LAKE SHORE DRIVE — Once every year, starting at sunrise on the first Sunday of September, the waves lapping at the concrete edge of Lake Michigan can be heard from the middle of the city’s most idyllic roadway.
For five early morning hours, DuSable Lake Shore Drive is quiet. The late-summer breeze is met with silence.
Bike the Drive, the annual event that shuts down Lake Shore Drive to cars and opens it up to thousands of cyclists, bikers and other recreation-minded Chicagoans, is back this weekend for its 25th year.
For one Sunday morning, gone is the usual drone of car engines, high-pitched honking and the occasional crash. In its place: thousands of people pedaling, talking and taking in views of the lake and skyline from the middle of one of Chicago’s busiest roads.
The event, a fundraiser for the Active Transportation Alliance, has grown into one of the city’s most beloved annual traditions. And as Bike the Drive marks its 25th anniversary, its popularity — paired with growing debate over the future of Lake Shore Drive and criticism of the state’s plans to redevelop it — has some Chicagoans wondering what the lakefront could look like if the quiet lasted longer than five hours.
Could Chicago’s most famous highway be closed to cars for good?
“People think of it as this geologic element, like something that came into being with the Earth,” Active Transportation Alliance’s Jim Merrell said of Lake Shore Drive. “It was built by people. … It’s something that we can also change for future generations.”
Car Free LSD: Pipe Dream Or ‘Real Alternative’
For most Chicagoans, the possibility of closing Lake Shore Drive to cars is more pipe dream than a serious proposal. For others, it could seem preposterous.
More than 140,000 vehicle trips take place on Lake Shore Drive per day, along with thousands of bus rides, according to the Chicago Department of Transportation.
For all of the consternation about the highway from residents and transit advocates, it remains one of the city’s most used north-south transportation corridors.
Bike the Drive offers a glimpse of what happens when that equation is temporarily flipped.
“It’s a visceral and powerful manifestation of what our mission is about,” Merrell said. “It’s a real alternative to the car-centric world that we live in.”
Active Transportation Alliance, the transportation advocacy group that runs Bike the Drive, has spent decades pushing for more walking, biking and transit options in Chicago. The event grew out of a smaller ride, where about 12,000 people were allowed to use a small stretch of the road.
In 2002, the ride expanded to close 15 miles of the highway and 25 years later, the ride hosts about 20,000 people every year.
What makes Bike the Drive so powerful, Merrell said, is for five hours, Chicagoans get to see a familiar piece of infrastructure from an entirely different perspective.
The ride stretches about 15 miles from Hollywood Avenue to the Museum of Science and Industry. From a car, Lake Shore Drive can feel almost like a moving observation deck, with the lake on one side and the city’s skyline on the other.
On a bike, the experience is slower and more grounded.
“You get a much more intimate experience of the city and the lakefront and the neighborhoods,” Merrell said. “You start to see the scale of things differently.”
The road itself becomes impossible to ignore.
“It’s a vast slab of concrete cutting through what is our city’s front yard,” Merrell said.
People gather near Fullerton Beach along the Lakefront Path during the warm weather on May 21, 2021. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
A Lakefront For Everyone
The idea that the city’s most picturesque highway is more than a transportation corridor goes back much further than Bike the Drive.
Chicago’s lakefront was once an industrial edge of the city, crowded with rail yards, docks and smokestacks. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, civic leaders and residents fought to preserve it as public space.
The 1909 Plan of Chicago, developed by architects and city planners Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, envisioned an almost continuous chain of parks along the shoreline. Entrepreneur Aaron Montgomery Ward spent decades fighting efforts to build on Grant Park, helping establish the idea that the lakefront should remain open to the public.
A mile-long “No Kings” march in Chicago on March 28, 2026 prepares to leave Grant Park to march around the Chicago Loop. Credit: Arthur Maiorella for Block Club Chicago.
The result is one of Chicago’s defining features: a 26-mile stretch of beaches, parks, trails, museums and recreational spaces that runs through the heart of a major American city.
This week, the Financial Times called the lakefront “one of the most striking public waterfronts in America,” describing its transformation from an industrial shoreline as “one of the great success stories of modern urbanism.”
Lake Shore Drive eventually became part of that landscape.
The roadway evolved in pieces over more than a century, beginning as a carriage drive along the lakefront before becoming the multilane highway Chicagoans know today. The Outer Drive Bridge — yes, the one that was stuck for hours this week — over the Chicago River opened in 1937, connecting the North Side and downtown portions of the Drive and helping create the continuous roadway.
The Lake Shore Drive S curve from 1970. The curve was redesigned in the 1980s. Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/Roger W
Today, the highway and the lakefront exist in an uneasy relationship.
Kyle Banquer, an urban planner by day and member of the neighborhood group Lakeview Urbanists in his free time, explained that the tension is at the center of the debate over what should happen to the Drive.
“Lakeview doesn’t really have much park space outside of the lakefront,” Banquer said. “For Lake Shore Drive, we view it as a green space first and a transportation corridor second.”
Banquer acknowledges that Lake Shore Drive is an “incredibly important transportation artery” that thousands of people rely on every day.
