Meet the guerrilla bike activists in Chicago installing bootleg infrastructure for safer streets

The People’s CDOT, or the People’s Chicago Department of Transportation, began in October 2022 in response to what John described as glaring deficiencies in the official CDOT. These deficiencies result in dangerous conditions on the streets of Chicago—endangering and claiming the lives of pedestrians and cyclists each year, according to John.

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The group itself is made up of mostly cyclists who met at various other bike safety events. Together, they share the common motivation of ensuring safer streets in the city of Chicago. To date, John said the People’s CDOT has installed “10 to 15” street calming infrastructure projects. This includes cinder block posts to protect bike lanes, concrete planters to stop cars from blocking sidewalks, plastic speed bumps to slow down vehicles, and cinder block bollards to prevent cars from driving on the Lake Front Trail.

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The majority of the group’s projects originate from requests from community members who reach out over Twitter asking for help. Maybe their kids play on a street where cars frequently speed by. Or maybe a cyclist was hit while traveling down a bike lane and a truck merged into them. When this happens, the People’s CDOT will arrive in the area with equipment on hand to correct what they see as a failure of the city to properly protect its citizens from traffic danger.

It’s a type of vigilante activism that has seen a rise in recent years in major metropolitan areas like Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles in response to the drastic rise in pedestrian deaths in recent years. A report released in June by the Governor’s Highway Safety Association found that drivers hit and killed more than 7,500 pedestrians in 2022—the highest number of fatalities since 1981. People of color represented a disproportionate amount of these deaths.

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[An anecdote described in the article] highlighted an inherent issue with the actions of guerrilla activists like the People’s CDOT and Crosswalk Collective: the general lack of community approval. While the goals of these groups to ensure safe conditions for pedestrians and cyclists are no doubt noble, the way they go about doing so can be seen as unwanted, unasked for, illegal, and problematic.