Chicago Tribune
October 4, 2005
By William Presecky
Tribune staff reporter
A mounting traffic crunch along Chicago's far western fringe led state planners Monday in Yorkville to unveil two potential expressway routes, as well as the so-called no-build, or baseline, alternative.
The media preview by the Illinois Department of Transportation came before two public meetings Tuesday and Wednesday.
The proposed north-south expressway alternatives both would link Interstate Highway 88 in Kane County with Interstate Highway 80 near the Kendall County border with Grundy County.
Both routes include at least part of the 36-mile-long by 400-foot-wide transportation corridor that IDOT opted three years ago to protect from encroachment.
One of the alternatives terminates at I-80 near Minooka. The other intersects I-80 west of Morris.
The final options were evaluated on their ability to increase mobility, address local transportation deficiencies, improve safety and improve access to jobs outside the area.
The public meetings are scheduled for Tuesday in the Yorkville Middle School, 702 Game Farm Rd., in Yorkville and Wednesday in White Oak Elementary School, 2001 Dupont Ave. in Morris. Both open-house meetings are from 5:30 to 8 p.m.
Gregg Mounts, IDOT's deputy director of highways, said the choices have the potential to provide the most travel benefits, the greatest compatibility with local land-use plans and pose the least environmental and development impacts.
In paring to three the list of potential plans it will target for detailed analysis, IDOT has reached about the midpoint of five-year, $18 million federally funded study that agency planners say was not skewed in favor of the proposed Prairie Parkway plan championed by U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
The federal transportation bill signed into law this summer includes $207 million for a new north-south expressway west of Illinois Highway 47.
Federal law requires, for the sake of comparison, that a no-build option also be studied along with other proposed transportation alternatives. The no-build option presumes that several planned improvements to arterial roads and other transportation improvements will advance with or without a new expressway. The IDOT options were culled from about 20 based on 150 suggestions made last summer by residents, employers and officials.
The spokesman for a citizens group that opposes building an expressway said he was surprised at the limited nature of the alternatives.
"It looks like they took the easy way out," said Jan Strasma, spokesman for Citizens Against the Sprawlway.
"The residents of the area would have been better served by a diverse highway network rather than a single road that has impacts on farmland, the environment and sprawl," said Strasma.
According to IDOT project manager Rick Powell, "The consensus we came to was that widening arterial roads, even if you do several of them, will solve some of the needs but not all of them."