Someone Drove A Car On To The Chicago Riverwalk, Baffling Locals

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The Chicago Riverwalk is a lovely pathway for taking a stroll along the city’s namesake river. Well, that’s usually the case, except when there’s a compact sedan slinking through what is supposed to be a pedestrian-only area.

The world was alerted to these shenanigans on Tuesday thanks to a video shared by Lettuce Cat on Twitter. The footage shows a silver sedan driving slowly on the pedestrian walkway in a westward direction. The driver traveled past the Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk and under the North Columbus Drive bridge.

The vehicle in question appears to be a seventh-generation Honda Civic, though no license plate is visible in the video. Details at this stage remain slim. The Autopian has reached out to Lettuce Cat and local authorities for more information.

At this stage, it appears likely the vehicle gained access to the Riverwalk via North New Street. According to WGN9, this is one of the only points on the walkway that is easily accessible for road vehicles. The incident happened “around 7:23 PM” according to Lettuce Cat.
“My theories are the same as everyone else’s, a wrong turn by Lizzie McNeill’s,” Lettuce Cat told The Autopian. “I was just in utter disbelief at first, but I’m not too surprised it happened based on my experiences with Chicago drivers.”

Twitter commentators posted similar theories online. It’s plausible that a confused driver may have turned onto the River Esplanade from North New Street. Perhaps, they were confused by GPS directions and followed blindly until they ended up on the walkway. Street View images on Google Maps suggest there are no bollards preventing vehicular access to the River Esplanade. If restaurants still operate along that stretch, the driver would likely have found themselves driving past tables and chairs almost immediately. However, if the area was bare and free of pedestrians, they may not have realized they were in a pedestrian-only area.

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It’s currently unclear how (or if!) the vehicle left the Chicago Riverwalk. The Autopian has asked Chicago police for comment on the matter and will update this article accordingly.

From a personal standpoint, I’m almost surprised this was able to happen. Most Australian cities have heavy bollards protecting downtown pedestrian areas after intentional vehicular attacks became more common around the world. Many American cities do the same.

Chicago, on the other hand, appears to be trusting locals to know not to drive on the riverside walkway. It’s good to trust people, but it’s clear that isn’t enough to keep cars off the Chicago Riverwalk. More as we have it.

Image credit: Lettuce Cat via Twitter screenshot, Google Maps

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53 thoughts on “Someone Drove A Car On To The Chicago Riverwalk, Baffling Locals”

  3. Just this morning I turned into a bank, but the “entrance” was actually for a crosswalk in the middle of the block. After bouncing over the sidewalk my wife said I need to cut down on the weed.

  4. I was on vacation in Belfast, driving a rental Peugeot 307. Being pre-GPS, I managed to get lost. I went down a narrow street, then that opened up to a pedestrian plaza. I panicked, drove through that and down a flight of stairs to get back to the road. Very embarassing.

    2. I once drove a car across the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, looking for a parking space. The barricades were down, but I don’t think I was supposed to be out there, a group of Chinese tourists didn’t seem amused

  5. As a 16-year Chicago resident, I am not even slightly surprised by this. If anything, I’m only surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. In my experience people will drive their cars absolutely anywhere they can physically fit them. It is a chronic problem on the Lakefront Trail, whether with clueless morons blithely driving down the path on the north side, wondering why there are so many people there; people on the south side near Promontory Point driving through the park and parking by the lake because they find it convenient and don’t want to walk anywhere; or drivers on other locations on the south side who turn the path into a street because there’s a traffic jam on S. Lakeshore Drive. On Monday morning I was riding down the Dearborn bike lane when a northbound driver drove into the bike lanes at Washington to drop off a passenger, apparently expected me to move for them, and got angry when I didn’t. Last fall there was the Tahoe driver who drove down the *sidewalk* at the four-way stop at the end of my block because he didn’t think he had to sit in the car traffic jam that he was a part of. And on, and on, and on. Yes, the accumulation of all of this over many years makes me angry.

