The Chicago-style hot dog—or, the danger of confusing transportation problems with city problems

It's nice when a single policy can deepen the symbiotic relationship between cities and mass transit. But when it can't, forcing it risks obscuring other priorities.

ETA: see note at the end regarding Metra. My thanks to readers for the feedback!

The argument brewing over a proposal to renovate North DuSable Lake Shore Drive (Lake Shore) in Chicago furnishes the latest specific case of a general phenomenon: urban transportation governance so broken it leads only to a menu of mediocre options, with no genuinely attractive choices. This is another case of what happens when a single project or policy is expected to carry weight for multiple competing or unrelated priorities, a phenomenon Ezra Klein dubbed the everything bagel and that I am extending here to the Second City in the form of the Chicago-style hot dog.

The metaphor reminds us not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good—if infrastructure planning requires that every single topping be included, often the result isn’t a better project, it is no project at all or one with low utility. Similarly, Chicago-style hot dogs are delicious and famously include a lot of toppings, but sometimes a Costco dog is enough.

My last post was about the everything-bageling of congestion pricing in NYC; this one is about the plan, and the opposition to the plan, to remake Lake Shore.

The latest iteration of the plan, Redefine the Drive, is fairly typical of the genre. It’s drawn up by a consulting firm (because the relevant agencies lack capital planning capacity) and features the de rigueur fanciful renderings. It would cost a fortune to implement—about $3.5 billion estimated. It promises some green features, some active transportation infrastructure, a ton of public meetings, and a stream of federal grant money. It largely fails to respond to criticisms detailed as early as 2018.

Fancy rendering from Redefine the Drive.

I don’t have a strong opinion on the merits. But that’s because the merits, as defined, don’t scratch the surface of the city’s challenges as they relate to Lake Shore.

As I see them, the two relevant priority issues are that the city’s public transit system is managed incompetently and Chicago’s crown jewel—the Lake Michigan lakefront—is cut off from the city by what is in all but name a highway.

Unfortunately, these longstanding problems do not lend themselves to remediation via individual projects or grants.

A call to halt Redefine the Drive

Opposition to the plan is being led by group of aldermen urging a halt to all construction on the project. Backed by transit advocates, they call for “a smaller, more efficient footprint that includes sustainable, multimodal 21st-century transportation solutions to accommodate all users and provide safe and easy access to our lakefront parks and other resources.” They want “modern solutions that prioritize non-car travel and put pedestrians, cyclists, public transit users, recreation, green space, commercial growth and property values¹ ahead of cars.”

What’s not to like? Unfortunately some of the goals in question contradict one another and others can’t really be accomplished in this project. And the decision to pursue the full Chicago dog rather than do the hard thing—confront these limitations—underscores the gravity of the everything-bagel problem bedeviling public policy, especially in deep blue cities and states.

What’s the deal with Lake Shore?

For the uninitiated, Lake Shore Drive (recently renamed DuSable Lake Shore Drive) is one of the main north-south arteries in Chicago. It is actually a section of the 2,000 mile U.S. Route 41, which in Illinois runs from the Indiana border at the southeast, up the lake, and then inland north by northwest parallel to the lake to Wisconsin. The Chicago Tribune editorial board calls it “the most beautiful and famous ribbon of asphalt in the Midwest.” There’s nothing magic about the asphalt itself, but the view is lovely and moreover the link the fast-moving road provides is very useful because it connects many relatively dispersed population and commercial centers in a region where the frequency, safety, and user experience of transit are mediocre and in decline and no one with the power to fix it is doing anything about it.

In the main, Lake Shore does not pose a transportation problem. Notably, there are bus routes on Lake Shore already. Dedicated lanes would accelerate them, but this is not the main problem. Lake Shore is a city problem.

Map from Wikipedia entry for U.S. Route 41.

Lake Shore is an eight-lane fast-moving highway that cuts off the city from its waterfront. It is the reason why Chicago is a city by the lake, rather than on the lake. And it can be difficult to find the poorly marked, sometimes infrequent entrances to pedestrian tunnels and bridges that traverse Lake Shore affording access to the beach. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the city was actively discouraging people from accessing the lake—especially in the most popular areas, on the near north side. As you can see from the right-hand side of the above rendering, even the post-treatment Lake Shore will continue to separate the densest neighborhoods of Chicago from the lake with a 100+ foot wide river of fast-moving traffic.

If you’ve been to other cities that are on a beach—Miami, Santa Monica, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv come to mind—you’ll observe that the phenomenon of a city separated from its waterfront by a big road is widespread. Include river cities and it’s close to universal. This is for historical reasons usually having to do with the location of ports and industry, which in turn dictated the alignment of rights of way (initially railways in most cases), which provided a place to put the wide, fast roads deemed necessary by twentieth century planners, which roads now frequently separate city-dwellers from their waterfronts.

