|
June
2005 |
|
Afternoon in the Intersection of Equality and Safety School and Ped Safety Bills Passed Taking It To the (Healthy) Streets DuPage County Observes Bike Day |
Taking It To the (Healthy) Streets For two days in April, planners, transportation advocates, engineers, public officials and policymakers gathered at the invitation of the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation to build a nutritional pyramid for healthy streets in Northeastern Illinois, focusing on what is needed to realize “complete street” design, create safe walking and biking routes for school children and seniors, and reduce reckless driving. The Second Annual Healthy Streets Conference served as kick-off point for CBF’s Healthy Streets Charter, a campaign that aims for “a balanced transportation environment that more wisely allocates resources and space to encourage walking, bicycling and public transit through a coordinated regional effort integrating education, marketing, enforcement and street design.” The conferece focused on “hard” engineering, which determines factors like turning radii, crosswalk configuration and signal timing, and “soft” engineering, which addresses behavior through marketing and education, among other initiatives. Keynote speaker, Martha Lucy Barriga Hernandez, director of Via RecreActiva in Guadalajara, Mexico, spoke about the benefits of closing a network of streets to motor traffic on a weekly basis, as has been recently proposed for Chicago under the moniker “Sunday Parkways.”
|
