The Original Lake Shore Drive

Understanding how Lake Shore Drive began and where we go from here.

Chicago finally woke up from its winter slumber this week. After a barrage of thunderstorms and dreary conditions, sunshine and 50-degree weather feels like a rebirth and reminds me how grateful I am to live in this marvelous city.

Oh, what a place Chicago is. I moved here from Florida in 2022, where sunny skies and warmth are the default. Here, grueling winters instill an appreciation for the good days when they come, and no Chicagoan forgoes the first lovely day of spring on the Lakefront Trail. Parents push strollers over the icy pavement cracks. Bikers feel the fresh air rush through their hair—no longer with its usual bite. My own morning routine starts by jogging alongside hundreds of other runners also shaking off the remnants of hibernation. It would be truly beautiful—if, that is, I could hear my friends talk over the road noise. It makes me wonder: why did the city sacrifice the gorgeous lakefront for a highway in the 1800s—or did it?

At the turn of the century, the city of Chicago hired architect Daniel Burnham to transform the park system to accommodate rapid population growth. In his 1909 Plan of Chicago, Burnham’s first and foremost goal was to improve access to the lakefront. He famously said, “The Lakefront by right belongs to the people… It affords their one great unobstructed view, stretching away to the horizon, where water and clouds seem to meet... Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated by individuals to the exclusion of the people.”¹ Jean DuSable Lake Shore Drive (LSD), named after the Black founder of Chicago, was not created to be an eight-lane “access expressway” as it stands today. Its first iteration, predating the invention of the automobile, more closely resembled the modern Lakefront Trail: pedestrians walked closer to the water and wealthy aristocrats’ horse carriages crawled along on paths slightly further inland. Take a stroll on North Cannon Drive for an experience closer to that of the original trail.

Photo of early Lake Shore Drive, year unknown.

Fast forward through fifty years, two world wars, and the genesis of car culture, and the Interstate Highway System had morphed Lake Shore Drive from Burnham’s people-first vision into the grotesque behemoth we have today, transforming a once peaceful trail into a concrete barrier that sees over 100,000 cars daily. The cost? Incessant noise pollution, air particulates from tire residue and car exhaust, and countless neighborhoods severed from Lake Michigan, our precious source of freshwater like no other lake system on Earth. Building a highway along our lakefront was like digging a canal through a living room. It might be the fastest way to deliver goods, but it floods the house, erodes the foundation, and is just plain ugly.

LSD is not a highway—at least, not in the legal sense. By every other metric, however, it is. The definitely-not-a-highway road is eight lanes wide with few stoplights, rail guards along “high crash zones,” and plentiful exit ramps. These safety measures are often required, since the not-highway averages 7 car crashes every day. In just the last 5 years, LSD has recorded over 4,000 incapacitating injuries and 59 fatalities.² These prolific crashes cost us our travel efficiency, our emergency resources, and even our emotions. We’re constantly losing neighbors, friends, and other Chicagoans to the poor road design choices at play here.

Better Streets Chicago, a local transportation advocacy group focused on improving infrastructure and transit service, conducted a noise study of LSD in 2023. Volunteers compared ambient noise levels during rush hour to noise levels during the yearly Bike the Drive event, the one day of the year Chicagoans are free from car noise on LSD. Results showed a rush hour average of 64.8 decibels, versus 59.1 decibels during Bike the Drive. That’s a vacuum cleaner turned on 24/7 versus runners’ footsteps, conversations between friends, cicadas buzzing, and trees rustling in the wind. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic, that’s also a whopping 271 percent difference.³

Better Streets Chicago used a Sound Level Meter at multiple sites to record average decibels. Here, volunteers recorded 74.2 decibels across Grant Park. Photo courtesy of Better Streets Chicago.

Additionally, the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) found that a shocking 95 percent of all road users sped beyond the posted speed limit of 40 mph, with nearly 1 in 10 reaching dangerous speeds of 70 mph or more.⁴ Such consistent speed violations demonstrate dangerous design. These statistics practically prove what most Chicagoans intuitively assume: despite legal definitions, this eight-lane road functions exactly like a highway. This isn’t about traffic enforcement; it’s about the mismatch between IDOT’s intended “boulevard” design and the concrete reality of straight, wide lanes with few traffic lights. If it looks like a highway, sounds like a highway, and drives like a highway, then it’s a highway.

