Ordinance 26-2554
In July 2026 the Village of Bourbonnais put all-way stop signs at eight intersections. The village released its records. They show a real complaint from real residents, a police memo containing no data of any kind, and a decision made in one night.
01 / What happened
In July 2025 a resident of River Street sent a text message to her village trustee. She could not walk her grandchildren down her own block. The sidewalks were broken, and cars came through too fast. Put stop signs at Bisaillon and at Drummond, she wrote.
A second trustee heard a similar complaint about Patriot Way and emailed staff on a Saturday morning. The police department wrote something up. In June, Public Works forwarded it to the mayor and the village attorney and called it a traffic study. On July 6 the board adopted eight of the nine locations, taking both readings in a single meeting, and voted 6 to 0.
Nothing in these records suggests anyone profited. No contractor, no developer, no money changes hands anywhere in the file, and the residents who complained had a real problem. That is worth saying plainly before anything else, because the criticism that follows is about method, not motive.
02 / The rule
A stop sign assigns right of way. That is its job. It tells a driver who goes first where two roads cross. It is not a speed management tool, and the national manual that governs every traffic sign in the country says so directly.
Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 11th Edition, Section 2B.06
"YIELD or STOP signs shall not be used for speed control."
The word that matters is shall not. The manual has tiers. A Standard uses "shall" and is mandatory. Guidance uses "should." An Option uses "may." This sentence is a Standard, the manual's highest tier.
Illinois says it twice more. IDOT's manual for local roads repeats it at Section 39-2.08(b). And Illinois law makes the manual binding on villages rather than advisory:
625 ILCS 5/11-304
"All such traffic control devices shall conform to the State Manual and Specifications and shall be justified by traffic warrants stated in the Manual."
In most states the manual is best practice. In Illinois, justifying a device by the manual's warrants is a statutory duty placed on local authorities. Illinois adopted the 11th Edition on March 2, 2026, four months before this ordinance.
The rule exists because stop signs barely affect speed. Drivers slow for roughly 200 feet, then make up the time in between. The Federal Highway Administration watched 31,212 vehicles at stop signs and found 67.6 percent did not stop; a 2012 study of 2,400 vehicles found only 35 percent came to a complete stop. Compliance is documented as worse at signs drivers judge unnecessary, and that habit does not stay at the unnecessary sign. See the research listed at the end of this page.
03 / The village's own words
Patrol Commander Brent Barrie's report is five pages on police department letterhead. It covers repaving Larry Power Road, repainting a curb near the Dairy Queen, replacing weathered no parking signs, and a list of intersections that could use stop signs. It is a competent officer's punch list.
Here is the stated purpose at each stop sign location, in the report's own words. Emphasis added.
The Grove playground
"Stop sign additions will regulate traffic speed around the Grove playground area."
Latham Park
"Creating a 4-way stop intersection will slow all drivers in the area."
River Street
"The placement of stop signs on River St ... would regulate motorist speed in the area."
Stratford Drive West
"These newly implemented stop signs would regulate motorist speeds in the area."
E. John Casey at Edgemere
"Creating a 4-way stop at the intersection would regulate speeding motorist on E John Casey Rd."
Highpoint Circle N
"Placement of stop signs on Highpoint Cir N @ Burning Bush to regulate the speed on Highpoint Cir N. (Trustee Littrell)"
Patriot Way at Kathy
"Placement of stop signs on Patriot Way @ Kathy Dr to regulate speed on Patriot Way. (Trustee Toepfer)"
Seven of the nine locations. Public Works Director Terry Memenga told the Daily Journal the same thing on July 7: "They're used to flying through. So the goal is to slow down the traffic."
Note the two parenthetical attributions. Highpoint Circle and Patriot Way are labeled with the name of the trustee who asked for them, and those two entries are also the only two in the report with no supporting reasoning at all. No park, no school crossing, no complaint volume, no road characteristic. One sentence and a name. Every other location gets a paragraph.
| Element | Present in the record? |
|---|---|
| Traffic volume counts | None |
| Speed measurements or radar data | None |
| Crash history at any location | None |
| Sight distance measurements | None |
| Pedestrian counts at the park locations | None |
| Any reference to the MUTCD or its warrants | None |
| Review by a professional engineer | None |
| Posted speed limits mentioned | 2 |
Two posted speed limits, both 25 miles per hour, are the only quantitative facts in the document. The national manual asks for something specific here: Section 2B.12 says the decision to establish all-way stop control "should be based on an engineering study." Schedule A of the village's own ordinance says that prior to passage, all intersections "shall be verified against Village street records and any required engineering determinations." No record of any such verification was produced.
