With plans to transform Chicago into an all-encompassing bikeway network, the city of Chicago is ambitious-to say the least.

The city’s Bike 2015 plan seeks to increase bicycle use by making it safer and more accessible to cyclists so that all trips less than 5 miles are eventually by bike, according to the 150-point strategy plan.

In 2008, Chicago’s Department of Transportation’s Bicycling Ambassador program took on 75 of those benchmarked strategies. The installation of hundreds of new bike racks and bike lanes, the educating of thousands of Chicagoans through outreach programs and the opening of the new state-of-the-art Sauganash bike trail, at West Bryn Mawr and North Kostner Avenues, are just a few examples, said Charlie Short, the Bicycling Ambassador program coordinator.

While the city is far from finished, he said, it’s much closer to making Chicago a “world class city for bicycling” than ever before.

Plans are underway for Chicagoans to see 11 more miles of bike lanes, 7 more miles of shared bike lanes, five new transit shelters, a “share the road” training program for taxi cab drivers and CTA operators and an “individualized marketing campaign” to encourage commuters to replace their automobile trips with biking and mass transit, project officials said.

The new plans will be officially revealed at the quarterly Bicycle Advisory Council Meeting on Dec. 10 at 30 N. LaSalle St.

The need for safer bike lanes and bike racks is one of the main priorities, Short said, whose program was able to reach all 50 wards in the city this year with the 2015 plan.

“It’s one thing to be able to put a bike lane down and another thing for people to have some place to [lock] their bike,” Short said. “There’s always work to be done; we make

that our intent every year.”

The Active Transportation Alliance, formerly the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, was hired as a consultant to help actualize many of the encompassing goals of the program.

Margo O’Hara, communications director of the biking advocacy group, said by comparison to other bike-friendly cities, Chicago manages to accomplish the goals set by the 2015 plan rather impressively.

She said she can’t emphasize enough the importance of training CTA operators on sharing the road with bikers, a task her group has worked to address for years.

“We actually wrote up a curriculum for CTA bus drivers a number of years ago, which has fallen by the wayside,” she said. “It’s nice to see the city pick that up again.”

But not all advocacy groups believe the 2015 plan goes far enough in defense of bikers.

Todd Gee, president of Chicago bike-activist group Break The Gridlock, said he would like to see the city spearhead initiatives to reduce automobile usage in its entirety.

Gee said the 2015 plan is on the right track, but the city can increase bike safety by making driving downtown more expensive with increases in the cost of parking stickers or implementing direct impediments to driving.

“Actual reduction is the most important thing,” Gee said. “It seems people don’t have a holistic view in mind when using their car.”

Break The Gridlock attributes America’s automobile dependence as a contributing factor to global warming, global terrorism and heart disease, according to BreakTheGridlock.org, a grassroots organization that works with biking advocates all over the city “addressing the impact of cars on Chicagoans.”

Steven Lane, a West Town resident and volunteer at biking advocacy group Critical Mass, who has been biking to and from work for 10 years said, the city’s biking community carries a general sense of pride in Chicago for spearheading so many bike-friendly initiatives, but the plan still has a few kinks to work out.

From considering bikerider density when formulating safe routes to accommodating U-Locks for the new CTA bike racks, Lane said, some of the 2015 plan’s projects aren’t being orchestrated logically.

“It’s sometimes ironic that we would come to this new system being unveiled and everyone’s like, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t use this [with my lock],'” Lane said about the new double-stacked bike racks at various CTA stations.

“We still have a ways to go in order to catch up with Portland, Ore., or even further to become an international bike city like Amsterdam or Copenhagen, [Denmark],” he said. “But I’m feeling better and better and the city is way safer than it was 10 years ago.”

For more information on the Bike 2015 plan, visit Bike2015Plan.org.