Oak Park’s village board heard from dozens of residents about Harvard Street’s place in the Oak Park bike plan last week, with Oak Parkers split on the pros and cons of parking on the street being converted to bike lanes.
Debate on the future of the street was spirited, as the village ran out of public comment sign-up sheets while accommodating the crowd that gathered at Village Hall to weigh in on the bike plan. The meeting stretched past midnight after so many residents took their turns at the podium addressing Oak Park’s trustees over a three-hour discussion.
Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman said the board will move forward from the listening session looking to engage more with residents on the issue and find points of compromise.
“I’m going to take the next month to listen for where some of the compromise is, however, I do at this point appreciate the work that has been put into hearing from residents,” Scaman said. “We are looking for our processes to match the spirit that we have as elected officials, but I do see where there has been a lot of work done to adjust the final alternative that is addressing some of the concerns. At this point, I’m in favor of that as I continue to just see if there is room for further ideas or at least for me to be specific about an area where I know there will be a disability access challenges and how we would reach out to the homeowner and work with them. So, I invite any of our residents this evening to email us questions.”
The board is expected to vote on a bike plan in July.
In the latest draft of Oak Park’s bike plan, the east-west street in south Oak Park is identified as one of the first stretches of road in the village that would be reshaped once the plan is put into action.
The bike plan includes short-term, medium-term and long-term plans for making Oak Park more bicycle-friendly, with the plan’s short-term vision calling for the parking spaces along both sides of Harvard Street between Maple Avenue and Humphrey Avenue to be converted into stiped bike lanes. The current plan’s long-term vision would see the striped bike lanes on Harvard Street eventually upgraded to raised, protected bike lanes.
The plan’s short-term vision also calls for parking to be removed on Augusta Street between Harlem Avenue and Cuyler Avenue in favor of striped biking lanes as well as on one side of Chicago Avenue between Kenilworth Avenue and Ridgeland Avenue near the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, according to the plan.
The vast majority of public commentors at the June 3 meeting were primarily concerned with how the plan would affect Harvard Street.
Opponents of the bike lanes said the plan was created without giving residents a fair voice, unjustly removes easy access to homes along the street, creates accessibility challenges for older Harvard Street residents and will not convincingly make the street safer for cyclists.
Proponents of Harvard Street’s inclusion in the plan said it’s a commonsense location for protected bike lanes because of the schools and parks it connects and that the loss of parking access for the street’s residents does not outweigh the benefits the whole community would enjoy through Harvard Street’s inclusion in the proposed Oak Park bicycle network.
The first residents allowed to speak on the issue were several school children who prepared statements in support of the bike plan. One young girl Anya, who identified herself as a third grader at Irving School, took to the podium wearing her bike helmet and pajamas.
“If there is a bike path when I get older, I would feel a lot safer biking around parks with friends, when I’m riding with my parents I will know exactly where to ride because the lane will be marked,” she said. “I have seen kids get into accidents when they do not know where to go. This happened to me just this weekend when I was riding with my parents on a busy street. There was a stoplight. We went between two cars and when it was time to go, I was having trouble going straight and I went right in front of a car. My mom was yelling things and I could not understand what she was saying or what was happening. It was scary, I think if there was a bike path, then that would not have happened.”
Several of the opponents of the Harvard Street bike lanes said that their outreach to board members and village staff had been ignored and that the street is already safe for bikers of all ages, few recorded bike accidents have happened on Harvard and that removing parked cars would encourage reckless driving on the residential street in addition to creating accessibility challenges.
“It is not going to eliminate speeding cars going down the street,” said Jen Zarosl, a Harvard Street resident and a teacher at Lincoln Elementary. “This is a year-round permanent inconvenience for people. Kids biking to school is only going to be here or there. I am all for biking. I love it, my family grew up biking but my husband was recently diagnosed with M.S. He might not be able to bike much longer, so how is this going to affect him? It will affect him because he will have to walk further to get to my house.”
Several supporters of the plan said that the village-wide bike plan is wisely designed, and that Harvard Street’s inclusion plays a nuanced part in making the proposed system function.
“I am deeply for the bike plan, I think it is a wonderfully designed and very thoughtful plan and how it has gone about the actions that it proposes,” said Stephen Stassen. “It isn’t just proposing interventions because it feels like it. Those interventions are to create a whole network so kids can go to school, elderly can be part of the community, that families can go to parks. That is what this plan is designed for and it does it carefully. North-south streets are nice and quiet, they do not need much intervention like Kenilworth. Your east and west streets with the intersections present the biggest issue.”
Some supporters of the bike plan mentioned that people with disabilities could be authorized to seek permission from the village to have handicapped parking spots cut out of the bike path in front of their homes to accommodate them.