City problems vs. transportation problems

While Lake Shore is preeminently a city problem, closing Lake Shore would create a transportation problem. The road carries around 170,000 vehicles a day. Contrary to some motivated readings of the literature on the subject, these trips are not going to simply vanish or convert to transit. They will overwhelmingly clog adjacent roadways instead.

In terms of its urban downsides, Lake Shore is similar to the water-fronting highways in another major city: the West Side Highway and FDR Drive in New York City. Adding bus lanes and similar infrastructure to these roads would serve constructive purposes on the margin, but the main issue isn’t that they lack the infrastructure. It’s that they cut off the city from the waterfront and provide a constant, loud soundtrack diminishing the enjoyment of the adjacent parks and natural beauty.²

In Chicago, this is a bigger deal than in New York. While water access and ports were central to the growth of both cities historically, today physical and visual access to water serves mainly as a lifestyle amenity.³ Few big cities offer a waterfront as grand as Chicago’s. Global warming means it is more enjoyable more of the year.

Lake Michigan is Chicago’s chief competitive lifestyle amenity. Unlike NYC, there are not a wealth of beaches and other naturally beautiful things within easy reach by transit or short car ride. Chicagoland is flat and the parks, hiking, etc. in the area pale in comparison to their NYC counterparts. In my experience, having lived in both cities, Chicagoans also love their beach, whereas one can live in NYC for a decade and never go to the beach simply because the city is bigger and offers more things to do. Also, from a recreational standpoint a lake is more useful than a river or tidal estuary (like the East River) that is deep, fast-moving, gross, and notoriously dangerous to swim in.

In brief, removing Lake Shore Drive would do more good in Chicago than the equivalent action in NYC. That’s what makes this problem so vexing. The potential upside is if anything bigger than reformers are presenting, but the changes needed are impossible to envision under present conditions—namely, the dysfunctionality of the CTA.

An image from Redefine the Drive that I think is intended to simply list the agencies involved, but with a two-way arrow that (to me) implies appropriate confusion over responsibility and whether this group project is even happening before the end of the semester.

Avoiding the elephant in the room

The Chicago aldermen and allied activist groups want to shut down Redefine the Drive (including even public meetings about it) until Lake Shore is transitified and bikeified. Here is an image from Chicago Bike Grid Now depicting what they want done with the highway, which, again currently carries 170,000 vehicles a day at something like 40-50mph:

This is where the identity of the road in question becomes interesting. Somewhat comically to me, the people on the “it’s a road, and roads are for cars” side of the debate engage in a motte-bailey style of argument where they drape their claims in aesthetics (Lake Shore is “the most beautiful and famous ribbon of asphalt in the Midwest”) and then retreat (in the same editorial) to the cold reality that suburbanites travel the route by necessity because the interstates are jammed. In other words, this is a major piece of infrastructure that exists for important economic and political reasons and we should not lightly reduce its capacity—a more defensible claim.

But the “reform” side is similarly deluded, in my view, about the ability of its plan to accomplish its stated goals. If Lake Shore is to be a major transit artery as well as a bikeway and road for cars, it is going to be quite fast and there’s going to be a fair amount of traffic, including loud traffic from buses and cars. This will result in the lake still being cut off from the city—which is, again, the main problem (objectively in my view) with Lake Shore. It won’t be quite as bad as the status quo. But the difference will be limited.

Basically no one wants to tackle the operational challenges

The main problem with transportation in Chicago is the chronic underperformance of the CTA on every metric. I would have said this in 2019 as well. But today, as compared to the years leading up to the pandemic, a far higher proportion of riders who have alternatives use them.

On most L routes, frequency is lower than pre-pandemic levels and crime and disorder (including open marijuana use and people turning train cars into bathrooms) are higher, especially outside of rush hour. The CTA has a ridership crisis and solving it under present constraints, including a climate where rules enforcement is politically untenable and the police are understaffed and don’t want to do it anyway, is an intractable chicken-egg problem.

Transit systems in cities around the country have faced a version of this problem, but the CTA is underperforming its peer systems in other cities on these and other metrics. CTA President Dorval Carter is attracting a lot of scrutiny, but so far has managed to stay in office.

The CTA, somewhat unusually for an American transit agency, is substantially a city rather than state agency. Four of the seven members of its governing board are appointed by the mayor of Chicago, with the remaining three by the governor of Illinois.

Currently, the CTA’s big project is an extension of the red line for $3.6 billion (estimated)—about the same cost as Redefine the Drive, though both will surely surge higher. The red line already connects many underbuilt areas that have low ridership with the urban core, yet this connection has failed to inspire more building in those areas. The extension, if completed, will increase the length of the line by 5.6 miles to areas that largely suffer from the same problems.

