Board to weigh a three-lane Westmore-Meyers Road

Drivers on Westmore-Meyers Road north of Jackson Street could someday find one lane each way and a turn lane down the middle. The Village Board will take up the Westmore-Meyers Safety Enhancement Project at a special meeting on Thursday, Oct. 29, at 6 p.m. in the Lorraine G. Gerhardt Community Room, according to the agenda.

The village hired Civiltech Engineering in May 2025 to study the road after residents raised concerns about the intersection at Washington Boulevard, village records say. The study grew to cover the whole corridor from Roosevelt Road to St. Charles Road, with a closer look at the stretch from Jackson Street to St. Charles Road.

That northern stretch is where most of the crashes happen. Of the 207 crashes in the study area from 2020 through 2024, 142 were between Jackson Street and St. Charles Road, along with 55 of the 75 crashes that caused injuries and 80% of the crashes involving people on foot or on bikes. Using national and state crash models, the consultant found the stretch should see about 19 injury crashes a year for a road of its type, but it averaged 27.

The study blames the road’s layout. Westmore-Meyers is mostly four lanes with no separate left-turn lanes, so drivers wait in a through lane to turn into side streets and driveways while traffic behind them and coming toward them keeps moving. That leads to rear-end, sideswipe and turning crashes, a staff memo says. Speeds add to the problem. The posted limit is 30 mph, but fewer than 30% of drivers obey it, and the 85th-percentile speed is 36 to 37 mph, according to radar counts taken on school-year weekdays.

The Illinois Prairie Path crossing gets particular attention. Nearly 800 people crossed Westmore-Meyers on the trail on a typical weekday in September 2025, the study found. A rectangular rapid flashing beacon went in there in 2018, but six pedestrian and bicycle crashes still happened at the crossing between 2020 and 2024, and the consultant says drivers and trail users alike seem confused by the signal. The plan would replace it with a pedestrian hybrid beacon, which shows drivers a red light, and add a refuge island in the middle of the road.

Changing the road from four undivided lanes to two lanes with a continuous center left-turn lane would cut injury crashes by an average of 42%, or 11 to 12 fewer crashes a year, with negligible effects on traffic, the consultant estimates. Traffic on the corridor has been steady since 2020, ranging from just under 12,000 vehicles a day south of St. Charles Road to about 16,000 at Roosevelt Road. Three earlier studies, in 2016, 2018 and 2023, also recommended reconfiguring the road. The presentation points to Main Street in Downers Grove, a four-lane road carrying about 14,000 vehicles a day that was changed to the same layout in 2024.

The idea has drawn mixed reactions. At a joint meeting of two board committees on April 14, residents spoke both for and against it, and much of the opposition was about the bike lanes in the original design, including worries that delivery trucks and contractors would block them. The committees voted 9 to 5 in support of the concept, and the presentation describes resident opinion as evenly split. Since then, village staff have drawn up an alternate version that keeps the safety changes but drops the dedicated bike lanes and adds street parking on one side, all within the road’s current width.

Construction is estimated at $2.2 million. The village applied in August for money from the federally funded Highway Safety Improvement Program, which the Illinois Department of Transportation runs, and awards are expected in early 2027. The village’s capital plan already includes $300,000 for design engineering and $3 million for construction in 2028. If the board agrees to move ahead, staff would update the cost estimates and seek proposals for design work. About a year after construction, the village would check whether crashes actually dropped.

Thursday’s agenda also includes a review of the village’s debris management policy, which the Public Works and Environmental Concerns Committee recommends leaving unchanged, and a discussion of the corporate levy and the village’s year-end surplus policy. Public participation is on the agenda.