As La Grange Park continues to refurbish the branding for its main areas of commerce, village officials are seeking reactions from residents on the recently completed Village Market Paint and Post pilot project.
The project grew out of the Village Market Streetscape Improvement Plan that was approved by the Village Board in 2023.
“They’ve installed these white posts into the asphalt, and that creates a temporary curve and we painted behind that along with the crosswalks,” village planner Derek Rockwell said. “This is a pilot program, and we’re in the feedback phase right now. That’s why we have the survey going on.”
The resident survey is available on the village web site, lagrangepark.org, under the “government” tab which will have a section for the Village Market Market Plan.
The site also shows a short film of village staff working on the project and a link to the text of the Improvement Plan itself.
A primary goal of the project is to make the area more pedestrian friendly, and the pilot is a step toward testing out some ideas at the intersections of Sherwood Road and Woodlawn Avenue and Homestead Road.
The posts, or “bollards” as they are sometimes called, are designed to reduce the geometry of the intersection and slow traffic down, or provide a “calming effect” as city planners term it.
The goal is for new pedestrian walkways, and posts will encourage people in the area, either shoppers or residents in the nearby Homestead Apartments, to take advantage of walking to the immediate area around Jewel Foods and other merchants in the Village Market shopping center, officials said.
Since the village owns the affected roadways, there will be no need to get approval from the Illinois Department of Transportation, though that approval will be necessary to make any changes to other major streets in the village such as La Grange Road and 31st Street.
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While the pilot program is expected to be finished within a 12-month period and confined to the Village Market area, depending on results and resident feedback, the tactic could be applied to other sections of the village, like the 31st Street area, which is also going through a program to update transportation in the shopping corridor.
As for the expected result from the changes, Rockwell said it was an ongoing process.
“We are in the midst of doing that research,” he said. “We did pre-installation counts of vehicle and pedestrian traffic. And right now we’re doing post-installation counts and we’re going to compare them to each other. That will supplement some technical data with the survey, which provides the community’s perception. So we’re heading into it from both sides on that.”
Hank Beckman is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.