Editorial: Redesigning DuSable Lake Shore Drive? Chicago should look to Detroit and not build the same old road.

In discussions about the future of Chicago, Michigan’s largest city functions as a boogeyman. “If we’re not careful,” the chatter often goes, “we could end up like Detroit.”

But that’s an obsolete view of the Motor City, a place that, despite its long struggle in the face of industrial decline, is attracting investment and innovation in a way that could leave Chicago eating its exhaust. Even though it will have a lot less of it.

Take what’s going on at Michigan Central. That’s a 30-acre brownfield site between the Corktown and southwest Detroit neighborhoods, and soon to be anchored by the renovated and re-imagined Michigan Central Station.

The massive Beaux Arts station, once the tallest railway station in the world but abandoned in 1988 and recently best known for so-called “ruin porn,” was purchased by the Ford Motor Co. Ford has invested more than $1 billion and plans to use the building as a hub for “mobility,” a newspeak way of saying advances in transportation. Construction on the building is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

But we got a recent look at the neighboring Book Depository, once Detroit’s massive main post office and also abandoned in the 1980s. Ford also bought that 260,000-square-foot building, and is integrating it into a campus.

Ford is working with partners like Google on the campus, but the main partner at the Book Depository is a company called Newlab, modeled on MIT’s Media Lab. Newlab is re-imagining the future of roads and vehicles by giving a variety of independent innovators the space and freedom to develop new ideas and prototypes involving mobility.

Chicagoans might think of it as a transportation version of 1871, the nonprofit digital startup incubator located in the Merchandise Mart and founded by J.B. Pritzker before he became governor. But it’s operating in a more targeted way and on a bigger scale.

According to Michigan Central CEO Joshua Sirefman, Ford, Google and Newlab (and numerous smaller partners) are building “a platform that gives us insight into the potential capabilities of what our roads look like and what they should achieve.”

Which brings us to North DuSable Lake Shore Drive.

The renderings of the planned massive redo, slated for the portion between Grand Avenue and Hollywood Avenue, clearly offers improvements, such as an increase in the size of Oak Street Beach and neighboring parkland and an improved separation between cars, bikes and pedestrians. The renderings look impressive.

Here’s the thing, though. At the heart of the revamp is the same old kind of road.

This is a crucial project for Chicago to get right, especially since there surely will be a clash of different stakeholders, and the project is likely to disrupt much of the city for years. We’re already reeling from what feels like constant construction on the Kennedy Expressway, the obvious alternate for most people.

Over Easter weekend, we saw signs already popping up in lakefront condo buildings indicating Near North Side residents are gearing up for a fight for their interests, as they ready themselves for massive construction at their doors.

But as the move toward electric vehicles quickens, the same old kind of road might be shortsighted, especially given how long this project likely will take.

Most transportation experts see near-total vehicle electrification as just a matter of time. Not all that much time, either. Arguably, as quick as DuSable Lake Shore Drive can be rebuilt.

Right now, of course, people charge their electric vehicles at home or at charging stations, with all the associated range anxiety. Ideally, electric cars and trucks would be able to recharge via some kind of wireless device even as they travel or sit parked on the street.

It’s hardly science fiction. Michigan already is working on a wireless inroad EV charging network. Michigan’s Department of Transportation announced in February a five-year pilot project with an Israeli company, Electreon. Already, charging capability is being added into a prototype 1-mile section of a public Detroit roadway by Michigan Central, allowing companies to test the system even as regular cars also use the street.

In essence, inroad copper coil segments buried some 3 inches under the tarmac will use magnetic induction to send energy from the regular grid to an electric car with a receiver unit under its chassis as it merely scoots along the road, or even just parks above one of the underground coils.

Simply put: You’ll be able to park and charge your battery at once (there’s a chance for sweet revenge at that notorious meter deal), or just drive along while boosting your juice. Surely, that will be a game-changer for EVs.

Sirefman told us that everything is moving very fast: “What are the implications for roads of the massive shift toward electrification. How do we get equitable access to charging? And does a road like Lake Shore Drive become a venue for the next generation of transit?” he asked us in what felt like three massively important questions. “Charging,” he said, “will be an inherent part of the structure of a road.”

We reiterate: In Detroit, this is happening right now.

It’s also happening elsewhere. Sweden powered up the world’s first segment of electrified roadway in 2018, with a stretch of 1.2 miles. Indiana, Florida and Pennsylvania are all either working on or planning roadway electrification projects. Back in 2019, we wrote that the “idea of smart-powered lanes intrigues us.” It still does, and we think city transportation planners should look into the potential for its inclusion in the DuSable Lake Shore Drive rebuild.

Most nonactivist experts believe that whatever we do in the next couple of decades has to be able to accommodate multiple systems: traditional cars, old-school bikes, new, highly efficient e-bikes and even point-to-point autonomous vehicles, ideally in their own, dedicated lanes where they don’t collide with human motorists. But without electricity easily available, none of this will reach its full potential.

Our suggestion is that city planners talk to Detroit — the new Detroit. Michigan Central would be a great place to start.

DuSable Lake Shore Drive is the premier thoroughfare in the Midwest and an icon throughout the world. We should be building a road for the future.

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