“At the same time, there are still crashes happening along Lake Shore Drive every day,” he said. “We recognize that there is a real conflict between the park and the transportation corridor.”
The North Side and DuSable Lake Shore Drive as seen from the 95th floor of 360 Chicago, 875 N. Michigan Ave., as crews work to replace the windows on April 8, 2026. Credit: Colin Boyle/Block Club Chicago
Rethinking The Drive
That conflict is at the center of a state-led effort to redesign Lake Shore Drive.
The Illinois Department of Transportation has spent years studying changes to the North DuSable Lake Shore Drive corridor, from Grand Avenue to Hollywood Avenue. Its preferred plan, released last year, would add more than 100 acres of lakefront green space and make changes intended to improve traffic flow and access for pedestrians and cyclists.
But advocates and some lakefront elected officials have argued that the plan doesn’t go far enough. One of their biggest complaints is that the plan doesn’t include a continuous dedicated bus lane along the Drive.
The criticism has put a larger question back on the table as the state considers what comes next: What should Lake Shore Drive actually be designed to do?
For advocates such as Merrell, the answer starts with recognizing how many people already use the lakefront without driving. A dedicated bus lane, he argues, could make transit faster and more reliable by moving large numbers of people without requiring each person to have a car.
“We should make it less reliant on cars,” Merrell said. “I think Bike the Drive helps people imagine a different future and understand that this is something people built and something we can also change for future generations. An alternative future, whether it’s a lower-profile road or one that really prioritizes transit, is just as accessible.”
More Lakeshore Less Drive
Ellen Steinke likes to believe in the pipe dream.
Steinke is behind the Instagram account “More Lakeshore Less Drive,” a group that is pushing for a fundamentally different approach to Lake Shore Drive. She’s also part of a comedy troupe called Funny You Should Care, which hosts live shows that center around politically-minded issues. The idea is to make the audience learn something and also laugh about it.
Steinke’s argument isn’t that every car should disappear from Lake Shore Drive, but it’s something she’s fantasized about.
“The heart wants what it wants,” Steinke said. “I’m just really passionate about the lakefront. I think it’s so beautiful and unique, and such a gem and such a treasure that we have.”
Steinke knows that closing Lake Shore Drive to cars is a longshot, but she does hope for a slower, scaled-back boulevard — still a scenic drive, still useful for getting around, but less of the high-speed highway that exists today.
“It’s iconic to drive along Lake Shore Drive,” she said. “I don’t think we have to take that away.”
What she does want to take away is the assumption that the Drive has to remain essentially the same as it’s always been.
“It’s just a little bizarre,” she said. “We’re this progressive city. I think we’re the best city in the country, if not the world, and yet we have this highway running through our public park where we have people exercising and children playing.”
Chicagoans have spent decades learning to live with the noise, pollution and danger that come with putting a major highway through a public park, Steinke said.
But commuting patterns have changed, people are working downtown less often and other cities like San Francisco, Portland and Chattanooga have all removed highways that divided neighborhoods from their waterfronts and converted them into public spaces.
Lake Shore Drive, meanwhile, has not been fundamentally rethought in generations.
“How can we make decisions for the lakefront and for the highway that are forward-thinking and modern, and not just rehashing the decisions of the past?” Steinke said.
Some of her concerns are environmental. The lakefront is among the city’s more polluted areas in part because of the highway and the runoff, tire particles and brake dust that collect around it. Cars also regularly leave the roadway and end up in the park or near the lake.
Others are harder to quantify.
It’s the noise. The honking. That’s where Bike the Drive becomes more than an annual bike ride for Steinke.
“During Bike the Drive, it’s so quiet,” she said. “You can even feel it blocks away. The whole city feels so much calmer.”
For five hours, the highway’s absence changes the character of the lakefront. People linger. Kids have more room to run. The soundscape changes. No matter where you are on the Drive, the lake feels like its steps away.
The point isn’t that fewer cars would be better, Steinke said. It’s that Chicago could choose to make more room for nature, recreation, accessibility and the basic human need to be somewhere without having to hurry through it.
“What if we had a place where we could rest?” Steinke said. “I just feel like we deserve a place that’s peaceful.”
On Sunday morning, there will be music, food, vendors and thousands of people treating Lake Shore Drive less like a highway and more like a giant public plaza.
There will be serious road cyclists trying to cover the full 30-mile round trip. There will be families with children in trailers and seats. There will be dogs riding in baskets and backpacks. There will be costumes, music, laughter and people moving slowly enough to look around.
In some ways, it’s a bit of a miracle.
“The fact that we’re all OK with the highway being closed one Sunday a year is a far cry from 25 years ago, when they tried to get this thing off the ground,” Banquer said.
Do transit activists in Chicago believe in miracles?
“What is the lakefront for?” Merrell asked. “Is it for moving people in their cars or is it for city residents to enjoy, recreate, have cultural experiences and build community?”
At least for one morning, the answer is clear.
______________________________________________________________________
Support Local News!
Subscribe to Block Club Chicago, an independent, 501(c)(3), journalist-run newsroom. Every dime we make funds reporting from Chicago’s neighborhoods. Already subscribe? Click here to gift a subscription, or you can support Block Club with a tax-deductible donation.
Listen to the Block Club Chicago podcast: