Stop sign. Courtesy of Metro Creative Connection.
On Monday, four-way stop signs were installed on N. Edgefield Ave at Eighth Street and Ninth Street after residents in the neighborhood successfully petitioned the city.
Resident Jordan Gooch and his wife moved to Winnetka Heights in April 2021. At the time, District 1 Council Member Chad West was a driving force in having a traffic circle installed at the intersection of Edgefield and Ninth Street, but Gooch said it did not fully solve the traffic issues in the area.
“It didn’t really reduce the volume of traffic, people were still able to cut over it,” Gooch said. “I think it was just poor design from the city, so we voted to have it removed and pursued the stop signs.”
The Advocate reported in April 2023 that the traffic circle, which was installed in August 2022, did significantly decrease speeds and slowed traffic. The findings of a city study showed that the average speed of cars slowed two miles per hour once the island was installed, dropping from 25 miles per hour to 23 miles per hour.
The percentage of cars driving over 30 miles per hour dropped from 16% to 9.5% after the island was installed.
The Winnetka Heights Neighborhood Association worked with Councilman West and the city’s Transportation Department to have the island built in the neighborhood after neighbors became increasingly concerned about speeding cars and traffic in the area.
Ultimately, the traffic circle was removed last summer and residents began petitioning for stop signs to be installed.
Getting the stop signs installed was a process that took several years and had dozens of people involved. Gooch began the effort by creating a website and email list, placing a sign in his yard with a QR card to sign up. About 50 people signed up for the email list, and neighbors would swing by to grab petition lists and collect signatures.
About 150 signatures were needed for both Eighth and Ninth Street, Gooch said, and they were able to get the petition submitted.
“It was a lot of neighborhood work, and I had a lot of support from the neighborhood association,” Gooch said. “It was a neighborhood-wide thing that everybody wanted to see to get a little bit of traffic slowdown.”
With two young kids and a dog, Gooch said it was important to him to have safer traffic patterns in his neighborhood.
“The amount of traffic we get through here is like 2,000 cars a day, and that’s based on three different city studies,” Gooch said. “Both of the earlier two studies found that of those 2,000 cars, 15 percent of those were going over 30 miles an hour. After seeing that information, we knew something had to be done. We just got to the point where we needed to buckle down and just do the petition.”
