From food allergies to traffic safety, it takes time
True for so many things in our lives - it isn’t always easy to jump into acceptance of change. We all need time to settle into new ideas or community initiatives.
As our community and communities around us grow, making our community safer for all of us to get around, ages 0-110+, is perhaps one of the most important things we as a community can endeavor to take on.
When my oldest was entering kindergarten, our community was just starting to get the message about food allergies. Or rather - maybe more children with food allergies were entering school, but people didn’t quite understand yet.
My oldest is lethally allergic to tree nuts and allergic to sesame and shellfish. He’s also allergic to the vapors in the air. Meaning if you roasted pecans in the same room as him, he would experience anaphylaxis.
When we went to a pre-first day of school meeting in his kindergarten classroom, the teacher announced to the parents in attendance that the classroom would be nut-free. Children would not be allowed snacks with nuts in them. She was met with quite a lot of animosity.
There was audible mumbling. Some of the parents even shouted things like: "What on earth is my child going to eat?!? They only ever have peanut butter crackers for snacks. They won't eat anything else."
But by the time my son entered fifth grade, there wasn’t pushback about snacks in the classroom. I felt like parents in our community- well, generally, just more people were beginning to understand the severity of the problem and coming to a place of empathy. At some point, people came to understand that this wasn’t simply about individual preferences. Keeping nuts out of the classroom could literally determine whether another child was safe.
Generally in the US, I think people understand the food allergy problem now. People actually believe my son when he tells them he has food allergies. And our food system has more accommodations to account for the severity of food-related needs. But it has been decades worth of national and personal advocacy and involvement. And unfortunately, there was probably a lot of harm that happened while food allergy sufferers were waiting for people to catch up.
This feels similar, to me, so some of what I am hearing from our community when it comes to our traffic-calming measures. While out getting signatures, I’ve heard from a number of people about how much they dislike the white poles that are temporary installations as part of a permanent plan for curb bump-outs.
Vision Zero Oak Park was voted in by the board in February. But you can see the plan was in development for a few years. We engaged existing community groups in the conversation. The board called in experts, reviewed, adjusted, and voted on a plan that had a lot of community buy-in. “The adoption came after more than a year of data and crash analysis, interagency coordination, and extensive community engagement, including a project steering committee, focus groups, public open houses, pop-up events, and online engagement.”
Check it out here:
The road markings, the bike lanes, the effort to make us safer—it’s been well thought out and researched.
Our urban village is full of cars, bikes, pedestrians (more) - and having a plan to make our roads safer -that makes good sense to me. I’ll go one step further and say it makes sense to all of us.
As I said above, as our community and communities around us have grown, making our community safer for all of us to get around is perhaps one of the most important things we as a community can endeavor to take on.
Or is it?
What do you see as the most important issues in our village that will help improve our quality of life?
What are some issues you would like our village government to work on to make Oak Park an even better place to live?
