Chicago Pays $9.5 Million After Cyclist's Wheel Caught in Forgotten Streetcar Rails on Designated Bike Route

On October 25, 2014, Catalin Dumitrescu was riding his bicycle along East 56th Street near South Harper Avenue in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, a corridor the city had formally designated as part of its bike network. He never made it to his destination. His front wheel dropped into a groove cut by an embedded streetcar rail, the bike went down, and Dumitrescu hit the pavement with force severe enough to leave him, as his lawsuit would later describe, 'significantly disfigured and disabled.'

The rails that caused the crash had not carried a streetcar in roughly six decades. Chicago's surface streetcar system stopped operating in or around 1958, but the rails on 56th Street were never pulled up. Over the years, road crews periodically paved over them with asphalt patches, even as the city removed similar legacy rails at other locations across Chicago. The patching did not hold. By no later than 2011, the rail had worked its way back through the surface at the very stretch of street the city was now routing cyclists onto.

Dumitrescu's attorney, Todd Smith, built the negligence case around a sequence of institutional failures that compounded over time. The city knew the bike route existed. The city knew rails from the old streetcar network still lay beneath certain roads. And despite that knowledge, no inspection was ordered, no removal was performed, and no warning was posted before cyclists were directed down 56th Street. The lawsuit framed the rail not as a relic but as an active danger the city had the means and the obligation to eliminate.

The case also pressed the city on its maintenance record after the street was put into service as a bike route. Records showed the asphalt patches applied over the rail were inadequate to keep it submerged under the weight and stress of ordinary traffic, yet the city continued patching rather than addressing the underlying problem. The pattern, Smith argued, reflected negligence that went well beyond a single oversight.

Chicago settled the case for $9.5 million. The Chicago Sun-Times, which broke the settlement story in September 2019, reported that neither Dumitrescu nor Smith commented publicly. The settlement followed nearly five years of litigation and was among the larger bicycle-related payouts the city had faced.