04 / The record
Read as a whole, the documented board-level review of this ordinance consists of one trustee saying he would drive past the locations.
05 / The crash record
The manual's crash warrant asks a specific question: at a four-leg intersection, are there five or more reported crashes in a twelve month period, of a type an all-way stop could correct? We pulled all 525 crashes the Illinois Department of Transportation recorded in Bourbonnais for 2023 and 2024, located each intersection against street centerline geometry, and counted by true distance.
Crashes at each intersection, 2023 and 2024 combined
Within 100 feet of the intersection. Red line marks the MUTCD crash warrant threshold of five in twelve months.
Source: IDOT Open Data crash files for 2023 and 2024, filtered to Bourbonnais. Intersection coordinates derived from OpenStreetMap street centerline geometry. The count is stable: widening the search to 165 feet gives four crashes across all eight, and to 330 feet gives six. Zero injuries at any radius up to 650 feet.
The crash warrant is met at none of the eight intersections. The highest count anywhere is one crash in a year, not within a factor of five of the threshold. Both crashes recorded at the intersections were property damage only, and both happened where a stop sign already stood on the minor approach.
The warrant asks specifically about crashes "of a type susceptible to correction by all-way stop control." Widen the search to 330 feet and the total rises to six, but four of those six are cars striking a parked vehicle or a fixed object, which a stop sign does not prevent. Only two crashes in two years, across all eight intersections, are of the type this ordinance could have addressed.
Across the whole village there were ten crashes involving a pedestrian or a cyclist in those two years. None was at any of the eight intersections; seven were at signalized intersections on the main arterials. That cuts both ways. It undercuts the pedestrian danger premise at these specific locations, and it points at where the village's real pedestrian risk sits, which is not where the village put its stop signs.
06 / The substitution
The report contains exactly one location-specific technical rationale, and it is sound reasoning:
Barrie report, River Street
"Drummond St and Pallisard Dr are slightly offset streets where they meet at River St. The placement of stop signs on River St at these intersections would create a hybrid 4-way stop."
The ordinance the board adopted does not say Pallisard. It says Bisaillon.
What the police department recommended
What the ordinance adopted
Bisaillon and Drummond are the two streets named in the resident's July 2025 text message to Trustee Littrell. There is nothing wrong with a resident making a suggestion, or a trustee carrying it forward. That is how representation is supposed to work. The problem is narrower and is about documentation: the only technical reasoning in the entire file was replaced, and no document produced by the village explains why or by whom.
Commander Barrie wrote on June 1 that his updated report contained "2 additions." Neither copy of the report the village released contains Bisaillon. Both carry the January date and both still say Pallisard. The changes first appear in Memenga's June 4 memo, with no police department document behind them.
07 / The Grove
This is the fairest question anyone has asked about this ordinance, and the honest answer is not the one a critic would want. Probably yes, it is safe. And that makes the missing study worse, not better.
A stop sign at a park entrance is not improper under the manual. The MUTCD expressly lists "the need to control vehicle/pedestrian conflicts near locations that generate high pedestrian volumes" among the factors an engineering study may weigh. A busy playground qualifies, so the Grove is arguably the most defensible location in the whole ordinance. The best crash evidence agrees: the landmark study by Lovell and Hauer examined all-way stop conversions in San Francisco, Philadelphia and Toronto and found pedestrian crashes fell roughly 39 to 43 percent. It carries a four-star rating in FHWA's Crash Modification Factor Clearinghouse and appears in the Highway Safety Manual.
From a mechanism the federal manual itself names. MUTCD Section 2B.07: "Safety concerns associated with multi-way stops include pedestrians, bicyclists, and all road users expecting other road users to stop." A stop sign protects a pedestrian by teaching them cars will stop. If enough drivers roll through, that lesson is false. Two things make this worth taking seriously at a playground.
Compliance is genuinely poor. FHWA observed 67.6 percent of drivers failing to stop. A 2012 study found 35 percent making a complete stop. A national survey of behavior at stop signs in school zones reported roughly a third of drivers still violating the sign with child pedestrians present.
Young children are the worst possible users of that assumption. They may be physically unable to detect vehicles approaching faster than about 20 miles per hour, because a faster car looms less in the visual field and can register as not approaching at all. Ten-year-olds crossing leave roughly 1.1 seconds of margin where adults leave 2.0. In one study of five and six year olds crossing real roads, 60 percent did not stop at the curb and no more than 41 percent looked for traffic.
