As part of a response to an epidemic of automobile crashes across Chicago, many of them involving pedestrians and cyclists, a new strategy for safer streets is taking hold at our 110-year-old neighborhood school and its sister park.
With nearly 900 students, Portage Park Elementary School sits on most of a city block in its namesake neighborhood, just kitty-corner from its namesake park. The community’s popular, leafy 38-acre park predates the Chicago Park District and is home to a historic field house, Olympic-sized pool and a popular farmers market.
Access to our incredible community resources, however, is not without risk.
In recent years, five students have been hit by cars while crossing nearby streets. Like many Chicago schools, ours deals with a crossing guard shortage, parents wary of letting children walk or bike to class, traffic, and reckless drivers at pickup and drop-off times.
A 1-square-mile area that includes the school and park — Chicago Police Department Beat 1624 — has accrued more than 2,600 vehicle crashes in the last five years, or more than one a day.
Nearby intersections along Irving Park Road have seen numerous fatal crashes. Last fall, Josh Anleu, a 16-year-old Schurz High School student, was killed while riding his bike a short distance from the park on North Long Avenue. An unsolved hit-and-run in February just two blocks away resulted in the hospitalization of an 18-year-old cyclist.
Do these incidents make Portage Park a crash hot spot? It’s likely our neighborhood and probably yours mirror trends showing our communities are significantly more dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and motorists than in the past. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 42,500 people died on American roads in 2022, including more than 1,200 in Illinois. These are numbers not seen in decades.
Locally, Chicago saw nearly 86,000 crashes in 2022, including close to 3,600 involving pedestrians or cyclists. The crashes resulted in 160 deaths: 98 of those fatalities were occupants of vehicles, 52 were pedestrians and 10 were cyclists.
Worldwide, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death among young people. Youths, along with seniors, are disproportionately represented among pedestrian deaths on Chicago’s streets.
While experts seek to pinpoint causes behind the spike in crashes, pressure has grown for solutions, starting with infrastructure that forces drivers to slow down and pay attention. Locally, roadway safety advocates are more organized and active than ever, and we are not waiting for the crisis to fix itself.
Increasingly, like-minded Chicagoans are finding support in organizations such as the Active Transportation Alliance, Better Streets Chicago, Bike Grid Now, Bike Lane Uprising and the Southwest Collective. These groups are not just engaging in traditional grassroots advocacy but also public information campaigns, local elections and outreach to reframe roadway safety as a critical safety issue.
For parents raising children in Chicago, solutions cannot come quickly enough.
We started in Portage Park by talking with the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) and elected officials. We collected available data and petitioned for a traffic study. Inspired by infrastructure projects elsewhere, we attended a CDOT Mobility Collaborative forum for residents to connect with city planners tasked with building an equitable and accessible transportation system. We saw how leaders in other communities, such as Ald. Matt Martin, 47th, and Ald. Andre Vasquez, 40th, used discretionary funding to build safe infrastructure around schools. CDOT and Ald. Nick Sposato, 38th, shared our vision for a safe gateway linking our school and park, and planning began.
Now years of advocacy are coming together across two projects. In response to the crashes on Long, Ald. Ruth Cruz, 30th, funded the installation of bollards south of Irving Park to make crosswalks and intersections safer. Weeks ago, CDOT broke ground in Portage Park to add curb extensions, also known as bump-outs, at several intersections and build a raised intersection between our park and school. The bump-outs have shortened street crossings for students and parents and ensure corners remain clear of parked vehicles. The raised intersection serves as an oversize speed bump. New signage sets a lower neighborhood speed limit of 20 mph.
Hopefully, these improvements give young people more opportunities to safely experience childhood in our city from more than an arm’s length away from a parent or caretaker.
This fall, visit our neighborhood and see the results of our collaboration, and if there is a way you think our efforts can make your community safer, we want to be an advocate for your neighborhood too.
Patrick Corcoran is an advocate for roadway safety, a parent of two Portage Park Elementary School students and the policy director for Illinois’ Office of the Comptroller.
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