After taking a second look, I noticed that the lane uses ideas I've heard about but haven't seen together in action. First, it's a two lane bicycle path, even though car traffic on Dearborn is one-way.
The bike lane is along the curb. If you look in the background, you'll see that there's still off-the-curbside street parking. There's a striped buffer zone in between the parking lane and the bike lane so that no one hits a biker while they open the car door. Pretty smart.
It didn't take a monstrous multi-million dollar construction project either. It just took a weekend of work crews repainting lines. It eliminates one car lane but traffic wasn't too crowded on this road anyway.
The bike lane will go through downtown Chicago. I found the city press release and noticed this quote:
“The Dearborn Street two-way protected bike lane project will balance roadway space to ensure pedestrians, transit users, bicyclists and motorists can travel along and across the street safely,” Klein said.
Roads in downtown Springfield cater to one type of user. They're designed for workers to get in and out of downtown as quickly as possible. That's understandable since there's a large population who commute from the edge of town, or the surrounding small towns, and go home as soon as the workday ends.
The many one-ways are not so convenient for out-of-town visitors, or anyone attempting to travel from one downtown destination to another. The clear message communicated by Springfield's downtown roads is, "get in and out fast, but don't stick around."
Springfield's narrow focus on cars is a barrier to downtown bike lanes as well. Some city leaders react with shocked indignation at the suggestion of removing a little curbside parking or painting new stripes on a road. But, reaching the goals of attracting new people and business activity to downtown requires rethinking 30-year old assumptions about transportation.
Edit: I'm adding a pic with a better view of the parking lane and buffer zone...
