New bike lanes installed in downtown DeKalb

DeKALB – Residents and community members commuting in and around downtown DeKalb will find new bike lanes have been added to Grove Street between Second and Fourth streets.

The initiative is an offshoot of the city’s downtown reconfiguration project that aimed to bring Lincoln Highway down to three lanes, widen sidewalks, and improve traffic flow and walkability.

“It was a complementary thing, but it wasn’t in the same bid contract per se,” City Engineer Zac Gill said. “It was a required parallel improvement to be done contemporaneously.”

The city identified Grove Street as in need of resurfacing, officials said.

Gill said the city found it made sense to prioritize the addition of the bike lanes along the roadway.

“We need to provide that in case the state ever would want to extend bike lanes along the rest of Lincoln Highway outside of downtown,” Gill said. “When they go to downtown, they would have to have a parallel accommodation, you know, somewhere for the cyclists to continue that route. Even though there’s [not] anything else it connects to now, it’s there so that if they ever were to put those in there, we would not be the missing link in the chain.”

Gill said the new bike lanes are a required component in accordance with the Illinois Complete Streets Law, which requires bicycle paths and walkways to be prioritized in city planning.

The new bike lanes along Grove Street are currently isolated, officials said.

But Gill said the city has been taking steps to make the city more bike-friendly over the years.

“Taylor Street – when we repaved that last year – received the same treatment,” Gill said. “First Street has the shared roads. It doesn’t have the complete independent bike lanes. But that’s there, as well as Grove connects through to Seventh [Street.]”

The new bike lane striping came with a roughly $2,500 price tag paid for by the city’s street maintenance contract, officials said.