'Transportation desert': It's tough to be without a car on the Far South and Southeast sides. Residents are looking for answers.

chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-southeast-side-tough-commute-getting-around-20190612-story.html

By Mary Wisniewski

The parking lot of the now-closed Rosebud Farm Stand is seen June 13, 2019, on the 500 block of West 130th Street in . It was the main grocery for the Golden Gate and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods for more than 60 years until it closed abruptly in August. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

Chicago’s Far South and Southeast sides have a lot going for them — the Pullman National Monument, an international port, Big Marsh Bike Park and a new factory for CTA rail cars. The area is also being talked about as a possible spot for the city’s first casino.

But it can be tough to get anywhere without a car. Industrial sites, the Bishop Ford Freeway, rail lines, truck-laden arterial roads and Lake Calumet all create challenges for those biking, walking or using public transit. The CTA Red Line stops at 95th Street, miles short of the city’s southern border, and residents sometimes need multiple buses to get anywhere.

Community and environmental groups are advocating several fixes — including a bike and pedestrian path along 130th Street, reducing the number of lanes along Torrence Avenue and a trail across Lake Calumet. Some money for improvements could come from the state 1/5 capital bill, or from a casino, but it will take a lot of cooperation from various government and private entities to get it all done, advocates say.

“We’re truly in a food desert, a financial desert, a transportation desert, a sidewalk desert, and a whole lot of other deserts,” said Deloris Lucas, an activist in the Golden Gate neighborhood in the city’s Riverdale community area. “What we’re trying to do is just uplift the community and connect it to all the open spaces in the area.”

“It’s an area that has immense potential, but its historic reliance on heavy industry has cut communities off from each other,” said Matt Gomez of the Active Transportation Alliance, an advocacy group. “We’re trying to provide reliable connections.”

Lucas lives near the old Rosebud Farm Stand store on the 500 block of East 130th, which was the main grocery for the Golden Gate and Altgeld Gardens neighborhoods for more than 60 years until it closed abruptly last August. To get to shopping now, residents need to go miles away, taking two or three buses, said Lucas, a semiretired teacher who founded the We Keep You Rollin’ Bike and Wellness Group.

Lucas’ group is part of the Southside Trailblazers, a coalition of advocates who live around Lake Calumet. One of their wishes is to get a bike-pedestrian side path along 130th Street between Ellis Avenue and Indiana Avenue. It is currently a forbidding stretch of road, busy with truck traffic, with just a few patches of sidewalk. While she was showing visitors the area last week, Lucas just missed cutting her foot on a broken liquor bottle lying in the grass beside the road.

The side path, which would cost about $1.95 million, was recommended in a recent Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning report on Riverdale.

2/5 Vehicles drive on 130th Street between Altgeld Gardens Homes and Hegewisch on June 13, 2019. The region lacks safe transportation paths for those walking or biking.. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

Activists also want a trail to connect Riverdale to the Little and Beaubien Forest Preserve, and a monument honoring abolitionists, since the area was a link in the Underground Railroad.

To make it easier to get between the Pullman neighborhood and Riverdale, the Trailblazers want a paved north-south bike and pedestrian path through Metropolitan Reclamation Water District land from 111th to 130th Streets. The proposed “Kensington Trail” would run parallel to Cottage Grove Avenue, which is a rough spot for biking or walking, said activist Tom Shepherd. “There’s lots of fly dumping, trucks and glass,” he said.

Shepherd said the previous water district Executive Director David St. Pierre had been receptive to the trail idea. But agency spokesperson Allison Fore said the land is not available, as it is being used for the district’s corporate purposes.

Advocates also want a trail through the north end of Lake Calumet between Pullman and Big Marsh Park, which has an area for stunt riding and mountain biking. Right now, the only way to Big Marsh by bike is along , which has bike lanes but also a scary amount of truck traffic. Gomez said that an engineering study would be necessary to determine how such a path could be built.

3/5 Another possible project would be a “road diet” for Torrence Avenue, which runs north and south between Lake Calumet and the Calumet River, said Active Transportation Alliance advocacy manager Julia Gerasimenko. This would mean reducing the four-lane road to two lanes, with a protected or separated bike lane.

Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, 10th, is “skeptical” about removing a lane of traffic from Torrence because of all the truck traffic, but her office does like the idea of building a separated bike path, said John Heroff, of Garza’s office. Garza also favors other improvements, including better bike connections to Big Marsh, Heroff said.

Heroff said Garza’s office is looking at the possibility of using tax increment financing to build a bike path along 122nd Street, and having a path go through Indian Ridge Marsh Park into Big Marsh. “If there was a casino, that could be a help with improvements getting to Big Marsh,” said Heroff.

Perhaps the most complicated fix for the area is being sought on the border of the Chicago neighborhood of Hegewisch and the village of Burnham. This improvement would fill in a gap on the Burnham Greenway, a bike and pedestrian path that slices through the southeast part of Chicago and neighboring suburbs. The Greenway could eventually become part of an even larger bike beltway in Northern , connecting north to Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood and west to the Mississippi River.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources plans to build a trail from 126th Street to Brainard Avenue in the village of Burnham this fall or next spring, said Ders Anderson, greenways director for Openlands. But the way is intersected by five busy railroad tracks. People who want to follow the trail, or who just want to exit the South Shore or Metra train at Hegewisch station and cross into Burnham, can wait 20 minutes to more than an hour for freight trains to clear the tracks, said Anderson.

A solution is to build a pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the tracks, at a cost of $7 million. Cook County has agreed to take over management of the project, and the Illinois Commerce Commission has agreed to contribute $2 million, said John Yonan, superintendent of the county’s Department of Transportation and Highways.

The county has made paying for the bridge part of its state capital bill request, and it could get other funding, Yonan said.

“There’s some real optimism there will be the money to fund construction,” said Yonan, who said building could start as early as 2022.

Lucas said she hopes that the area’s transportation problems will start getting the attention they deserve.

4/5 “It’s so sad that we’ve been overlooked for so many years,” Lucas said. “But we are a part of Chicago.”

An earlier version of this story misstated the address of the Rosebud Farm Stand store and misspelled Brainard Avenue. [email protected]

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Mary Wisniewski is the transportation reporter and Getting Around columnist for the Tribune. She joined the Tribune in 2016 after stints as a general news reporter at Reuters and transportation reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She has written an award-winning biography of Chicago novelist Nelson Algren.

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