Recently there was a furor on social media. Some folks were offended that our red brick streets had been defaced with paint. Was it graffiti artists? A Sherwin-Williams truck spill? Nope, it was the village, executing our bike plan, painting bike lanes on Marion Street.
We have a Bike Plan that spells out the changes. It’s extensive and thoroughly researched (You can find it here: https://engageoakpark.com/bike-plan). It creates a network of comfortable, safe routes kids can take to school, and that you can take to the gym or coffee shop. We are far from its final state, but it’s being continually improved.
The village has also been rolling out highly visible traffic-calming measures. The pushback has been loud. Social media posts rail against the pinch points and bumpouts. They hate the little white poles and post pictures of them all bent over.
We’ve got a plan for this too; it’s called Vision Zero. It’s comprehensive and thoroughly researched (You can find it here: https://engageoakpark.com/visionzero). The goal of the plan is to bring traffic injuries and fatalities down to zero.
Together the Bike Plan and Vision Zero represent a decade-long push to use best practices to improve pedestrian, cyclist, and driver safety in Oak Park. If you thought Oak Park is already relatively safe, check out our crash dashboard: https://jvanderberg.github.io/oak-park-crashes.
In 2025, Oak Park police recorded 1,716 crashes, almost five a day — 215 of those crashes caused an injury, about four a week. Nearly four in five of those injury crashes involved only cars. So if you think all of the work we are doing is just to protect cyclists and pedestrians, think again. Most of the people getting hurt on our streets are in cars. And 2026 is worse: with two months left, we’ve already had more injury crashes than all of last year.
Pedestrians and bike riders were in 4% of those crashes but 21% of injury crashes. In 2025, 33 crashes injured a pedestrian, and 12 injured a cyclist. These are the most vulnerable users of our roads. Tragically we’ve had one pedestrian fatality so far in 2026. I know the intersection well. It has zero traffic-calming measures, and poor visibility. Bumpouts at that intersection could save lives.
We know traffic-calming works; it prevents death and injury because it slows cars down. For pedestrians, the numbers are stark. A pedestrian hit at 23 mph has about a 10% risk of death; at 32 mph it’s 25%; at 42 mph 50%. [1]. Real-world experience bears this out. London’s 20 mph zones cut road casualties by 42% [2].
If you don’t like all of the new speedbumps, remember that they are there to protect our children. Oakland, California found that children living near speed humps had 53% lower odds of being hit in their neighborhood, and 60% lower odds of being hit in front of their own home [3].
What about all those new bike lanes? Bike lanes not only protect cyclists, they protect drivers too. A 13-year study of 12 large U.S. cities found protected and separated bike lanes were associated with fewer deaths for all road users [4].
As our village rolls out these changes, give them grace. Remember that there’s a concrete plan, and that the plan is directed by research that shows these measures save lives and prevent injury. It might look ugly, it might slow you down a bit, but you’ll get used to it, and the numbers will eventually reflect the improvements. And please, try out the new bike routes, Harvard, for example, is amazing.
Josh is a passionate urbanist and entrepreneur who has called Oak Park home for over a decade. Sources for this column can be found in the online version at oakpark.com/Opinion.
[1] https://aaafoundation.org/research/impact-speed-pedestrians-risk-severe-injury-death
[2] https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4370
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1448312
[4] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190529113036.htm