THE LANDMARK VIEW
Dreamers can sometimes be a pain in the neck. They come up with these impossible ideas – Hey, let’s get this winged vehicle flying through the air! Hey, let’s reverse the flow of this river! Poor saps, their dreams never come true.
Actually, as we all know, they do come true. Not always, but often enough that their ideas can’t be dismissed, even though the prospect of making them come true looks painful and incredibly bothersome.
The good thing about dreamers is they often don’t give up. And while their persistence may seem a trifle grating at times, it often brings results, slowly but surely.
Take flooding on the Des Plaines River, for example. For many years, residents near the Des Plaines in Riverside were told there wasn’t much local government could do about it – federal and state agencies, expensive studies and all that.
Then a group of residents got hacked-off enough to start pestering those federal and state agencies. Their persistence also got the attention of local government, which started to chime in on their behalf.
Has the exercise paid off? Well, the dream of no flooding may still be well down the line, but those expensive studies are underway and Riverside is not going to be just waved aside as those plans are formulated.
Same thing goes for Randy Brockway’s dream of building a pedestrian bridge across First Avenue. Oh, man, talk about agencies: the Illinois Department of Transportation, the Cook County Forest Preserve District, the Chicago Zoological Society, School District 208, School District 96, the Village of Riverside.
And do you know what it costs to build bridges like that? Well, they’re expensive, and the school, county, village and state sure don’t have lots of money sitting around waiting to be thrown at a bridge.
The effort is just building, so to speak. Like the Riverside Residents for Flood Prevention, it’ll be a grassroots effort, at least at first. The research into feasibility and funding has already begun. It may take years, a decade or more.
But the idea of building such a bridge for the safety of students, as a forward-looking way to promote cycling and for connecting a regional bike trail system should be encouraged by local government. Like the effort to prevent flooding, this is something to get behind.
Brockway and his compatriots are looking for others in the area to buy into their effort to get the bridge built. If you’re interested, send him an e-mail at randyjb@sbcglobal.net.
And with Riverside’s village president now part of a regional planning agency, perhaps the village will also be able to benefit from information gleaned as part of that larger effort, info that might lead to sources of funding and support.
Hey, it’s a start.