Suburban Cycling and Walking Becoming More Dangerous

The Chicagoland area boasts 400 miles of bike trails, but for many, getting where you need to go means taking streets, a prospect that's getting more dangerous in the city's suburbs. "Instead of declining, in 2015 suburban collisions rose 3 percent and fatal collisions spiked by nearly 13 percent, according to the most recent Illinois Department of Transportation data." Marni Pyke reports for the Daily Herald.

The costs of bike infrastructure strike some suburban officials as too much to bear, but that puts their constituents in danger. "Many bikers and pedestrians feel like endangered species, at odds with the car culture of the suburbs," Pyke writes. Even more walkable suburban downtowns like Arlington Heights can be dangerous, because they contain high-volume, high-speed arterial streets. Pyke reports and the speed of traffic can be the difference between a crash and a deadly crash.