Residents prevail in fight for safety measures along Glencoe side street

Hohlfelder Road residents can stop now. In fact, they’re required to.

The Glencoe Board of Trustees on Thursday, July 20, directed village staff to install two stop signs and pedestrian crosswalks on Hohlfelder Road following months of advocacy from Glencoe residents. 

According to an edition of Glencoe’s “Village eNews,” installation of a three-way stop at Orchard Lane and four-way stop at Sunset Avenue will happen within the next month or so.

The trustees, who agreed on the safety measures during a committee of the whole session, also requested increased monitoring of the road by public safety officers and continued use of speed monitors on the street.

“Our goal is we want to make you safe, we want to do it in a reasonable way,” Village President Howard Roin said to attending residents.

This decision comes nearly a year after several Hohlfelder Road residents brought their concerns to the attention of the Village of Glencoe.

Hohlfelder Road is a residential street that runs between Dundee Road and Westley Road just west of Green Bay Road. Randy Strickley and Andrew Ushakov, two Hohlfelder Road residents who have led the Hohlfelder Traffic Committee, the resident initiative, said that in recent years the street has become a popular cut-through route between Green Bay Road and Dundee Road..

Ushakov, who lives at 1051 Hohlfelder Road, said residents are concerned with the speed of cars, the number of cars and the lack of crosswalks.

Once residents approached the Village, they began to collect data regarding the street traffic and presented their findings in January. They conducted a resident meeting later that winter before consulting an outside company.

After it conducted a traffic study, the Village of Glencoe hired engineering firm Gewalt Hamilton Associates to perform an outside study. GHA recommended the installation of speed bumps, speed tables, narrowing lanes and speed feedback signs. Their results showed that Hohlfelder Road did not meet the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices criteria necessary to install four-way stop signs.

“This is as comprehensive of a traffic study as has been performed in the time I’ve been here,” said David Mau, Glencoe’s public work director. “And I think appropriately so.”

Study results showed that average speeds on Hohlfelder Road were 3-7 mph above the speed limit of 25 mph. Speeds in the 85th percentile were 8.5-12.7 mph above the limit.

Strickley said within two days after the committee of the whole meeting, the Village began marking spots with paint and flags indicating where the new stop signs and pedestrian crosswalks would be.

“We were pleased that the trustees listened to what we provided them and read the letters that were sent to them as well as the summary we provided them of why their initial analysis of average speed limits made no sense,” Strickley said.

Strickley said the residents will be happy if they see a “dramatic reduction” in speeds, but they do not necessarily expect to see fewer cars.

He said that residents will continue to monitor the situation and will revisit the idea of speed tables if speeds do not decrease, which he believes is almost impossible.

“We had probably four people who have lived on the street for over 25 years, who said ‘thank heaven that this is happening, we’ve been asking for it for 25 years,’” Strickley said.

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