On Thursday, DuPage County and the City of Elmhurst staged a pop-up event where road space near the Illinois Prairie Path was covered with lawn furniture, flower pots, toys, and artificial grass to create "parklets."
It was a chance to do outreach to residents about the traffic management recommendations in the new DuPage County Safety Action Plan. That's part of a Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning initiative called Safe Travel for All, an effort to prevent serious and fatal crashes in northwest Illinois.
But, don't worry, despite the fake grass, any positive feedback on the Safety Action Plan collected that day was not simply the result of Astroturfing.
At the pop-up, the DuPage Division of Transportation's Chief Transportation Planner John Loper told Streetsblog the purpose of the plan is to identify high-injury locations within the county. "Especially where we have vulnerable road users or users of the system that are crossing our arterials," he said. "[The goal is] to identify locations where we think that we can make improvements. Ideally, we would like to get to zero fatalities and zero high-severity crashes, but we know it is going to be very difficult. We continue to make progress on that every year through our program, and try to target some places like this to try to avoid serious injuries in the future."
The event took place at the intersection of the trail and York Street and the multi-use trail in west-suburban Elmhurst, near the Wild Meadows Trace special use area. "Even though [York is] a two-lane roadway, we have thousands of people crossing every day," Loper said. He added that the path crosses York mid-block, which is not ideal from a safety standpoint.
After experimenting with many different safety options, the County is now trying Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons. These allow trail users to activate signals to ask drivers to stop for them in the crosswalk, as required by Illinois law.
Tragically, motorists do not always obey RRFBs. For example, in 2016, a driver fatally struck bike rider Joni Beaudry, 55, at a trail crossing in northwest suburban Mount Prospect. Witnesses said Beaudry had activated the crossing signal before she entered the roadway. A safer approach is to use mid-block stoplights that trail users can activate to make it obvious to motorists they must stop.
The parklets, which are usually plain-Jane no parking zones used to "daylight" the trail crossing, were delineated with traffic cones. In one of them, kids could play with a Jenga game, jump rope, or bubbles. "This is just to show.. how you can [creatively] use the space," said Katherine Nickele, Senior Transportation Planner with the transportation consulting firm TYLin. "Maybe there could be some more... space for people to sit outside. And this is also demonstrates how this type of space can be used in other locations. It can be space given to businesses. It can be for street trees to bring some greenery into the street space. Street trees are also known to help us encourage drivers to slow down a little bit. When it's just asphalt, and it looks wide, drivers tend to go fast."
Besides an info table about Safe Travel for All, there were displays for the Elmhurst Police Department promoting traffic safety and the Elmhurst Walk and Rollers Working Group, the City's bike-ped advisory group. Asked how it felt to have so many people there promoting traffic safety, Nickele said, "It's a needed cause, and I'm happy to be part of the process to really work to implement it."
One of the folks who stopped by was Elmhurst resident Victoria Ludkowski, who's a member of the Walk and Rollers, although she wasn't volunteering that day. While there, Ludkowski shared some ideas for safety improvements with the planners. "I said that the speed limit should be 20 mph on side streets," she said. "Right now, it's 30. And if you look at some of the public safety meetings at City Hall, citizens have come there and requested that the side streets be 20 mph because they have little children. It's just safer, especially for people on bicycles."
Loper and Nickele discussed the next steps for the Safety Action Plan. "We're going to be identifying those high-injury network locations," Loper said. "We'll continue to push forward with those. Every year, we go through the process of filing a safety grant application... There's a federal program called the Highway Safety Improvement Program, and we'll apply for those grants. We usually do pretty well, collecting some revenue from that."
However, getting federal funding for sustainable transportation has become more difficult under the second Trump administration. "We will be focusing all of our programs," Loper added. "We'll improve sidewalks along with street resurfacing projects. We have programs that improve the path system and path crossings. So we will continue to fund those programs, whether we have federal funding or not."
Did you appreciate this post? Streetsblog Chicago is currently fundraising to help cover our 2025-26 budget. If you appreciate our reporting and advocacy on local sustainable transportation issues, please consider making a tax-deductible donation here. Thank you.
