alderperson told the Sun-Times Tuesday.
The project, funded by CDOT, uses painted curb extensions and flexible, plastic bollards. Those may be replaced with more robust concrete curb extensions in a year or so, with the help of state funds, she said.
Cruz said some neighbors have thanked her for helping make the greenway. Others, however, are unhappy with the attempt to slow down traffic.
“Change is hard. So I understand that not everyone is going to be on board with these improvements. I hope with time they see how they benefit the whole community,” Cruz said.
The stretch of Long Avenue has one of the worst safety records in the city. Long Avenue is among the top 10% of streets for serious injuries and deaths, according to a CDOT brochure from an April community meeting. The stretch of Long Avenue between Belmont and Addison has more crashes than 95% of all other neighborhood streets.
The city found that many drivers were using Long Avenue as a shortcut. Sixty percent of people traveling on Long Avenue live in the neighborhood, according to the city. But people from outside the neighborhood caused 80% of the crashes with injuries, and 100% of crashes that resulted in serious injury or death.
Long Avenue averaged about 4,000 vehicles per day, well above the average 1,000 to 2,500 seen on average neighborhood streets, according to the city.
Christina Whitehouse, head of the advocacy group Bike Lane Uprising, praised the city for building the improvements “relatively quickly by Chicago standards.” Still, she said she hopes the city builds more robust “physical protection,” such as protected bike lanes, instead of plastic bollards and painted contraflow lanes, which she said confuses drivers.