Six North Side and near north suburban hot spots have been identified by the Illinois Department of Transportation for a pilot study aimed at improving traffic flow, public transportation and other commuting problems in these densely populated neighborhoods
The studies will take place over the next year in with input from residents and leaders in eight congested Chicago communities and four northern suburbs. The six hot spots were selected from the city neighborhoods of Edgewater, Rogers Park, West Ridge, Uptown, Albany Park, North Park, Sauganash and Lincoln Square, and north suburban Evanston, Wilmette, Skokie and Lincolnwood.
“We picked these northeast communities because they are redeveloping. We’ll examine how planners might make good land use and zoning decisions that might better use transportation situations already in place,” said Randy Blankenhorn, chief of IDOT’s Transit and Metropolitan Planning Department in Springfield.
“We are trying to understand interactions between existing development and transportation systems, transportation needs for all travelers within and through these areas, and conflicts that exist between various users,” he said. “Ultimately we’d like to understand how we might harmonize transportation services with mature development.”
Blankenhorn and his consultants have made several visits to Chicago in recent months, to talk with community residents and leaders participating in the pilot, one of two such pilot studies initiated by IDOT last January.
The other will focus similar attention on a substantially broader South Side transportation corridor from the South Loop and fast redeveloping South Side neighborhoods to developed south suburbs such as Orland Park and rural far south Will County.
“That will allow us to study a microcosm of all levels of development from the rapidly redeveloping South Side communities to Will County, where you have a lot of farmland,” said Blankenhorn. He expects to name southern case study areas by mid-November.
The transportation/residential community studies were undertaken as part of Gov. Ryan’s Illinois Tomorrow Program and are expected to yield development models to correct traffic problems and to help planners balance development and increasing population density with transportation and traffic systems. The half-dozen northern areas named for IDOT’s case studies are:
Lake Avenue and Green Bay Road to the Edens Expressway in Wilmette, examining traffic circulation;
Chicago and Main Street in Evanston, observing traffic and parking issues;
Broadway, from Foster Avenue to Devon Avenue, where pedestrian, bicycle and traffic issues will be scrutinized;
The intersection of Lawrence, Lincoln and Western Avenues to examine pedestrian traffic problems;
Sheridan Road, from Devon to Hollywood Avenue, for pedestrian and traffic issues; and
A yet-to-be-determined Metra or CTA rail station, where pedestrian, land use and parking issues will be studied. Community input has “been impressive,” Blankenhorn said in a phone interview. “They understood the problems, and also have made some good recommendations for solutions.” He says similar community input is being gathered in IDOT’s South Side pilot.
One area that sought to be included as a hot spot is where Lake Shore Drive terminates. “Originally, Lake Shore Drive was planned to go straight to Evanston,” the area’s alderman, Mary Ann Smith (48th), said in a phone interview. “But that northernmost increment of the road’s construction was halted in the late ’50s. The temporary fix left streets around where the Drive ends under-maintained for decades, a disaster in our midst. No one wants a roadway like this, unfinished and left there by default,” she said of traffic problems that mounted with residential development over decades.
Smith recalled traffic experiments that ranged from adding links to Lake Shore Drive and houses being demolished to accommodate curb construction to using reversible lanes on Sheridan during rush hours. “We’ve learned that if someone sneezes at Hollywood and Sheridan the whole system, all the way to the north suburbs, breaks down. That’s proof it is really not a system and that it’s much too fragile, too jury-rigged a situation for a city.”
Smith says her area’s participation in the IDOT study followed its receipt of a $200,000 IDOT Smart Growth program grant about eight months ago, and that followed the area’s own resident study of mounting traffic problems. “We are the first community moving forward with these Smart Growth funds. It’s the first of its kind because it is a true city-suburban initiative. The situation needed that kind of collaboration because everybody is suffering exactly the same kinds of problems all along this corridor.”
The IDOT meetings also highlighted problems in Lincolnwood, ranging from heavy traffic spilling over into alleyways to the difficulty that residents have in crossing Touhy Avenue just east of Cicero Avenue.
Smith says she and area residents who’ve taken on the traffic issue over the last five years, have learned that “when you encounter a problem in something as institutionalized as traffic is, it’s hard to convince people that its execution may have been handled ass backwards. People tend to think of these systems as having been put there by God. The idea you can create change took a long time for my community to believe.”
“We did a lot of homework, looked at European traffic systems, assembled block clubs, community organizations, chambers of commerce. The public is just beginning to grasp traffic congestion is a huge public safety issue,” said Smith.
“In my community, a car ripped through a bus stop and tore the cement steps off of Sacred Heart Grade School on Sheridan. Senior citizens have been hit by cars. In five years there were so many collisions on Broadway . . . They weren’t fatal, but we realized we had come to accept these collisions and speed and the fact that we can’t get across the street. We accepted it as a way of life. Now we’ve come to the point where we, in our community anyway, have developed a strong, strong rebellion against all of that.”
