If you have ridden or walked the Des Plaines River Trail through Park Ridge for more than a couple of years, you know the spot. The trail met Touhy Avenue mid-block, with no light, no crosswalk, and a sightline that made it genuinely hard to tell what was coming from the east. Riders learned to time their crossings by ear as much as by sight. That crossing is gone now, following the trail work on Park Ridge's stretch.
The Fix That's Already There
The mid-block Touhy crossing has been rerouted to a signaled intersection at Talcott Road. Instead of guessing when to dart across four lanes, trail users now hit a light. A few blocks north, a new at-grade crossing was built at the intersection of Devon Avenue and Dee Road, another spot where sightlines had been a persistent complaint among people who use this trail regularly.
Both fixes came out of a $2 million award to the City of Park Ridge through the Illinois Transportation Enhancement Program, covering trail resurfacing and width standardization on the segment between Touhy and Devon. This wasn't a countywide grant applied evenly across every town the trail touches. Park Ridge applied for a project-specific grant to fix its own piece of the trail.
How the City Funded Its Piece
The Des Plaines River Trail through this stretch of Cook County has never been one continuous project. It's a patchwork, funded segment by segment, town by town, and that's actually the more useful way to understand what happened here. Rosemont secured a separate $1.6 million in ITEP and state funds to cover its own adjoining piece, from Devon Avenue to Bryn Mawr Avenue, including crossing improvements at Higgins Road and Dee Road.
Put together with a 1,000-foot elevated boardwalk through a flood-prone stretch and a new pedestrian bridge over Lawrence Avenue, the full 4.4-mile renovation from Lawrence Avenue to Touhy Avenue carried a total price tag of $12.5 million. It was marked with a ribbon-cutting at Robinson Woods-South in August 2024, with representatives from the Forest Preserves of Cook County and local officials from both Park Ridge and Rosemont on hand.
The Riverside-Brookfield Landmark reported that Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who also chairs the Forest Preserves, called the effort "a great benefit to local residents and nature lovers across Cook County" and thanked the partner municipalities for their part in it. The mechanics behind it are specific to this one: two towns, two separate grant applications, one connected result.
The Stretch That's Still Catching Up
Here's the part that matters if you're planning rides or walks for the rest of this year. The segment immediately south of the completed Touhy-to-Lawrence work, running from Lawrence Avenue to Irving Park Road, has been under construction through most of 2026. According to the Forest Preserves of Cook County's own project page, that segment is expected to be completed this fall.
That timing matters for anyone riding south from the new Talcott Road crossing. For the past couple of seasons, that ride has meant a smooth, resurfaced trail for a few miles before running into orange path-closed signage, felled trees, and the kind of makeshift detours that regular trail users have been navigating around construction fencing rather than through it. Once this segment wraps, riders heading south from Park Ridge will have a longer uninterrupted stretch of good trail than they've had since before the work started.
Beyond that, the picture gets murkier the farther south you go. The next piece, from Fullerton Avenue to North Avenue, is targeting construction bidding by late 2026, with matching funds still being lined up for 2027. The most technically difficult stretch, involving new bridges over roadways and railroad tracks between Irving Park Road and Fullerton Avenue, isn't expected to start engineering until later this year, funded largely through a state ITEP transportation grant. None of that affects the piece running through Park Ridge directly, but it's a reminder that this is a trail getting rebuilt one negotiated segment at a time, not all at once.
If You're Riding This Fall
A few practical notes for anyone using the trail through town in the coming weeks:
- The Talcott Road signal and the Devon/Dee at-grade crossing are both open now and have been since the 2024 completion.
- Dam No. 4 Woods-East remains one of the main access points on the Park Ridge side of the trail, with parking available for anyone starting or ending a ride there.
- Watch for lingering construction signage south of Lawrence Avenue as the Irving Park Road segment finishes up. Crews have been clearing felled trees and rerouting sections away from flood-prone ground, and some path-closed signs may remain even after work is functionally done.
- If you're headed north instead, the trail through the rest of Park Ridge and into Des Plaines is generally considered one of the better-maintained stretches of the entire 28-mile Cook County system, a reputation that predates this latest round of construction.
What This Says About the Town, Not Just the Trail
None of this is really about a single road crossing. It's about a documented safety complaint on a piece of regional infrastructure and a project-specific grant for the stretch running through Park Ridge. The Des Plaines River Trail runs through a dozen towns between the Wisconsin border and Forest Park, and not every one of them has gone after project-specific funding for the stretch running through its own borders. Park Ridge did, and the fix has been in place and working for two years now, quietly, while the rest of the system continues to be assembled piece by piece around it.
For residents who already use this trail as part of a regular routine, whether that's a morning ride before work, a weekend walk with the dog, or the route you take to avoid driving on Touhy at all, this fall marks the point where the investment starts to pay off in miles rather than just in one fixed intersection. If you've been holding off on longer rides south because of construction, this is close to the point where that stops being a reason.
If you're weighing what a home near this kind of neighborhood infrastructure is actually worth, or thinking about what draws buyers to a particular block in Park Ridge, that's a conversation The PAK Group has regularly with families who care about exactly this kind of daily-life detail. You can find more on the neighborhood here, or request your complimentary home valuation when you're ready to talk specifics.
