I have a confession many Oak Park drivers could make. More than once, driving north on Oak Park Avenue at night, I have rolled through the crosswalk at Thomas Street with someone standing at the curb, because I never saw them. I wasn’t speeding or on my phone. The crosswalk was dark, and the person waiting had learned, the way pedestrians here learn, to wait for the cars.
That corner now has flashing beacons, and Thomas on either side has diverters that keep through-traffic off the block. This paper’s letters page has spent the summer calling the village’s traffic calming excessive, ugly and unstudied. I live at that corner, and I’d like to make the opposite case, without telling anyone they’re a bad driver. Most of us aren’t. That’s the point.
A street that is only safe when every driver is careful every single time isn’t safe. It’s lucky. And you can feel the difference, even if you’ve never had a crash. It’s the parent on the parkway who says “car!” every 90 seconds. It’s the kid who isn’t allowed to bike to Mann alone. It’s the neighbor across the street you’ve never met because neither of you lingers out front.
That feeling is the first thing calming changes. Donald Appleyard’s famous San Francisco study compared a street carrying 2,000 cars a day with a similar one carrying 16,000. People on the quiet street had three more friends and twice as many acquaintances and thought of the sidewalk as part of home. In 1971, 80 percent of British 7- and 8-year-olds walked home from school alone; by 1990, 9 percent. The kids didn’t change. The streets did.
The numbers behind that feeling are real, too. From 2018 to 2022, 132 people were killed or seriously injured in Oak Park crashes; 68 percent involved a driver failing to yield, slow, or obey a sign. People like me at a dark crosswalk. Federal Highway Administration studies put driver yielding at crosswalks like that near 18 percent; with beacons, 80 percent or better.
Doesn’t this just push traffic onto Division? London has built more than a hundred low-traffic neighborhoods this way. Inside them, injuries fell by a third; on the main roads around them, they didn’t rise. That’s why the village made the Thomas diverters temporary and is counting cars through this fall: the pilot is the study. If Division gets worse, the fix belongs on Division.
Every town that has done this has had this fight, then kept the streets. Stockholm’s congestion charge had 34 percent support before its trial and 68 percent five years later.
So here is my ask: Before you post “remove it” on the village’s Engage page, stand at Thomas and Oak Park at school dismissal for 10 minutes. Then post what you saw and what you’d change. That’s the feedback that gets acted on. And if you’d like your block to feel the way Thomas feels now, the petition process is open to you. I’ll walk it with you.
Thomas Hallock lives at Thomas Street and Oak Park Avenue, where his kids walk to school.