Lisle officials have told Lucent Technologies Inc. that the company must include an extra turning lane at the entrance of the day-care center proposed for its DuPage campus.
“Our staff’s study confirms our suspicions and our concerns, and I recommend we go forward with the turn lane,” said Trustee Luke Brandonisio. “The safety of the children is paramount.”
Last month, the village directed its Transportation Department to study the issue with Lucent’s transportation consultants.
Lucent, the New Jersey-based telecommunications-equipment giant, is asking the village to amend an earlier annexation agreement to allow it to build a free-standing day-care center on the south side of its access road, near Naperville and Warrenville Roads.
Preliminary plans for the single-story brick center call for an entry drive off the access road. The center would be on the right, fronted by a row of parking spaces with a parking lot on the left.
Village officials want an extra lane–a right-turn deceleration and stacking lane–added on the west side of the entry drive to eliminate traffic problems.
Lucent’s traffic consultants say the real concern is how fast cars travel on the access road.
“When we determined that the issue was really speed instead of capacity, we thought we had found another solution, and that is speed humps,” said consultant Paul Kosokos with Barton Ashmen Associates of Chicago.
Humps differ from speed bumps, he said, because they are shallower and longer and are traditionally used in neighborhoods to slow cars down.
Lucent’s proposal was to install one hump about 300 feet east of the intersection of Naperville Road and the access road and another one about 150 to 200 feet east of the first hump.
Lucent officials said that was the solution, citing a DuPage County 2020 traffic study that predicts only about 40 cars will use the intersection on any given day.
`I can’t say it’s wrong to put in the turn lane, but there are drawbacks,” Kosokos said.
The lane could entice more traffic onto the access road, which is already used by motorists as a shortcut, the consultants said.
“Putting in a turn lane is sort of like building a three-car garage, but you only have one car–it’s not wrong, but is it really needed?” Kosokos said.
The center, set to open next year, would be leased by Knowledge Beginnings, a division of the California-based Children’s Discovery Center that operates more than 70 employer-sponsored centers throughout the country.
The center could handle as many as 260 children, Lucent officials said, most of whom would be children of employees.
