Taking the bus was Bill Wendt’s only way to get to Schaumburg on a recent Tuesday night. This near-west-sider is car-free and didn’t think it made sense to traverse the 25 miles on his one-speed bicycle.
Wendt takes on numerous causes. The Maxwell Street Market, for instance. A letter to the editor that recently appeared in the UIC Flame blamed the death of the market on a land-grabbing UIC administration’s “monomania: everything for the university, nothing else counts.” Or the RTA and the CTA: He blames the demise of monthly passes on the inefficiency of a transit system serving downtown at the expense of crosstown riders. The current edition of Cornerstone, the newsletter of the near west side’s Central West Community Organization, includes his “somewhat edited” statement from a 1992 CTA hearing, which condemned the $300 million redevelopment of the Lake Street portion of the Green Line, calling it the “Greed Line” and “an antique elevated to nowhere”; he also blasted community activists who, he claimed, went along with the project just because Oak Park and downtown interests wanted it. He believes that if the CTA wanted to spend $300 million it should have put $30 million into rerouting the el to the Congress line and $270 million into a monorail system that would take west-siders to jobs in the suburbs.
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“Bill made a big entrance in this small meeting room,” recalls Schaumburg transportation planner Tom Dabareiner, who recognized Wendt from the public-meeting circuit. “As he took off his coat, I thought to myself, ‘Geez, did he bike here?’ He had this windswept look about him.”
After the meeting Wendt distributed some handouts, then asked if anybody could drive him to his bus stop. Dabareiner dropped him off, and Wendt just made the last Pace bus. He caught the el at Harlem, got off at Logan Square, retrieved his wheels, and pedaled east. He stopped for a hamburger and arrived home around 11.
