Wherever bicyclists gather–bike shops, Critical Mass rallies, Chicagoland Bicycle Federation events–Allen Walker is there, handing out his homemade flyer. It shows a photograph of the mangled remains of his $1,800 Italian racing bike. All that’s left is the frame, which looks like a daddy longlegs squished by a piece of earth-moving equipment. Above the picture is a warning: “Don’t let this happen to you.”
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At Wilson the bus bounced over a bump. The driver stopped, then drove on to Foster. Walker had a feeling something was wrong. When he got off at Foster and Sheridan, the driver asked him, “Are you the guy with the bike? It fell off.”
“The driver seemed like she was kind of remorseful about it,” he recalls. “She said, ‘You just talk to claims, and they’ll reimburse you for that.’”
A bump near Soldier Field threw Aaron Shkuda’s road bike into the road while he was riding the Jackson Park Express. “The bike just sort of wobbled, and it wasn’t there anymore,” Shkuda says. “I walked up to the driver and asked, ‘Did my bike just fall off?’ He said, ‘I can’t stop because we’re on the Inner Drive.’”
Walker says he’s contacted the agency “two or three times a month” since the accident. Every time he calls, “pretty much they say, ‘It’s under investigation.’ I think they don’t really know what to do. They probably will string me along until the statute of limitations runs out.”
