When Mary Lou Wehrli’s parents grew up in Naperville in the early part of the 20th Century, the population was 3,000–still snugly fitting into town-founder Joe Naper’s original vision of a trading village one day’s oxcart ride from Chicago.
When Wehrli was growing up there in the ’50s and ’60s, Naperville was a prosperous farming town of about 25,000. As a girl, she would ride horses for miles through woods and over fields and hitch them up downtown.
Now Naperville’s population exceeds 130,000. Those farms are subdivisions, and the old horse trails are roads packed with Naperville commuters driving home from the Metra station and hustling to football and soccer practices in fast-moving, mass pulses that residents refer to as the “Naperville 500.”
A rabid Naperville booster, Wehrli isn’t curmudgeonly about the growth. “It provides an economic life for the whole town,” she says, though she acknowledges downsides of a rural town turning into a bedroom community, including “a loss of economic and age diversity.”
She can’t do anything about the demographics, but she and some other Naperville residents are doing something about the drivers.
Wehrli drives around the town’s residential streets at a crawl, with a sticker on the back window identifying her Subaru station wagon as a “Naperville Pace Car.”
In recent years Naperville residents have been complaining to city officials about the volume and speed of the traffic, especially on the 25-m.p.h. residential streets. Cars routinely do 30, 35 and 40 through these neighborhoods, where many people have moved to raise their kids in a safe environment.
But people such as Dan Oswald aren’t sure they have that. The president of a Chicago publishing company, he moved to Naperville about eight years ago, to raise his three kids. When Oswald sees people roaring by his corner lot, he gets angry, often shouting at them to slow down. “These streets are full of kids and no matter how much you train them, kids will occasionally run into the street,” he says.
Eighteen pedestrians were injured and one killed by cars in Naperville in 2002. And of the 3,916 traffic accidents resulting in 606 injuries and four deaths, the leading cause was “failure to reduce your speed to avoid a traffic crash,” according to Sgt. James Bedell, traffic unit supervisor for the Naperville Police.
Worried Naperville residents call Steve Cope, the city’s transportation and traffic services operations manager, every day, and the Pace Car program is one of the tactics he uses to mollify them without turning Naperville into a police state or a connect-the-dots adventure of stop signs and speed bumps.
If the residents had their way, cars would be “bouncing around and stopping everywhere,” says Cope. “We’re fighting a culture. This is about motorist behavior. The majority of speeding is from local residents themselves.”
Though Oswald says he obeys the speed limit in residential areas, he admits that, on main arteries such as Ogden Avenue, he drives as fast as the traffic will allow. He feels he doesn’t have a choice. With a three-hour round-trip commute to Chicago, Oswald’s time is short. And the distances between football and baseball fields in Naperville are great. With three kids, he’s constantly rushing. “Everyone is,” he says.
That’s why Naperville’s “traffic-calming” strategy emphasizes education over law-enforcement and engineering solutions. As part of its Friendly Streets Program, the city issues educational materials in neighborhoods where speeding is a problem, runs programs that encourage children to walk to school and issues yard signs that say, “Keep Kids Alive: Drive 25.” The Pace Car program is the latest part of that program.
The Pace Car notion was conceived several years ago by an Australian transportation consultant named David Engwicht. First implemented in the U.S. in Boise, Idaho, it’s simple: The city asks citizens to sign a “Pace Car Pledge,” by which they promise to agree to drive the speed limit on all roads, to be courteous to all pedestrians and bicyclists, to minimize their car use and to “Let other motorists know why I am driving courteously by displaying the Pace Car emblem on my car, and do something humorous to my car to make others smile.”
Wehrli’s Pace Car sticker is accompanied by another that says: “I’d rather floor it.”
And some cars behind her do floor it around her slow Subaru. “You see, he’s just clueless,” said Wehrli one recent rush hour as a sedan ripped around her over a double line.
Wehrli says she thought long and hard before agreeing to be a Pace Car driver and didn’t apply the sticker until she had completed an internal transformation that made driving 25 seem normal. Like many people, she typically drove 5 to 10 m.p.h. faster than the posted limit. “It really slows you down inside, gives you a peaceful feeling,” she says. “Your mind is now thinking about the welfare of someone else. It’s easy to do and you feel good about it.”
Debbie Kresl doesn’t have that inner peace. Though she’s the Naperville project manager responsible for building the Pace Car program, Kresl still hasn’t applied the Pace Car sticker to her vehicle. “I’m just as guilty as others when I’m in a hurry,” she says, adding that she wants quality over quantity in terms of the Pace Car drivers she signs up.
So though her goal is to have 10 percent of Naperville drivers on the Pace Car program–that would amount to about 13,000–she and Cope are not aggressive about promoting the pledge or upset that around 90 people have signed it since the launch, a couple of months ago.
They say they’ve spent less than $3,000 on the Pace Car brochure and the stickers and don’t expect to see measurable results from the program for a year.
Much more has been spent on engineering solutions. Largely unused white parking boxes painted on the edges of wide streets make the streets appear more cramped, thus slowing traffic. Another engineering move has been to place “traffic circles” in residential intersections. But those are $5,600 a pop, according to Kresl. Pace added he has received calls from residents who were dissatisfied with the results.
The other deterrent to speeding, of course, is law enforcement. Naperville issued 16,060 speeding tickets in 2002 alone–up from 10,762 in 2000.
A man who says he was born and raised in Naperville wrote Sun Publications columnist Tim West to complain that he’s been pulled over “numerous times for practically nothing,” aside from the fact that he’s a male in his 20s.
“Our perfect little city has turned into a suburban metropolis nightmare stemming from overprotection. I enjoy the fact that when I drive through the city of Naperville, I rarely have to deal with so-called `real crimes,’ but I do get extremely irritated by being pulled over repeatedly for reasons that seem awfully immature to your average American police officer.”
He signed his e-mail, “A Once-Was Napervillian Turned Bolingbrookian.”
But officer Bedell says complaints about overzealous cops are outnumbered by gripes about aggressive drivers. “The No. 1 complaint I receive on a daily basis is about speeding vehicles on residential streets within our city.”
All the Pace Car Program has yielded is a slew of comments in the suburban papers from drivers such as the one who told columnist West that “when he comes across a Naperville Pace Car he will be extending a finger at the driver to indicate Naperville is No. 1.”
But for people such as Wehrli, the Pace Car idea is worth a try. “Speeding is the No. 1 concern of residents in Naperville,” Cope says. “They turn to me and the city to solve their issues. They are the problem.”
