The Village of Streamwood on Sept. 12 issued an “Exciting Progress Alert!” on Facebook. And it is indeed exciting: The final trusses of the new bridge over Route 59 have been assembled!
You can now see the bike/pedestrian bridge being built just north of Irving Park Road to connect two Streamwood neighborhoods, giving residents a safe path to places like Streamwood High School, Streamwood Oaks Golf Club, a couple of parks and nearby stores.
The bridge is not open yet; the concrete must now be poured over those final trusses. The plan is to have the bridge open by the end of the year.
A lot of concrete has been poured closer to the ground on both sides of the four-lane Route 59. The bridge is leading to neighborhoods, but the final connections to the trails in those neighborhoods aren’t in place yet, either.
The bridge is part of a larger Bartlett & Streamwood Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan, created with the assistance of the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning and residents’ feedback.
It’s been an ambitious plan with a lot of related trail work, including new and extended neighborhood trails as well as, hopefully in the future, a trail along Irving Park Road that could link Streamwood to areas west to the Fox River and east through Schaumburg to Busse Woods.
The Streamwood bridge is one of many in the region that will be getting done after a lot of effort and cost.
The bridge is really needed in Streamwood, because there is just no great way to cross busy Route 59, or to easily get anywhere even if you did.
The winding neighborhoods being connected lie between Irving Park and Schaumburg roads, on the west end of town. You could cross Route 59 at either of those roads, via sidewalks and crosswalks.
But to get back into the neighborhoods, you have to ride on those sidewalks — and bicyclists really shouldn’t — or ride on the roads themselves until you get to a side street.
You could also dare to simply cross Route 59 in a few spots, with no traffic lights. It’s not a good idea. And there are no sidewalks on Route 59.
But trails do exist now within the neighborhoods on both sides of Route 59, and the bridge will connect them.
On the west side of Route 59, various trails, in varying conditions, run along all the little bodies of water, including a branch of Poplar Creek, and otherwise weave behind homes.
On the east side, a new trail has been built on one side or the other of Madison Drive. That leads to Streamwood Boulevard, the only road that weaves through the neighborhoods all the way to the east end of town.
The village calls Streamwood Boulevard a bike route, but it doesn’t have a sidepath or bike lanes, so riders have to be comfortable riding on that road. But it is pretty roomy and traffic pretty light on it, except maybe during rush hour.
So the bridge will at least connect the neighborhoods immediately surrounding Route 59 and give residents more options for riding and getting around. Plus, a nice new bike bridge is always fun.
Overall, the suburb’s streets are definitely not a Chicago-like grid, so it hasn’t been easy to get across or through town. More serious cyclists willing to take some risks find a way, but they may not be so fond of the neighborhood trails that are on the thin and aging side.
Some of those trails as well as streets, especially west of Route 59, do offer some nice scenery, given Poplar Creek and those little bodies of water, plus Columbia Park.
As for the Streamwood residents or passersby who want to make a longer ride involving the Fox River Trail not many miles west, they’ll have to either wait for that Irving Park Road trail — beyond the multi-use path being built as part of the state’s repaving work between Route 59 and Schaumburg Road — or take their chances now on Irving Park Road or others through east Elgin.
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