The terms we are arguing about.

A four-wheeled motor vehicle with a top attainable speed of more than 20 mph but not more than 25 mph on a paved level surface, conforming to the federal definition under 49 CFR 571.500 and the Illinois Vehicle Code's provisions for non-highway and low-speed vehicles.

In plain terms: a street-legal small electric or low-emission vehicle — typically what is colloquially called a "neighborhood electric vehicle" — designed to operate on roads with posted limits of 30 mph or lower, and on dedicated LSV corridors.

The point is not the vehicle.
The point is what the road can become when the dominant vehicle on it tops out at twenty-five.

Once the design speed of a corridor is 25 mph, the geometry of the street changes. Lanes narrow. Sight lines shorten. Pedestrians and cyclists become compatible rather than imperiled. Sidewalk dining becomes possible without bollards. That is what we are designing for.

For the purpose of use on LSV corridors, an eBike means a bicycle equipped with a motor of 750 watts or less and meeting the standards of Class 1 (pedal-assist to 20 mph), Class 2 (throttle-assist to 20 mph), or Class 3 (pedal-assist to 28 mph), consistent with Illinois Public Act 100-0867.

Class 3 eBikes are permitted on LSV corridors and on roadways shared with LSVs; they are not assumed permitted on multimodal trails without explicit local authorization.

Why these classes, and not others.

The three-class system is doing real work. It separates the bicycle you can ride with grandchildren on a trail (Class 1, 2) from the one that can keep up with an LSV on a corridor (Class 3). A corridor where everything moves between 15 and 25 mph is a corridor where conflicts stay survivable.

The 750-watt ceiling matters too: above it, the vehicle has crossed into a different regulatory category and a different conversation.

A dedicated, non-motorized right-of-way separated from the LSV corridor itself, designed to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists (including Class 1 and Class 2 eBikes), and — where width and surfacing permit — equestrians.

Minimum working specifications, subject to local revision:

• Paved width of at least 10 feet for two-way bicycle traffic.
• An adjacent soft shoulder of at least 4 feet where equestrian use is permitted.
• Signed crossings at every road intersection with LSV-corridor signage on both sides.
• Drainage and grading sufficient that the trail is usable nine months of the year.

Multimodal does not mean every mode everywhere.

A trail that tries to serve walkers, cyclists, eBike commuters, horses, and the occasional snowmobile in the same eight feet serves none of them. The standard above assumes some segments will exclude equestrians and some will exclude Class 3 eBikes, and that the signage will say so plainly.

The right question at the local level is not "can we put a trail here?" but "which modes does this segment serve, and which does it not?"

A continuous right-of-way connecting two terminal points, suitable for horse travel in single file or in pairs, separated from motorized traffic and from paved bicycle traffic except at designated crossings.

Corridor minimums.

• Soft surface (compacted granular or natural earth) of at least 6 feet width.
• Vertical clearance of 12 feet.
• Crossings of paved roads or trails marked, signed, and where feasible signal-actuated.
• Continuous shade or staged shade structures at minimum 2-mile intervals.

Terminal facility minimums.

A corridor without proper terminals is a trail to nowhere. At each terminal point — typically at the edge of a village — the standard is:

• Trailer parking sufficient for at least six rigs, with truck-and-trailer turning radius.
• At least four stalls or tie areas with shade and water.
• Potable water for horses and riders.
• Manure management — a covered bin emptied on a posted schedule.
• Restrooms accessible without remounting.
• Direct, surfaced connection to the village center within sight of downtown.

A village where the horses are stabled within view of the downtown is a village that has made a decision about what kind of place it intends to be.

The local term — borrowed from French Canadian usage and adopted across the Driftless — for the steep-walled valleys cut into the unglaciated bedrock of northwestern Illinois, southwestern Wisconsin, and adjacent Iowa and Minnesota. In Jo Daviess County, the coulees are the defining landform: limestone and dolomite walls, thin loess and residual soils, narrow ridgelines and tucked valleys.

The coulee is not a metaphor. It is the topography that makes the rural-residential math work badly. One-acre lots sited along coulee shoulders run into shallow bedrock, steep slopes, and fractured carbonate aquifers that move contamination laterally and quickly. Any zoning regime that treats a coulee shoulder the same as a flat field on Tama silt loam is, by that fact alone, a regime that has not understood what it is regulating.

The branch of transportation engineering that governs how and where driveways, intersections, and other access points connect to a road. The FHWA and AASHTO access management literature treats driveway density as a primary determinant of corridor crash risk on rural roads — every driveway is a low-volume intersection, and rural crash rates scale roughly linearly with driveway density.

For shared corridors carrying cyclists, eBike riders, and low-speed vehicles, the access management standards become more demanding, not less. Backing motorists have poor sight lines for the slower modes; vegetation along curving rural roads worsens the problem. The corridor future this project proposes stands or falls on whether access management is taken seriously in the subdivision ordinance — not on whether trails get built later.

A planning framework — most associated with Randall Arendt and the Natural Lands Trust — in which the same number of houses allowed on a parcel are sited on smaller clustered lots around a shared internal street, with the balance of the parcel (typically 50 to 70 percent) preserved as common open space, working farmland, or natural area under permanent easement.

The contrast is to conventional strip subdivision, where each lot is a horizontal slice along a county road with its own driveway. Cluster design produces shorter water and sewer runs, fewer access points, septic systems sited on the most suitable soils, and an intact roadside viewshed. It is the policy framework this site proposes as the alternative to the current Jo Daviess County amendment.

Read the better draft →

A fiscal impact methodology developed by the American Farmland Trust and applied across hundreds of U.S. jurisdictions since the 1990s. For each major class of land use — residential, commercial, industrial, agricultural — the COCS study calculates how many dollars in local government services are returned for every dollar of property tax revenue generated.

Working farmland typically returns somewhere between $0.30 and $0.50 per dollar of revenue — a net subsidy to the rest of the tax base. Residential land typically returns somewhere between $1.15 and $1.50 — a net cost. The City of Galena's projection that the Jo Daviess amendment would move the ratio to $2.11 per dollar of revenue places the result well outside the normal residential range, in territory the COCS literature describes as fiscally distressed.