Back in July of 2024, an IDOT renovation initiative called Redefine the Drive was unveiled to lukewarm public response. Shiny graphics showed a packed lakefront with a suspiciously underpopulated Lake Shore Drive. This is the usual messaging: transportation planners present their designs as the “cure” to congestion without showing what the road would look like at rush hour, packed to the brim. They’re well aware that congested roadways aren’t a good pitch. And though the expanded park space and greenery is appealing, there are almost no actual major changes to LSD itself. Bus lanes are limited exclusively to on/off ramps—which IDOT claims will “speed up buses” without encroaching on other vehicles or park space—and the proposed bus lane design was rejected due to fears of increased neighborhood traffic and a monumental 1 additional minute of travel time. A city that values shaving 6 minutes off commutes (which their selected plan supposedly will do) over decades of lakefront access has misplaced their priorities.

Illinois Department of Transportation “preferred method” for Redesign the Drive. Purposefully lacking the view of rush hour. Photo courtesy of IDOT.

IDOT’s fearmongering about congestion and reduced bus service is not based in reality. In fact, researchers found closing roads led to “traffic evaporation” without corresponding traffic increases on parallel roads.⁵ When Seattle’s Department of Transportation proposed tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct (which sees similar levels of traffic to LSD), officials prepared for disaster. Instead, traffic “evaporated.” What happens when cities tear down highways? Not much, we’ve found. Cities such as Seoul, Montreal, and New York City all took a chance by tearing down their metro highways. Instead of Carmageddon, traffic largely disappeared.⁶

What state agencies miss is an understanding of human behavior—people adapt their behavior to infrastructure, not the other way around. Houston is a prime example of this. If cities build wide, fast highways through downtown, people will drive everywhere. If cities build walkable, bikeable places with abundant public transport connections, people will do that instead. IDOT predicts that there would be very little modal shift to public transport regardless of their improvements to LSD, yet 46 percent of North Side residents who could use an express bus today choose not to due to inconsistent schedules and car traffic.⁷ Claiming very little modal shift while prioritizing car usage makes car dependency a self-fulfilling prophecy. It does not need to be this way.

Reimagined “boulevard” design proposed by Better Streets Chicago. Featuring narrower roads, a light rail station, and expanded park space.

Daniel Burnham never shied away from boldness. He famously said, “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work...Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty..” Tens of millions of dollars spent on minor changes to LSD are these so-called “little plans.” So little, they seem to intentionally avoid stirring men’s blood. No bold transit options, no traffic calming measures, just the same toxic highway. IDOT, given a monumental task and more than a decade to plan it, wants to preserve our concrete barrier to lakefront access, but with slightly nicer landscaping. Big whoop.

Thankfully, there are many who do want big plans, who do have magic in their blood, who do want our wonderful city to aim high. They dare to ask such questions as, “What if you could hear birds chirping along Lake Michigan?”

1. Burnham, Daniel H., and Edward H. Bennett. Plan of Chicago. Edited by Charles Moore, Commercial Club of Chicago, 1909.

2. https://misterclean.github.io/ilga-crash-summary/lake_shore_drive.html

3. Better Streets Chicago. DLSD Noise Pollution Study Report. Version 3.1.2, 2023, static1.squarespace.com/static/5e94fcbb2b85ce7fcd6a9f03/t/673e732a8c3cd95a31fc99b9/1732145980448/DLSD+Noise+Pollution+Study+Report+-+V3.1.2+-+FINAL.pdf.

4. Chicago Department of Transportation. "North DuSable Lake Shore Drive: Purpose and Need Statement." 19 Dec. 2014, northdusablelsd.org/Archive/pdf/2014-12-19_PurposeAndNeed_PostedVersion.pdf.

5. Zhang, Yiduo, and Kevin Manaugh. "The Equity Implications of Road Pricing Strategies: A Review of Evidence." Case Studies on Transport Policy, vol. 10, no. 4, 2022, pp. 2095-2105, doi:10.1016/j.cstp.2022.11.002.

6. Lecroart, Paul. "Reinventing the Seine: Greater Paris and the River." METREX, 1 Oct. 2020,

7. Chicago Department of Transportation. North DuSable Lake Shore Drive Project Survey Results. Version 2, 14 Nov. 2017, northdusablelsd.org/Archive/pdf/PM3/2017_11_14_SurveyResults_V2.pdf.