Riverside is concluding its quarterly village board updates surrounding the issue of traffic near Berkeley Road.
At the board’s June 20 meeting, Director of Public Safety Matthew Buckley gave the last traffic update to trustees before the board agreed to stop receiving updates each quarter, as they had for the past year. Buckley said that village staff’s recommendation to end the updates is a result of measures Riverside has taken since 2020 to slow traffic speeds in the area and push drivers from Berkeley Road east onto Harlem Avenue rather than having them head west toward Byrd Road.
“This will still be an area that we are always keeping an eye on,” Buckley said. “We do regular monitoring there, especially because of the Star Buds business that’s on that corner. We make routine passes through that parking lot, checking on the business, making sure everything’s fine in that area.”
During his presentation, Buckley told trustees about the village’s latest traffic counts on Berkeley Road, during which police staff monitored the number of vehicles using the street as well as their speeds from May 13 to May 22.
Over this period, 1,164 vehicles traveled down Berkeley Road; according to village documents, the average speed on Berkeley Road was 17 mph, which is under the street’s 25-mph speed limit. Only three vehicles traveled over 30 mph over those nine days, and no cars went higher than 32 mph, which is the fastest a car can travel over the speed limit on the road before police will enforce a speeding violation.
A similar traffic count over six days in October 2018 showed that 29 vehicles drove faster than 31 mph, village documents show.
“We’ve done these quarterly traffic counts, which have shown that a lot of our improvements that we have done have worked,” Buckley said. “They have reduced the number of vehicles on that street and definitely have shown that [they have] reduced the speed of vehicles travelling on that street.”
Traffic on Berkeley Road has concerned residents who live there since 2018, when one of the homes on the street was broken into. While the village refused to close down access to Berkeley Road from Harlem Avenue in 2019, it agreed to install signs in February 2020, discouraging drivers from turning onto the road from Harlem. According to village documents, in August 2020, former Police Chief Thomas Weitzel told the village board that the ‘Do Not Enter’ signs had reduced the amount of traffic cutting through Berkeley Road by 60-70%.
Then, the issue of traffic lay dormant until January 2022, when village trustees directed staff to look into further measures that could be taken to calm traffic on Berkeley Road. Village documents say the village manager, Jessica Frances, then created a plan with resident feedback to address their concerns, though it was not implemented until work on Star Buds “was underway.”
Since then, other village measures to reduce traffic on Berkeley Road have included adding ‘Right Turn Only’ and ‘No Left Turn’ signs near the Star Buds parking lot exit onto Berkeley and the end of the alleyway just west of Star Buds. The village has also installed signage in the area to alert drivers that they are under video surveillance.
At a board meeting in February this year, Buckley told trustees he had heard from residents that there was a “noticeable decrease in traffic” turning west onto Berkeley Road from Harlem Avenue.
Buckley said Riverside’s department of public works is now working on adding another sign at the end of the alleyway to push traffic toward Harlem Avenue.
“Between myself, Manager Frances and Director [of Public Works Dan] Tabb, we’ve spent a lot of time standing on Berkeley, a lot of times right at Harlem Avenue, just watching traffic, coming up with different ideas of how we could approach this and different things we could do,” Buckley told trustees on June 20. “As things come up and we find stuff like [new signage], if we can do something small that helps alleviate other issues, we’re going to stay on top of that and do it also.”
