Gia Biagi is secretary of the Illinois Department of Transportation.
Chicago might have too many nicknames. We’re the Windy City. The City of the Big Shoulders. City in a Garden. The Second City. The Third Coast. New ones seem to crop up all the time, and I’m saying right here that you’ll never get me to call it “Chi-Town.” But I’ve always been partial to “The City that Works.”
I have more than a decade working for the city in urban planning, parks and transportation, and for me, “The City that Works” means we’re a city that, well, works. And we work hard and smart. We grind, adapt, move forward, build and rebuild, figure it out, get big things done, and we ought to work well for the people who live here. The tilt toward action, movement, is part of the appeal.
The current “Horizon Lines: Visions for Chicago 2050” design competition launched by World Business Chicago asks us to propose bold and transformative ideas for Chicago’s future. This includes how we move around cities and what we might do with the streets and sidewalks we share that make up the public realm. In short, what transportation future should the City that Works work toward? It’s a critical question because the future is upon us.
Autonomous vehicles. Delivery drones. Sidewalk robots. Electric air taxis. Traffic management powered by artificial intelligence. Vehicles and infrastructure that talk to each other. An unending number of new technologies and tools seem to land on our streets every day. To prevent the proverbial tail (technology) from wagging the dog (our city), we need to design for the public realm we want, and the right tools will follow.
Too often, our conversations about mobility confuse the tool with the job we want the tool to perform. The job is to move us from where we are to where we need and want to be. The tool that dominates just about every discussion about movement in cities is the motor vehicle. What has been lost is the recognition that moving the car isn’t the point. It’s moving people. And transporting things. How we do that can take many forms. We have the tools and occasionally the will to invest in them, like the recent move to remake our public transit into a coherent transit authority that works better for people who need or choose to use it.
Any bold idea for the future of Chicago and its transportation system should question the primacy of personal vehicles. But that interrogation must also take seriously the fact that today, that same personal vehicle remains a critical lifeline for people in our city to get to the important places in their daily life. A truly transformative idea for our city’s future finds a way to make moving around our city easy, safe, cheap and convenient for everyone.
So, what does that future look like? And how do we get there from here?
We’re not a city that lacks imagination or ambition. We have a million possible futures. I’ll count myself among urbanists and planners who love a debate about what makes for a great city. There is a “greatest hits” in other cities that deserves a look. Barcelona superblocks! These are clusters of city blocks that push cars to the perimeter and build plazas where streets and parking once were. Tokyo scrambles! Those are traffic intersections where thousands of pedestrians are able to cross the street safely and easily in minutes, from all directions and all at once. How about Bogota’s Ciclovía! In Colombia’s capital city, every Sunday, a million people bike, walk, run and roll on 75 miles of streets temporarily closed to cars. And Paris! Rebuilding itself into a “15-minute city” with your everyday needs such as groceries, day care, jobs, schools and more within an easy walk or bike ride from where you live.
We might think replicating one of these ideas will deliver that perfectly walkable, equitable, sustainable and prosperous city of our hopeful imagination. Not likely. Many of these were hard wins, often fraught and contested in their local context. They don’t work well everywhere, and they don’t solve every problem. And all those cities still have the same kinds of challenges we do, even if the scale and proportion might differ. We should not pretend we can easily pick up another city’s big idea and drop it into Chicago. But we can take inspiration and invent a Chicago-style version that makes sense to us.
Horizon Lines asks us to be inspired and focus on ideas. But the most transformative thing we can do is focus on the work. What needs to be done is right in front of us. We need to fix our ability to deliver big ideas faster, especially ones that involve our infrastructure. Every minute an infrastructure project waits — due to red tape, political wrangling, indecision, prolonged negotiations, burdensome rules, lack of funding and too few hands to move it forward — the costs go up, support softens, champions go quiet and good projects die. The worst part is the public loses confidence in the institutions we count on to deliver what we need and want.
No bold vision is immune to the forces that can slow and even stop the delivery of the infrastructure that supports that grand idea. This cuts across every possible category of our collective aspirations for a better Chicago. If we want affordable housing, better schools, more parks, safe neighborhoods, reliable transit, economic growth, and more, in the next 25 years, we need to lock into our bend toward action.
Live and breathe our City that Works identity. Be that city that adapts, moves forward, builds and rebuilds, figures it out, gets big things done. Be that City that Works, better than ever before, for the people of Chicago.
Gia Biagi is secretary of the Illinois Department of Transportation.