Oak Park

Oak Park Trustees ultimately decided to kill the docked system, but could dockless be the right solution for the home of Frank LLoyd Wright?

Trustees argued that the suburb's annual subsidy of the bike-share system represents irresponsible spending, while ignoring the much higher costs of car infrastructure in the village.

The study focuses on use patterns in outlying neighborhoods, Oak Park and Evanston.

Active Transportation Alliance director and Oak Park resident Ron Burke says he’s tired of waiting for the village’s trustees to move forward with making Madison a safer and more economically viable complete street. A plan was proposed nearly three years ago to reduce crashes and make the street more walkable and bikeable with a road diet on the street between Austin and Harlem. A survey at the time found the overwhelming majority of residents support the plan, Burke said.

Last weekend, the Illinois Department of Transportation announced that Oak Park will receive a $12,000 federal Safe Routes to School grant to purchase a trailer, bicycles, helmets and supporting materials for its local Kids on Wheels education program. This will likely be the first time SRTS funds have been used for a fleet of training bikes, according to Active Transportation Alliance spokesman Ted Villaire.

The walls of the Oak Park Village Board’s chambers are emblazoned with environmental buzzwords like “Bicycle Friendly,” “Mass Transit,” “LEED Certified,” “Energy Efficient,” and "Clean Air." So it’s pretty ironic that the board recently voted, in that very room, to make walking harder in order to make driving easier.

All around the country, and especially in suburban areas, safety conscious parents often keep their kids indoors, off what many fear to be dangerous streets. As a result, many fewer children are walking and cycling, with grave consequences for the nation's health. The Active Transportation Alliance has long tried to offset this trend in a small way, by offering a few bicycle safety education programs for kids in partnership with towns like Oak Park and Wilmette.

A recent survey conducted for the Illinois Bicycle Transportation Plan found that Illinoisans want bikeways that provide physical separation from motor vehicles, and believe these kind of “8-to-80” facilities are a key way to get more people to cycle. Protected bike lanes and bike boulevards, AKA neighborhood greenways, are becoming commonplace in the city of Chicago. Yesterday, the Active Transportation Alliance launched a new project to encourage suburbs to build these types of low-stress bikeways, which are comfortable for people of all ages and abilities.

Although I currently live a stone’s throw from Lake Street's protected bike lanes, I almost never ride in them. I moved to East Garfield Park during this snowy winter, when the PBLs rarely seemed to get plowed. Now that it’s springtime, the lanes are often filled with broken glass and garbage, and many of the flexible posts that separated them from the parking lane are lying on the sidewalk or in the bikeway. As a result, I almost always take Fulton, Warren/Washington, or Jackson to get downtown – anything but Lake.