Frontier Cyclist, vol. 12: Chicago Edition

Posted by: Keith Meatto on: July 20, 2010

In: Bikes | Chicago | FP Top 5 | Frontier Cyclist
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A Chicago hill [Today we're thrilled to have a Frontier Cyclist dispatch from Chicago, a city famous for da blues, da Bears, community organizers with big dreams, and last weekend’s Pitchfork Music Festival. The Windy City is also home to our own Frontier Gastronomist and her sage advice about pork chops. And as literary lion James Tadd Adcox reveals, Chicago is a great city for cycling.]

About a year ago I bought a bike. Before that, I hadn’t been on a bike since I was maybe 12 years old, rocking a 10-speed in the suburbs of Raleigh, NC. The new bike was, as a friend pointed out, a break-up present to myself—I’d just ended a three-year relationship and I needed a distraction. What I discovered, almost as soon as I started biking again, was how much smaller the city became. I’d been living in Chicago for two years, walking and taking public transit, and thought I had it pretty easy, living near a 24- hour train line and a couple of all-night buses. But now, all sorts of places that I tended not to visit, either because they weren’t near bus lines or because they required a couple of transfers to reach, were suddenly nearby. In fact, nothing seemed all that far: Oak Park, which could take upwards of an hour to get to by train, turned out to be only four miles to the west. Even Hyde Park, Obama’s old neighborhood and home to the University of Chicago, was a doable-if-longish bike trip from my place in Ukrainian Village.

Granted, I haven’t biked in many other large cities. But for the sake of bravado if nothing else, I’m willing to argue that Chicago is one of the best urban areas for cyclists. Here are my Top 5 Reasons To Bike in Chicago

5. It Is Flat

There are people whose bikes have derailleurs in Chicago, but I don’t really understand why. There aren’t any hills. There are bridges, and occasionally because of these you might have to pedal uphill a little ways, but not enough to give you any trouble on a single-speed. Plus, single-speeds are lighter and easier to maintain.

Chicago: No Derailleur Required

4. There Are Well-Marked Bike Lanes

Bike lanes are pretty much everywhere in Chicago. There are a few higher-speed, high-traffic roads without lanes that I tend to avoid (Western Avenue, I’m looking at you). For the most part, major roads are very bike-friendly.

3. There’s a Lot of Traffic

At first this sounds like a reason against biking in Chicago—more traffic means more danger, right? This, at any rate, was what I thought when I started riding in Chicago. “Man,” I thought. “Look at all this traffic that I’m successfully negotiating. Clearly I am a badass.” I kept thinking this until my first couple of experiences biking in small-town North Carolina—where there’s not a lot of traffic, but all of it goes really fast, and drivers have little to no experience with bikes on the road. As in New York, because there’s so much traffic in Chicago, most of the time cars can’t get going faster than 30 miles an hour. And even if Chicago motorists occasionally express, loudly, their dislike of bikers, at least they know you’re there.
Chicago Winters: Not Mild

2. Winters

The thing about winters in Chicago is that each one you survive makes you a morally better person. This is doubly true if you survive the winter on a bike. Last fall I told myself that I wouldn’t worry about biking year-round, I’d just keep riding until the weather got so bad that it was more fun/less hassle to take public transit. The weather never actually got that bad, a fact that I suspect has more to do with the hassle of public transit than it does with Chicago’s mild winters. (N.B: Chicago’s winters are not mild). And I found that even in sub-zero weather, it still sucks less to ride a bike than it does to wait 30 minutes for the next overcrowded bus.


1. Because Mayor Daley Says So

What, you’re going to argue with this guy? He eats jerks like you for breakfast.

Mayor Daley: Cycling Enthusiast
James Tadd Adcox is the editor-in-chief of Artifice Magazine. He rides a Kona Paddy Wagon.