In other words, the CTA’s main project right now is in the area of capital improvements, not operations, and its completion will likely exacerbate its already considerable operational challenges. It is possible some good will come of it anyway—there are efforts to couple red line construction with land use reforms—but what it’s not doing is helping to make the CTA a competitor to the car, make Chicago more competitive as a city, or meaningfully increase transit accessibility.

So what’s the answer?

I’m left finding it hard to get fired up about the plans for Lake Shore one way or the other. The tweaks are modest. The alternative visions are more ambitious, but mostly in the wrong domain: transportation rather than city. They would increase transit access in an area that already has pretty good bus service (contra my larger points about the CTA)—and ditto for bikes—but would leave the city-lake relationship severed. And this is little surprise. If you read the demands carefully, it seems a major objective is to build an everything-bagel transportation coalition in Chicago. (That the policy payoff here is not that significant makes this especially dubious in my view, but I’m not an organizer.)

Given a magic wand, one might be tempted to do a Big Dig-style burial of Lake Shore and/or a huge expansion of transit so that lake and city could be reunited. But in a world where construction costs for both roads and transit have gone stratospheric, this is off the table. Which is a shame, because that would be a true Chicago dog.

There is no win-win here. I’m glad I don’t have a job that compels me to have a capital-O Opinion about this plan. Because the fact of the matter is, the plan is not the problem.

Redefining the problem

Both the proponents and the opponents of the project want to redefine Lake Shore, a big task. I would suggest going bigger.

The proximate problem is Lake Shore, but the ultimate problem is mismanagement at the CTA and governance in Chicago. In contrast to coastal cities, the city has very spotty demand. Demand⁴ in some areas, like the West Loop, the Milwaukee Avenue corridor, and on the north side (especially by the lake), is high by Midwestern standards. Certain other areas, like Bronzeville and Bridgeport, have experienced some overflow demand. This should be understood in the context of a Rust Belt city still suffering the effects of deindustrialization and suburbanization (which is still ongoing, currently to Indiana⁵). Other neighborhoods have immense amounts of vacancy, distress, and empty lots.

Five years ago, Pete Saunders memorably characterized Chicago’s demographic flows as one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit, and while one can debate the proportions it’s a useful anchor. Chicago is not New York, and demand is not as wide or as deep. Parts of the city, including adjacent to L stations with relatively rapid service to the Loop, still look like they were bombed out.

The upshot of the San Francisco/Detroit dynamic is that Chicago has a more limited set of policy options. The usual path has been to build a politics around encouraging more economic dynamism so that the city generates enough resources to help lift up its many struggling areas and residents without pushing out more residents, employers, and tax dollars from Chicagoland. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that this is not the priority of the current mayoral administration (a topic for another day).

In sum, the dysfunction of the CTA and the unmet challenge of harnessing the city’s strengths are the underlying challenges here. And, ultimately, that dysfunction is to blame for the CTA being unsafe or unusable much of the time—which is one reason why Chicago needs major car arteries like Lake Shore, which is why we can’t have nice things like a nice lake-city interface. It feels flip to say, and it is, but the reason the renderings of Lake Shore don’t fix Lake Shore is that no rendering can fix mismanagement of the city and its transit agency.

ETA: A couple readers observed that the post doesn’t discuss Metra, the Chicagoland regional rail service. Fair enough. This wasn’t intentional, but the reason is simple: Metra is so good if it serves your needs. The problem is when your local station or the terminus of your line is not convenient to your destination—problems to which rail is ill-suited, especially in a region with significant job sprawl. For this reason I am skeptical that ridership on Metra, even an improved Metra, can be leveraged into a true revamp of Lake Shore. This is a shame because Metra is actually in a much better place from a governance perspective than the CTA, and unlike the CTA is adapting to post-pandemic travel patterns.

1. The inclusion of property values on this laundry list is interesting. I would not take it at face value—for example, the fact, which is likely, that car access enhances property values in some areas would be unlikely to persuade the aldermen—but it is a productive frame, in my view.

2. Large, untolled urban freeways also have the effect of encouraging more vehicle travel, especially from outlying areas of the city or the suburbs, but to the extent this is undesirable it counsels more in favor of congestion pricing or other tweaks than closing the highways. The inducement of demand is certainly something to consider when building a highway in the first place, but that’s not the fact pattern here.

3. In Chicago, the lake is also the main source of drinking water for a large population, but that is orthogonal to the Lake Shore issue, unless you want to lean into the issue of tire particles, but this is getting a bit niche even for a Substack footnote.

4. Price per square foot of real estate is a reasonable proxy for demand in this context.

5. Parts of northwest Indiana historically suffered from high levels of pollution, but air quality is improving, which is increasing the quantity of land desirable for residential development. It might be interesting to explore the spatial impacts of such trends.