There was no Solomon-like threat to hack in two the controversial bicycle path included in DuPage County’s proposal to widen a portion of Midwest Road south of the East-West Tollway.
But after a vote Monday, a County Board committee hopes highway staff now can push ahead with the road-widening project and end a spirited debate over plans for a mile-long path of asphalt, which for months has divided residents in the collection of posh subdivisions that is Oak Brook.
Road-widening projects attract a fair share of not-in-my-back-yard-type protests, but most of the focus in this debate was on plans for a new bike path along Midwest Road between 31st Street and the tollway bridge.
The board’s Transportation Committee voted 5-1 to spend an extra $156,360 to revise engineering plans and put the bike path on the west side of a new, four-lane Midwest Road. Under the proposal endorsed by committee, the bike path would skirt the Butterfield Country Club, rather than the back yards of homes in the Brook Forest subdivision on the east side of Midwest Road.
The proposed revisions are an acceptable compromise to residents of Brook Forest subdivision, who had been vocal opponents of the bike path, according to board member Patrick O’Shea (R-Lombard), a member of the Transportation Committee. Residents had argued earlier this year that the bike path was unneeded, was too wide as proposed and could bring crime to their back yards.
The revisions, though, are opposed by Oak Brook village officials, who had pressed the committee to consider alternatives that would keep the bike path on the east side of Midwest Road.
The proposal is expected to go to the full board for its consideration later this month.
Karen Bushy, Oak Brook village president, and Stephen Veitch, Oak Brook village manager, appealed to committee members to accept their alternative, which they said would move the road farther away from residences.
Bushy said the Brook Forest subdivision has a large number of children whose safety would be jeopardized if they were to dash across four lanes of Midwest Road to the bike path on the west.
“The purpose of this is to move people around and certainly for the children,” she said. “There is no benefit to having this where children are not.”
Bushy also complained that village officials had been left out of discussions leading to the compromise revisions.
Midwest Road now narrows to two lanes south of the tollway.
The county wants to widen the road to four lanes, build a 6-foot-wide bike path adjacent to the curb, and add left-turn lanes from Midwest Road into the country club and at Mockingbird Lane into Brook Forest subdivision. Most of the work could be done within the existing county-owned right of way.
Subdivision residents, whose homes back up to Midwest Road, had argued that trees and bushes allowed to grow on the right of way shield their yards from traffic noise.
Some residents have contended that putting what originally was to be an 8- to 10-foot-wide bike path behind their homes would increase the threat of crime. At County Board and Transportation Committee meetings in August, several residents voiced sentiments that the bike path would be used not by subdivision residents but rather by people commuting from towns such as Lombard or Westmont to lower-paying jobs at the country club.
“I think it’s a security issue,” said one resident.
Subdivision residents also have argued that putting the bike path on the west side of the road makes better sense because an existing asphalt bike path runs intermittently along the west side of Midwest Road south of 31st Street.
Subdivision residents approached O’Shea for help after what they saw as an unsympathetic response from the village.
Roberta Arquilla, a board member and former president of the Brook Forest homeowners association, said the revised plan was “a happy medium” and a “fair compromise.”
The revisions proposed by the county would narrow the planned lanes to 11 feet from 12 feet. They also would leave some vacant right of way as a buffer between the road and subdivision homes.