So two serious studies point opposite ways, and the difference between them is almost certainly driver compliance, which is to say whether this is a sign drivers respect. That is measurable. An officer with a clipboard at the Grove for two hours could count it. If compliance is high, the sign is doing exactly what Commander Barrie hoped and the village should say so loudly. If a third of drivers roll it, the village has taught several hundred children a day to expect something that will not reliably happen, and what it needs there is enforcement rather than another sign somewhere else.
The village did not count, before or after. The one location where the safety case was strongest is also where the missing study would have mattered most, and where finding out would have been easiest.
08 / The other side
This case is better than critics usually allow, and it deserves to be made properly.
The problem is real even though it is undocumented. Two trustees heard it independently. A grandmother wrote a paragraph about being unable to walk children down her own street. The police report states the department "routinely receives speeding complaints" from River Street residents and from the Briarcliff homeowners association. The village produced no complaint log, but that is a records keeping failure, not evidence the complaints did not happen.
Failing a warrant does not prohibit a stop sign, and one warrant arguably fits. All five all-way stop warrants are written as options. Warrant E covers "other factors" and explicitly contemplates installation at an intersection of two residential neighborhood collector streets, or "where pedestrian and/or bicyclist movements support the installation." Four of the eight sit beside a park, a school walking path, or a grocery store. A village defending this decision has real ground to stand on, provided it had done the engineering study the manual asks for and documented those pedestrian movements.
Crash data is a lagging indicator, and the intervention is cheap. The crash warrant asks a village to wait until five collisions have happened before acting; at a playground entrance, declining to wait for a child to be hit is a defensible moral position, not an evasion. And eight stop signs cost a few thousand dollars, where speed humps or a signal cost far more and are far harder to undo. That asymmetry genuinely favors trying something.
Responsiveness is not corruption, and the village produced the records. A resident contacts a trustee, the trustee raises it with staff, the board votes in public and signs its name. The trustee attributions in the police report are evidence of transparency, not of a back room. Commander Barrie wrote those names down himself. And the village released internal emails, a trustee's personal text messages and both memos in eight calendar days, in response to an informal request from a resident. Many municipalities would have sent the ordinance and nothing else.
09 / The verdict
Yes. Nothing in this record suggests bad faith by anyone. No vendor benefits, no developer benefits, no money moves. Residents raised a real concern and their elected officials acted on it.
No. A police narrative containing no data was renamed a traffic study as it moved up the chain. It bypassed the Public Works Committee entirely, since no committee meeting was held in June or July. It arrived at the board with no staff report and was adopted the same night on a suspended rules motion. Six trustees voted yes without a single number in front of them.
Possibly, but not for the reason the village gave, and nobody measured it. The published research points two ways at once, and it is worth being precise about which way each part points.
On crashes, the evidence favors the signs. A North Carolina study of 53 conversions to all-way stop found a 68 percent drop in total crashes and 77 percent in injury crashes, with rear-end collisions up 6 percent. It would be wrong to claim these signs make the intersections more dangerous, and this page does not claim it.
On speed, the reason the village actually gave, the evidence runs one way and it is against. Every study located here found the same thing: the reduction is confined to roughly 200 feet of the sign, drivers make up the time in between, and peak speeds tend to rise slightly. The village bought a device that reliably does something it never said it wanted, and reliably fails at the thing it did.
So the sharpest criticism is not that the village made anyone less safe. It is that eight intersections were changed on the strength of a document containing no numbers, for a stated purpose the governing manual forbids, and the village built in no way to ever learn whether any of it helped.
10 / What would fix it
The useful response is not to demand the signs come down. They are installed, some residents are pleased, and removing a stop sign is politically harder than adding one. The useful response is to measure. A speed trailer at each of the eight locations for one week, now and again in six months, would cost very little and would settle the question permanently. The police department already owns the equipment and ran this kind of study on Career Center Road in 2023, measuring over 100,000 vehicles.
Three questions a resident could reasonably put to the board. One: was any engineering determination made before passage, as Schedule A of your own ordinance requires, and if so may the public see it? Two: will the village run a speed and compliance study at these eight locations and publish the results, so the next decision has data behind it? Three: Trustee King told the board that "a second round of additions may be seen in the future." Will that round be based on measurement, and will it go through the Public Works Committee?
11 / Sources and right of reply
Village records obtained under FOIA request 26-2307, produced July 15, 2026. Copies available on request. Research sources were located and checked individually; where a figure reaches us through a later paper rather than the original, that is noted in the entry.
Every official named on this page is welcome to respond, and any response will be published here in full and unedited. If something here is wrong it will be corrected promptly and the correction noted. If you have records relevant to these eight intersections, particularly any engineering determination, traffic count or speed study, please send them.