Hi friends!

Thanks to some shout-outs from Streetsblog and lots of you spreading the word via social media, we’ve seen nearly 250 signatures in just two days. You guys are amazing!

But the real work is still ahead of us, and we need to show our leaders that our city demands they make space for people.

Our sidewalks are too narrow, overrun by too many car lanes and too much street parking, making it difficult to practice social distancing on the walks that the Chicago Department of Public Health says we can take. And our only two car-free cycling routes are still closed, forcing many of our essential workers (like our ever-important healthcare providers) to make the difficult choice between risking COVID-19 exposure on public transit or risking themselves in traffic. Our city deserves better than this.

What the mayor fails to see is that our lakefront and the 606 were overrun because we don’t have enough spaces for people to be people. Other cities have come to understand this about themselves, opening up streets to people in-lieu of cars as an ADDITION to any existing people-focused infrastructure. This is the approach Chicago should be taking, but we’re doing the opposite. So please, continue to spread the word, call your alderman, retweet and post to your stories, Airdrop the link to strangers, make viral TikTok’s...and let’s fight like hell for #OpenTrailsCHI

I think we can do it.

-Kyle