  6. Something similar happened in Minneapolis more than a decade ago. There are several pedestrian bridges that cross over major roads, many with ramps (that start below the bridge, then do a 180 degree turn back to the bridge) for the pedestrians to walk up instead of stairs Someone managed to get their car up the first part of the ramp until the 180 degree turn. I don’t recall the model of car (maybe an early 2000s Kia?), but it was just barely narrower than the ramp, so the driver got it up the ramp but lacked the skill to reverse it back down. The driver also couldn’t get out of the car when ordered to by police, and the cops ended up extracting the car with a winch while the driver sat inside it. Steel and concrete bollards went up at the ends of the ramps on most bridges that had road access to them after that incident.

  7. I lived in a neighborhood with a bike/walking trail and one morning there was a car on it like this. They had been doing some work and removed a steel post and they drove in- but it was too narrow to turn around even doing the Austin Powers bit. They tried to back out but ended up wedging it between some bollards- it may have been a stolen car but the post was only out for 1 day

  8. I had this happen about 5 years ago when I was biking to work on the pedestrian-only 606 trail. Apparently the driver had accidentally punched in walking directions and was also not particularly observant. (That particular trail also only had one entrance that a car could get in easily, and pretty much nowhere to turn around, so that guy probably got several miles of reverse-driving practice that day.)

  9. Something like this happens a couple times a year in Chicago – car on the pedestrian/bike lanes of the lake shore drive bridge, car on the lakefront path. What can I say? People are idiots.

  11. Concrete bullets are dangerous to non-automobiles who aren’t paying attention. It’s too bad that we need so many signs, barriers, and such, just because some people are ignoring the very obvious “DON’T DRIVE HERE” indicators.

    Then again, some asshole managed to drive on the Spanish steps, so there’s that.

  13. Times are tough for Jake and Elwood. There are no malls left to drive through, no more Dodge Monacos, and the cops aren’t even interested in chasing people anymore.

    1. I was too scared to drive that car through Chicago more than once. lol The one time I drove through the Chi a CPD officer paced me, looked the car up and down, probably decided it wasn’t worth the paperwork, and sped off.

  16. Point of clarity, the car is on the River Esplanade, not the Riverwalk. The two are on opposite sides of the river. The Esplanade does have that spot where one could drive onto it. Fortunately the Esplanade only extends for a couple blocks.

    On the opposite side, the Chicago Riverwalk runs for something like 12 blocks, but I don’t see how a car could access it.

    1. Agree, not possible to get on or drive anywhere on the opposite side, unless you rammed a fence on Lower Lower Wacker (the third level down)

    2. Theoretically, one could drive onto the path at Lower Randolph, go a few blocks up and then enter the Riverwalk underneath the little humpbacked bridge on the path.

  17. This person found literally the only place were it would be possible to get a car on the riverwalk and where it’s possible to drive it for a stretch. Most other areas are far too narrow or have stairs. This portion is also not much used as it’s sort of a dead end after 2 blocks. The opposite side of the river is much busier.

  19. See, this is why Texas, Georgia, Maine, Rhode Island, etc have the right idea banning small cars, they’re a public nuisance, if that had been, say, an Excursion, it would have gotten hung up on a tight corner somewhere before getting that far down the path. And this was a Civic, imagine how much more chaos the driver could have caused in a Suzuki Alto, could have wound up driving straight into a bathroom stall

  23. “The Autopian has reached out to Lettuce Cat…”

    While I applaud the far-reaching journalistic effort that I have come to expect from this site, I wouldn’t be expecting a response from Lettuce Cat anytime soon. Wednesday is bong cleaning day, after all. Everybody knows that.

  25. This reminds me of some signs they used to have up along the river walk in Louisville. One said “No parking on wharf, cars will be launched” and the other “danger, water contains high levels of hydrogen.”

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