Sign Confusion On West Side Street; Downed Stop Sign, Cul-De-Sac Wrongly Marked As One-Way Street
CHICAGO (CBS) -- While the CBS 2 Investigators worked on a story last week about parking tickets, they spotted a couple of other unusual things happening on the same one-way street.
Lots of vehicles were driving the wrong way on the 2600 block of West 15th Place, and street signs were knocked down, missing or just plain wrong.
When CBS 2 Investigator Dorothy Tucker started asking questions, changes happened fast.
"It's been like this almost a month or over a month," Mia Willis said as she walked past a stop sign that toppled over on her street.
She didn't call 311 about it because she thought someone already had.
"The city's always over here. They pick up garbage," she said. "If I worked for the city, I would say, 'Oh, we have an issue here,' instead of just saying 'Oh, that's not my job,' and just walk on past."
The Chicago Department of Transportation said no one ever reported the stop sign being toppled over.
Willis said she's worried about the safety of kids who attend the daycare center down the street.
"They come past here every day for their walk, or whatever. It's about 20 kids, and the stop sign is now down on the ground. So someone could just run right through the intersection while the kids are crossing the street," she said.
Willis pointed out another problem on the same block caused by the recent expansion of Cinespace Chicago Film Studios.
The film studio got approval last year to close some city streets to traffic, including all of those leading to the east end of 15th Place.
"It's supposed to be a two-way, because it's a cul-de-sac down there," she said.
A Google Maps image from July 2018 shows the one-way sign. CBS 2 tried to get to the one-way street, but every way we turned was blocked.
The confusion forces drivers to make dangerous decisions, like a U.S. Postal Service vehicle that had to drive the wrong direction.
After CBS 2 alerted CDOT, a new stop sign went up.
"It was great to see it go back up today," Willis said. "Which is good because school is starting up."
CDOT made other quick changes, including removal of the old one-way sign and installing a new cul-de-sac sign.
Apparently no one asked the sign shop for new signs until CBS 2 contacted the city. It's unclear if it was the city's responsibility or Cinespace's job to request the new signs.
